The Special Operations Warrior Foundation provides full college scholarships to every child who has lost a parent serving in the Special Operations Command. Our special operators train like professional athletes, perform like minor Gods, and lay it all on the line every day in defense of freedom and decency. The Spartan Race is for civilians whose lives are too damned cushy and sedentary, and allows maniacs to go out there for a day and crawl through mud and jump over fire and throw spears and get pummelled with pugil sticks. I'm running the Spartan Race South London Super in support of the SOWF....   (read more)

Here's a bit of contemporary history for you. After the 2008 election, but before the handover of power, Bush invited Obama over to the White House for a one-on-one sit-down meeting, in which he begged the incoming president to preserve just two programs......   (read more)

As I put this up, it shows only a thousand of the 6,026 American servicemen and women who have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. (I'm going to keep adding to it.) There have been no terrorist attacks on the American homeland since 9/11. Fifty million Muslims and others, previously living in two of the most oppressive and brutal regimes on Earth, are now free....   (read more)

This one goes out to the boys in DEVGRU....   (read more)

My little bin Laden's Dead Boogie....   (read more)

Well, the Large Hadron Collider had gone online. And we were still there. That was a nice start to the day - not having been sucked into a small black hole, nor woken up to find that stranglets had devoured the entire planet, leaving only an inert hyperdense sphere 100 meters across....   (read more)

I'm a Martin Amis fan. There, I said it. Ordinarily, when people ask me who my favourite contemporary novelists are, I usually slip Amis in - but almost always add that "he's a guilty pleasure" or some such similar wiggly qualification....   (read more)

Since the periodicity of my long-running quotations series has been getting asymptotic with infinity, here are the quotes that have been piling up since the last edition...   (read more)

This is an essay that I've been writing in my head - and reciting bits of out loud at various intervals, in variously heated discussions - for five years. I write and publish it now for the following reasons:...   (read more)

The full story of what happened on three of those four terrible flights will never be known. But we do know something about the final moments of United Airlines Flight 93, the decisive event of the day....   (read more)

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciouslyly malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion...   (read more)

Morning in Newquay, early and misty and still, and I was up and out for a pre-departure run by Somerfields for provisions - and also the Kodak shop to burn CDs, and reclaim all of my camera memory. This was the self-same Kodak shop, actually, manned by the encephalitic clowns who lost all my Day 2 pictures. Heigh ho....   (read more)

"All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope."...   (read more)

"The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity . . . It was the deep knowledge - and pray God we have not lost it - that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest."...   (read more)

"The British people are the sort of partners you want when serious work needs doing. The men and women of this kingdom are kind and steadfast and generous and brave, and America is fortunate to call this country our closest friend in the world." - George W. Bush, yesterday's Whitehall address...   (read more)

"Whatever the duration of this struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men - free people will set the course of history....   (read more)

Sara landed in Quito three nights ago. All four of us, my three adult sisters and I, seemingly following some genetically hard-wired agitation timer, have simultaneously thrown ourselves into massive transition. ...   (read more)

I am watching the reading of the names of 9/11 victims at Ground Zero, on television. (I'm in a place with a television, which today I'm grateful for.) As the names rolled by, as did the images of the loved ones down in the footprints of the missing buildings laying flowers, I was deeply struck by what all these people looked like...   (read more)