My new Impertinent Questions column is up at Death By 1000 Papercuts. It’s called Small Socialism. Click here to take a look!
Archive for “Uncategorized”
Impertinent Questions: Small Socialism
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Impertinent Questions: The Church of the State
Wednesday, September 1, 2010My new installment of Impertinent Questions is up at Death By 1000 Papercuts: The Church of the State. Click here to check it out!
Impertinent Questions: Dollars for Dumps
Sunday, August 29, 2010I’ve begun a regular feature over at Death By 1000 Papercuts called “Impertinent Questions,” scheduled to run on Sundays and Wednesdays. In the first installment, posted today, I ask: why not use the magic of the Cash for Clunkers program to fix the housing market? Click here to check it out!
Doctor Zero Podcasts: 100 And Counting!
Monday, August 16, 2010The redoubtable Joe Koday has reached a milestone, and recorded his 100th Doctor Zero Podcast. To commemorate the occasion, he penned the following ode to Lori Ziganto, which also happens to mention my work in passing.
Writing about current events is like whitewater rafting. It’s amazing how much distance you can cover before you know it. I’m delighted and honored that Joe continues to produce these excellent audio recordings!
Click here to listen to the Doctor Zero Podcasts
Follow Joe Koday on Twitter
Take a number behind Joe and stalk Lori at Snarkandboobs
Doctor Zero: Superhero by Joe Koday
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No . . .it’s a plain bird. That’s the best superhero joke I know. Doc Zero once wrote that it was best to begin a composition with an arresting opening paragraph. I always preferred to go for comedy over drama. Get the audience laughing and they’re yours.
My name is Joe Koday. Since April 2010 I’ve had the honor and the pleasure of being the voice behind Doc Zero’s Podcasts. I take Doc’s brilliant essays (read by millions in 170 countries and on the International Space Station) and produce audio recordings of them for a world wide audience of . . . six or seven. This is Doctor Zero’s 100th podcast.
Death By 1000 Papercuts Reviews “Doctor Zero: Year One”
Saturday, August 7, 2010Mondo over at Death By 1000 Papercuts has posted a terrific review of “Doctor Zero: Year One.” DBKP is the kind of fast-moving site you’d expect a gang of right-wing cutthroats to run. They update constantly, and they don’t keep the weird stuff hidden below decks. Drop by and check them out!
DOne: A Greco-Hat-Tip
Thursday, July 29, 2010Note from Doctor Zero: I recently invited our loyal site gadfly, DOne, to write at length about his disagreement with my point of view on independent voters. Following is his response. I hope readers will show him the same courtesy in the discussion forum they have always extended to me. Full disclosure: while this may come as a surprise to regular guests in the comment section who are familiar with DOne’s posts, he’s one of my oldest friends. Along with occasional contributor Loneloc, we met in high school. In the Day by Day saga of my life, DOne is Jan. I’m a fusion of Zed and Sam, while Loneloc is a giant cartoon praying mantis chained to a drum set.
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Love coming on too strong does not give glory or virtue to men. But if Kypris comes in moderation, no other goddess is so gracious. Never, oh goddess, let fly at me an inescapable arrow from your golden bow, after you drench it in desire.
Euripides, in his semi-sympathetic exploration of the witch Medea, utilizes his Chorus to strike home the paramount of all Ancient Greek ideals: moderation. We, according to Athenian creed, must strike an accord between sense and sensibility, the masculine and feminine; all contraries presented us in life are extremes which are perversions of what is truth. Any imbalance favoring any of these extremes is detrimental to the social fabric that surrounds us. Simply put, excess is not only gauche, but destructive; excess permits us to act in a manner both uncivilized and unwarranted and cobbles a roadway to despair and perdition.
Our current political climate is a perfect example of the state of contrarian excess.
Guest Post At the Daily Caller: Juggling The Sherrod Chainsaw
Wednesday, July 28, 2010I’m going to help take care of The DC Trawler, Jim Treacher’s corner over at The Daily Caller, while he’s on vacation for a few days. My first guest post is up now: Juggling the Sherrod Chainsaw. Click here to check it out!
The Calculus of Racism
Sunday, July 25, 2010Shirley Sherrod, formerly of the USDA, said some rather provocative things during the rambling March 2010 speech that would later prompt the Obama Administration to summarily dismiss her. When I say “summarily,” I mean they called her on her cell phone while she was driving, made her pull over to the side of the road, and submit her resignation from her BlackBerry.
The anecdote that prompted the Administration to extract that resignation letter from her trembling thumbs was less interesting than this passage, from a bit later in the speech:
I want to just share something with you and…I think it helps to — it — you know, when I learned this, I’m like, “Oh, my goodness.” You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century, black — there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for the seven years and — and get their freedom. And they didn’t see any difference in each other. Nobody worried about skin color. They married each other, you know. These were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves. But they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery.
But then they started looking at the injustices that they faced and started then trying — you know, the people with money — you know, they started — the…poor whites and poor blacks who were — they — you know, they married each other. They lived together. They were just like we would be. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided we need to do something about it — you know, about this. Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, “Hey, we need to do something here to divide them.”
So that’s when they made black people servants for life. That’s when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they — it started working so well, they said, “Gosh, looks like we’ve come up on something here that can last generations.” And here we are over 400 years later, and it’s still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us. The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and, whether it’s health care or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power, you know. It’s always about money, y’all.
Sherrod immediately provided an example of “folks with money” doing “what they need to do to keep that power”:
You know, I haven’t seen such a mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. Some of the racism we thought was buried. Didn’t it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bush’s and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.
She probably didn’t appreciate the irony of reflexively using a false accusation of racism to suppress dissent against the enormous power grab perpetrated by the Democrats in their health-care bill. False accusations of racism in the service of tyranny are themselves a profoundly racist act: There is no legitimate dissent from the President’s usurpation of our liberties. All such dissent is a result of the ugly prejudice baked into white cracker genes.
Whistling Past The JournoList Graveyard
Wednesday, July 21, 2010Leftist writers and pundits have been trying to stroll past the crater left by the Daily Caller’s JournoList bombshell, hands stuffed in their pockets and eyes rigidly forward. Over at the Caller, Jim Treacher provides a roundup of reaction from across the blogosphere (look for a familiar name!) He includes a few gems from liberals, including David Corn of Mother Jones asking, “And this is the best they can do?”
Taylor Marsh grins through the flop-sweat to assure us conspiracy to defraud the dwindling audience of the dinosaur media, and slander innocent people as racists, is no big deal when “avowed and openly progressive reporters” do it. I guess we’re supposed to take it as a given that all progressives are liars and smear artists, so we’ve got no right to complain when they’re caught lying and smearing people. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, progressives gotta try throwing a white sheet over Fred Barnes to save Obama from a scandal that should have finished off his campaign.
Value Is Knowledge
Tuesday, July 20, 2010Value is knowledge.
That sounds a little backward, doesn’t it? It’s easy to see how knowledge is valuable. Consider the fanciful example of traveling back in time with tomorrow’s stock market results. Such data would be worth fantastic sums of money.
I thought about the reversal of this concept as I was reading a New York Times report on the disastrous results of government’s management of General Motors. Frantic closure of GM dealerships resulted in the loss of over ten thousand jobs. Writing at Ace of Spades, Gabriel Malor explains it this way:
The truth is that the Administration was in full panic mode and were trying to chop the auto companies down to something a distracted, inexperienced bureaucracy could manage. Both GM and Chrysler ultimately rejected hundreds of Obama terminations — evidence that the President’s taskforce was making hasty and arbitrary choices.
There would certainly have been job losses if GM suffered the judgment of the free market and died in the early days of the Obama Administration, crushed beneath the weight of its unsustainable union labor commitments. Instead, the Administration screwed bolts into its neck, pumped a few hundred billion volts of deficit spending into them, and resurrected it… for the benefit of the very labor unions who broke its back. If you’re a taxpaying American, you contributed several thousand dollars to pay for this economic necromancy, even if you’ve never owned a GM car.
