Alleluia - an Anti-Windmill Subsidy Letter in The Times at Last.

Wonders never cease; The Times has actually published a letter today from a critic of the Goverment's decision to inflict yet more carbon penalties on generators rising from £16 per tonne of CO₂ to £30 by 2013, which he says will be passed on to domestic and industrial consumers pushing more of the former into fuel poverty and more of the latter overseas. If Britain is to support a new industrial policy, he says, the environment to allow it to blossom must be in place - and this includes competitive energy prices.

The writer is Tony Lodge, Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies.  Interesting that The Times never seems to find space anywhere but on its letters page for attacks on the Government's insane policies on 'renewable' energy but regularly provides massive space to worshippers of the Windmill God. In fact you rarely read criticism of it even on the letters page. Looks as though even The Times dared not be so brass-necked as to just bin Tony Lodge's letter along with all the others it must be binning every day.  

Massive U-Turn by The Times on New Thames Estuary Airport

After rubbishing for months Boris Johnson's idea of building a new London airport in the Thames estuary The Times has this morning suddenly come out in favour of its being given serious consideration - a U-turn so dramatic as to make all those of David Cameron's that it has made so much hay with in recent days seem insignificant by comparison.

Their reason for this dramatic change of tune?  Well BA's Willie Walsh said at The Times CEO Summit that now there is never going to be a third runway at Heathrow he will take his bat and ball to Madrid instead.  

Doesn't seem to have occurred to The Times that Walsh might just have been bluffing in a last-minute desperate effort to frighten Cameron into changing his mind about Heathrow.  And I bet Walsh never bargained for the possibility that his threat might result in the advancement of Boris's idea which he too has always rubbished (unsurprisingly, given that the Heathrow on whose landing slots he has such a cast-iron grip would be reduced to a shadow of its former self or destroyed altogether if it went ahead).

Hang on though; maybe it did occur to The Times that Walsh might be bluffing. Maybe they aren't trying to punish him for threatening to bugger off to Spain; maybe they are trying to help him frighten Cameron into changing his mind on Heathrow?   In short, maybe it's The Times that's bluffing?  

Either way, it's probably another sign among many that The Times has ceased to be our 'newspaper of record' and become just another campaigning rag and PR man's dream, albeit with less vulgar font and graphics than the others. 

In Terms of Bollocks 4

Matthew Amroliwala on BBC World News on 22 June reporting Obama's plans for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan:

"..... David Cameron has been briefed in terms of the contents of President Obama's ...."

= David Cameron has been briefed about the contents of ....

He just loves saying 'In terms of', never missing a chance to use it in place of any simpler alternative.  The above example came just seconds after a similar equally daft one.  The guy is such a pseud he is like a parody of someone who is a pseud.

English all Gone to Buggery

I have always assumed that the main driving force behind the changes in our language from generation to generation has been the shifting needs and demands of each age – basically just a kind of modernisation process.  There must indeed be a large element of that of course, given the constant need for new words and phrases to name things and activities that didn’t exist before. But it’s just dawned on me that an even bigger element has nothing very much to do with needs at all; it’s just changing fashions.  The great majority of people choose their words for the same reason they choose their clothes; because it’s cool to use the in words just as it’s cool to wear the in clothes.  It’s also safer; you don’t risk being considered an outsider, or out of touch, or just plain weird by your peers.

In olden times when only an educated and aesthetically sensitive minority could read and write, these linguistic fashions would have gone down parallel tracks: a single, literary one for that minority who were capable of communicating with each other in writing, and multiple vernacular ones among illiterate communities in different regions.  The ‘fashion drive’ within the literary one would have been the need to impress one’s interlocutors with the sheer beauty, power and range of one’s language – a drive which produced the glories of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

Weep, for all that has gone to buggery.  Now even the great and the good compete only to see how often they can work into their speech and writing as many as possible of the brain-sappingly fashionable words and phrases on John Rentoul’s magnificent #bannedlists (here and here) avoiding at all costs all possible alternatives that are more individualistic, elegant, imaginative or less tediously repetitive. So, not ‘in future’ but ‘going forwards’; not ‘problem’ but ‘issue’; not ‘and’ ‘of’ ‘as’ ‘for’ ‘by’ ‘in’ ‘to’ ‘with’ ‘through’ or just about any other nominative, prepositional or conjunctive word or phrase you can think of if you can possibly think of a way of constructing your sentence so as to replace them by ‘in terms of’; and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Fashion is driving our language not to new heights of elegant economy but to the turgid, inarticulate depths.

Who or what is driving these ‘fashions’?  My guess is that there are four main strands to it.  One is the modern disease of political correctness, which intimidates us into calling a spade anything but a spade, so ‘mental disability’ must be ‘learning difficulties’, ‘elderly’ must be ‘older persons’, ‘chairman’ or ‘chairwoman’ must be ‘chair’, 'staff' must be 'colleagues', 'departments' must be 'teams', 'interested parties' must be 'stakeholders', any other organisation we have to deal with must be a 'partner', and grammar and style must be sacrificed at all costs to avoid offending feminist sensibilities by using masculine nouns, pronouns and possessive adjectives. 

Another is the daily PR assault on the media by the climate change and environmental fraternity, so that everything now is or is not ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ or good for your ‘carbon-footprint’.  A third is to be found in what seem to be two principles of progressive teaching, one that no child is ever wrong and two that everything possible must be done to avoid confusing them with anything complicated. So yes, they must be taught that the letter ‘h’ is pronounced ‘haitch’ because the poor little dears would be baffled if it were pronounced ‘aitch’, and no you mustn’t correct them if they always say ‘myself’ even when it should be ‘me’ because the poor dears would never then understand why sometimes it’s rude to say ‘me’, and so on. 

And then there is the fourth strand, the central one underpinning all of them, which is the army of companies making a fortune selling training programmes to organisations and individuals of all kinds - sales, marketing, management, career development and media trainers probably being the biggest culprits - who bash all this crap into the heads of people when they are still young and impressionable and can be persuaded that if they don’t talk like this they’ll never get on.

We have to find a way of stopping them, otherwise our descendants are going to wind up back in their literary caves just grunting at each other.

Let's all celebrate as the French and Germans are hoist by their own ever-closer-union petard

Is it not getting clearer by the day that there's only one solution to the Eurozone's Greek, Irish, Portuguese and Spanish problem?  Let the Eurozone move to full political,economic and monetary union as Euroland now, with a president and legislature elected direct by universal adult suffrage; with Euroland-wide standardised pensions, social security and welfare entitlements, and with all member-states' debts converted to Euroland debts.

SInce it has been the efforts of France and Germany to create a fake version of such a union, in which they fondly imagined they would actually be the real powers behind the scenes pulling all our levers, is it not now poetic justice that possibly the only way they can save their fake union from ending in humiliating and total shambles is to move to a genuine union which they really are unable to control but the bills for which their nationals will still have to pick up.

Meanwhile those like us who never bought the idea of ever closer union can stay happily outside Euroland but hang on to our existing treaty benefits as long as it suits us to do so.  Why should we care if the Eurozone is driven down that road? We should celebrate their being hoist by their own petard.


And if their answer to this idea is that it's bollocks to think that this kind of union is wanted by any Eurozone country or could be achieved, well quite, so why have you all been talking that bollocks for the last 50 years or so, and will you now please stop.

More Wind Power Bollocks from Browne

Former BP boss Lord Browne, now President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, tells us in the Times Thunderer column today how we should have lots more wind power ‘cos it will create lots of lovely jobs (mentioning by the way that most of the jobs it’s created so far have gone overseas but swiftly and gayly skipping on from that, presumably on the assumption that now he’s pointed it out it will swiftly be put right).    Yes it will need container loads of government cash to make it happen he cheerfully acknowledges, but this is all right ‘cos North Sea oil and gas needed government incentives in the early days too. 

Can you believe that such a big name can write such utter bollocks, totally ignoring the massive differences between the oil and gas markets and the renewables market?  The Royal Academy of Engineering exists we are told to promote excellence in the science, art and practice of engineering.  Browne clearly thinks it exists to procure shed-loads of government cash to create jobs for the boys.  

Notice also that another whole-page article in the same issue is devoted to telling us how much inflation is outstripping our incomes, without telling us how much of that is being taken from us by utilities forced by the government’s Climate Change Act to buy wind power at exhorbitant prices.  

Last week they allowed David Aaronovitch to rant on for half a page in support of wind power, the only argument in support of which he could think of was that opponents are, in his anything-but-humble opinion,  nimbies.  

God help us all.  Our parliament, our great institutions and our media are all fatally penetrated by people who cannot see the real world for bullshit, or can but don't give a shit.