Author ArchivesJohn

Trees blocked out the sky and made me feel safer. Obviously the branches of trees would do nothing to stop or slow a Katyusha attack. But when you’re under rocket and missile fire, the sky feels like a gigantic malevolent eyeball. When you’re underneath trees, the gigantic malevolent eyeball can’t ...

AIDS kills. There is no vaccine. Condoms help prevent the spread of AIDS. Sorry to state the obvious, but it seems that these basic facts still need to be proclaimed. The 16th International AIDS conference is meeting in Toronto this week, and it has emerged that the Bill and Melinda ...

Hummer and McDonald’s: two of the most hated names in capitalism. How appropriate that they should team up together. My wife and I had lunch today with our three-year old son in the friendly, comfortable environs of a local McDonald’s restaurant, a welcome interlude in the middle of my workday. ...

I’ve been amazed at the amount of scepticism over the recent terrorist scare in Britain. Many, mostly left-liberal, commentators and huge sections of Muslim opinion don’t think there really was a terrorist plot at all. Nothing inherently wrong with that, except the bizarre rationalisations of their evidentially-challenged position that have ...

THIS is what we pay our governments to do. THIS is the reason we have government at all. And THIS was the government doing a terrific job in its primary role as protector of its citizens. Just last night I was at the first day of Oliver Stone’s World Trade ...

The concept of personal responsibility is making a gradual exit from public discourse. To emphasise it these days typically brings a raised eyebrow in response. But it’s a concept that every single libertarian must fight for as that notion is one of the those lying at the very heart of ...

It may amuse the more school-boy-humoured men amongst us to think of one’s penis as a “deadly weapon.” Hee hee hee. Unfortunately for some men that literally is the case. An article in the Guardian on Thursday, 2nd August brought my attention to the case of a man about to ...

Today, I part ways with Time blogger Andrew Sullivan on the issue of global warming. I like Sullivan, and I don’t think he’s the kind of guy to plod clumsily into a left-liberal environmental credo. That said, his article in today’s Times entitled ‘Wanted: a practical guide to saving the ...

Alton Towers, a family fun and amusement park in Great Britain, recently had to cancel a “Muslim fun day” because there wasn’t enough interest in it. The event was organised by Islamic Leisure who had billed the event as the “First National Muslim Fun Day.,” expecting 28,ooo to sign up ...

Two days ago a judge had a rattle at internet betting sites in the course of the trial and sentencing of Bryan Benjafield who stole in excess of £1 million from his employer over 18 months, squandering the lot on internet gambling websites. Judge Andrew Langdon announced his disbelief at ...

There they hide in the long grass. Waiting for their prey. Always ready to move. Telescopic lens at the ready. Their prey comes into sight. Closer and closer they skulk until within range. Out they spring, without warning, and begin to shoot. The prey stands no chance. The scenario above ...

Long-term readers of this blog may know of my fondness for something which has come to be known as ‘junk’ food. There are two reasons for this: (a) that I don’t believe it’s junk at all, and (b) that I love to piss off the politically correct. When I moved ...

By now you will have seen video from the camera and heard sound from the microphone that inadvertently eavesdropped on the US President and UK Prime Minister at the G8 summit this week. I have a few observations, such as that we’ve learned a few interesting things about the President ...

“Guns kill people in the same way that spoons made Michael Moore fat.” -Anon

I was in the middle of writing an article about something else when this ripsnorter landed in my news stack: the Henley Centre has published the results of its annual single-question survey regarding individualism, and the results are SWEET! I put my unfinished post through the shredder and started to ...

Many times this blog has called for individual responsibility to be the guiding principal of lawmaking. It is individual responsibility (and the sovereignty of the individual) that sets libertarianism apart from other ideologies. A simple example of this principal in a political argument: 1) If one chooses to ride a ...

I’ve avoided mentioning Al Gore’s climate change movie ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ until now. My excuse is that I haven’t seen it, and although I know Gore’s version of events well enough to privately predict that it is witless hogwash, in the interests of reason I like to give the benefit ...

I’ve had several comments to the effect that my position on climate change policy ignores information from climatologists; that it is ignorant of scientific observations. In case my previous posts on the matter (for example this) haven’t been clear enough, let me state my actual position so that the discussion ...

The Constitutional amendment which would have banned gay marriage was defeated in the United States Senate today, despite President Bush’s public calls in favour of it. Bush said that the institution of marriage needs taken out of the hands of ‘activist judges’ and put back into the hands of the ...

Earlier this month, environmentalist groups on behalf of the Winnemucca Indian Colony succeeded in having Divine Strake postponed until at least June 23rd by filing a lawsuit against the Pentagon (see my original article on Operation Divine Strake here). And USA Today reports: “A number of small, rural protests have ...