This is still true today, when the idea of "say what you mean and mean what you say" is sadly out of fashion, and BS is a perverse art form, notably among the governing and "elite" classes. Orwell quote via the lovely Brits At Their Best.Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’.
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought . . .
Even by the relentlessly poor standards of the Obama administration, whose doctrine unfailingly appears to be “kiss your enemies and kick your allies”, this is a new low.A related note: thoughts by Daniel Hannan and ChicagoBoyz. Obama does seem bound and determined to alienate all our allies, especially Great Britain -- a fact that I find both depressing and infuriating.
But then again, as I've said before, whenever (a) government decides to engage in social engineering, and (b) other people are doing things to you "for your own good," the result is always abysmal. I swear, more immoral things are done in the name of morality than not.Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history.
"It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified."Hmmm. That "curious fanaticism" seems to have plenty of modern cousins.
"Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: There are many people under you, but no one is listening."HA!
Some liberals argue that the Constitution is unconstitutional.Ha! Of course, anything is "unconstitutional" if it keeps the big-government crowd from getting its way!
Good grief.Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care.
An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.
. . . The report, which follows reviews by the Care Quality Commission and the Department of Health, said that “unimaginable” suffering had been caused. Regulators said last year that between 400 and 1,200 more patients than expected may have died at the hospital from 2005 to 2008.
Um .... riveting.The graphic novel follows the 'adventures' of Zana, Max et al at the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Department – known as ECHO – as they struggle to secure funding for the fictional sate of Borduvia, which has been devastated by an earthquake.
Written by a Belgian graphic novelist Erik Bongers, Hidden Disasters – a cross between Tintin and Thunderbirds: International Rescue – contains such immortal dialogue as: "We must inform the Commissioner! She's briefing the European Parliament on the earthquake tomorrow."
Papierkrieg from Makaio Tisu on Vimeo.
... this may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for right thinking people to confront a specific, widespread mental disorder that has long driven us crazy: what I call Airhead Liberalism Political Disorder or ALPD for short. This is not a coherent ideology like Socialism or Marxism. Rather, it is a style of political engagement whose purpose is psychological satisfaction independent of actual of costs or benefits. In a nutshell: if advocating a policy makes me feel good about myself, it’s a good policy.Well, DUH! Thanks, Captain Obvious. Have you noticed that nowadays everyone cares about meaning well? Consequences be damned! If you engage in a policy that makes you feel good (such as dumping billions of dollars into African aid or driving the entire country into unprecedented debt-helotry), who cares if the actual result is failure and misery on a massive scale? You meant well. That's all that matters, sweetie pie. Who cares about REALITY? Good intentions, good intentions. They're paramount. But hasn't anybody recalled that "good intentions" show up in an axiom that's too often true?
To the extent Washington has a Middle East policy, it seems to involve playing balance-of-power games on the scale of the Mad Hatter's tea party.Heh, DC has a Middle East policy?
Dear Iowahawk,By the way, the "felony stupidity" tag is for Kevin Rudd. Rude much, Prime Minister?
I think I love you.
Sincerely yours,
Mad Minerva
On Friday, November 6, The Princeton Tiger led a humanitarian aid mission to bring hot breakfast – oatmeal – to Harvard students. “Everyone’s hurting in this economy,” said Steven Liss, Chairman of The Tiger. “But Harvard’s endowment shrunk from $37 billion to scarcely $26 billion– they’ve lost more than anyone in these tough times.” A Massachusetts native, Liss cited concern over the coming winter. “Harvard’s our rival, but we hate to think of them having to get by on only continental breakfasts. How can we enjoy our omelettes when they have to clutch croissants in shivering hands, too weak to lift the cantaloupe from their plates? It’s just not decent!”
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
The three professors who were fatally shot at a meeting of the biology faculty were Gopi K. Podila, chairman of the biology department, and Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, both associate professors in the department.Yikes. Here is the news at the UAH website. The shooter, 42-year-old Amy Bishop, was a Harvard-educated researcher.
Joseph Leahy, an associate biology professor, and Stephanie Monticciolo, a staff member in the biology department. were wounded and in critical condition as of Saturday morning, and Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera, an assistant professor of biology, was wounded but released from the hospital Saturday.
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - A U.S. high-powered airborne laser weapon shot down a ballistic missile in the first successful test of a futuristic directed energy weapon, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said on Friday.Dude, read that again. A laser mounted on a special military 747 jumbo jet shot down a ballistic missile while both were in mid-flight. The missile was flying at a speed of about 4000 miles an hour. It happened off the coast of California.
Police said a female member of the UA-Huntsville faculty shot and killed three co-workers on campus.Huntsville Police, Madison County Sheriff's department and HEMSI responded to a shooting at the UAH campus at 4:00 Friday afternoon.
The shooting happened in the Shelby Center, a math and science classroom building.
Authorities said a female faculty member during a Biology faculty meeting learned she would not receive tenure. She then pulled out a gun and started shooting.
... that band of colours is, in reality, a moonbow. Like a rainbow, its daylight equivalent, a moonbow is produced when light is broken up into its constituent colours as it passes through water droplets. In both cases, the source of light is the same: the Sun. In the case of the rainbow, sunlight produces its effect directly. In the case of the moonbow, however, that sunlight is first reflected off the surface of the moon and then shines back down to Earth.Gorgeous.
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
[We] are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.Bravo!
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.Mwahahahaha!According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.
. . . The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.
“Climate change” is not a story of climate change, which has been a fact of life throughout our planet’s history. It is a far more contemporary story about the corruption of science and “peer review” by hucksters, opportunists and global-government control-freaks. I can see what’s in it for Dr. Pachauri and professor Hasnain, and even for the lowly Environmental Correspondent enjoying a cozy sinecure at a time of newspaper cutbacks in everything from foreign bureaus to arts coverage.It is indeed a "far more contemporary story," just as it is consistent with the age-old story of self-interest, messianic delusions, and the corrosive desire for corrupting power. Here's my most recent post on the topic.
... an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators and leaders -- from Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" to Obama's White House, with many stops in between -- have developed or articulated narratives that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times. To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.He's right.
Much of the criticism of Zinn has come from dissenters on the left. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once remarked that "I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."
Last year, the liberal historian Sean Wilentz referred to the "balefully influential works of Howard Zinn."
Reviewing A People's History in The American Scholar, Harvard University professor Oscar Handlin denounced "the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history."
Socialist historian Michael Kazin judged Zinn's most famous work "bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions."
For the researchers, grant dollars and reputations are on the line. For reporters, global warming offers the thrill of covering The Biggest Story Ever Told, an appeal I could not resist. For politicians, it has offered an endless opportunity for grandstanding and power grabs. Convinced they are saving the earth—what could be more rewarding or important?—all three groups helped each other lose their minds.Alas, all too true!
A recent move by North Korean officials to rejigger the nation's economic system has introduced a new level of misery to everyday life.The result has been chaos and panic. Here's some awesomely direct analysis from the news story. Pay attention, kids:
In the last month, the price of rice rose tenfold at private markets, and residents often had to wait in line for hours in subzero temperatures to buy food.
. . . At the heart of the turmoil is a series of dictates imposed late last year by Kim Jong Il's regime: revaluing the currency, closing down privately run markets in favor of state-owned shops and banning the use of foreign currency and the sale of many imports from China.
Recent visitors to North Korea, aid agencies and defectors say the changes have sent the already-troubled economy into a tailspin.
. . . The new dictates appear designed not only to put the entrepreneurs out of business but to confiscate any accumulated wealth.
"We need to strengthen the principle and order of socialist economic management," Cho Song Hyun, an official with North Korea's central bank, said in December to a pro-regime newspaper in Japan.
"Was it incompetence or callousness that led them to do this? You take your pick," he [Marcus Noland, a North Korea specialist and deputy director of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics] said. "There is so little accountability in the system, the regime has considerable capacity to inflict misery on the population without any significant political risk."And that is why that entire form of government is rotten and has always produced mass human misery.
