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In all the flap about Obama's reckless comments about Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela not posing a threat to the U.S. because they're small and spend less on their military than we do, one statement he made has gone virtually unnoticed. Yes, it's important to realize that we have a presidential candidate who actually believes that the Soviet Union once told the U.S. "We're going to wipe you off the planet" (they never did). Is it as important as Gerald Ford's gaffe when he declared that Poland was a free country -- back when it was under Russian domination? Let's not...

It would have been so simple for Obama to handle this like a statesman instead of a whiner. President Bush went to Israel to affirm America's ironclad support of Israel's survival as a nation. While there are Americans who don't agree with it, this has been the policy of the United States from the foundation of Israel on. President Bush didn't invent the policy, but he affirms it more vigorously and intelligently than most presidents have done. President Bush said, "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade...

Can you believe that J.K. Rowling is suing a small publisher because she claims their 10,000-copy edition of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a book about Rowling's hugely successful novel series, is just a "rearrangement" of her own material. Rowling "feels like her words were stolen," said lawyer Dan Shallman. Well, heck, I feel like the plot of my novel Ender's Game was stolen by J.K. Rowling. A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training...

IT WAS THE last Sunday of 2007, and I was preparing to substitute for our gospel doctrine teacher, who had just had her second child. The text of the lesson was the book of Revelation, chapters 5, 6 and 19 through 22. I read of the "golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints" (5:8), and I thought: Wouldn't it be much more convenient if all the images in this book could come with a nice little explanation like that? And then it dawned on me: Maybe the explanation was given only where the meaning would not...

In the News & Record last Sunday, Lewis Beale of Newsday wrote about how "War films can be hard for Hollywood to peddle." It seems that "of the four flms released in the past six months dealing with the current world situation -- all with big-name stars and the full Hollywood studio push -- none earned a profit in its initial theatrical release." Stephen Bochco explains the failure of these war films (as of his own TV series on the war, Over There) by saying, "It's a hugely unpopular war, and there's a staggering amount of depressing coverage.... I don't...

On Monday I got a letter from a friend of mine who is a sergeant in the US Army. With permission of his commanding officer (he does not reveal any classified information), I'm sharing it with you. He writes: I've been on the ground in Iraq for a few weeks now, and thought I'd chime in with a grunt's-eye view. In Sadr Al-Yusifiyah, an area to the East of Anbar province (just across the Euphrates from Anbar, actually), things are moving in a very interesting and hopeful direction. About six months ago, something happened that the Americans are calling "The...

There are those who would like to tell you that no religion is civilized, but these tend to be people whose ignorance of history is so profound as to appear deliberate. Human beings sometimes do terrible things, and when they do, they invariably find reasons to invoke their belief system, whatever it is, to excuse their bad behavior. Thus Communists have committed their barbarities in the name of "the good of the people," just as Christians and Muslims and practically everybody else, when they decided certain people needed killing or oppressing, found a way to excuse themselves in the name...

So Al Gore gets the Nobel Peace Prize, and my wife says to me, "Wow. First time they ever gave the peace prize for religion." So true. And so sad. What has Al Gore done for the world? Ran loaded hearings in the Senate to promote the idea of global warming with no evidence worth a bucket of ... whatever it was John Nance Garner said was in such a bucket. Then he was President Clinton's pet veep, treated with genial contempt, which he earned by his incompetence at running even an inconsequential office like that. Then he tried to...

It was quite a spectacle. Democratic Congressmen and Senators standing there denouncing Rush Limbaugh for attacking American soldiers by calling them "phony." We already know how much they hate Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk show personalities. Talk radio is the only part of the American media that the Left does not already control, one way or another; that's why they're trying to reintroduce the "fairness" doctrine (equal time for all points of view) only for talk radio, while the media the Left controls remains "unfair." But if they can make Rush Limbaugh look unAmerican, unpatriotic, well -- then all...

It was quite a spectacle. Democratic congressmen and senators standing there denouncing Rush Limbaugh for attacking American soldiers by calling them "phony." We already know how much they hate Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk show personalities. Talk radio is the only part of the American media that the Left does not already control, one way or another; that's why they're trying to reintroduce the "fairness" doctrine (equal time for all points of view) only for talk radio, while the media the Left controls remains "unfair." But if they can make Rush Limbaugh look unAmerican, unpatriotic, well – then all...

So the election grows closer, and it's time to satisfy all those people who have been demanding that we put a stop to illegal immigration. The failure of the so-called "amnesty bill" leaves the government no choice other than expulsion of anyone without papers. The National Guard is activated and the city and state police forces are nationalized. Sweeps of Hispanic neighborhoods round up all the Spanish-speaking people with brown skin and sort them out according to who has the right documentation. Six million of them are found to be illegal immigrants. They are loaded into buses, trucks, cattle cars...

History does repeat itself. Never exactly – there are always enough differences in the details that people who are determined not to learn anything from the past can find an excuse. But history shows patterns precisely because human beings don't change. After the First World War (then called the Great War), Britain and France were exhausted. They had triumphed – barely – but they had left more than a million dead soldiers on the battlefields.

      |     Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card April 29, 2007 Don't You Dare Ask for Proof! In last Sunday's News and Record, columnist Andrew Brod heaped ridicule on those who dare to contest the religion of global warming. What is his proof? He doesn't think he needs any. In fact, he's against proof. He likes it when governments make massive changes without any evidence that those changes are necessary. He spends his whole column citing political documents like the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on...

Warning: don't get hung up on a few disagreements with a democrat Orson Scott Card - we have overwhelmingly more points of agreement. If you disagree with me, see my tagline    :^)Duty. Honor. Country. Once these words could inspire the hearts of patriots. Now, in our benighted era, the elite in our nation sneer at the words and at those who still believe in them. ::: But there is such a thing as honor, and whether we name it by its right name or not, we depend on it. Honor is akin to the word "honest." We say a person...

When I heard that Mitt Romney was actually running for President, my first thought was, "Is he serious?" Doesn't he know that there is zero chance of a Mormon ever being in the White House? Everyone knows that Christian evangelicals hate Mormons so badly that if they had to choose between a bribe-taking, FBI-file-stealing, relentless-lie-telling, mud-slinging former first lady, and a Mormon ex-governor who doesn't lie, who's still married to his first wife, and who supports the entire Christian evangelical agenda, they'd still rather die than vote for a Mormon. Being Mormon just makes Romney too easy a target. And...

It's not going to be the best movie you see this year, but it might be the most important. Amazing Grace is the story of William Wilberforce, the man who was most responsible (though he certainly did not work alone) for abolishing the slave trade and, ultimately, slavery itself, beginning with the British Empire, but ultimately around the world. The trouble with a story like this is that while Wilberforce's effort was heroic, fighting in what seemed to be a losing cause — yet one that could not, morally, be abandoned — the great moments consisted of speeches and...

All in a Good Cause Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have. An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann." The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the...

What Is Driving Global Climate? Science isn't done by consensus. It's done by rigorous testing. When a hypothesis -- or a computer model -- fails to correspond to the actual real-world data, you throw it out. That's what the real climate scientists are doing. They have found, in recent years, a very close correspondence between global climate and variations in the amount of radiation the Earth receives from the Sun. The light and heat we get varies depending on the distance and position of the Earth and the amount of radiation the Sun puts out. The Earth's distance and position...

Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have. An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann." The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to...

Let me tell you about an audiobook that I hated. I didn't hate it because it was badly written – it was mediocre in the way that mediocre thrillers usually are, and that means it would ordinarily have been tolerable. No, the reason I stopped listening to Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link is that this book is evil. I don't mean it's about evil. I don't even mean that it is evil-porn, like those horror books whose authors are pervertedly devoted to thinking up cool ways to torture and kill people. I mean that this book, to the degree that...

President Bush is a genuinely awful speaker. Wouldn't it be a shame if we lost a war for the survival of western civilization because we had a President who reads his speeches in a dispassionate drone? It's been interesting to watch the media respond to the speech. Not that many months ago, the media was reporting on the speeches of Democrats and other critics of the war, talking about how Bush's plan in Iraq had failed because we always needed "more boots on the ground." None of them -- not even the generals who hated defense secretary Rumsfeld with such...

Keeping Things CivilAfterword to the novel Empireby Orson Scott Card The originating premise of this novel did not come from me. Donald Mustard and his partners in Chair Enterainment had the idea for an entertainment franchise called Empire about a near-future American civil war. When I joined the project to create a work of fiction based on that premise, my first order of business was to come up with a plausible way that such an event might come about. It was, sadly enough, all too easy. Because we haven't had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think...

Here's how it happens: America stupidly and immorally withdraws from the War on Terror, withdrawing prematurely from Iraq and leaving it in chaos. Emboldened, either Muslims unite against the West (unlikely) or collapse in a huge war between Shiites and Sunnis (already beginning). It almost doesn't matter, because in the process the oil will stop flowing. And when the oil stops flowing, Europe and Japan and Taiwan and Singapore and South Korea all crash economically; Europe then has to face the demands of its West-hating Muslim "minority" without money and without the ruthlessness or will to survive that would allow...

He should be up in about 5 minutes. He's written a book about a possible civil war between the right and left.

Producer Joel Silver's Silver Pictures has optioned Empire, an upcoming book from bestselling sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, for a big-screen adaptation. The novel is currently slated to hit bookshelves on November 28. According to the Card's official Web site, here is the story of Empire: The American Empire has grown too fast, and the fault lines at home are stressed to the breaking point. The war of words between Right and Left has collapsed into a shooting war, though most people just want to be left alone. The battle rages between the high-technology weapons on one side and militia...

Does anybody here remember when Doonesbury was funny? Never mind. It was funny this past Sunday, in a bitter, ironic kind of way. The comic strip, by Garry Trudeau, shows a professor teaching a class, in which he compares two presidents -- Bush and Clinton. Of Bush he says, "The first president initiates a bloody, costly, unending war on false premises ... and approves covert policies of illegal detentions, kangaroo courts, extraordinary renditions, torture, and warrantless wiretapping of thousands of Americans." Of Clinton, he says, "The second president lies about hooking up with an intern. Question: Which one should be...

Is America in danger of civil war? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer Orson Scott Card thinks that we're in enough danger that he's authored a cautionary tale entitled Empire that's set in more-or-less present times. In Card's novel, which is straight thriller fiction a la Jack Bauer rather than the science fiction for which Card is generally known, shadowy forces use terror and assassination to trigger a civil war in an America sharply divided along Red/Blue lines. In the Afterword, Card writes: "Rarely do people set out to start a civil war. Invariably, when such wars break...

I believe in two-party government. I especially believe in it when it prevents Congress from doing anything – because that prevents them from doing stupid things. Of course, the Republicans were already doing a fine job of keeping even one-party government in a permanent logjam. Plus, the Republicans were also proving themselves just as unable to remain worthy of power while holding it as the Democrats did during their decades of dominance from 1954 to 1994.This election proves only that the monolithically leftwing mainstream media can make the public believe we are losing a war that we are winning. As...

"Meanwhile, we have this election. You have your vote. For the sake of our children's future -- and for the sake of all good people in the world who don't get to vote in the only election that matters to their future, too -- vote for no Congressional candidate who even hints at withdrawing from Iraq or opposing Bush's leadership in the war. And vote for no candidate who will hand control of the House of Representatives to those who are sworn to undo Bush's restrained but steadfast foreign policy in this time of war."

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror. And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election. If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one. Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the...

Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card September 17, 2006 Homework, Part I The Worst Job in the World What if you had a really lousy job? You're only employed for seven hours a day, but you have to ride the bus for half an hour each way. While you're there, they only let you go to the bathroom at certain times. You only have ten minutes to get from one work station to another, and somehow you also have to use the toilet and get your new work materials from a...

I think it's about time we remembered that words are supposed to have meanings. It's sort of a quiet agreement among all the speakers of a particular language, that you try to use a word according to its agreed-upon meaning. For instance, I recently heard a Democratic congressman refer to the War on Terror -- specifically, the Iraq campaign -- as "catastrophic." He seemed to be a reasonably educated guy. I think if a doctor told him, "What you have is a catastrophic illness," he would understand what the word meant and prepare for death or permanent disability. Or if...

      |     World WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card July 16, 2006 Know Thy Enemy I do hope that the readers of this column already know that no decent person could ever advocate that Israel negotiate with Hamas and Hezbollah or give in to their demands in the slightest in order to get their kidnapped soldiers back. The slightest concession would only guarantee that more and more Israelis would be kidnapped in the future. The only way to extinguish kidnapping is to make sure that it never,...

When our young men (and women) volunteer to serve in our military, it is usually with an eye to serving their country, even at the risk of their own lives. In the process of their service, they will take orders, constantly. Sometimes those orders will come from people they respect – even love. Sometimes, though, the orders will come from people they dislike, or disdain, or fear or hate. Yet the ones who last in the military learn to submerge their own will and keep silent, except when some truly outrageous or dangerous or illegal order is given – whereupon...

Poor Abdul Rahman. He lived in Germany, where there is freedom of religion. He forgot that freedom of religion only applies to non-Muslims who convert to other faiths. Muslims aren't allowed to follow their individual consciences. If you're born a Muslim, then in your entire life you will never, never have a choice about what religion to belong to. Because if you convert from Islam to another faith, good Muslims have a right -- no, a duty -- to kill you. Oh, wait. How can I say that? I keep forgetting -- we've been assured ten thousand times since 9/11...

WorldWatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card February 12, 2006 Three Books That Name Names Bernard Goldberg, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is #37). Kate O'Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports David Horowitz, The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America We Americans have been through massive cultural and social revolutions in the past two generations. We've drastically revised the way we marry, the way we have sex, the way we educate...

I keep wondering why I'm getting flashbacks to the 1960s. I never took any hallucinogenic drugs. And yet I keep hearing people on TV saying we need to bring the troops home now. Of course, back in the 60s, the people saying that were all wearing long hair and, if they were of the guy persuasion, beards; now it's people in suits. So it occurred to me that maybe they're the ones having the flashbacks. They really think this war is Vietnam. Having romanticized the anti-war movement of the 1960s, they think they're wrapping themselves in the mantle of heroes....

This is the most provocative article by Orson Scott Card I've ever read. But don't rush with the judgment and flame throwing before you read till the end. If you just skim the beginning, you might think he makes a conclusion that he is NOT making... A bit of a spoiler from the very end: "...I pick A. I think B and C are both vile. That’s my opinion. But at least I took the available information into account when I reached it. Mark my words, many people are going to be outraged at my opinion – I can see...

A week before the London bombings, I was in England for a US Defense Department-sponsored conference on the future of weapons of mass destruction. It was held in Sussex, as part of the Wilton Park conference series, which is well attended by diplomats and military people from many European and Middle Eastern countries. This time, they also brought along some science fiction writers, in the hope that we would actually know something about the future. (Whether we delivered on that hope is another question. The other guys did great. As for me: I warned them in advance that I wouldn’t...

When the bombs went off in London, you could practically feel the relief on the part of those who hate the war in Iraq. Of course, they regretted the deaths of so many innocents, and of course they were outraged at those who committed the act. But they also felt vindicated, and some of them said so. They gloated a bit that Rumsfeld had recently said that Al Qaeda was on the ropes, so to speak. Here was proof positive, they believed, that our war in Iraq – far from limiting terrorism – had created new recruits and spread it...

Orson Scott Card will be signing his new fantasy novel "Magic Street" in Southern California, July 12-17 Huntington Beach, CA Tuesday, 12 July - 7:00 p.m. Barnes & Noble 7777 Edinger Ave. Huntington Beach, CA Pasadena, CA Wednesday, 13 July - 7:00 p.m. Vroman's Books 695 East Colorado Pasadena, CA San Diego, CA Thursday, 14 July - 7:00 p.m. Mysterious Galaxy 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd. San Diego, CA San Diego Comic Con International Friday, 15 July - Sunday, 17 July Panels and signings TBA

So Newsweek prints an uncorroborated allegation about American interrogators flushing Qurans down the toilet in order to get fanatical Muslim prisoners to talk, and there’s rioting and death all over the Muslim world. There are several lessons to be learned from this incident, some trivial, some quite important.  1. The courts have given the news media carte blanche, in the name of the First Amendment – but the media are no better than government at exercising unchecked power. When it’s known that no one can punish you, a certain kind of person stops caring whether he hurts anybody. And such...

The press has taken sides, and the propaganda is showing up now in the public mind. In a recent issue of the Greensboro News and Record, a hapless letter-writer wrote in to express outrage that the Republicans in Congress would "cut off debate" about judicial appointments. Nobody actually lied to this poor soul. Because, after all, a vote to end a filibuster is, in fact, a vote to cut off debate. The real problem is that a filibuster is not debate, but rather a device for preventing the majority of the Senate from taking an action that the filibustering minority...

So they've gone and killed "Star Trek." And it's about time. They tried it before, remember. The network flushed William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy down into the great septic tank of broadcast waste, from which no traveler…. No, wait, let's get this right: from which rotting ideas and aging actors return with depressing regularity. It was the fans who saved "Star Trek" from oblivion. They just wouldn't let go. This was in the days before VCRs, and way before DVDs. You couldn't go out and buy the boxed set of all three seasons. When a show was canceled, the only...

To Catholics, the passing of John Paul II meant they lost one Pope - a beloved and popular one. But they know that they will soon have another. There is a long (and complicated) chain of succession going back to the early days of Christianity, and that sense of continuity will sustain them. One Pope is gone, but Mother Church continues. But I'm not a Catholic. According to my beliefs, the office of Pope holds no particular authority; I have no stake in the succession; Pope John Paul II was never the leader of my church. And yet ... I...

March 26, 2005 Whose Life Is Worth Living? By Orson Scott Card It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book. “Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed. They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars. I did ask where they shopped, and which...

It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book. “Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed. They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars. I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have...

It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book. “Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed. They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars. I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have not...

World Watch First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card March 6, 2005 Global Warming: Fighting Off the Ice Age I've been waiting a long time to see real science applied to global warming. Finally, there's a bit of rationality applied to the subject. Not that there haven't always been real scientists involved. But either they, or the people writing about their work, have been functioning like "creation scientists" -- they are already convinced, so instead of testing their own ideas, they turn whatever data comes along into "proof" of their belief in order...

Orson Scott Card gives here very interesting reviews of The Wedding Date and Racing Stripes. Follow the link to read them. But his review of the Million Dollar Baby is absolutely fantastic: Million Dollar Baby is being touted as Clint Eastwood's best performance ever, and it probably is -- though the film editor didn't have to select the take where snot bubbled out of his nose when he was crying. It's also a fine performance by Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, with director Clint Eastwood doing a wonderful job of evoking a time and milieu as he draws memorable performances...