Why Size Confounds Governance; Why Democracies Die

Glen Reynolds Explains Washington Paralysis; British School Indoctrination as a Warning to Us

old fashioned censorship

Here’s a really thoughtful -as usual – piece by law professor/blogger Glen Reynolds of Instapundit and PJTV. It cries out for reading because it aptly describes the knowledge problem that Congress has, with particular reference to the new health care reform.  Enjoy.

In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It’s like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there’s plenty of evidence that Congress isn’t a repository of rocket scientists. But it’s just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn’t make much difference.

The United States Code — containing federal statutory law — is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can’t be aware of all the real-world complications it’s producing, it can’t even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it’s doing.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Progressives-can_t-get-past-the-Knowledge-Problem-89780997.html#ixzz0kNgOdeTA

Another read, perhaps even scarier, is a longish essay that describes the politically-correct hell that Great Britain has formed for itself, with special attention to its education system.  Our kids are already getting quite a bit of this, but the essay is a cautionary tale re where this can all lead if we continue to ignore the problem.  And thinking we ought to just leave it to the parents and their teachers is just what the baddies would like us to do. I’ve pulled out a few paragraphs below.  You can read the whole thing at Gates of Vienna. Warning!  Gates is all about excoriating Jihadis, so if you still think people who attack us for religious reasons shouldn’t have their values discussed, let alone attacked, rest here.  Behold!

We have seen the result of this in my earlier article The BBC, Islam & Young Children which paints Christianity, indeed all indigenous Europeans, as a bunch of enslaving, sexist, racist murderers, whilst giving Islam a cute and cuddly clean bill of health. This happily complied-with instruction comes directly from the Department for Children, Schools and Families who have also decreed that the teaching of the Holocaust be dropped by some schools to avoid upsetting Muslim sensibilities, even though Holocaust denial is a criminal offence — as long as the offender is not a Muslim of course.
Such reverence for religion is unreciprocated toward non-Muslims, however, where indigenous schoolteachers are advised to wash their handsbefore touching the Koran with their filthy, infidel, ape-like digits, and indigenous school children are instructed to copy the Shahadah from within it, which states:

“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.”

The Shahadah, clearly not coincidentally, is the first of the five pillars of Islam, and the only statement one needs to recite in order to convert to Islam. It is the most important sentence in the Islamic world and as it is the only part of the Koran teachers are advised to tell their pupils to copy, one has to question the allegiance of Britain’s current rulers.

This assault upon indigenous British schoolchildren is beyond my comprehension. As a result it is no surprise to discover that white working class boys bear the brunt of this warped and sinister experiment in the Cultural Cleansing of the British, and languish at the very bottom of educational league tables.

The socialists Baljeet Ghales, Herman Ouselys, Vineeta Guptas, Keith Ajegbos and Chris Mullards have done their jobs well. Their hatred of whites, Europeans, the English and capitalism has been succoured and encouraged by white Socialists of the same bent, who now control all of our institutions and government and such is their influence they can even get to those outside their state sector remit, leading to the following quote from a privately educated girl on a BBC Have Your Say page:

“A lot of people around me think that Britain is some amazing, rich, beautiful country. I think learning about the horrible things we have done help us to learn that our country isn’t as amazing as we make out.” — Jess. Year 10.

It is a shame that even privately educated children such as Jess appear not to have heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knew a thing or two about totalitarianism and whose following observation might give Jess and her Year 10 friends pause for thought:

“To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.“