You can’t automatically expect, presume or assume that everyone else loves animals as much as you do, nor is it any of your damn business whether they do or not.  As far as the lady goes with the horses that were portrayed as being so badly abused, the horses did not look badly abused to me.  They are farm animals after all.  They grew up sleeping in horseshit.  They grew up smelling horseshit their whole lives.  They are used to horseshit being stuck to their bodies.  I can assure you that if the horses could speak and you asked them about the horse manure, they would tell you that it really is no big deal.  In fact, not only is it not a big deal, they probably aren’t even aware of the fact that there is shit stuck to them.

Ask any kid who grew up on a dairy farm in the country about the smell of cow shit and how much it bothers them.  They will tell you that you get used to it and it is no big deal.  It is part of life growing up on a dairy farm.  Horses getting shit stuck to them and having to sleep in their own feces is part of growing up a horse.  I am sorry if you think that is abusive, but I think it is pretty normal to a horse.  I think a judge with any common sense whatsoever would also agree, especially any judge with experience in farming.

Another fact to consider is that older people also have a different outlook than we of a younger generation do.  I can’t help but think of when I was a kid.  Farmers would not hesitate to get a gun and put a 12 gauge slug into the vitals of a stray dog that was running loose on their property.  That includes little old church going grandmothers.  They would also not hesitate to kill them even though it was probably someone’s beloved pet.  (In case you can’t tell, I grew up in the country)  This was part of life.  Dogs were not to be trusted.   Nobody ever got reprimanded for it.  You knew that if your dog went and visited the neighbors farm, there was a really good chance it wasn’t coming back.  Those old farmers would exceptionally good marksmen.

When we had a pet dog growing up, that dog spent its entire life sleeping in a dog house outside.  So did grandma’s dogs.  That dog was loved and cared for, but it was never treated as well as one of us kids, nor do I think it ever should have been.  We would turn it loose and play with it outside on nice days, but living in that doghouse was its reality.  After all, it was a dog.  Isn’t that why they invented the dog house?  What did the dog eat?  It ate table scraps and dog food.  After all, it was a dog.

The point I am trying to make here is that I think reasonable people put all pets below humans on their priority scale.  Some people will put them at the very bottom of that scale.  Some will put them higher above most other things in terms of their importance in the grand scale of life.  I love animals too, but I obviously put them much farther down the scale of importance than you obviously do.  When I see a dead animal, I feel sorrow for the pet owner, but very little for the pet itself.  I don’t like to see an animal suffer but I would euthanize one before I would pay a $1000 vet bill.  That is right.  I put $1000 above the value of a pet’s life.  Call me cold hearted.  I call it being a practical person who has his priorities right.  I could care less if your animal’s value is $1 or $10,000,000.  That is your call.    Just don’t expect me to put the same value as you do.  That is my judgment to make, not yours.

People have different perspectives and priorities that we need to consider and respect.  This lady who was arrested for animal cruelty was in tears over the death of her dogs.  Was it a stupid thing to do?  Yes, of course it was.  Should she have been arrested for it?  I hardly think so.  In my mind that is obvious abuse of power over a citizen who caused no harm to another citizen.  Was it irresponsible?  Yes, without a doubt.  I think that those tears on her face were penalty enough as far as I am concerned.  How would you like it if you got arrested for every irresponsible thing you have done in your life?  Yea, I thought so.  You probably have done far worse things than neglect your pets in your lifetime, and you got away with it.  Yeah.  How about your early drinking years when you got behind the wheel after a couple too many beers?  I bet you did that more than once or twice.  How about that first time you smoked that doobie with your buddies?  Yeah, how would that look having a permanent police record for something like that?  This lady is balling her eyes out because she knows the death of her dogs is her own fault.  Leave her be.  She will not repeat this mistake.  The laws in this country and this state are out of hand and you seemingly innocent people who think you are doing everyone a favor are really adding to the problem.

It is Friday and I heard Tom say on his show that he doesn’t claim to be an angel.  Really Tom?  Sounds to me like you are talking out of both sides of your mouth. 

Tom, I like your apparent stance on political issues which I happen to agree with almost entirely.  But, sticking your nose into these people’s business like this just because animals are not as high of priority in their lives could not be any more liberal.  Your whole stance on this issues screams that you are a raging liberal on this issue.  You lost major wisdom points in my book pal.  You call yourself a Tea Partier?  Really?  How about you let people live their lives their way and butt the hell out if it doesn’t affect you.   Isn’t that what this tea party movement is all about.   You claim to want the government out of our lives and yet you support stiff laws against people who neglect a friggin dog?

I am so infuriated by this issue that I am seriously considering stopping all future contributions to the SPCA.  I thought we were helping out a good organization.  After seeing them stick their noses into matters like these farther than I think any person has a right to, I have to reconsider my previously undying support for their organization.  Maybe that money isn’t supporting the kinds of things I thought it was. 

It is great that you love animals.  It is great that you do what you can to help abandoned animals.  However, it is completely irresponsible for you to stick your nose into these people’s lives in the way that you have with the horse lady and this lady with the dead dogs.  It was wrong of you to make the accusations and assumptions that you have without considering the obvious fact that these people have the human right to set their own priorities in life when it comes to how much they care about the animals they own.  Stop assuming we all should and that we all ought to treat animals as well as we treat our brethren. 

I encourage you all to travel out into the country and take a damn good look around a real farm.  (You know, the places where that packaged food in the supermarket comes from.)  How about a little common friggin sense on this issue?  If you really loved animals that much Tom, I can assure you that you would be a vegetarian.  Go visit a slaughterhouse for Christ’s sake.   How could you possibly take the stance on these issues that you have and not be completely appalled at what goes on every single day in the life cycle of every single farm animal.  Come back to reality, would you please?  Animals are animals and should be treated as such.  It is sad when they are mistreated.  People should be encouraged not to mistreat them.  But, that is as far as it should go.  They are animals after all.

From everything I know about the horse issue, I am glad to see the horses were returned to their owner.  That is the common sense thing to do whether you nosy do-gooders like it or not.  I applaud the judge for standing for liberty.

Everybody acts like some evil guy working at BP knew that this drilling was going to lead to an explosion and he did it anyway.  That is utterly ridiculous.  I am quite sure that the man in charge did not think that there was going to be this massive accident.  If he did, he most certainly would have stopped the project.  There is no doubt that no one wanted to see those 11 people lose their lives.  Speaking of which, how come we don’t hear about that anymore?  All we hear about is how the leak is gushing thousands of gallons and how the government is responding to it.

It is becoming just like after hurricane Katrina where all of these people blamed the federal government for not responding faster.  They blamed the government for not somehow stopping the damage caused by the hurricane.  This is just ridiculous.  Now people are blaming the government for not stopping the oil leak.  It is as if people think that the government can wave a magic want and make everything better.  What a bunch of retards.

Governments are essentially worthless in times like this.  They weren’t designed to handle problems like this.  Nor are they capable of doing so.  Getting the government involved in this is like asking your grandmother to fix your computer when it blue screens while booting to Windows.  It is ridiculous to even ask for their help.

This whole issue is just another political football that will be used to drive a wedge deeper into American society.  People will choose sides over this issue.  How did we get so far off track as a people?  Can’t we just admit that sometimes bad shit happens?  Let’s just fix it and move on instead of worrying about who has to become a scapegoat.

If consumer confidence improves enough in the US where people start committing to large ticket purchases, companies will begin hiring again.  If companies begin hiring again, the economic problems we are facing right now will begin to fade.

In most countries in Europe, government taxation is a very big drag on the economy.  The people also tend to work fewer hours per week.  There is also a lot less manufacturing.  All of these things are more links in the chain that is going to keep Europe shackled for the next decade.  Unfortunately, the US is not immune to problems in Europe.  The worse their economy gets, the worse our economy gets.  The world is flat and very much interdependent.

The United States economy is much more elastic and much more resilient than other economies in the world.  If need be, the United States can monetize its way out of its debt problems.  Hopefully that doesn’t happen.  If it does though, you had better own gold or something else that doesn’t lose its value.

If people in the US don’t wake up and start holding politicians accountable for overspending, the United States will soon be in the exact same boat as Europe.  Then we will not be able to get ourselves out of messes like this.

Family values come into play here because the lack of these values and utter lack of moral character creates the underlying mentality that people use to pass bad bills such as this one.

Imagine a boy who grows up in a strong family value oriented household.  This kid’s father is going to want to teach his son some of the more important things he has learned in life so that his son can avoid some of the mistakes dad made.  He will teach his son ideas like “go to college so you can get a better job”, “drive that car another year until you can really afford a newer one”, “learn about computers because they are the way of the future”, “life isn’t always fair”, “take the lemons life hands you and make lemonade”, “there is no substitute for hard work”, etc.  In fact, you may have heard some of these things yourself.

Dad is going to teach him to do things that need to be done even though he doesn’t feel like doing them.  Dad is going to teach him things like, how to change the oil in his car or low to replace a light switch or how to use basic hand tools.  They may seem rather insignificant, but they aren’t.  Learning all those little lessons in life helps to make a man more autonomous.  It helps him to be a little less reliant on someone else and more self reliant. It teaches him to think for himself and focus on long term benefits of living responsibly.

This is the entire basis for my point about family values affecting political policy.  When people are self reliant, they don’t want someone else telling them how to live their lives.  They don’t want someone in Washington making a law that forces them to follow new rules for things that should be none of anyone else’s business.  He doesn’t want government doing things for him that he is quite capable of doing himself.

Look at the trends

As the family unit continues to deteriorate, you will see more and more legislation passed that tries to force people to do things that dad should have taught them to do.  If you asked your dad, he would have told you that you would be a damn fool not to have health insurance already.  In fact there are numerous people who take a job mainly because they need that insurance coverage.

As the family unit continues to deteriorate, you will see the high school graduation rates stay at ridiculously low levels.  You will see more people on welfare because nobody ever taught them to feel shame for it.  You will continue to see excessive numbers of teenagers using drugs.  More people will believe the lying politicians who tell them that it is not that person’s own fault that they are in a bad situation.  People are quick to blame someone else for their self inflicted problems.

If we are going to mandate anything in this country, it should be mandated that parents have to preserve the family unit once children are born.  Churches tried to do this for all the right reasons, but people shunned them instead of taking their good advice.

Have you noticed any correlation between the deterioration in the family unit and the increased me, me, me attitude in people?  I bet you have.  People’s own character is at fault here.   People of reasonable moral character do not need all of these bullshit government regulations to force them to live in a responsible manner.  Can’t you see that this is really the root of the problem?

Yep.  There is nothing quite like the seat of the couch action you get when watching an event like this.  It is like watching a giant shuffleboard tournament.  (I bet a lot of people don’t know what shuffleboard is either)  The girl gets on one knee and slides a giant rock down a slippery lane trying to strategically position it for points.  All the while she is yelling things like “Yep,  yep, yes, yes, yes, yep, hold, hooooooold, yep, yes, yes”  Meanwhile two other girls are alternate between furiously sweeping miniscule debris away in front of the rock as it heads toward its target.  Sometimes they sweep like madmen and other times they just fake like they are going to do it.

What a concept is sports.  Who invented this thing anyway?

My wife was watching it with me.  The United States was competing against the Janpanese.  When the Japanese girl went to launch her rock I wondered if she would start yelling “Hai, hai, hai, hai” instead of yes.

The other thing I found very strange was the names of the women on the Japanese team.  They had Americanized first names like Amy and Moe.  Seems like some Europeans have been doing some breeding in that part of Japan.

I felt inspired to throw my own two cents in about the Olympics when I read about Paul Buckley’s post about the Olympics.

I kind of like the extra coverage of Lindsey Vonn.  I guess I am just a pig with raging hormones who likes to see hot looking women on television.

I agree about the rain though.  How disappointing is it to have a rainy winter Olympics?  The rain has already influenced a number of outcomes.  It is a shame that weather plays a factor in some of these competitions like the biathlon.

His reasoning was that no person should go broke because they want a higher education.  Is this guy for real?  I have rarely heard anything more ridiculous in my entire life.  Talk about socialism.

The reason some people aren’t attending college is not because of the costs.  They are not attending college because they don’t realize that it is critical to their future success.  They don’t realize how much easier life will be if they could only put for the effort to get an education.  If a person wants to go to a certain college that they can’t afford, it does not prevent them from going to college at all.  It merely prevents them from going to that college.  Ultimately, they decide to go to a less expensive one even if that means a community college. 

Face it.  These kids who choose not do go to college at all just don’t want to learn.  They don’t want to go to college.  If they did want to go, they could certainly afford it.  Any kid can afford to go to a school like ECC or GCC or MCC.  There is absolutely no reason they can’t.  These colleges will accept anyone with a GED.  All you have to do is graduate high school and you are in.

The problem is that these kids who skip college are not interested in learning.  They don’t have a thirst for the knowledge and skills that these higher learning institutions offer.  If they did want to go badly, there is nothing stopping them, including costs.

I am so sick of this argument about college costs.  Stop subsidizing the expensive schools.  Let the market decide how much a student is willing to pay for their higher education.  The whole idea of subsidizing college tuitions is counterproductive to maintaining a low cost of education.  This is basic economics people.  If the government quits paying for people’s college educations, the colleges are forced to find ways to deliver that education for less money.  This is how it is supposed to work.

The goal should not be to give people enough money to go to college.  The goal should be to let the market force colleges to make themselves affordable to students.  When the economy is booming tuitions could go up.  When the economy is suffering tuitions would go down.

Part of the reason our educations cost so much is because schools get funding from places other than the enrolled students.  This creates the perfect environment for a wasteful bloated bureaucracy.  Let the markets determine school tuitions.

If the government agrees to pick up the tab for educations at the end of 10 or 20 years, you are going to see an absolutely massive increase in tuition costs.  Pumping more money into colleges does not guarantee a better education.  We have proof of this in the public school system that has had funding increases since the beginning of time.  It is counterproductive.

Prestigious universities and community colleges alike are capable of delivering an absolutely outstanding education if and only if the students are there because they actually want to learn about what is being taught.  If they aren’t self motivated to learn what is being taught, then they come out of there with a substandard education.   

If you want to reduce the cost of education, stop sending kids there who don’t want to be there.  Stop handing colleges free money.  The more you give them, the more they will cry that they need even more.

The populist attitude around this country is that every kid should receive a free higher education and the government should see to it that they get one.  How about focusing on getting them to graduate high school first you fricken morons?  A college education is easily and readily attainable to any kid who wants it right now.

I got a good laugh when they had this little segment about the internet.  Forgive me but I forget the guy’s name.  This channel 2 guy recommended that people check out Fixya.com the next time they needed help fixing something.  That made me chuckle.

If you check that site out, you will see that it is a total spam site.  The site is completely loaded with ads, mostly Google Adsense.  If you read the supposed solutions to the problems on there, you will see that for the most part these so called expert answers are super low quality pieces of crap.  In fact, it appears that the overall business model for this site is to flood the internet with highly optimized posts that provide zero value to the end user so that visitors just click on an ad to leave the page.

Has anyone ever got any good advice from this site?  I have looked at their posts numerous times to try and find solutions to various problems.  I can honestly say that there is not one time that I can recall ever finding a decent solid answer that helped me.  It is pretty much as useless as Ehow.com.  They have thousands of fluff posts about how to supposedly fix something.  But, when you visit and read the material, you realize that this so called expert is in fact a clueless bozo who knows nothing about what they speak of.

For the most part you will be let down by that site.  That is of course assuming you are a reasonably intelligent person.  I hate to bash other websites because it is not like I am providing huge value with my own.  However, this Fixya.com site is, in my opinion, a total Adsense spam site that should be pushed way down in the Google rankings because of its excessive advertising.  Notice I didn’t give them any link love from my site.

I bet they are making a killing with the Adsense though.  Good SEO + Low Value Content + Adsense = very high CTR as the visitors leave the site when they realize how useless it is.  How they ever convinced this channel 2 news guy that their site was worth publicizing as a useful tool is beyond me.  Crap, crap crap.  That site is even BBB accredited. (LOL)

This terrorist attack attempt that we saw happen in Detroit on Christmas Day should reaffirm every American’s commitment to winning the war against terror.  It is evident that these no good terrorist sons of bitches are never going to stop trying to kill people that have done nothing to them in this lifetime.  Tell me.  What exactly did America do to this Nigerian S.O.B. who wanted to blow himself and everyone else on that plane to smithereens?

How is the United States and the rest of the world supposed to prevent these types of things from happening?  It is so damn easy to travel from country to country.  Can you imagine how bad it would be if the United States were on the same land mass as Africa?  Terrorists from the Middle East could ride here on their camels or in the back of their white Chevy pickups with gun turrets on the back.   At least they would be easier to spot.

As far as I see it there are really only three options here.

1)      All people of the world have to come to accept and respect differences in religion, thus becoming tolerant of religious differences. (How the hell is that going to happen?)

2)      Tolerant religions have to eradicate the intolerant ones from the earth (which in turn makes the tolerant ones become non-tolerant). It is a paradox.

3)      One intolerant religion has to take over the world and enslave or kill everyone else.

What other options are there really?  With modern technology it is way too easy for small groups of terrorists to wage war on a massive scale against the rest of the world.  Every year it becomes easier for them.  We have truly entered a new era.  The time has come when peaceful nations like ours are forced to exert brutality, unwillingly, against other intolerant people of the world in order to preserve our own existence for future generations of Americans that we hope will grow up to be tolerant.

Maybe someday mankind will reach a point where it can release this kind of energy by competing with one another for colonizing outer space instead of fighting senselessly over religion.  God help us if we can’t reach that point.

I have no tolerance for this kind of crap. This is the same mentality that punks all over the city have when they spray paint buildings and signs with their less than literate punk ass poetry. Kids do this kind of crap because the consequences of getting caught are so minimal.

If you let them get away with this kind of crap when they are teenagers, what kind of crap are they going to be doing when they are twenty? Will it progress to stealing from their employer? Will they key someone’s car because that person ticked them off?

If I was the father of either of these two kids, I’d be kicking some ass and taking out an ad in the Buffalo news to make them apologize publicly for their fricken stupidity. These kids are lucky they didn’t get caught in the act. They might of got a real beating and deservedly so.

The police use infrared cameras to spot the plants. Once the plants reach a certain size they stick out under an infrared camera like a sore thumb. Could you get away with planting one or two? Yeah probably, especially if you plant them near pine trees that emit the same signature as the weed does. But 139? Dude, you are going to get caught. It is only a matter of time. Dumbass.

How sad is it when somebody has to have their weed that bad that they are willing to risk going to prison for years? He got caught with scales too. It’s going to be hard explaining that one to the judge. These guys have to be wake and bakes, because only a stoned person would have the balls to think that they wouldn’t get caught. This year it was 139. Next year it would have been 200.

Doesn’t this guy ever hear the news of the other local ganja farmers getting busted? Derrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Dey won’t catch me, derrrrrrrrrrr. Huh,huh,….Derrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. My weed is hidden too well. Derrrrrrrrrrrrr. Dey will never find it down by da creek…..Derrrrrrrrrrr.

The guy has got to be a total fricken spent bowl.

Somebody needs to tell these guys that there is just as much money in organic vegetable gardening.