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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 ...

As a child I was always told to eat my dinner and keep my mouth shut; ask no questions, no derogatory comments about greens, no complaints or smart-arsed remarks. Seemingly as an adult that advice might remain shrewd. A year ago a ruling in Belfast’s High Court had journalists, newspaper ...

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 ...

No trial. No jury. No judge. Straight to execution. Well, not quite execution – a walk of shame. Two men were forced to walk up and down the Shankill road in Belfast wearing mock-up sandwich boards proclaiming: “I am a burglar and a thief” and reportedly getting hit with walking ...

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 ...

I’m loving the recent song by Nickleback: “Rock Star.” Some of the lyrics include: “Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars Live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap We’ll all stay skinny cause we just won’t eat” “I wanna be ...

When you live under a collectivist system you can expect a number of things to hit you during your life: increasing taxes, “national insurance,” rates, and a general increasing government infringement on the freedoms of the individual. In short: More tax. More regulation. More control. Until you find the sweet ...

As some of you know my Weird Wednesday series is a commentary on the more bizarre side of the news. Regrettably some people won’t see this story as weird at all, but I was in disbelief about it myself. This week it emerged that several shops in Belfast have been ...

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 ...

Birth by Government: Part II Happy new year folks, I hope you all had a good Christmas. Getting caught up in the general busy-ness of the festivities I lost my blog time but now back and at it I’ll make strenuous efforts this year to beat the number of people ...

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 ...