Breaking Things and Fixing Things
you break it, WE fix it
There are a number of sayings associated with breaking things. As in: "if you break it, you fix it." But, on the other hand, there is also "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Then there is Law Four of my Four Laws. "Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them." You can see that my maxim is really another form of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." And the point is that if you are an earnest reformer – and who isn't – then the only chance you have to fix a government program is after it breaks.
So let's see. Any gubmint programs breaking this week?
Item: I think we understand that our education system is broke, 'cos it's woke, as this piece details at American Greatness: "Losing a Generation." It's not just COVID.
From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who said they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a recent CDC study.
Could it be that handing off the education of our kids to gubmint bureaucrats is not a good idea? Anyway, enrollment in regular public schools is down and enrollment in charter schools, religious schools, and homeschooling is up. So there’s hope.
Item: The Twitter Files show that our "intelligence community" is broken, trying to push Twitter around to censor voices that did not echo the party line on Trump, Hunter Biden, and laptops. Plus, Twitter has been used to push intelligence community foreign-policy narratives.
And I was intrigued by the blow-up when Elon Musk suspended a few regime journalists for doxxing his son's location – and the EU chimed in with threats to Twitter! This is what is called a "tell." Especially because nobody in the global regime cockpit seems to give a damn when notable conservative voices are suspended.
When the regime needs to censor it means that it is losing control of the narrative.
Item: The 4,000 page omnibus spending bill that the Schumer-Pelosi leadership is ramming down the throats of Congress-critters and you and me. They are telling us that Congress is broken, that the regime has all kinds of must-pass items that could never get passed if they weren't attached to a must-pass bill to avoid shutting down the federal government. Here's Sen. Rand Paul with the bill:
Thank goodness he included the warning labels.
So what are they afraid of? That they couldn't get their Ukraine war spending passed? That they couldn't keep their post-COVID welfare handouts going? That they need to sneak in massive new subsidies for green energy and fund massive new programs to fight systemic racism?
Suspending the rules means that the rules aren't working for the rulers any more.
Item: The attack on criminal justice, with the Defund the Police movement and the George Soros prosecutors that are releasing accused petty criminals pre-trial and provoking a surge of thefts and violence. I get it: the Mascots of our regime Anointed are doing worse than before, despite the dozens of laws and the trillions in spending to bend the arc of history towards justice. So it can't be liberal programs; it must be racists and enemies of blacks. Therefore the only path to justice is to break the unjust criminal justice system.
There's a charming naïvete about this. My feeling is that criminal justice has always been a mess. After all, the fact of any criminal act reflects a failure on the part of society to socialize everyone. So whether you expel or execute or imprison or drug or reeducate miscreants, it's still an embarrassing failure.
Item: Green energy initiatives from mandating Electric Vehicles to ending fossil-fuel exploration. Sooner or later this will crash the economy and there will be hell to pay.
Really, it would be best for us all if this came sooner rather than later. Because the longer we travel on the green energy train the worse the trainwreck will be at the end of it.
Item: "Ten Lessons from the Return of History" that I linked to yesterday. You mean our foreign-policy establishment has been screwing up all these years?
My feeling is that every regime needs two enemies, because there is no politics without an enemy. The regime needs an external enemy to fight and an internal enemy to repress. In both cases the enemy should be small: a small state and a small minority. Otherwise you get into a world war or a civil war. And that’s not good.
Note that our present regime seems hell-bent on world war with Russia and China, and also civil war with the ordinary commoner middle-class majority. This may not be a good idea.
There seems to be a awful lot of breakin’ going on, and it’s going to need a whole lot of fixin’ when the breakin’ has got bad enough.
Is there anything that is going well for our ruling class?