Federal Lands

The reason we have this problem is that so much of the West is owned by "us," or "the U.S.," or something.  You may not have known that, but it matters a lot for context.  Check out this map:

Click for an even more federally-owned image.

Now, there is a genuine kerfuffle about land rights.  Not ownership, exactly, but the right to use the land for cattle grazing.  Adverse possession, Lockean combining my labor (or cattle) with the land, and so on.  There's this.  And then this. 

These people are crazy, right?  Why don't they graze their cattle on private land, and stop whining?  Check out Nevada, folks.  In the map above.  There is no private land.

Have we reached a cow tipping point?  What is going to happen?  My answer:  sell it, sell most of it.  My friend Holly Fretwell at PERC wrote about this back in 2003.  Fifteen years ago, Terry, Vernon, and Emily worked on this.  It's not like we didn't know.  Sell it.  SELL IT!  More recently, Holly is still trying to get someone to listen.

Bad to the bone

Wow. Some enterprising fellow in Austria, (allegedly named Hans Url, so this may be a hoax) faced with the heinous prospect of having to get off the dole and go to work, cut his foot off with a power saw, tossed it into a fire so that it could not be re-attached, and then called emergency services.

Unfortunately for him, missing a foot does not automatically keep you on the dole, even in Austria!

Let's break it down:

(1) People, they can't pay the guy benefits after that, right? Jeebus, the whole country would go cut their feet off then!

(2) The linked article refers to the miscreant as "footless". Is this just a slip of the pen, or has the guy actually DONE THIS BEFORE?

(3) The gentleman is from a town in the Austrian state of Styria, which if you are a fan of Thomas Bernhard, should be making you nod your head knowingly and murmuring "it figures".