Author ArchivesJohn

“Early morning, and the city comes alive. And what is immediately clear is the parameters of a global war between nature and the car. By a little after sunrise, it is clear that it is the car that is winning.” So says the BBC’s Malachi O’Doherty in a report for ...

Dear Mr Tran, Thank you for your article on Bush’s nomination of Michael Hayden for CIA Chief. It struck a chord. In your profile, it says that your interests include “US politics, environmental policy and corporate social responsibility”. Remarkable! I’d never have expected the Guardian to employ a journalist with ...

On John Prescott’s affair:Blair has the right idea here, in allowing Prescott to keep his job. What “Randy Old Sod” does with his pecker is entirely up to him. There are those who believe that people in government should be held to a higher standard in such matters. But that ...

The purpose of a movie is to tell a story. In the case of United 93, written and directed by Paul Greengrass and to be released tomorrow, its story is one that the whole world lived on September 11th, 2001. The most blatant terrorist attack in recent history, it was ...

Edward Garnier, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, recently expressed his view that imprisoning criminals “is hugely expensive and not working.” Hugely expensive is not the same as too expensive, but Mr Garnier reckons the £37,000 per prisoner per year is too much to pay. Unfortunately citing a statistic does ...

Three unconnected stories in the Times newspaper recently illustrated perfectly what is wrong with modern charity. I present these cases as a sort of 3-in-1 blog. (1) Gordon Hood What is the purpose of government? To my libertarian mind the function of government is, put crudely, to protect the fundamental ...

My backyard faces out to the massive desert landscape of the American SouthWest (controlled by the Federal Bureau of Land Management). You could leave through my gate into the desert and start walking, and not find ANYTHING but desert for a few hundred miles. What a great place to blow ...

I’ve completed filing my US tax return, which is due on Monday for all 136 million of us eligible working adults who haven’t requested an extension from the IRS. I feel outrage at having to comply with such a behemoth taxation system, but not nearly as much as I should. ...

1) A sorrowful letter to my local paper from a citizen close to losing his home has escalated my anger at the city government like nothing else. He is one of many whose property tax has tripled within the past two years, leaving him barely able to afford to live ...

An excellent article appeared into today’s Guardian by Rabbi Jonathan Romain, minister of Maidenhead Synagogue. It was a short feature on the history of prostitution, particularly that occurring in biblical accounts throughout the Old Testament. Apparently, “…the government is trying to develop strategies to tackle…” prostitution. Romain’s point is made ...

The BBC’s future role, function and structure have been set out in a White Paper published by the UK government. I’m looking at a copy of it now. It is nothing short of insulting. It’s insulting to consumers of British media. It’s insulting to legitimate British broadcasters. It’s insulting to ...

Here are a few of my opinions: 1. Black men are generally better boxers than white men 2. Vegetarians tend to be thinner than meat eaters 3. Asians are on average more intelligent than white people 4. Socialists are usually much more angry and unhappy than capitalists 5. Men tend ...

On 3rd October 2003 Lorraine Hadley and Natallie Evans lost a High Court bid to become pregnant using frozen embryos after their former partners withdrew consent. Mr Justice Wall decided that the men, Howard Johnston and Wayne Hadley, had rights in this case that cannot be overturned. He didn’t really ...

Workers United Shall Not Be Defeated! (Nor Shall They Be Rational) We have recently had another fine example of the horrendously naïve, blinkered, and irrational philosophy of socialism at work here in Northern Ireland as 200 postal workers walked out of a Royal Mail depot in Belfast causing two and ...

I’ve noticed a fundamental misunderstanding among many who talk about rights, on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum. Firstly, as a libertarian, when I say that it is someone’s ‘right’ to do something, I am dealing with that which affects the ability of other human beings to ...

People who don’t eat meat make me almost as nervous as Palestinians wearing backpacks. I just don’t trust the buggers. Why on earth would any human being give up eating meat? OK, some people don’t like how it tastes, and I don’t mind such types. But what about that lot ...

A cross-party group of MP’s published a report last week in which they claimed that we have 10 years to “save the high street.” They tell us that once the big supermarkets kill off the smaller stores they will raise their prices, and this means that supermarket expansion should not ...

Several times over the past few months, I have turned the attention of this blog to the issue of firearms, and the erroneous approach of some people to gun law and gun control. There is an oft-repeated claim of gun control advocates (gun control being laws which aim to curtail ...

1) Oppose anything that favours wealthy, white men and their corporations Whites are the most depraved race on the face of the Earth. The male of the race are particularly deplorable, and should they also be wealthy, you will know that they are the primary cause of all problems in ...

A regular portion of my morning involves scanning the day’s news from various sources: American news networks, AP wire by satellite, radio talk, the blogosphere, the American and British press. So quite often I glance through Guardian Unlimited, the online feed of that annoying leftist British rag, The Guardian. Why ...