The Ship's Cat of Salems Den is a gargantuan, efficient nation, remarkable for its keen interest in outer space, restrictive gun laws, and suspicion of poets. The hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical, humorless population of 37.031 billion Shadows are ruled with an iron fist by the corrupt, dictatorship government, which oppresses anyone who isn't on the board of a Fortune 500 company. Large corporations tend to be above the law, and use their financial clout to gain ever-increasing government benefits at the expense of the poor and unemployed.

The tiny, moralistic, pro-business government juggles the competing demands of Law & Order, Defense, and Industry. Citizens pay a flat income tax of 5.9%.

The frighteningly efficient a Shadow economy, worth a remarkable 3,702 trillion Claws a year, is broadly diversified and led by the Arms Manufacturing industry, with major contributions from Automobile Manufacturing, Gambling, and Uranium Mining. Average income is 99,970 Claws, but there is a large disparity between incomes, with the richest 10% of citizens earning 514,465 per year while the poor average 10,610, a ratio of 48.5 to 1.

Hundreds of thousands of convicts work as slaves in Salems Den's many privately-owned prisons, teenage fathers are forced to join the army, pristine wilderness has been trashed in the quest for cheaper oil, and the Black Panther is believed to be extinct. Crime, especially youth-related, is almost non-existent, thanks to a well-funded police force. Salems Den's national animal is the Black Panther, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation.

Salems Den is ranked 10,077^th in the world and 1^st in The Himalayas for Largest Gambling Industry, scoring 8,816.82 on the Kelly Criterion Productivity Index.