Author ArchivesJohn

Many have heard by now the story of Iggy. Iggy is a puppy who was adopted by daytime talk show host Ellen Degeneres. After finding that the dog didn’t get along with her cats, Ellen gave Iggy to her hairdresser whose two daughters fell in love with him. Apparently Ellen ...

I kid you not: top musical artist John Mayer, although a little wasted at the time, almost got into a fist fight with Mac Guy Justin Long (arch-foe of PC Guy in the Mac-PC commercials) over libertarian-Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, whom Mayer appears to be passionate about supporting. “Read ...

The story from Ananova says it all: “A British scientist has been awarded a doctorate for a paper predicting that humans will one day marry robots. Maastricht University awarded David Levy a PhD for a thesis entitled Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners. The thesis examines human attitudes toward affection, love ...

Believe it or not, there are still some people around who regard a certain category of words to be evil or immoral in some way. It’s known as ‘swearing’. I’ve found this a curious concept since I was a teenager, since not much about it made any sense to me. ...

An excellent article appeared in The Wall Street Journal in Saturday by Senior Editor of Reason Magazine Brian Doherty, helping to celebrate 50 years since Ayn Rand first published her magnum opus, ‘Atlas Shrugged’. Like many (most?) libertarians, I am immensely grateful for Rand’s contribution to 20th century political discourse. ...

Crawley reports on a case that has people debating the ethics of raising a disabled child: Disability charities are extremely worried by the legal precedent that could be set by the case of the 15-year-old Katie Thorpe. Katie’s mother, Alison Thorpe, has asked doctors to give her daughter, who has ...

Don’t ask me how exactly this happened, but in a cabin on a mountain over the weekend we got ourselves into the classic Liar-Truth Teller Enigma, later embellished by the brilliant logician Raymond Smullyan. It’s an old logic puzzle, which runs, basically, something like this. A man finds himself standing ...

I hate those words.  I’m on my way to an event in the mountains where, rather than staying in a hotel with wifi or ethernet broadband internet, they’ll have me holed up in a cabin with no connection to the outside world.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, I won’t ...

Speaking of Ron Paul, this video is a beautiful primer to libertarianism and comes from the Candidates@Google series.  Google executive Elliot Schrage sits down with Ron Paul to chat about libertarianism and how its principles would be implemented in the event of a Paul White House.  (It gets really good ...

I’m getting more and more excited about libertarian candidate for the Republican nomination for President Ron Paul. I’ve always liked Paul. He’s a steadfast devotee to the principles of liberty, and yet running as a Republican, not a candidate of the Libertarian Party. All the signs are good: he’s bringing ...

A drunken asshole punched out my wing mirror today. Here’s how it happened. I was driving along a 5-lane city street and saw a guy in the middle of the road ahead of me, slowly making his way through the traffic to the other side. He was American Indian, maybe ...

Nice to see that someone agrees with me about polygamy, saying almost exactly the same as what I did on the Warren Jeffs case at the time of his arrest several months ago. Forcing someone into sex or marriage is wrong, whether it’s a plural marriage or a single marriage. ...

William Crawley posts about a fascinating piece of research which has garnered it an Ig Nobel award: “This year’s Ig Nobel Peace Prize goes to the US Air Force Wright Laboratory ‘for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops’. I ...

So here it is! The new blog with its new format, new interests, new features and the addition of audio. I’m still ironing out many issues, but I’m an impatient bastard so couldn’t wait to begin blogging. The idea of waiting until everything is perfect before using the new site ...

I love it. The folks at Columbia University invite Iran President Mahmood Ahmadinejad to their campus and then show him up for the “petty and cruel dictator” he is. Big kudos must go to university president Lee Bollinger for calling him precisely that to his face, and for the rest ...

September 11th, 2001 • New York City, USA

I’ve listened to the police interview conducted with (now ex-) Senator Larry Craig shortly after he was arrested in an airport bathroom in Minneapolis some months ago, and I don’t think he did anything illegal. And even if he did, he sure didn’t do anything that should be illegal. Here’s ...