Perhaps it would be good for me to tell you a little about the stories that we cats tell each other around the fire while we wait for the staff to bring us some nice warm milk.  The first is told on Halloween.  It is the story of the Kitty Hawk and tells of a giant hawk that swoops down and picks up the bad kitties and carries them off where they are turned into yappy, arrogant, stupid and ill-tempered little dogs.  This is where Chihuahuas come from.  The mother cats tell this to their kittens to get them to behave.  Believe me, no cat wants to end up a Chihuahua.

For Thanksgiving it is the story of how the Pilgrims would have starved had it not been for the resourcefulness of the cats in winning the affection of the Indians who then provided food for the Pilgrims and taught them how to grow much of it for themselves.  The Indians recognized the cats as brilliant hunters and immediately saw they had something in common with them. I’m not sure they really trusted the Pilgrims, but they came to that conclusion a bit too late.

On Christmas Eve just before we all go to sleep our mothers would tell us the story of Kitty Claws, which is where humans got the story of Santa Claus.  Kitty Claws embodied the best of catdom; kindness, wisdom, warmth, and concern for fellow cats.  Kitty Claws brings presents for all good kitties, the bad ones having been taken by the Kitty Hawk and recycled into Chihuahuas and given to unsuspecting kids as Christmas presents.  Toy mice are a favorite.  Live ones are better but in deference to the staff’s sensibilities toy ones are the norm.  Kitty Claws travels in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.  In the beginning the sleigh was pulled by mice but you can imagine the problems that created with the mice being understandably nervous knowing that Kitty Claws was a big eater and it was a long night.

So if you hear a little noise coming from around the Christmas tree late on Christmas Eve, it is NOT the cat trashing the tree, it is Kitty Claws visiting your precious kitties.

The staff, like the rest of the world, is concerned about the financial crisis.  We cats are too.  Anything that interrupts our food or sleep is a cause for alarm.  As an expert on all things I’ll offer my opinion on one of the points of human behavior that mystifies me and leads to small problems becoming large ones – Regulation.  Humans have a fascination for it.  As soon as anything new comes along someone thinks they should regulate it.  What humans don’t seem to get is that regulation, even well-meaning and generally intelligently done regulation creates greater risk than everyone acting on their own because if everyone does the same thing and it turns out to be the wrong thing a local problem becomes a world-wide disaster.

Let’s use cat food as an example. I have never understood tuna flavored cat food.  Who thinks cats catch tuna in the wild?  Ever see a cat go fishing?  Mouse flavored cat food, now that would sell to cats, but apparently not to humans, and since humans are the ones doing the buying it is tuna not mouse.  Maybe someone tried mouse flavored cat food and failed.  Anyway those individual failures present relatively little risk to society and that weeding out process provides a laboratory to determine what actually works. Tuna flavored cat food, for example. 

But when regulation determines the actions of society as a whole there is great “systemic risk”.  A failure that would otherwise affect only a small segment of society is catastrophic, and no experimentation has taken place to determine what actually works.  Regulators never change their policies and even if they wished to do so it would take forever.  Do this on a global scale and you have what we have now, a global disaster. The international policies that contributed to the problem were the Basel Accords, but that is for another day.

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As much as the Left whined about preventing “systemic risk” the entire Progressive program is focused on creating it because of the hubris that somehow the experts of the Progressive movement are not affected by the limited knowledge that affects everyone else so they want to set the rules for absolutely everything.  The Founders created a Federal Republic with a central government with specific limited powers in order to protect us from over-control by that government and in the process, perhaps without knowing it, limited “systemic risk”.  The last thing we need is only one flavor of cat food.