Feudalism: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

Pure Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you all the milk you need.

Bureaucratic Socialism: Your cows are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the Continue reading...]]> (Source: Unknown)

Feudalism: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

Pure Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you all the milk you need.

Bureaucratic Socialism: Your cows are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the regulations say you should need.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

Pure Communism: You have two cows. Your neighbours help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.

Real World Communism: You share two cows with your neighbours. You and your neighbours bicker about who has the most “ability” and who has the most “need”. Meanwhile, no one works, no one gets any milk, and the cows drop dead of starvation.

Russian Communism: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the black market.

Perestroika: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the Mafia takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the “free” market.

Cambodian Communism: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

Militarism: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

Totalitarianism: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.

Pure Democracy: You have two cows. Your neighbours decide who gets the milk.

Representative Democracy: You have two cows. Your neighbours pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

British Democracy: You have two cows. You feed them sheep’s brains and they go mad. The government doesn’t do anything.

Bureaucracy: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

Pure Anarchy: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbours try to take the cows and kill you.

Pure Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

American-style Capitalism: You don’t have any cows. The bank will not lend you money to buy cows, because you don’t have any cows to put up as collateral.

Environmentalism: You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.

Political Correctness: You are associated with (the concept of “ownership” is a symbol of the phallo centric, war mongering, intolerant past) two differently – aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.

As a nation, we were extraordinarily blessed in our revolutionaries. It wasn’t just that they were brave and determined. So were the avatars of revolution throughout the 20th century who wrecked nations and peoples. No, what makes them so wondrously distinct is that they were also just and wise, grounded always in Continue reading...]]> NR editor Rich Lowry wrote a great piece on Friday.  You should read the whole thing, but here are the opening paragraphs of his column entitled “Our Founders the Realists”:

As a nation, we were extraordinarily blessed in our revolutionaries. It wasn’t just that they were brave and determined. So were the avatars of revolution throughout the 20th century who wrecked nations and peoples. No, what makes them so wondrously distinct is that they were also just and wise, grounded always in a clear-eyed view of human nature.

“There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” James Madison wrote in The Federalist, “which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” When revolutionaries talk of depravity, it is often to brand their class or ethnic enemies for destruction. Gas chambers, prison camps, and killing fields inevitably follow.

The depravity of which our Founders spoke was different. It ran through the hearts of all men, themselves included. It tempered their expectations of what they could achieve and what they should attempt. No secular millennium, no perfectly harmonious republic — because, as Madison wrote, “the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man.”

“Enthusiasm there certainly was — a revolution is impossible without enthusiasm,” Irving Kristol writes of 1776, “but this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt, introspection, anxiety, skepticism. This may strike us as a very strange state of mind in which to make a revolution; and yet it is evidently the right state of mind for making a successful revolution.”

The Revolution was institutionalized in the Constitution, an inspired exercise in leveraging human failings against one another — “ambition counteracts ambition” — to create a stable structure of liberty.

I often wonder what the Founders would say if they could be brought forward in time and witness the modern American scene.  I think it would make an excellent screenplay, if done right.

Jefferson’s personal account of the years, months, and days leading up to the drafting and signing are also worth reading.

If the U.S. attorney doesn’t like what commenters say on your site, you may be served with a subpoena demanding their personal information.  Even if no crime has been indicated or committed in those comments.

So it is at the Las Vegas Review Journal, which has received a demand for all records related to recent commenter postings, including “full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers … the Continue reading...]]> Newspapers with online versions and newsblogs everywhere take note:

If the U.S. attorney doesn’t like what commenters say on your site, you may be served with a subpoena demanding their personal information.  Even if no crime has been indicated or committed in those comments.

So it is at the Las Vegas Review Journal, which has received a demand for all records related to recent commenter postings, including “full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers … the IP address”.

The comments were posted on this op-ed about an ongoing federal tax evasion trial. The defendant, Las Vegas resident Robert Kahre, is accused of tax fraud for paying people in U.S. minted gold and silver coins based on their precious metal value but using their face value for tax purposes (which is many times less).

As you will see if you scan them, the comments – about 100 of them - fall on various points on the Sane and Nutty graphs, per usual with these kinds of things.  Nothing terribly surprising or disturbing in any of them.

Here’s what Thomas Mitchell, editor at the LVRJ, is saying:

My first instinct is to fight the subpoena tooth and nail. After all, John Peter Zenger was just the printer who published anonymous essays critical of the colonial governor. His jury nullified the existing law and freed him.

On the other hand, if someone were to confess to a real and specific crime on our Web site, I’d give him up at the drop of a hat.

Bottom line: We could fight the federal subpoena, at considerable expense, and lose. Our attorneys are now trying to see if we can limit the scope of the information sought.

What the prosecutors don’t appear to understand is that we don’t have most of what they are seeking. We don’t require registration. A person could use a fictitious name and e-mail address, and most do. We have no addresses or phone numbers.

To add prior restraint to the chilling effect of the sweeping subpoena, we were warned: “You have no obligation of secrecy concerning this subpoena; however, any such disclosure could obstruct and impede an ongoing criminal investigation. …”

I wonder if Thomas Jefferson could have been subpoenaed when he wrote from Paris in 1787:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

The Sedition Act wasn’t passed until 12 years later. I thought it had since been repealed.

Heh!

Update: The LVRJ is fighting the subpoena.  And the ACLU has posted a message asking commenters if they would like free representation.  See here.  (Thanks to SinCityXtreme for sending the head’s up and link.)

Also, there are now 173 comments on the story.

On June 9, farmers, ranchers, and consumers from more than a dozen organizations will gather in Jefferson City, Missouri to protest NAIS – National Animal Identification System – during a “listening session” organized by the USDA.  Apparently the USDA does not want to take “no” for an answer and is looking for ways to make this program more “palatable” to citizens.  And their cows.

If Continue reading...]]> We can file this one under Astronomically Expensive and Unnecessary Crap.  And cross file it under New World Order Advocates On Crack.

On June 9, farmers, ranchers, and consumers from more than a dozen organizations will gather in Jefferson City, Missouri to protest NAIS – National Animal Identification System – during a “listening session” organized by the USDA.  Apparently the USDA does not want to take “no” for an answer and is looking for ways to make this program more “palatable” to citizens.  And their cows.

If you are not familiar, NAIS is a three-phase program designed by the USDA and the National Institute for Animal Agriculture to “advance” guidelines for international trade through an agency of the World Trade Organization called the OIE.

NAIS will tag and track movements of 33+ species of animals worldwide. Phase 1 would require all livestock owners to obtain a GPS-linked “Premise ID number” for their property (farm, ranch, homestead, etc.). Phase 2 would require all animals be tagged with an international ID device. Phase 3 would require electronic reporting of all livestock movements on or off a “premises” to enable a trace-back to that premises.

Doreen Hannes, a researcher, author and public speaker, whose family has a small farm and raises much of their own food states, “The design of NAIS is effectively a license to farm. This program would cost us at least $4,000.00 the first year. There is no method for growers to recoup the cost of the program, and the implementation of NAIS will be the destruction of the family farm and rural America. The cost to freedom is simply immeasurable.”

Paul Hamby, NW Missouri coordinator for Campaign for Liberty, states “NAIS will put an undue burden on non-electric Amish farmers, small hobby farmers, 4-H and FFA members while providing no benefit to them. NAIS will not make our food supply safer. I am against this international livestock ID program run by the same federal government who just bought General Motors.”

I don’t think it’s necessary to invoke the “little guy” to object to this program.  No one should be forced to pay to electronically tag their animals so bureaucrats at another slow-moving, over-funded WTO agency can run reports on worldwide livestock movement every time a sheep sneezes in Bangkok.

Besides, in Australia and Canada, where a similar high-tech tracking program has been tried just on cattle, error rates are reported to be high.  Sounds like a database nightmare that could bog down the entire food system.  In addition, the requirements and costs of infrastructure are clearly prejudicial against small producers and local food systems and favor well-funded industrial and global producers and processors.

For more on this and the group Missourians Against NAIS, from whence most of this information came, see here.

Here’s a nice piece and a couple of photos from Illinois Review (that’s me on the far left, next to Mary Katherine Ham).

And here’s Warner Todd Huston’s write-up.  (How on earth did I miss talking to WTH?!  Darn it!!)

Here’s Bob Weeks’ blurbs at Kansas Meadowlark.  Including mention that Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher presented me with my award.