Looking at you Brits from continental Europe, I don't see much of a difference ;-P

Here are the combined results of two largest parties in lower house elections in Czech republic for the past 20 years:
1996: 56%
1998: 60%
2002: 55%
2006: 68%
2010: 42%
2013: 39%

In all elections since 1996 up to 2010, the two largest parties were Social democrats (scandinavian-style liberal left) and Civic democrats (conservative right). In 2013, Civic democrats fell to 7.7% (5th place out of 7 parties that got into lower house), which is about 1/3 of their previous result. The second place was taken by a completely new party (populist party led and funded by a local billionaire), but I don't expect them to survive the next lower house elections, just like the previous two newcomer parties didn't.

This problem isn't caused by proportionate election system. The cause is that the winner doesn't have the balls to form a minority cabinet and play the democracy game all the way through. Running a minority cabinet is hard but the results are difinitely worth it.

There's a slight problem with your idea: Every single supplier on the market has only one goal: destroy the market by becoming a de-facto monopoly. And while it may take decades, some companies do succeed even without government regulation. Huge corporations and weak government result in corporations becoming the new government.

Czech republic requires any endorsement of political parties or candidates by a corporation to be declared as non-monetary donation to the political party. We don't have any contribution limits but the law requires that political parties have to make all donation records public at the end of the year, including names, addresses and birthdates/corporation ID numbers. If the political party doesn't have all that information, it has to either return the donation in question or give it to the state. Giving money directly to individual candidates or elected officials is prosecuted as bribery.

You should call it "ghetto culture." Black people are a much more diverse group than your post implies. Ghetto culture is also very common among Czech and Slovak gypsies, with very similar crime, education and economic statistics and widespread prejudices among the majority population.

I think you're exaggerating their limited participation. But I don't blame you, the parents themselves probably believe that they play much less active role than they really do, simply because they don't keep track of everything they do to help their kids learn. And just to be clear, I'm not talking specifically about reading. I'm talking about their entire education (including mathematics, science, history, etc.). The younger the kids are, the more guidance they need, whether direct or indirect.

If we focus exclusively on reading, creating environment that encourages kids to try is more than enough. When there's plenty to read around the house and kids see their parents reading often for themselves (not just reading to the kids), the "monkey see, monkey do" principle will drive them crazy about reading. I know because I was like that as a 5-year-old.

But let's go back to education in general. I started teaching myself programming when I was 10 years old. Now I have a degree in Computer Science. So I can see in hindsight how much time I wasted learning useless crap simply because I didn't know better. I also felt for a long time that I was missing something important - it turned out to be the whole theory of algorithms, complexity and proving correctness that I've later learned at university. If I had a mentor early on who would point me in the right direction every once in a while, I could have learned much faster and avoided some bad habits that I still struggle with today.

I also have another personal experience with learning on my own: English is my second language. I had to take 11 years of compulsory English classes (since 5th grade all the way up to second year at university). I got my first computer after the first year of English. Another year or so later, the classes became complete waste of my time because I was learning much more from computer games. I've also learned some key insights that I'm successfully using to learn a third language at the moment.

I've never said that parents have to do everything right. They just need enough insight to realize that what their kid is doing doesn't work and that they have to step in and give some advice. If that advice doesn't work either, they need to step in again and try yet another way, over and over again. This is especially important for pre-teen kids who may not be able to try a different approach on their own yet or they might waste a lot of time exploring dead ends.

Also, it's not enough that there's text around. The kids need to explore it at their own slow pace. That pretty much rules out TV. And while you can learn to mechanically read from a McDonald's menu, you won't develop any functional literacy from it. (Functional literacy is the ability to understand the meaning of written text. Functionally illiterate people can read text out loud but they'll have no idea what it means unless somebody repeats it back to them.)

It's not that simple as you think. The obvious advantage of "unschooling" I can see is that it takes full advantage of kids' natural curiosity. The traditional education of the shove-boring-facts-down-kids'-throats kind completely obliterates any curiosity very fast. But. Parents have to provide guidance in order to make unschooling work. When parents don't or can't provide guidance, kids can easily take the wrong approach to the task, become overwhelmed and lose interest. Parents also have to provide intellectual stimulation in order to point their kids' curiosity in the right direction (at least indirectly by asking the right questions or buying the right books).

So I do believe that it's completely possible to raise a naturally curious kid into illiterate adult even without any abuse. When kids grow up in an environment which completely lacks any intellectual stimulation and parental guidance (specifically of the intellectual kind), they'll turn their curiosity towards some other activity and give up on intellectual achievements. Later, when they start going to school, their late start will bring them bad grades, which will demoralize them even further and make them hate education. Kids can't get curious about reading when there's literally nothing to read in their home. And they'll begin to hate reading if you force them to read under threat (of bad grades). But again, the problem is in learned behavior, not genes.

That's how I learned English. My native language (Czech) belongs to the Slavic family so it has very little in common with Germanic and Romance languages. I strongly recommend this TED talk about learning languages: How to learn any language in six months. When you play games where you don't need to understand a word of the text to get the meaning (e.g. the first Diablo, various shooter and action games, etc.), you slowly learn vocabulary. When you soak up enough vocabulary, you'll start figuring out the grammar. And then you're ready to play language-heavy RPG games like Fallout (1 and 2, I've never played Fallout 3) and various adventure games.

And since you're probably not familiar with Czech, here's the previous paragraph one more time in Czech (loosely translated sans accents because unicode makes /. barf) so you can try for yourself if you can understand it:

Takhle jsem se naucil anglicky. Muj rodny jazyk (cestina) patri mezi slovanske jazyky, takze s germanskymi a romanskymi jazyky nema moc spolecneho. Vrele doporucuji tuhle TED prednasku o uceni jazyku: Jak se naucit libovolny jazyk za sest mesicu. Kdyz hrajete hry, ve kterych nemusite rozumet ani slovu, abyste pochopili vyznam textu (napriklad prvni Diablo, ruzne strilecky a akcni hry atd.), tak se pomalu ucite slovni zasobu. Kdyz pak nacerpate dostatecnou slovni zasobu, zacnete postupne chapat i gramatiku. A potom muzete zacit hrat jazykove narocna RPG jako Fallout (1a 2, Fallout 3 jsem nikdy nehral) a ruzne adventury.

UK and Poland didn't adopt the EU charter of fundamental rights so they can just ignore this ruling. But the rest of EU must follow it, including Czech republic which finally decided to adopt the charter as well.

Well, here in Czech republic, the previous prime minister's party went from 2nd place with 20.22% of votes in 2010 (with tiny difference between 1st and 2nd place) to 5th place with 7.72% in 2013 early elections, barely making the election threshold of 5%. So yes, there's still hope at least for my country. It doesn't guarantee that the next guy in power will be sane, but at least it's nice to know that voters can actually kick the worst ones out really hard when they run out of patience.

Picard listening to Tamarians before his camping trip.

Mybitcoin.com copycat scam, right on schedule.

Sorry but you don't understand even the complete basics of genetics. Time-bomb crops wouldn't be that dangerous in the wild even if they actually existed. It's extremely unlikely that a significant portion of normal crop population would become contaminated by time-bomb genes in just a few years. And two plants with both normal and time-bomb genes still have 25% chance of producing completely clean offspring.

Also, the chance of infertile hybrid turning into multigeneration time-bomb is practically zero. It's much easier to simply break the reproductive system completely than to build a generation countdown into it.

MAFIAA does all of the above all the time. MAFIAA holds copyright to everything they've funded, not the authors (while most authors technically own the copyright, they had to assign complete control over it to MAFIAA to get funding). So I fail to see your point.