The longest-term stakes in the war against terror are not just
human lives, but whether Western civilization will surrender to
fundamentalist Islam and shari’a law. More generally, the overt
confrontation between Western civilization and Islamist barbarism that
began on September 11th of 2001 has also made overt a fault line in
Western civilization itself — a fault line that [...]

A policeman was
premeditatedly shot dead today.
Now, I don’t regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible
crime — indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I
would do it myself. If he were committing illegal violence — or
even officially legal violence during the enforcement of an unjust
law. Supposing a policeman were criminally threatening someone’s
life, say. [...]

The congressional Democrats have made Nancy Pelosi their leader.
Whether or not this is conscious strategy, it means they’re going to
run to the left. And very likely get slaughtered in 2004.
It’s truly odd how self-destructive the American Left has become.
They’re like that famous line about the Palestinians, never missing an
opportunity to miss an opportunity. [...]

One of the problems we face in the war against terror is that
al-Qaeda is not quite a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It’s something
else that is more difficult to characterize and target.
(I wrote what follows three years before 9/11.)
Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good
propaganda and excellent satire (vide Illuminatus! or any
of [...]

I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle’s
SF as “conservative/militarist power fantasies”. Pournelle uttered a
rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I
could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend
Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy
and his patriotic instincts. I can hardly [...]

Ta-daa! In ritual obeisance to the customs of the blogosphere, I now
perform my very first fisking. Of Der Fisk himself, in his 8 Nov 2002 column
“Bush fights for another clean shot in his war”.

“A clean shot” was The Washington Post’s revolting description of the
murder of the al-Qa’ida leaders in Yemen by a US [...]

(There is an extended and improved version of this essay, A Political
History of SF.)
When I started reading SF in the late Sixties and early Seventies,
the field was in pretty bad shape — not that I understood this
at the time. The death of the pulp-zines in the 1950s had pretty much
killed off the SF short-fiction [...]

The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night. Never mind their
shiny new governorships — the `smart’ money pre-election was on
them picking up an absolute majority of governor’s seats, and at the
Congressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994’s.
The races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical — notably
the Florida governorship — [...]

It’s out. The Manifesto site is here. The Manifesto has been
submitted to PetitionOnline. To show your
support, please add one of thw web buttons to your splash page.
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It’s official. The anti-war movement is a Communist
front.
No, I’m not kidding — go read the story. Investigative reporter
David Corn digs into last Saturday’s D.C. antiwar rally and finds it
was covertly masterminded by a Communist Party splinter originally
founded in support of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. For good
later, he further digs up [...]

Consider spicy-hot food — and consider how recent it is as a
mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow
down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal
ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn’t always that way.
In fact it wasn’t that way until quite recently, historically
speaking. [...]