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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...

Each time a group of Christians comes up with an unfamiliar way of understanding the scriptures and our relationship with God, there are other Christians who are quick to insist that anyone who believes like that can’t really be Christian. Much blood has been shed over these doctrinal differences; wars have been fought, boundaries have been changed, and people have gone into exile. Whether it was the often bloody struggle between Arians and Athanasians, between Lutherans and Catholics, between the Church of England and the Puritans, people have been willing, it seems, to die, to kill, and to deprive others...

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...

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...

Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card December 17, 2006 Honoring Those Who Died I was on my way home from speaking to officers at an air base, so when, during a brief layover, I saw a young man in uniform waiting for the same flight as me, I thought nothing of it -- I was used to uniforms. It happened that during boarding, we were nearly alone at the back of the plane for a few minutes. We struck up a conversation. This young man was nearing the end of his...

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...