Minds detached from reality produce language detached from reality. From Fox News:
But before Irene fizzled, the Obama White House wanted to make sure that Irene was no Katrina and that, in fact, the president and his aides would be seen in compassionate command of the situation.
Hence the introduction of what may be the most condescending euphemism for the national government in its long history of condescending euphemizing: “federal family.”
Another classic from Theodore Dalrymple:
Observations on NHS bureaucracy
Stapled to my hospital payslip each month is a glossy, expensively printed, eight-page propaganda leaflet from trust headquarters. In true Stalinist fashion, it portrays a happy and contented workforce, proud of being awarded stars by the government. There is always money enough for this kind of thing – though not for medical supplies, equipment, or staff salaries.
The leaflet’s main value, though not its purpose, naturally, is to illustrate how immense sums could now be poured into our public services without any tangible benefit whatsoever to the public. In it, the time-servers lay bare their corrupt souls.
The trust’s director of organisational and workforce development (if inflated titles come, can salaries be far behind?) wrote an article for it entitled “HR in the NHS Plan”.
HR? Hormone replacement, perhaps? No, human resources: you, me, we are all resources now, like iron ore in Liberia.
The director writes: “I have now completed a review of the organisational structure for the HR function and each operational directorate, as well as corporate areas and have a Lead HR Manager who will work with relevant management boards and staff . . . The Trust Board have also [sic] recently agreed our HR strategy which outlines the strategic direction we will follow in continuing to work towards key national and local objectives in order to meet the needs of our users, communities and staff.”
I hope all this is clear to you. If not, the director goes on to explain that “the strategy has been developed around four key areas”.
What are they, the four key areas? HR in the NHS Plan (National Strategy). The aims and values of our Trust. The Improving Working Lives Standard (IWL). Local Workforce Development priorities.
She then informs those who are not yet tearing their hair out or banging their heads on the wall to make this drivel go away that there are “seven key areas for delivery” – that is to say, the seven key areas of the four key areas of the strategy.
The seven key areas (will Walt Disney ever make a cartoon of them, I wonder) are: HR strategy and management; equality and diversity; staff involvement and communication; flexible working; health workplace; training and development; and flexible retirement, childcare and support for carers.
If I have understood correctly, the strategy is to draw up a strategy so that the strategy is delivered, give or take a strategic subordinate clause. “Delivery of the strategy will be based on a firm foundation of accepted behaviours and man- agement principles which I believe are key to building trust and confidence and set standards around communication, decision-making, dignity and respect and a framework for learning and education.”
No doubt it would be wise to call in a few external consultants (former employees of the trust) to ensure that the strategy is working strategically.
One does not know whether to laugh or cry. Who are the people who write this stuff? The whole of the British public administration is so riddled with thousands of unscrupulous, cunning, careerist dimwits, who will do anything they are told as long as it preserves their jobs and careers, and who routinely mistake their own activity for work, that recovery or amelioration is impossible.
Our corruption is now far worse than the money-under-the-table or brown-paper-envelope sort. It is a deep moral and intellectual corruption, and therefore far harder to eradicate or control. It has turned the whole of the public service into a legalised pork barrel for low-grade bureaucrats. And the government connives at it, because it extends its power.
From Christopher Booker:
What is the maddest thing going on in Britain today? There may be many competitors for that title, but a front-runner must be what the Government has made the centrepiece of its energy policy, to ensure that our lights stay on and that our now largely computer-dependent economy remains functioning. Last week, the BBC ran a series of reports by its science correspondent, David Shukman, on the Government’s plan to ring our coasts with vast offshore wind farms.
The nearest thing allowed to criticism of this policy came in an interview with the Oxford academic Dieter Helm, who we were told had “done the sums”. What, Shukman asked, had he come up with? The only figures Helm gave were that the Government’s offshore wind farm plans would, by 2020, cost £100 billion – scarcely a state secret, since the Government itself announced this three years ago – plus £40 billion more to connect these windmills to the grid, a figure given us by the National Grid last year.
Helm did not tell us that this £140 billion equates to £5,600 for every household in the country. But he did admit that the plan was “staggeringly expensive”, and that, given the current extent of “fuel poverty” and the state of our economy, he doubted “if it can in fact be afforded”.
Even shorter on hard facts, however, was Shukman’s report on a monster new wind farm off the coast of Cumbria, where a Swedish firm, Vattenfall, has spent £500 million on building 30 five‑megawatt turbines with a total “capacity” of 150MW. What Shukman did not tell us, because the BBC never does, is that, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, these machines will only produce a fraction of their capacity (30 per cent was the offshore average in the past two years). So their actual output is only likely to average 45MW, or £11 million per MW.
Compare this with the figures for Britain’s newest gas-fired power station, recently opened in Plymouth. This is capable of generating 882MW at a capital cost of £400 million – just £500,000 for each megawatt. Thus the wind farm is 22 times more expensive, and could only be built because its owners will receive a 200 per cent subsidy: £40 million a year, on top of the £20 million they will get for the electricity itself. This we will all have to pay for through our electricity bills, whereas the unsubsidised cost of power from the gas plant, even including the price of the gas, will be a third as much.
It is on the basis of such utterly crazy sums – which neither the Government nor the BBC ever mention – that our politicians intend us to pay for dozens of huge offshore wind farms. In a sane world, no one would dream of building power sources whose cost is 22 times greater than that of vastly more efficient competitors. But the Government feels compelled to do just this because it sees it as the only way to meet our commitment to the EU that within nine years Britain must generate nearly a third of its electricity from “renewable” sources, six times more than we do at present.
The insanity does not end here. The Government talks of building 10,000 windmills capable of generating up to 25,000MW of the electricity we need. But when it does so, it – like the BBC – invariably uses that same trick of referring to “capacity”, without explaining that their actual output would be well below 30 per cent. (Last year, onshore turbines generated just 21 per cent of their capacity.) In other words, for all that colossal expenditure – and even if there was the remotest chance that two new giant turbines could be built every day between now and 2020 – we could only hope to generate some 6,000MW. This is not only way below our EU target, it is only a tenth of our peak demand during those cold, windless weeks last winter, when wind power was often providing barely 1 per cent of the power we needed.
To keep the lights on during such times, for every new megawatt of wind capacity we build it will be necessary for to build a megawatt of capacity from gas-fired stations, kept wastefully running 24/7, chucking out carbon dioxide. This will add further billions to the bill we shall all have to pay, while ensuring that wind power does nothing whatever to reduce our overall emission of CO2. But this, again, is another thing that the Government and the BBC are careful never to tell us. Madness is far too polite a word.
From Burt Prelutsky:
We have often heard that the devil is in the details. But these days, I’m afraid he’s in the Oval Office. Who else would have run on the promise to radically transform America? Who else would have thought that America, of all places, required a radical transformation?
If a normal human being were asked which countries could use an overhaul, he wouldn’t be thinking of the United States. Would he mention Russia and Venezuela? No doubt. Would he have China, Yemen and North Korea, on the short list? Absolutely. How about Saudi Arabia, Syria, Cuba and Iran? Indubitably.
On the other hand, it’s actually the one promise Obama has kept. But, who else but he and Satan would even suggest that a nation created by such giants as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Adams, had to wait 232 years for a leftwing community organizer to fix what wasn’t broken?
And when this arrogant pipsqueak chastises the Republicans in Congress for doing nothing about the debt crisis when they’re the ones who presented and voted for Paul Ryan’s budget plan months ago while this schmuck has been off golfing and fund-raising, does he really believe we take his words seriously? Great men, it’s said, speak truth to power; Obama speaks power to truth.
As most of you know by now, the California legislature has not only mandated that school textbooks will devote a great deal of space to ballyhooing the contributions homosexuals have made to society, but mandated that no disparaging words will be included either in the books or in classroom discussions.
I would say that, along with the notable contributions that homosexuals have made to Broadway, Hollywood and the world of interior decorating, one of the most astonishing is the way their well-oiled propaganda machine has succeeded in stifling anything like honest debate about same-sex marriages and the enormous amount of tax numbers diverted to AIDS research.
Probably the only good thing to be said about the current state of public education is that the test scores indicate that the kids are nodding off during math, science and English, so perhaps they’re also snoozing during leftwing indoctrination sessions. We can at least hope that they’re otherwise occupied while their brain-dead teachers dispense verbal bouquets to Palestinians, global warming alarmists, Islamists and illegal aliens, while damning Israelis, conservatives, the oil and pharmaceutical industries and, of course, anyone who thinks the teachers union should don a dunce cap and go sit in the corner.
Speaking of illegal aliens, why is it that they are invariably described as “hard-working”? We have perfectly fine legal immigrants from all over the world adding to America’s tapestry, but it’s only those who sneak in who are so designated. Are Polish immigrants notorious slackers? Are Germans and Finns nothing but gold bricks? Are South Africans, Taiwanese and Australians, a bunch of lazy stiffs? Are Swedes, Czechs and Italians, a collection of pathetic laggards? What about Pakistanis, Indians, Israelis and Canadians? Afraid to work up a decent sweat, are they?
How is it, I wonder, that with all those hard workers, Mexico remains a third world nation that keeps its economy afloat, thanks, mainly, to illegal drugs and the money orders sent home by those who have snuck across our border?
There are still people in America who refuse to acknowledge that the mass media has a liberal bias, even after the New York Times, the Bible of the Left, in reporting a recent Supreme Court decision, reported that five conservative judges were on one side — the wrong side, naturally — while “Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the other three moderates” were on the other.
Although I am extremely confident that Obama will be ousted in 2012, I hate having to rely on the so-called Independent voter. They’re the politically uninformed who pay so little attention that, in spite of one dreadful fiasco after another — including a trillion dollar stimulus, cash for clunkers, four trillion dollars of additional debt, a childish refusal to dig for coal or drill for oil, a foolish foray into Libya and a policy that fosters class and racial warfare — decided, temporarily, at least, that Obama was doing a heck of a job because they happened to like a speech he delivered in Tucson.
After napping through nearly two years of nonstop campaigning, they’re the Dummkopfs who, pollsters report, are still undecided three days before presidential elections. I know these folks take pride in being non-partisan and regard themselves as politically astute, but, in reality, they’re the saps who generally make their election decisions by flipping a coin.
Finally, in spite of telling us that all future terrorists would be tried by military tribunals, Obama and Eric Holder pulled an end-run and decided to Mirandize Somali Islamist Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame and try him in a civilian court.
Fortunately, the Casey Anthony jury is well-rested and eager to get back to work.
From VDH:
Whoever in the White House decided on another first family vacation at Martha’s Vineyard must be unhinged, coming as it does (a) after previous jaunts to places like Vail and Costa del Sol, and serial golf outings; (b) in the midst of tough economic times and bipartisan acknowledgment that national cutbacks for the vast majority of Americans are in order; (c) on the heels of three years of class warfare and anti-wealth demagoguery of the “fat-cat,” “unneeded income,” “spread the wealth” sort; and (d) during a presidential approval slide that seems to be based, at least in part, on the fact that the president’s usual rhetoric has nothing to do with reality, that he suggests one thing while doing quite another.
If the president thought that a campaign bus tour would rescue his numbers, he was mistaken — it seems to have had the opposite effect, perhaps because it seemed staged, almost like what a wealthy person would do if he wanted to act “real” for a bit.
But if President Obama has already purchased the new bus, why not use it Winnebago-style to see America with his family for a week, visiting a national park, a closed-down plant — or a real vineyard?
From James Taranto:
Lather, Rinse, Re-Elect
The Associated Press reports President Obama has figured out what to do about the unemployment problem, and you’re going to want to sit down before we tell you. Ready? OK, here goes:He’s going to give a “major speech.”
Wait, there’s more! The Los Angeles Times reports that he’s already “daring Republicans to block” the “job-creation package” he has yet to devise. Yesterday’s Dilbert strip offered a preview, with Pointy-Haired Boss playing the role of Obama: “This is the best plan in the world, and anyone who disagrees is an ignorant nuisance.”
The AP adds that since Republicans are likely to oppose the yet-nonexistent proposals, Obama “is already preparing to lobby the American public for support. . . . That would set up an issue for his re-election campaign next year.”
So, to sum up: Give a big speech, demand that Congress do his bidding, implore Americans to lobby Congress. Lather, rinse, re-elect. What a fresh new style of leadership!
From Thomas Sowell:
Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race.
After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence — as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, and other places — Philadelphia’s black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who perpetrate these crimes.
“Pull up your pants and buy a belt, ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt,” he said. “If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ’cause you look like you’re crazy,” the mayor said. He added: “You have damaged your own race.”
From VDH:
I’ll skip the next half-century, since the tragedy is too well known, and focus instead on the vastly different, contemporary liberal mindset. To be blunt, what strikes us about its recent and most vocal emissaries — politicians such as a Barbara Boxer, John Edwards, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi; or the Hollywood celebrities; or the great fortuned like a Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or George Soros; or the credentialed technocrats who run the foundations and government agencies, or the high-paid media types in the NY-DC corridor — is how vast apart are the circumstances of their own lives from the objects of their concern. In addition, present-day liberalism finds its most numerous adherents among the upper-middle class suburbanites and those who work for government and enjoy de facto tenure (e.g., the public employee unions, teachers, the public professoriate, etc.).
Let Them Eat Steak
Insulation is the common theme here. To the degree that one’s job insulates one from the vagaries of the marketplace — not just the danger of losing a job, but often the petty humiliation so often integral in making a scarce buck, by selling, peddling, hawking, or working for a business — one is now more likely to support the redistributive state and all its satellite philosophies. And to the degree that one has a good salary and capital, and can buy such insulation — where one lives, where one sends one’s children to school, where one vacations — one is most likely to advocate a sort of politics that will not affect directly oneself. The key then is to insulate oneself from the worry over losing a job and livelihood, either by guaranteed employment or ample wealth. (When the London riots started to hit the “better” sections, then suddenly the police appeared in real numbers and the unapologetic public anger increased.)
In other words, if one opposes charters and vouchers, supports teachers’ unions, praises the present-day public schools, and champions the therapeutic curriculum, one is still hardly likely to put one’s child in the L.A. or Fresno school system. If one is a strong advocate for more state subsidies and redistributive policies, one will not live in an East Palo Alto, an Orange Cove, or the wrong side of St. Louis or Baltimore where the money is aimed. Liberalism is, like all politics, self-interested, embraced by those who receive transfer payments and those in charge of administering the redistributive state. But it also provides psychic exemption to a new upper class and asks little concrete in return — no tutoring of the illegal alien, no side-by-side residency in the Section 8 apartment to help create “community,” no hiring in the progressive law firm of a ghetto intern in lieu of the Yale undergraduate. It is the worst sort of petty hypocrisy: an exemption for the guilty soul through support of the redistributive state aimed at the noble but unapproachable poor —and through a clear disdain for the crass and aspiring middle class, which lacks the taste of the elite and the supposedly tragic nobility of the impoverished and victimized.
The Apotheosis of Barack Obama
Some are surprised that Barack Obama – the community organizer, the hard-core leftist, the pal of Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright (compare the homes of each), the totem of the left — would buy a mansion and worry about the price of arugula. Or that when president, he would play golf more in three years than the aristocratic Bush did in eight. Or that in recessionary times, when iconic presidential sacrifice is critical, the First Family would favor Martha’s Vineyard, Vail, and Costa del Sol over the White House grounds or Camp David.
But this disconnect again is logical not aberrant. It is precisely because Obama rails about “fat cats,” “corporate jet owners,” “millionaires and billionaires,” and pontificates about “redistributive change,” “enough money,” “spread the wealth,” and “unneeded income” that he feels spiritually cleansed and so can satisfy his natural appetites for the good rarified life. On Monday swear that corporate jets blew up the budget, on Tuesday feel free to host corporate jet fly-in donors who pay $50,000 to hear you rail about the pernicious culture of corporate jets. Mutatis mutandis, so too an Al Gore or John Kerry.
Human nature argues that contemporary liberalism does not work; but if one is not proximate to human nature in the raw, then one can find psychological penance in promoting something that will never come back to haunt you. Let a flash mob hit Park Avenue or have a group from East Palo Alto swarm the quad at Stanford, or have a Malibu star’s kid shoved about in a downtown L.A. school, or an open borders idealist live in an apartment in Calwa, and then one sees first hand the real-time dividends of a distant elite channeling state money to the less fortunate.
The Wages of Hypocrisy
Barack Obama has hit 39% approval in the Gallup poll. Pundits point to the debt, to the mixed-up foreign policy, to ObamaCare, to his grating sermons on civility, to his blame-Bush fixations, to the serial banality of his inauthentic cadences and his canned Nixonian “make no mistake about it” and “let me be perfectly clear” emphases. All that is true.
But much of our public weariness stems from his loud liberal hypocrisy. Our president lectures about a certain sort of school he never has sent his child to. He talks about “folks” with whom he has never wished to vacation. Unlike a Truman or Humphrey, he sough office not to help those clingers with whom he might have wished to associate, but to feel good about wanting to help from a safe distance from those with whom he most certainly did not wish to mingle.
Golfing or walking the Martha’s Vineyard beach, in the fashion of Kerry’s 7th estate getaway or million-dollar yacht, makes one fret over “why lucky me?” — and requires an antidote of one or two spread-the-wealth sermons a week.
The weird sudden appearance of swarmy, young urban and highly-educated leftist bloggers, with little experience in the physical world or with manual labor, is likewise logical given that most do not raise families in the barrio or shop in the ghetto, or teach school on the wrong side of town or try to buy a house and support three kids on $70,000, or even hit the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Only such abstract liberal advocacy can square the circle of self-absorbed concerned metrosexuality.
As we saw last week in Britain and in some American cities, liberal redistributionism makes far worse the innate problems it was hailed to solve. But it remains a powerful narcotic to an aberrant elite, one that feels guilty over its apartheid circumstances and is desperately seeking spiritual redemption on the cheap.
Barack Obama was contemporary America’s clearest example of just such an iconic liberalism — both as a purveyor and a recipient. Just as voting for Obama gave a pass to so many, so too for Barack Obama his own rhetoric and advocacy provide a pass for his own preferences. Liberalism has gone from a first-hand concern for equality of opportunity to a psychological condition of very blessed, but equally unhappy, people.
A classic from Theodore Dalrymple:
Observations on gobbledegook
If anyone wants to know why British public services do not work properly, I should suggest that they look at the document containing the self-assessment rating scale of the 17 “learning outcomes” required for specialist practitioner registration by the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council. A nurse in training kindly drew my attention to this document, which she said she could not understand. Her incomprehension does her credit.
The linear “competency scale” goes from left to right, through the following points: (expert), absent, low (awareness), moderate (conceptual understanding) and high. The person in training is asked to circle which point on the scale best corresponds with his “current level and skill” for each of the 17 learning outcomes, among which are the following:
2. Set, implement and evaluate standards and criteria nursing interventions by planning, providing and evaluating specialist clinical nursing care across a range of care provisions to meet the health needs of individuals and groups requiring specialist nursing.
14. Identify specialist learning activities in a clinical setting that contribute to clinical teaching and assessment of learning in a multidisciplinary environment within scope of expertise and knowledge basis.
No doubt, when you clutch your chest as you suffer your next heart attack, it will be a great consolation to know that the nurse looking after you believes that she has a moderate (conceptual understanding) of the fifth compulsory learning outcome – that is to say: facilitate learning in relation to identified health for patients, clients and carers. What a relief to have done away with all that terrible lady with the lamp stuff!
Actually, a moderate conceptual understanding of these 17 learning outcomes is pretty good going: without undue modesty, I should put myself in the highest quartile of intellectual ability in this country, but should estimate my understanding of the said outcomes as being approximately absent.
The document is symptomatic of the deep moral and intellectual corruption that pervades the entire public service of this country, and now renders improvement of it virtually impossible. After all, the Nursing and Midwifery Council sets the tone of the nursing profession, and any person or group of people who could write a document such as the one I have quoted is beyond redemption. To entrust the nursing profession to the Nursing and Midwifery Council is thus rather like entrusting an aviary to bird-eating spiders.
We have trained vast numbers of people to write and presumably to think this rubbish. Indeed, the inexorable spread of this meaningless language is the sign of a quiet social revolution: we no longer live in a meritocracy, but in a mediocracy, for only people without talent, originality or integrity can master this language. But mastery of it is now the key to advancement, at least in the public services. The troubling thing is that the corruption has gone so far that it has become unconscious: those who produced the document from which I quote are so corrupt that they do not know they’re corrupt.
Interestingly, a consultant colleague recently tried to look up the website of the Plain English Campaign on a hospital computer. As quick as a flash, a message appeared on his screen: ACCESS DENIED: ADVOCACY GROUP. Our mediocrats may be lacking in talent and originality, but they have a sure instinct for survival: they know that plain English, and the use of words that have meaning, would be a grave threat to their position.
It’s official. Thank God. If we want any chance of defeating President Downgrade, we cannot nominate another Republican retread.
Benighted Comment 