How To Catch Wild Pigs

By Grant Davies

Most of us get a ton of forwarded emails each week. I get my share. If you do as well you know they have something in common with the jokes that also get to your inbox. That is, you have seen most of them before. Similarly, I'm sure many of you have seen the one below in the past.

I received it yesterday from a reader, and even though I had not seen this one before, it reminded me of the well traveled recipe for "How to cook a frog." Anyone who somehow missed that recipe over the years can leave a comment below and I'll retell it for you.

Let's title this one, "How To Catch Wild Pigs." We can assume it is a parable rather than a literal retelling. We can also assume it has been added to, redacted, and otherwise edited by numerous readers along the way before they passed it along to their list. I was tempted to do the same but decided against it. Here is the story.

There was a chemistry professor in a large college, who had some exchange students in his class. One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist regime. In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question.

He asked: "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?" The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said that it was no joke.

"You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free corn.

When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.

They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side."

The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity."

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America .

The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tax exemptions, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc., while we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time.

 So there is the parable. It should provoke thought about where we are and where we are going as a country. I would also observe that the last paragraph seems to make the assumption that there is a conspiracy (of sorts) that has, and continues, to "push us toward Communism/Socialism" purposely. I'm not personally ready to take that leap as it stands, but neither do I dismiss the possibility out of hand.

There certainly exist in the world people who would do just that if they could. I question only whether they have been able to be successful enough in the endeavor or whether Thomas Jefferson was correct in predicting that "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

In either case we know one thing for sure, penned pigs usually end up being slaughtered.

Carl Holzhouser, one of the highly paid researchers for this blog sent this piece along. Good work Carl! Expect your compensation to be 20% more on your next find than you received for this one.

Duck and Cover

When I was a boy we were taught in school that it was probable that we were soon to be fried by a nuclear bomb.

The suggested strategy for saving one's self was to keep an ear out for the air raid sirens which were mounted atop each fire station in Chicago, and when the alert came, to quickly dive under your desk and curl up into the fetal position. Unless, of course, it was 10:00 on Tuesday morning, in which case it was just a test, so you could keep doing whatever you were doing at 9:59, supposedly with no fear.

The boys always wondered why the enemy was so stupid that they wouldn't just make sure they attacked at that time on a Tuesday. The girls probably thought that too, but we didn't talk to them except to razz them, so it was hard to tell what they were thinking.

It was a scary time to live in that's for sure. Kinda like now. Only now, the children are not the ones who are scared. (Most of them voted for hope and change and are clueless regarding what this stuff really means in the "real world future.") The adults however, are feverishly searching Craig's List to see if they can procure an old school desk with what's left of their unemployment checks.

Yesterday, the agent of such change took his marching orders from his advisor, Rahmsputin, and told us to expect the political equivalent of that cataclysm because he is contemplating using the "nuclear option" on us to change our society forever. And make no mistake, if the government expands it's control over us to include our medical decisions, there will be plenty of dead (and poor) people as a result.

The use of a revenue bill to skirt the rules of the Senate by using the nuclear option (sometimes referred to as "reconciliation" by politicians with a sense of humor) to overturn the wishes of even the bluest of states, Massachusetts, so he can pass step one of the socialization of health-care is just an updated version of what, as kids, we knew of as "MAD."

The "MAD" (mutual assured destruction) concept was used to inform the Soviets that if they sent an ICBM our way, we would destroy all of their country and people as they were doing the same to us. No winner.

The case is the same here, the Democrats will be dead politically, and we will just be, "plain old dead."

Tales of the Bizarro World

I’m sure most people my age or older can remember the Superman Comics and the wonderful imagination of the authors who cooked up the idea of a “Bizarro” world, where everything was opposite of the real world. At least what the real world was back then.

No, the world back then wasn’t perfect, far from it, but the fantasy of those authors had to do with the American ideal, not the imperfect world it always has been. I remember the intro to the Adventures of Superman show on TV which referred to “Truth, justice and the American way“. It seems that back then it was still OK to think the American way was the correct way. Now it’s the "Chicago Way". (that's an essay for a different day)

The American way, as I understood it then, was that you had to work to earn your keep, you had to take responsibility for yourself and your family and then were expected to care for your neighbor. You were free to succeed, or fail.
Ideally, the government was a group of people who were pressed into service, rather than sought it out so they could mind everybody else’s business. Their important task was to defend the rights of those who they served, and little else.

Businesses were owned and operated by private people and the government only got involved in that arena when some needed service could not be provided by the people themselves due to a lack of sufficient capital. (Think of the post office or the Erie Canal)
In that world, the government praised successful companies and gave failed ones a decent burial. Things are, well, a little different now.

Government in the Bizarro world rewards failed companies with billions and billions of dollars taken from the successful and threatens with lawsuits and new regulation any companies who dare to actually serve the public by providing goods and services which are actually in demand.
Microsoft, ATT, IBM and others come to mind a few years back and Google, et al, are the targets today. Meanwhile, failed banks, brokerage firms and automobile companies with crummy management and bad business models are “invested in”. The message is fantastical if you think about it.
You are in trouble if you get too big, but by then you are “too big to fail” and they will be delighted to bail you out, if only you will become incompetent.
Of course that’s not weird in the Bizarro world.

Only in the port sided environment where we current live, could a group who runs a mandatory retirement plan which is shortly to be upside down, a medical system that is already in deficit, a regulatory body which can’t catch a Ponzi operator (even after having multiple experts explain to them for years in advance the exact method of the criminality), now propose to an adoring public that they be rewarded for those efforts by being put in charge of an expansion of the regulations and the regulated, a new health care system to be built on the model of the one currently collapsing, and the management of banks, car companies and insurance companies. I don’t think even the creators of the Bizarro Superman could have thought this stuff up.

But in the Bizarro world, Superman would order a double Kryptonite burger at his far off, slow food restaurant and gobble it down as quickly as the citizen lemmings are now swallowing the bizarre menu choices currently before them. With the same results I fear.

GM- Government Motors

The Government effectively runs GM now and today the news arrived that they fired the CEO. The President of the United States also announced that hereafter the US government will guarantee the auto warrantees of that company.
I have a question, since they are standing behind the warrantees, who will decide what's covered?
I suggest all repairs on all parts and labor for all cars forever.
(As long as it is performed by UAW workers of course)
Another benefit would be, if they are purposely manufactured poorly, all the repairs will stimulate the economy!
Good idea?