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Michael Kinsley had an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times on January 12th entitled ‘Libertarians deserve a listen‘. I agree! And I was interested to see the story. The same thing appeared in the Washington Post on the same day titled slightly less favourably The Church Doctrines of Pope ...

Saturday was a special day, set apart by the music gods in order that this latent blogger might enjoy the very best in big-name live music: first at 1pm, U2 3D at the Imax theatre at Irvine Spectrum, then at 5pm, Garth Brooks live at the Staples Center in Los ...

Apparently the presidential candidate favoured by black people is Barack Obama, who is black. Is this a coincidence? Is it wrong to ask that question? And, when a black person, upon being asked why they support Obama, answers “Because he’s the only one that sticks to his principles” is it ...

You know, I genuinely find Fred Phelps entertaining. I know he’s a bigot and a hatemonger. I know his positions are unsupportable, and hurtful to some. I know what he says is utterly ridiculous, on so many levels. But that makes Phelps – as Chief Nut at the ‘God Hates ...

I’m doing an awful job of finding time to blog: hopefully later today I’ll have something more substantial to share with you all. It’s not for lack of thoughts or lack of material, that’s for sure: there is much to be discussed, as Stephen is doing a superb job of ...

The premise of Michael Moore’s latest film Sicko is that the mostly private healthcare system in the United States is a failure, and that universal healthcare of the kind existing in the United Kingdom (the National Health Service or NHS) is what America needs. Anecdotes are not by themselves a ...

Friends, Welcome to the beginning of a new blogging year here at John-Wright.Net. For the next fifty weeks of 2008, we’ll be attempting to bring some reason to matters of political discourse, current affairs and a lot more. It’s an election year in America, which will be fascinating and murderous ...

Andrew Sullivan, eat your heart out. Belfast was covered in a couple of inches of snow last night, icing the cake of our winter vacation in the process and making Melissa very, very happy.

From Stephen and myself (I’ll presume to speak for him since I’m writing this from Belfast, NI): I’d like to wish you all – in particular our regular readers and contributors – a happy new year and a prosperous 2008. It’s worth pointing out that libertarianism is about being free ...

Isn’t it great? This photograph is one of ten chosen by Wired magazine photographers as their favourites of the past year. It was the accompanying photo for an article I read over thanksgiving weekend in a mountaintop cabin, dealing with cloned cattle and the benefits of cloning for that purpose ...

I love what Mark Belling said on his show yesterday: if you’re really talented and people recognise it, you aren’t working this week. Really talented people, he says, don’t work between Christmas and New Year’s. So, Belling finds himself working, filling in for Rush Limbaugh, and I find myself working ...

I almost missed my chance to see this movie in theatres, because life was so busy when the movie was released five weeks ago that it came and went before I had the chance. But since I first heard about it, No Country has been nominated for four Golden Globes ...

If only more people could take this prudent, libertarian approach to living in a free society: “[A confession from my beating heart:] I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful ...

…and it’s all due to global warming.

Read this in The Times: “Rudi Giuliani, aspiring US President, had prostate cancer. His chance of surviving in the US, he said in August, was 82 per cent; [but in the UK], “under socialised medicine”, about half as good. There was even a graph to prove that the NHS was ...

Don’t we all? Even if it’s just a painkiller for a headache once in a while, or a contraceptive pill, or a shot of coffee to wake you up, there’s nobody reading this who can honestly tell me they never use drugs of any kind. I’m not going to use ...

“A new PBS documentary quotes Andrew Jackson asking Congress to let him clear Indians off the frontier: ‘What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms … ?’ “So here I ...

I remember seeing this on the news before leaving for work this morning and saying, “That doesn’t look good.” I honestly believed that there wasn’t much hope for the dad and his three kids who went into the woods to cut themselves a Christmas tree on Sunday and still hadn’t ...

This is great news. Here’s his endorsement. It’s nice to find myself in agreement with Andrew Sullivan: “The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul’s federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp ...