Norway: The Best little Stalinist Ho-house in Scandinavia.

At the risk of pissing off our two one nordic readers... INDC Journal blogged on the recent release of the annual UN report detailing the world's best countries to live in by their conception of the "standard of living". Quite laughably they chose Norway...again.

...Which of course reminded my lazy-self of a fisking I did a while back on a news report detailing the ongoing Norwegian battle against Communist Crabs From Kamchatka - reproduce here for my edification.

Stalin's last army
- hordes of gigantic crabs on their way to invade Europe -
By Julius Strauss in Kirkenes, northern Norway
(Filed: 28/02/2004)

Millions of giant Pacific crabs, whose ancestors were brought to Europe by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, are marching south along Norway's coast, devouring everything in their path.
The monster crabs, which can weigh up to 25lb and have a claw-span of more than three feet, are proving so resilient that scientists fear they could end up as far south as Gibraltar.

Kaching!!!


Energised by a mysterious population explosion a decade ago, whole armies of the crustaceans - known as the Kamchatka or Red King Crabs - have already advanced about 400 miles along the roof of Europe, overwhelming the ports of northern Norway.

Maybe it was the radiation from all the sunken Russian subs that caused them to energise/mutate so freakishly... No wait! It must have been Global Warming Cooling Climate-Change™

They now number more than 10 million and have reached the Lofoten Islands off north-west Scandinavia, leaving in their wake what one expert described as "an underwater desert".

Solution: Kill them and eat them.

In a graphic display of the extent of the crab's submarine domination, some photographs of the ocean floor in Kirkenes in northern Norway show a writhing mass of the ugly, spiny animals.

Northern clams and other shellfish, once so numerous that divers could scoop up handfuls, have been all but eliminated.

OMG! Natural species predation!!
Who would have thunk...

Lars Petter Oie, a Norwegian diver who lives nearby, has seen the fjord outside his front door taken over by the crabs.

Plunging through a hole in the ice, another diver surfaced within two minutes with a huge specimen. A snap of its claw is enough to remove a man's finger.

Ouch! And to think, ships off Alaska regularly sink with all hands trying to snag big tasty crabs like these...

Mr Oie said: "I have been to conferences on the crab and one thing the experts agree on is that they have rarely come across a species that is so adaptable.

"It can survive on almost anything: kelp, dead fish, seaweed and fish eggs. It even eats crushed shells to get the calcium it needs for its shell."

Uh oh...An Allthing conference has been convened...
Mutant Commie Crabs - 1
Norwegian common sense - 0

The relentless advance of the crabs has led to calls from some Norwegian marine experts for a government-subsidised "blitz" to try to halt their relentless march south.

'Government subsidised "blitz"'...?!?
Is that how low common sense has fallen in the other socialist paradise up north?

Andreas Tveteraas, an analyst in Oslo with the international World Wildlife Fund, said that urgent steps needed to be taken.

Friggin' kill them and eat them for Jeebus Sake!
Send their corpses to starving Africans...or maybe even sell them for a tidy profit...to evil consumers like me.

"This animal has no natural predators and it's an alien species in the Barents Sea. That's why its numbers are exploding.

Exploding? You mean like a paleostinian terrorist...sell the crabs to them.

"Some scientists say it will stay in the north because it likes the temperature but others think it can go as far south as Gibraltar."

Bjorn. Let's discuss this for fifty years...

For years the Norwegian government has ignored the underwater advance, undecided whether to treat the crabs as a resource or a pest.

____________!

The animal's legs are considered a delicacy and fetch top dollar in Japan and America. Even in Oslo, consumers pay around 200 Norwegian kronor (£15) a pound.

Served with bread, butter, lemon and mayonnaise, the taste and texture of the crab meat is comparable with that of the finest lobster.

Helloooo...Anything in there besides a heaping tablespoon of apparently unused lumpy grey matter that smells like turned caviar from mother Russia?

One leg is enough to provide a grown man with a filling meal.

...Or three Japanese guys with big capitalist wallets.

At present, some Norwegian fishermen have been granted seasonal licences to catch the Kamchatka crab but stiff regulations on the size of the boat used and other criteria mean they are few in number.

Some "blitz"...License the potentially lucrative industry to death while you sit on your hands.

Aasmund Bjordal, of the Department of Marine Resources in the western Norwegian town of Bergen, said: "We're between two policies. One is to get rid of the crabs. The other is to manage it as a fishing resource.

Manage to do nothing...Apparently they don't make brains very efficient in the socialist north...I wonder why?

Aasmund apparently means arse-end of the world...

"In the meantime, it's already become an important source of income for some fishermen in the north. The problem is that it may be destroying the fishing stock."

At least the Northland fishermen aren't as inept as their overlords.

Predicting the crab's long-term effect on the marine ecology is difficult. The Barents Sea provides some of the world's richest fishing grounds and a collapse in stock would be a major disaster.

May the good Lord have mercy on their degraded mercantile sense.

There is some evidence that the crabs, which often live at great depths, have been eating the eggs of the caplin, a small fish that is a main source of food for cod.

In its native Pacific it faces much sterner competition but has nevertheless edged out other bottom-feeders to reach northern Japan and Vancouver Island.

Where even the socialists in Canuckistan have managed to figure it out.

Transporting the monster crabs to the Barents Sea was originally part of a Stalinist era scheme to provide food for the populations in the north-western Soviet Union.

The few that survived Stalins various purges and progroms that is...There's government management for ya...in an nut crab shell.

In the 1990s, for reasons nobody quite understands, the population exploded.

Gee could it have been a combination of enviro-confrences and typical innaction reports coupled with a laughable ignorance of capitalist profiteering?

In recognition of the growing threat to the local ecology, Norwegian authorities finally lifted on Jan 1 some of the restrictions on crabbing along part of the shoreline.

~Ingwe unveils the details of the government subsidized blitz~
I imagine it has something to do with Germans...

As for the fishermen themselves, they are as deeply divided as the government.

It sounds like Norway is saddled with Dhimmicrats as well as taxpayer-supported enviro-weenies angling for a bigger slice of the funding pie.

Many Norwegian fishermen hate the crabs, blaming them for falling fish stocks and complaining that they get tangled in their nets. But for others, they have brought unprecedented wealth.

How dare they seek unprecedented wealth™...license them from the oaks!

At the Rallarn, a pub near the harbour, a fierce debate raged this week. Some favour annihilating the crabs, an almost impossible task, while others are tickled pink at the chance to gorge for free on a rare delicacy they find almost at the bottom of their gardens.

You mean to say that even the cabal of profiteering international capitalists can't even manage to "annihilate" the tasty crabs?
Someone please call Halliburton...!

Elvis Jenssen, 41, said: "The bloody things hoover up everything off the bottom of the sea and all the fish are disappearing. They came over from Russia and now they're taking over."

Elvis is apparently live and well in Norway...and he is gunnin' for reparations from the commies.

But Glenn, a 30-year-old car mechanic, replied: "It's true the seabed now looks like the Sahara but they certainly taste good."

Capitalism 101 for socialized Norway - Failed.
May I suggest a pre-emptive strike by three Alaskan crab fishing boats...

UPDATE: Oooops! We lost our Icelandic reader...