Sorry to be making this update a bit late, but a lot has been happening lately. I’m very happy to announce that I’ve joined Human Events as a full-time writer! My first essay has been posted at www.humanevents.com:
The Mind of America
I’ve also posted a farewell to Hot Air, my blogging home since April 2009, which you can read here.
Since I’m writing exclusively for Human Events now, I’m not sure what will become of this web site. I’ll continue posting links to Human Events as my work appears there, and would invite everyone to join the discussion in their comment forums. My role there will be expanding in the next few weeks. I’ll be writing a lot more.
I greatly appreciate the high quality of discourse produced by readers of this web site. Keeping my day job running has made it hard for me to participate in the discussions, but now that writing will be my day job, I hope I can do so more frequently. I would like to proudly invite everyone to join the discussion at Human Events. They are a revered institution of conservative thought, and they’ve expressed remarkable faith in me. I’m determined to prove myself worthy of their trust, and bring further honor to their name. This is a dream come true, and everyone who left such kind and thoughtful comments here, during the past year, helped to make it come true. I hope to bring further honor to all of you, as well.
- John Hayward
Posted by Doctor Zero on November 2, 2010 ♦ Filed in Uncategorized ♦ 21 Comments »
It has long been my practice to write a horror story on Halloween, and share it with my friends. I posted last year’s effort at Hot Air, along with an essay about horror entitled The Very Witching Time of Night. I thought I would share this year’s story as well. Happy Halloween!
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 31, 2010 ♦ Filed in Uncategorized ♦ 11 Comments »
The 111th Congress began by dropping a trillion dollars in debt on the American taxpayer. The money disappeared in a wild spending spree, buying $2 million jobs in Los Angeles, and evaporating into nonexistent zip codes. Billions of dollars remain clogged in the filthy pipes of government, producing nothing but more debt through accumulated interest payments. Much of the “stimulus” money was used to pump lard into government payrolls, creating useless jobs that vanished as soon as the taxpayer subsidies ran dry. The President recently admitted that the stated reason for appropriating this vast sum of money, the creation of “shovel-ready jobs,” was an outright lie.
Government payrolls, are the only thing that expanded during the past session of Congress. Public sector jobs multiplied like a virus, and the number of six-figure government employees skyrocketed. Meanwhile, real unemployment in the private sector – including seasonal adjustments, long-term discouraged workers, and the underemployed – hit 22% nationwide. The lights burned bright and merry in the plush offices of K Street lobbying firms, while the rest of the economy slid into darkness.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 30, 2010 ♦ Filed in Elections ♦ 20 Comments »
You know what America really needs? More stimulus spending! We’ve got double-digit unemployment and a moribund economy after President Obama’s first trillion-dollar stimulus bill. Obviously we need more.
How much more? The President was asking for another $50 billion back in September. On the wilder shores of the storm-tossed deficit sea, Paul Krugman has been heard to mutter something about doubling or tripling the trillion we’ve already spent. He thinks the first stimulus was far too small, because it was based on ridiculously inadequate projections made by people like… Paul Krugman.
Tales abound of “stimulus jobs” created at a cost of millions per job. The average cost nationwide has been computed at $246,436 per job. By some estimates, we’ve lost over 11 million jobs since the recession began in 2007. At two hundred grand a pop, we’ll need roughly $2,200,000,000,000 in stimulus spending to recover them all. It might be time to think about invading Alpha Centauri to get the money. Hopefully their soldiers will wear solid gold armor, and use guns that shoot diamonds.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 28, 2010 ♦ Filed in Economics ♦ 8 Comments »
In a radio interview for Latino audiences, President Obama laid bare the ugly reality of statist government:
“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”
Referring specifically to Republicans such as Senator John McCain, who formerly supported an overhaul but now are stressing border security and supporting strict immigration laws like Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration measure, Mr. Obama said, “Those aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”
Did you ever imagine you would witness a President using this kind of rhetoric? Well, get used to it. He was dumping a fresh load of shame upon the office he occupies, but Barack Obama was also giving Latino voters some perfectly reasonable advice.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 26, 2010 ♦ Filed in Economics, Politics ♦ 10 Comments »
The central idea behind every form of collectivism is the belief that the State is better able to address most social problems than free-willed individuals. The government is morally and intellectually superior to its citizens. It can be trusted to act in their best interests, while greedy private corporations will only try to take advantage of them.
What resources does the State have, to accomplish these important goals? There is only one worth talking about. The primary resource of the government is compulsion.
The government might be able to make a little money from fees for services rendered, or leasing property it owns. As it turns out, most of the government’s attempts to turn a “profit” are dismal failures – the Post Office and Amtrak spring to mind as examples. It always ends up using compulsive force to subsidize its losses, or rig the market against private-sector competitors. The vast majority of its funds are collected through compulsory taxes, and its influence on the marketplace is expressed through regulations and penalties.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 24, 2010 ♦ Filed in Economics ♦ 28 Comments »
It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time to harvest the fall crop of horror movies. The most memorable scary movies are those which echo the fears of the moment. The Exorcist arrived at a time of tension between science and spirituality, pitting a very modern single mom and her daughter against an ancient terror. Halloween unleashed a faceless, unstoppable evil into the backyards and living rooms of a comfortable suburb. Jaws reminded audiences that overcrowded beaches full of overfed tourists are but the top layer of some very deep waters. The Blair Witch Project used creepy little twig dolls to teach a high-tech, know-it-all generation that old-growth forests still exist, and you can still get lost forever in their shadowy embrace.
The latest films to tickle our collective anxieties belong to the Paranormal Activity series. The first is available on DVD, while second opened in theaters this weekend. Our homes have become castles, fortified with giant plasma screens and high-speed internet, but the malevolent spirit haunting these movies walks right through our best electronic defenses. It doesn’t even bother knocking until it’s already inside.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 23, 2010 ♦ Filed in Culture ♦ 9 Comments »
Everyone has their pet theories about National Public Radio’s stunning decision to fire Juan Williams, and most of those theories are probably correct. Williams is reliably liberal in most of his views, but he’s too friendly with conservatives, and his presence smears a bit too much liberal credibility on the dry right-wing toast of Fox News. It’s a pledge week for NPR, and the high-profile sacking of the tainted Williams will inspire the insulated left-wing audience to push a few more bucks through the feeding slots in their hermetically sealed isolation bubbles.
NPR also received a boatload of the sinister foreign money President Obama has been hyperventilating about, from billionaire George Soros, and all that imported cabbage probably bought him some editorial influence. He might have insisted on a standard of ideological purity that Juan Williams could no longer meet.
Political correctness may have prompted a reflexive dismissal from the mindless drones running NPR, who were last heard musing that Williams should be reviewing his opinions with a psychiatrist. The Volturi do not give second chances.
Fear of criticism by the Islamic front organization CAIR, which the Left takes very seriously, could certainly have been a factor in their decision, as could anticipation of even more pointed criticism from less elegantly tailored sources. NPR certainly isn’t afraid of Juan Williams, and its CEO is no Megyn Kelly.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 22, 2010 ♦ Filed in Media, Political Correctness ♦ 50 Comments »
In the first decade of the new millennium, a great crisis of confidence shook the United States of America.
This crisis has cultural and international dimensions. The election of a supposedly “post-racial” black President was meant to achieve a level of racial harmony the public had wearily concluded it could not reach on its own.
We could see no remainder from the horrors of the civil-rights era, and public statements of prejudice against preferred minorities resulted in immediate exile from civic life… but the credentialed representatives of minority organizations assured us things were worse than ever. Lacking the cultural confidence to ignore these voices when they degenerated into meaningless blather, Americans outsourced the quest for racial enlightenment to a politician, who the media presented as a kind of messiah.
On the international front, the American public was told its strong resistance to terrorism had earned the sullen resentment of the Western world. Taking the United Nations seriously earned its contempt. Faced with the aggressive confidence of the expanding Islamic world, the West began negotiating the surrender of its ideals. The American people have been taught from an early age that freedom of speech is the most sacred principle of an advanced democracy… but they watched the institutions of Europe kneel fearfully before the threat of Islamic violence, and now their own “free” press has begun following suit. Self-censorship is presented with the queasy false bravado of children trying to justify surrender to the class bully as an act of heroism.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 19, 2010 ♦ Filed in Culture, Economics, Politics ♦ 27 Comments »
Comedian and fake news host Jon Stewart has announced a “Rally to Restore Sanity” on October 30 in Washington, D.C. Nervous at being almost completely eclipsed by Glenn Beck, Stewart decided to stage a rally that would be presented as a satire of Beck’s immense “Restoring Honor” rally in August. Of course, Stewart wants to drop his detachable clown nose at his convenience, to make “dead serious” points, as Time magazine puts it:
It’s funny, and it’s dead serious. Stewart may rely on the cover of being “just a fake news program,” but at least since he went off on Crossfire in 2004, he’s also had a very earnest distaste for the media personalities and politicians whose sole purpose, it seems, is to whip people into psychosis. You would think, looking at the way the country runs now, that America took the movie Network not as a cautionary tale but a how-to manual. Maybe Stewart can give a voice to the people who are not “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” but rather, you know, pretty ticked off yet willing to keep giving it a shot.
Guess what, Stewart fans? “Pretty ticked off yet willing to give it a shot” means you’re not even speed bumps to the ambitions of this carnivorous government. You’ve already lost a shocking amount of freedom in just two years. The mandarins who imposed ObamaCare couldn’t care less about your willingness to give it a shot. You will obey, completely, or you will be fined and jailed… unless you work for a favored corporation or union that secured a waiver. Your health-care options and employment opportunities have already been severely damaged by ObamaCare. The only way to repair that damage is to resist with all your might, and insist on repeal. Anything less is meaningless, and makes you useless. Have fun at your rally.
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Posted by Doctor Zero on October 17, 2010 ♦ Filed in Culture, Politics ♦ 19 Comments »
