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.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.  Government programs, once launched, never disappear.  Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.

From The Corner today:

Your Tax Dollars at Work   [Veronique de Rugy]

According to FoxNews.com:

Commercial fishermen struggling from catch restrictions and high fuel prices are getting $700,000 in federal stimulus money to retrieve lost crab pots now littering the ocean bottom, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday.

The money will be used to hire 48 people — including 31 fishermen — and Continue reading...]]> I occasionally blog on more obscure things because I am naturally curious and like to learn.  So:

From The Corner today:

Your Tax Dollars at Work   [Veronique de Rugy]

According to FoxNews.com:

Commercial fishermen struggling from catch restrictions and high fuel prices are getting $700,000 in federal stimulus money to retrieve lost crab pots now littering the ocean bottom, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday.

The money will be used to hire 48 people — including 31 fishermen — and to charter 10 vessels to retrieve an estimated 4,000 derelict crab pots, which pose a hazard to whales, seal lions and fishing boats, Jane Lubchenco said.

 

That’s $14,583 per person/job or $175 per retrieved crab pot.  Hard to gauge those numbers not knowing if this is a salary or commision job, or how long it will take to gather them all up.

I was curious to know if this ”hazard” is BS, so I searched out this article on the environmental impact of derelict gill nets and crab pots.  The crab pot problem is described thusly:

Commercial and sport crabbers are required to use a biodegradable cotton rot cord (also known as escape cord) on their pots so that if pots are lost, the cord will degrade and crabs can escape. Our research shows that only about a third of crab pots are properly equipped with escape cord and many derelict pots are found to continue fishing for months and even years. On average, a derelict crab pot will catch about 72 crabs a year. Primarily, crab pots become derelict when their buoy line is clipped by a passing vessel. Pots are frequently found in vessel traffic lanes and boaters out after dark have a challenging time seeing crab pot buoys.

So, 72 crabs times an estimated 4,000 derelict cord-lacking crab pots is 288,000 crabs that are caught and die, uneaten and unenjoyed, each year.  That, in itself, does seem like a terrible thing.  And at $1.60 per pound on average (that’s off the boat, not wholesale or retail), assuming a per crab weight of 1 pound, it’s also $460,800 goes uncollected by fishermen.  Or, at retail prices of $10 per pound, $2.88 million.

Anyhoo, apparently there is not much data on the hazard to whales, sea lions, and fishing boats due to derelict crab pots.  I assume this means not a lot of whales and boats are being taken out by stray crab cages, despite all the hullabaloo.  There was some data on the danger of the stray gill nets, though:

In 2008, the Northwest Straits Initiative removed a gill net with 162 seabirds, 14 salmon, 42 dogfish, 1,400 Dungeness crab and 1 harbor seal. Factoring in decomposition rates, it is estimated that this single net in 23 weeks time killed 1,800 birds, 450 salmon, 1,300 spiny dogfish, 16,900 crab, and 11 harbor seals. In an ecologically rich area like Port Susan bay, derelict gear can be a tremendous stress on the ecosystem and source of mortality.

That does seem bad.  This organization seems to have done their homework and to be doing decent work, and I was interested to read about their “no fault” non-legislative approach to the problem of reporting stray gear:

Central to the success of the derelict gear program has been its grassroots nature and partnerships with commercial and recreational fishermen to locate and remove gear. The Commission takes a no-fault approach to derelict gear removal. Rather than assigning blame for the derelict gear in the marine environment, the Commission focuses on removing existing gear and preventing new gear from entering the water through non-regulatory means. This approach is based on the following assumptions:

•    That the majority of the derelict fishing gear in Washington state waters is local or regional in origin;
•    That the majority of fishermen are operating legally in Washington state waters;
•    That fishermen do not want to lose expensive gear;
•    That if they do lose gear it is for reasons outside of their control;
•    That fishermen have a stake in recovery of lost gear that might otherwise impact the sustainability of their industry.

[Conclusion]:  The no-fault approach encourages fishermen to report lost nets so that they can be removed quickly.

I wonder what improvement could be made to crab pot and gill net technology to reduce the loss ratio?  Ideas?

In closing, here’s some trivia for all you crab pot geeks:

Derelict pots remove an estimated 74 Dungeness crab from Puget Sound each year. Dungeness crab larvae are a critical component of juvenile salmon diets.

I decided to buy a MacBook and iPhone the morning before the night before my 3-day trip to L.A. for the Heritage Resource Bank Conference, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) New Media Workshop, and Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) Blogger Reception & Meet-up. (Great and fun and very worthwhile, all. More about them in another post, along with my after thoughts.)

Right after I made the Continue reading...]]> It was bad form not to announce my absence, I know.  Humble apologies to all who visited E!! and found me absent.

I decided to buy a MacBook and iPhone the morning before the night before my 3-day trip to L.A. for the Heritage Resource Bank Conference, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) New Media Workshop, and Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) Blogger Reception & Meet-up. (Great and fun and very worthwhile, all. More about them in another post, along with my after thoughts.)

Right after I made the purchase decision, I decided to unplug my home PC/tower and take it to the Apple store so the nice Apple people could magically transfer all my data to my new MacBook while I was out of town.  Which meant I had access to Gmail and the Internet on my iPhone but was otherwise offline from Thursday morning until now, when I got my MacBook plugged in and configured and my iPhone synched up.  (If I had been thinking ahead, I would have set up an iTunes account when I was still plugged in so I could have downloaded WordPress in advance of my iPhone purchase…but I wasn’t.)

Now that I have all this fabulous mobile/wireless technology, I will never again be separated from my blog, Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts.

Joy!!

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.

In the meantime, check out my sidebar and blogroll links; there’s plenty of good reading.

In the days after its official shut-down, in what became a Long Good-bye on The Confabulum blog, managing editor Joe Carter wrote a detailed personal accounting and lovely farewell titled ”A Beautiful Mess.”  The piece was aptly named.  What made Continue reading...]]> A few stories and blurbs about “what happened” at Culture11 – at which I blogged for the short while it lasted – have shown up this week:  at The Corner and Washington Monthly (that piece is quite long) and The American Conservative and Right Wing News.

In the days after its official shut-down, in what became a Long Good-bye on The Confabulum blog, managing editor Joe Carter wrote a detailed personal accounting and lovely farewell titled ”A Beautiful Mess.”  The piece was aptly named.  What made it messy (and interesting) was a delightful diversity of belief, thought, and style among the editors and writers.

I was fond of the site, and was sad to see it run out of money.  There is talk that it may be resurrected.  We’ll see.

Patrick also gets brownie points for pointing us to P.J. O’Rourke’s latest brilliance in the WS (and he, in turn, gives thanks to The Anchoress, from whence he got it).  P.J. – who is Continue reading...]]> A blogger (or is blogging?) acquaintance, Patrick O’Hannigan of the Paragraph Farmer, has a good piece on the male vs. female wages myth and Obama’s new “White House Council on Women and Girls”  in The American Spectator.  Includes cameo appearances by Shakespeare, Foghorn Leghorn, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cinderella, and George Orwell.

Patrick also gets brownie points for pointing us to P.J. O’Rourke’s latest brilliance in the WS (and he, in turn, gives thanks to The Anchoress, from whence he got it).  P.J. – who is still hilarious even while battling cancer – shreds Obama on stem cells; you simply must read it.