…is linked here.
I don’t know whether the proclamation will be followed by a detailed executive order. If so, I will link it here as well.
“Big” vs. BIG
Over at National Review, Kevin Williamson writes:
One of the things about Big Business that provokes skepticism and hostility is just plain bigness, the sometimes incomprehensible scale of modern multinational enterprises.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-business-of-bigness/
Well, there is “Big” and there is BIG. Compare these two enterprises:
- Microsoft: 2018 revenue = $110 billion
- U.S. Government: 2018 revenue = $3,340 billion (that’s $3.34 trillion)
So government is 30 times larger than one of the world’s tech giants. Another way to look at it is that Microsoft amounts to 3.3% of the government.
If “Big” business warrants skepticism and hostility because of its incomprehensible scale, why should BIG government be perceived as so beneficent?
Heard on the radio today
- “De-risking” the stock market, a euphemism for “panic selling.”
- A fast-talking ad for “secure flip units.” In this case, “secure” really means “speculative,” and “secure” plus “flip” makes for a nice oxymoron as well.
Negativity
Caption from a cartoon on legal drafting: “Never use one double negative where no triple negative will not prove unnecessary.”
Very cute. And all too common.
Writing to think things through
I need to bicker with a language not because language is unsuitable or because I fear I may be unfit for it, but because I find myself saying what I think I wanted to say after, not before, having said it. Nothing could seem more dislocated. You do not write an outline first and then spill your words on paper; you write because you cannot write an outline. You write the way you do because the other kind of writing is unavailable to you. You write unnaturally not only because you do not have a natural language, but also because writing and thinking have become unnatural acts.
To parody Michelangelo, you do not chip away at marble in order to bring out a hitherto undisclosed statue; testing the marble, hiding its imperfections, covering up mistaken chisel marks is the statue.
You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through. You chisel in order to imagine what you might have chiseled with better eyes in a better world.
André Aciman, Parallax.
