I find it astonishing the things that people will get upset over. This photo is Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, mayor in the 500-resident town of Arlington, Oregon. The residents are so angry about this picture from her MySpace page that they’re issuing a recall petition against her (essentially trying to get her removed from office). […]

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What do you call a man with one testicle?
Geoffrey Jones.
The poor sod used to have two but he lost one when his now ex-girlfriend Amanda Monti ripped it off.
Ouch.
Ripped it off. With her bare hands. I can barely sit on this seat thinking about it without my own testicles trying to jump up into my […]

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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 Ron Paul, […]

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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 Angeles.

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Northern Ireland is full of the buggers: Born Again Paramilitaries, or “BAPS” as I prefer to call them. They swan around regenerated, forgiven, no longer the bad guys who terrorised people. They’ve found Jesus. And holy Hell do they know how to moralise. Often you can detect a rather horrible aura of self-righteousness, mixed with […]

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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 wrong to […]

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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 editors, and commentators choking on […]

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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 Fags‘ camp - worthy of […]

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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 sticks by a few little old ladies […]

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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 demonstrating, and I’ll […]

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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 great like Elvis without the tassels
Hire eight body guards that […]

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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 release of death. And even […]

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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 selling what have come to be […]

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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 coherent argument against universal […]

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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 I pissed off in 2007.
In an […]

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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 at one and the […]

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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.

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