The first act of any future president must be to tear down the wall between the civil service and political appointees, because otherwise none of the government’s acts will be his.
Thanks for writing this! So many nuggets in those 20.5k words. That "spinning wheel" is very well assembled, and "borganizations" is my new favourite amalgam for those sprawling apparatchik-filled orgs with copypasted brains. If you came up with that word yourself, kudos. Really laughed out loud at "use the master’s tests to dismantle the master’s programs". So much stuff...
In all those words, not one mention of poor'ol'Tzar Nikolai II, who said "I do not rule Russia. 10,000 clerks do." I mean, it's a trite truth that all countries are ruled by 10.000 clerks (*). What Nikolai really wanted to say, was that he had no rule over those clerks.
Nikolai might have deserved a mention. He even got a mention from the Rolling Stones, who sang how "Anastasia screamed in vain" not so long afterwards.
(*) barring terminal patients like the US where the prolonged metastasis accrued a million clerks, who are engaged in a permanent, furious, and ruthless Musical Chairs Battle Royale with ten million pretenders to those chairs. Grievance studies programs at universities keep cranking them out as if the supply of those chairs were limitless. Maths might not be their strongest suit, if they keep on confusing "astoundingly balooning" with "limitless".
Adam Smith might have said "there's a great deal of ruin in a nation," but he would never have witnessed such an industrial-scale production of ruiners.
Thanks for writing this! So many nuggets in those 20.5k words. That "spinning wheel" is very well assembled, and "borganizations" is my new favourite amalgam for those sprawling apparatchik-filled orgs with copypasted brains. If you came up with that word yourself, kudos. Really laughed out loud at "use the master’s tests to dismantle the master’s programs". So much stuff...
In all those words, not one mention of poor'ol'Tzar Nikolai II, who said "I do not rule Russia. 10,000 clerks do." I mean, it's a trite truth that all countries are ruled by 10.000 clerks (*). What Nikolai really wanted to say, was that he had no rule over those clerks.
Nikolai might have deserved a mention. He even got a mention from the Rolling Stones, who sang how "Anastasia screamed in vain" not so long afterwards.
(*) barring terminal patients like the US where the prolonged metastasis accrued a million clerks, who are engaged in a permanent, furious, and ruthless Musical Chairs Battle Royale with ten million pretenders to those chairs. Grievance studies programs at universities keep cranking them out as if the supply of those chairs were limitless. Maths might not be their strongest suit, if they keep on confusing "astoundingly balooning" with "limitless".
Adam Smith might have said "there's a great deal of ruin in a nation," but he would never have witnessed such an industrial-scale production of ruiners.
i truly enjoyed reading this, especially the clever alliterating aphorisms