John C. Wright's Blog, page 188

Letter to the Congressional Black Caucus from Tea Party Federation: Please Provide Evidence of Canno

I first heard of the Tea Party movement when my best friend and his wife (he is white; she is yellow) invited me and my black ex-roommate to come.

The first time I heard the allegation that the Tea Party movement was racist was the day the newspaper printed a photo of one of the tea partiers carrying a rifle over his back. The man in the picture was black, and his head was carefully cropped out of the photo, so that you could only see the scary gun he was carrying.

The second time I heard the...

Great Book of Science Fiction---Yet to be Written?

In our last episode, we encountered Mortimer Adler's definition of what constituted a 'Great Book'. There were three criteria:

TIMELESS: Great Books should be works that are as much of concern to us today as at the time they were written, even if that was centuries ago. They are thus essentially timeless — always contemporary, and not confined to interests that change from time to time or from place to place.INFINITE: The second criterion was their infinite re-readability. Few books are...

Peter Kreeft

I had the great honor and privilege of being inviting to a private talk given by Peter Kreeft at the Catholic Information Center, which is a bookstore and spiritual arsenal hunched in the position of a gladiator on K street in Babylon, that Great City, about two blocks from the offices of the Washington Post. It is run by Opus Dei, but I did not see any albino assassins there, or else I would have turned in my resume.

During the reception, I engaged in conversation a man of particular wit and...

I had not heard this news

This was in 2006. I did not hear this until Andrew Klavan made a joke about the film-makers who did the recent hagiographical biopic of Red mass-murderer Che Guevara making a film about a real hero, a man who died for his faith while fighting against evil, rather than, as Che, for it. 

It seems that a Roman Catholic Priest from Italy, while at prayer,  was shot in the back by a sixteen-year-old Muslim boy, who shouted 'Allah is Great' during the gruesome and random murder. There is some suspi...

Second Update on Pluto Day

A reader writes in and says he would have welcomed the addition of Eris as a tenth planet.

I, too, who live in a reasonable terror of the Red Lectroids from Planet Ten, also would have welcomed them into the Solar Union, rather than dismiss them, trampling their civil rights, by exiling them to the status of merely dwellers on asteroids.

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From the Pen of Jonathan Moeller

The ever-brilliant Mr. Moeller writes an adroit and trenchant message for Lenin's Birthday Earth Day. This just amused me to no end:

Happy Earth Day, comrades! 

I myself plan to demonstrate my regard for the green lifestyle in the usual fashion: by eating a Big Mac in my car with the air conditioner on.

And now, some Earth Day reading:

-An activist planned to travel unassisted to the North Pole to demonstrate the dangers of warming temperatures and vanishing Arctic ice. He promptly developed...

Update on Pluto Day

One of my thousands of loyal henchwomen who walk unnoticed among the muggles and mundanes of the ordinary world sends in this picture in honor of Pluto Day.

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And here is the website for the official save Pluto as a Planet society. May Azathoth increase their spans!

Worth a Thousand Words

We have a photo rather than an essay for this week's WRIGHT'S WRITING CORNER

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/116422.html?nc=8

Not Earth Day: PLUTO DAY!

While the rest of you Earthlings are celebrating Earth Day (a holiday beloved of Enviro-Marxist Gaeanist Neo-pagan Neo-Puritan Death Cultists whose scientific literacy is somewhere south of the Flat Earth Society) we here at the headquarters of the more cosmologically minded and cosmopolitan Space Princess Movement have decided to break the bonds of geocentric parochialism (our motto is 'Think Globally, Act Galactically') and celebrate a day devoted to another planet, one more worthy of our a...

johncwright @ 2010-04-22T02:19:00

George RR Martin has this to report:

 LOCUS has announced the shortlist for its annual awards, and I'm pleased to report that SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH, the Jack Vance tribute anthology I co-edited with Gardner Dozois, has been nominated in the Best Anthology category.
((Three of the five nominees in Best Anthology were edited or co-edited by Gardner, who is also up himself in the Best Editor category. Despite which, he is convinced he is going to lose both awards. That's why we call him...