The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist
terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The
suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to
spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or
journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s
will to [...]

This is a request for help from my readers. I’m trying to find out how to hack WP so that it will never insert <br> tags in my entries. I want it to ignore hard newlines, treating them as soft.

OK, the site theme no longer completely sucks. I’m using Jim Vanderveen’s modified version of Steam, with my own custom header and the CSS brutally simplified to get rid of margins and excess whitespace.
I’m extremely relieved to have got rid of the default “Kubrick” WP theme.
Fixed-width, heavy whitespace, gratuitous images — what were [...]

Having discovered that my WordPress 1.5 upgrade broke the CSS and
customized template I had designed for WordPress 1.2, I’ve been
shopping for a new theme at the WRC Theme
Viewer site. I’m looking for something clean and simple that I
can customize to my taste.
Having browsed through over a hundred and fifty themes, I’m left with one
burning [...]

My WordPress instance was just upgraded from 1.2 to 1.5. The visual presentation may have a glitch or two until I edit the template.
UPDATE: Aaargh. It looks like the special magic in the templates has been changed enough that I will have to rebuild my look and feel from scratch. This [...]

Aa a finger exercise in writing, I decided to submit a piece to Manolo’s
Essay Contest. The constraints — low word count, a subject
that really doesn’t interest me much — appealed to me. I
figured if I could produce something interesting under those
circumstances, it would be an accomplishment.
Here it is. You be the judge…

A commenter writes, in reference to my letter to the Microsoft
recruiter,

BTW, I think abrogating to yourself the status of MS’s worst
nightmare might be seen as presumptious, considering that FLOSS
depends on a big community, and a lot of what FLOSS is about precedes
your 97 work, but far be it from me to try to teach ESR [...]

The following is, verbatim, a letter I received a few minutes ago
from a Microsoft recruiter.

A minor SF writer of radical Marxist political convictions recently
uttered a rather incoherent rant in which, among other things, she
accused me of “simple-minded right-wing” views. I’m not going to name
her because I don’t dislike the woman enough to want to add to her
troubles. But I’ve heard this song before from other Marxists, and [...]

Oh, my stars and garters. A pro-firearms story in the New York Times?

Yes, children, it has actually happened: Police
and Owners Begin to Challenge Looters (link via InstaPundit).
Property owners with guns maintaining civil order in their
neighborhood are cited approvingly. There’s even a picture of a
handsome armed couple “on the lookout for looters”.
I think I’m [...]