January 3 - 7, 2005

January 7
Friday Hound Blogging
As part of our community service, er...as part of our service to the community, we continue with the tradition of Friday Hound Blogging. Yes, we know about Atrios and TBogg but this is much better because these hounds are retired racing greyhounds that are looking for homes. If you don't know about the plight of racing greyhounds go here.

Besides, greyhounds are way cooler than Basset Hounds, and don't even think about cats. So, without further preliminaries, Here's our guest of the day, Bella Blanco:



Bella is very sweet, easygoing, happy, and loves attention. She will approach and nudge you with her nose for attention. She is a greyhound “collector” who takes all the dog toys from the toy box to her bed. For more information about this dog, and other rescued racing greyhounds looking for homes, go here.

January 6
Ok, so we put yesterday's post in the good eye roll category and expected that we would be on our merry way to the Senate challenge to the Ohio Electoral vote count. We were really looking for some great oratorical gems to fall from the lips of our elected glitterati, like "We've got the White House and you don't neener neener neener," and "Republicans are poopy heads," but it turns out, what we thought was an anomaly, an aberration, a peculiarity, an eccentricity, an irregularity was actually part of a movement. A bowel movement perhaps, but a movement none-the-less.

We direct your attention to one David Holcberg
who is called a research associate at the Ayn Rand Institute and his thoughts on the recent tsunami disaster.

We remember reading Atlas Shrugged back in the day, although we don't recall anything in it about tsunamis, we do recall thinking Dagny was sort of hot.

Anyway Mr. Research Associate Holcberg opines that

The United States government, however, should not give any money to help the tsunami victims.

His reasoning is that the money isn't the government's to give because they have "extorted" it from the taxpayers. He explains that politician's have no "right" to give our money away, yet those pesky fiscal libertines can get away with this because

they have the morality of altruism on their side. According to altruism--the morality that most Americans accept and that politicians exploit for all it's worth--those who have more have the moral obligation to help those who have less.

And we let them do it because we are altruism enablers.

It is Americans' acceptance of altruism that renders them morally impotent to protest against the confiscation and distribution of their wealth.

Now here's where it gets a little confusing.

It is past time to question--and to reject--such a vicious morality that demands that we sacrifice our values instead of holding on to them.

But wait. Didn't you just say that it's holding on to the morality of altruism that lets those dandy do gooders in Washington get away with this in the first place? So are we to hold on to the morality of altruism, or sacrifice it? Oh wait, by letting the government take the money we are sacrificing it, right? No wait. If we don't let them help the tsunami victims then we are holding on to our morality. No. That's not right either because altruism is about putting the needs of others before one's self. In other words sacrificing, and that's what we're doing isn't it? So is that a good thing or no?

This philosophy stuff was always way over our heads. We still think Dagny was hot though.

January 5
Like most of the world, we here at IM Central have been overwhelmed with the degree of destruction and suffering caused by the tsunami. By now you know of the outpouring of support on its way to the devastated and dispossessed, but if not check with your local branch of the American Red Cross.

We say "most of the world" because recently while absent mindedly surfing through the web waiting for the Orange Bowl to begin (we never liked Oklahoma anyway, but who knew those California pretty boys could play football like that)? Anyway, while waiting for the game we ran across this.

Now we never thought the so called main stream religions were supposed to be, you know, logical or anything, but when the article says,

"The lands affected by this judgment from God aren't just full of idolatry; we're talking about places (think Thailand) that are hot spots where American businessmen travel for the express purpose of fornicating with young Asian children. It is a thriving industry over there; many of these girls are taken into that business when they are seven years old or younger."

We kind of thought that might mean God would go after the American Businessmen, not the kids who are often kidnapped into the sex trades,

unless of course those businessmen happened to have recently contributed to God's campaign.

Reading on we found out who it really was God had in his sights,

"Filthy Swedes went to Thailand - world epicenter of child sex traffic - to rape and sodomize little Thai boys and girls. 20,000 dead Swedes is to Sweden's population of 9 million as 650,000 would be to America's 290 million population. We sincerely hope and pray that all 20,000 Swedes are dead, their bodies bloated on the ground or in mass graves or floating at sea feeding sharks and fishes or in the bellies of thousands of crocodiles washed ashore by tsunamis."

Yes, all these years we thought it was Osama bin Laden who was the devil's handyman when it was those evil Swedes all along. Sure fooled us.

OK, so now you're thinking why did God kill over 100,000 people just to off a few horny Swedes when he could have just turned their country into a lake of fire and been done with it? Well, the good Pastor Phelps has an explanation for that,

"As far as God killing children in His wrath, have you ever heard of the great flood? God destroyed billions of people in His wrath, including billions of children. Have you ever heard of Sodom and Gomorrah? God destroyed all of them in His wrath, including children. Have you ever heard of the plagues of Egypt? God killed the firstborn child of every family in Egypt in His wrath. Have you ever heard of the Babylonian Captivity? God destroyed countless people in His wrath, including children."

So, basically, either God isn't the greatest shot, or not such a big fan of children. Hmmm, instead of J. C. could the messiah have been W. C.?

Oh, and if you're wondering where the good Rev got his "billions of people" figure. It probably wasn't from this guy who put the figure at 235 million. Ah, a million here a million there, what's the difference when you're talking about the homos.

January 4
OK, we always thought the home grown haircuts we used to get as children were a parent's way of making sure we would have no friends, but imagine our surprise when we ran across this. We admit to sleeping through most of our catechism classes, but we thought this whole circumcision thing was originally a Jewish tradition.

The article states, "A mental evaluation conducted for Baxter's trial found no indication of mental illness but concluded that Baxter was narcissistic, immature and suffered from low self-esteem and [low] impulse control." Low self esteem? Think how his kids are going to feel. We can just see it now in the boy's locker room, "Holy Crap Baxter! What happened to you? Have a go round with a lawn mower?"

Of course the inevitable nick names will spread throughout the school, "Lefty," "Ragged," "Bender," "Broken Arrow," and "Cabbage Patch," are a few that come to mind.

Think about the poor kid's wedding night, "Oh darling, I've so been looking forward to...Holy Crap! What happened to you?"

Umm..Dad? Given the choice, we'll take the haircut.

January 3
All we can say is why didn't we think of this? All those years of that fancy book learnin' when instead we could have been suing our teachers and making happy hour without all those pesky assignments hanging over our heads. OK, so we made most of the happy hours anyway, but that's not the point.

We mean, who goes to college to learn something? Certainly not these folks. Come on now, most people know Christians are trying to track down the miscreants who stole Christmas while at the same time keeping those homos from taking over the country. That's a full time job right there, mister. And then some. Why should they learn about somebody else's religion? It just muddies up the waters, know what we mean? Heck, they could find out we aren't all that different anyway. Then where would we be?

Besides, we're trying to raise educational standards in this country. Just look at this Accelerated Reading Program we got going here. We can't just let the kids read anything can we? Got to be careful. As a wise man once said, "the problem with teaching people to think is that then you can't control what they think about. "