Yes!!!!!!!!!!! Sanity in broadcast regulation!!!!

And let me say it again, "Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!" Broadcast regulation seems to have taken a small step into the 21st century at last with an appeals court striking down the FCC's indecency regulations as being unconstitutional. Outstanding!! Check out the story right here.

For anyone with a high enough IQ and enough of an attention span to read a simple sentence in the First Amendment, the idea that the FCC censoring the broadcast airwaves was unconstitutional should have been obvious. Of course, IQ requirements would exclude people like the general membership of groups like the Parents Television Council or Focus on the Family any such fundamentalist, ultra-right wing nutbags. So much fun can probably be had today and over the next few days visiting and reading their web pages and blogs and seeing them make even bigger fools of themselves than usual as they claim that "families are under attack."

The only people who have been under attack until now were Americans who knew how to raise their kids and how to manage their families, families that believed in the fundamental values of freedom of speech and expression and the arts, people besieged by gangs of Puritanical crazies who like to force their values on others.

Just like Barry Goldwater so brilliantly said, "You can't legislate morality," you can't legislate taste either, and you have no constitutional right to censor curse words or sex or violence in broadcasting either. Thank God the courts are showing some sanity at last with decisions like this.

What mental illness is Brent Bozell suffering from?

In light of the most recent rampage of the psycho FCC - prompted by the Parents Television Council's complaints about Fox's American Dad cartoon - I somehow got in the mood to read some more idiocy. Thus, for the first time in a while, I checked out some of the recent essays by PTC and Media Research Center head honcho, Brent Bozell.

Now, you see, the thing about Brent Bozell columns is that they're kind of like daytime soap operas. You can miss a number of them and not really miss anything new. They're all essentially the same, especially when he's complaining that somehow society's mores seem to change over time. At one point Bozell woke up and noticed that we weren't living in the 1950s anymore. So, of course, he complains about this a lot and throws around a lot of childish insult words like "smut," "trash," "sleaze," indecent," and "vile."

But the most recent little hissy fit by Bozell is about the musical TV comedy "Glee." You can check it out here, on the web page of the Media Research Center.

Just scroll down to the bottom of the screen and you'll see his piece, titled "The Glee Agenda." It's a play on the right wing paranoid phrase "gay agenda." Get it? Gay agenda? Glee agenda? If you look at the other Bozell columns, you'll see more of examples of his impish wit.

But reading this piece made me wonder what a mental health professional would make of the twisted mind that wrote the article. Bozell apparently feels like the producers of Glee are a bunch of left wing bullies who unfairly like to beat up on social conservatives. These social conservatives, you see, are really nice and decent folks...aside from the fact that they would like to force certain Americans into second-class-citizen status simply for what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Thus, the article goes on and lists all the examples of Glee's meanness and rudeness and all the examples of their persecution of the Christian right. I was certain that at one point reference to the Christian diet of Roman lions would come up.

Just how exactly does Bozell find the audacity to complain about the mean satire of Glee after the sort of prolific name-calling he's been busy with in his editorial pieces? Just look around on the very same page and see Bozell referring to CBS as a "toilet network," to FOX as "television's dung pile," to the old FX show "Nip/Tuck" as "vile," and just browse the rest of his postings for all his sophomoric insults. But his work, of course, is nothing as terrible and intolerant as Glee making a joke about Sarah Palin, is it?

If Brent Bozell truly can't understand what prompts certain TV producers to take shots at social conservatives - especially in light of the censorship campaigns the PTC has been engaged in recently - PTC members should take some of those funds their donors lavish on them and help pay for Bozell's psychiatric care.

By the way, it's disappointing that the Media Research Center page no longer gives the readers of Bozell's columns the opportunity to offer feedback. I wonder why he would not be interested in getting some commentary. But since the PTC loves to mail complaints so much, here are a couple of e-mail addresses at the MRC people can send their own complaints to:

contact.cmi@mediaresearch.org

dgainor@mediaresearch.org

mphilbin@mediaresearch.org

craezler@mediaresearch.org

How long will FCC keep caving in to home-grown terror?

Having neglected the blog for a little while now, I must get back into the swing of things here with commentary on yet another reason why the FCC needs to be, once and for all, declared as an unconstitutional entity. Or, at the very least, the specific powers of the FCC to regulate expression in the broadcast media must go.

The FCC has gotten around to fining the FOX network for a January 13th episode of their successful cartoon series American Dad where a series of jokes were made that could be interpreted as a man masturbating a horse. Again, folks, this was an episode where double entendres suggested sexual activity between a man and a horse.

Of course, the people who got outraged over this was America's own home grown cultural terror network, the Parents Television Council. They bombarded the FCC with their complaint letters again, and once again the commission rolls over for this group of thugs and takes censorious action against broadcasting.

What I would love to hear the PTC explain, however, is what sort of a heinous effect they see coming as a result of this episode. Will we now have an epidemic of impressionable children going out and masturbating horses? Media effects are usually the PTC's dread fears. They are usually harping about the horrific EFFECTS of video games and violent movies and TV shows - with a shocking lack of understanding of the concepts of causality and basic social science research, as this blog had repeatedly demonstrated. So is this what the PTC seriously believes?

I would love to see them proven right!!

I am so eager to see the next epidemic of children masturbating horses.

For any members of the PTC reading this, this is an open invitation to prove me wrong!!

True Crime on Culture Wars

The latest episode of Culture Wars - originally broadcast on April 22 on WSPC radio - is now available for podcast download right here.

Our special guest was WRAL reporter and true crime author Amanda Lamb. Her latest book, The Evil Next Door: The Untold Story of a Killer Undone by DNA, has just been released. If you are interested in high tech detective work and the hunt for an elusive serial killer, be sure and check this one out.

And, of course, check out the next episode of Culture Wars live this Thursday from noon until 1:00, EST!

A Breakthrough in Seismology

You might not need too much time to wrap your mind around this story. Check it out here. An Iranian cleric has just declared the true cause of earthquakes: promiscuous women who dress too provocatively.

OK, so not so surprising, right? Ultra fundamentalist religious zealots tend to say loony things like this. The Iranian theocracy is not made up of too many folks who tend to say too many intelligent, rational things about natural phenomena in the world.

Except doesn't this guy sound like someone who might have a good time hanging out with Pat Robertson?

Kinda disturbing, isn't it?

Don't deprive the Russian mob of future hitmen...

…by adopting all these kids from Russian orphanages!

So, does that sound a bit harsh? It’s just a thought I had after reading the latest about the case of the Tennessee woman who adopted, then returned, a Russian orphan. Check out the article right here.

Apparently more information is coming out about what happened between this boy, Artyom Savelyev, and his mother and what seemed to have prompted her to return the kid to Russia. According to the woman’s mother, her daughter had been living in fear of her adopted son. The kid was given to violent tantrums and rages when criticized or subjected to the most basic rules and regulations. Apparently he was given to screaming at, spitting on, attacking, hitting, and threatening his mother. The kid would regularly threaten to kill his mother and burn her house down.

Now that Artyom has been sent back to the homeland, the Russian adoption authorities are expressing outrage and they have stopped all adoptions by Americans. Some good old-fashioned America-bashing is, no doubt, soon to follow. Just keep an eye on this story and see if I’m right. We will very soon start hearing the propaganda about the pampered Americans who want it easy, want to take perfect kids, and who can’t deal with the realities of international adoption.

What some American might not be able to deal with is the adoption of certifiable sociopaths.

So let’s take a look at this case from a starker, more politically incorrect – yet honest and realistic – perspective. Realistic perspectives can often be a bit unpleasant and politically incorrect, after all. The fact is that Americans are the most generous and altruistic people in the world. Every time a volcano blows or a hurricane hits or an earthquake or fire or flood or a tsunami wrecks some part of the world, the first people sending in the donations are Americans. The people sending in most of the donations are Americans. The first relief workers in all these disaster areas will be Americans. Most of the food sent to refugees in war-torn African countries is sent by Americans (to be stolen by local war lords and corrupt governments). When Americans see the little orphaned babies in Russia or China or Romania or any of these impoverished countries, they will get teary-eyed, they will think of Pastor Jones at Sunday services telling them to do their part for social justice, they will listen to Madonna and Angelina Jolie, and they will rush to adopt one of these kids. In return, what they stand a good chance of winding up with is a nightmare visited on them by the dishonest adoption services of those countries.

The fact is that many of those foreign orphaned babies have been abandoned by the lowest dregs of those societies. Perhaps the outraged Russian adoption service didn’t mention that little Artyom’s mother might have been a drunken, drug-addicted prostitute who got knocked up by a john in a back alley and that she probably shot heroin throughout her entire pregnancy. The sort of impulsive, violent behavior described in the story is perfectly symptomatic of the children of drug users. Furthermore, the behavior sounds like that of the perfect, textbook-case sociopath in his early years. Once little Artyom got a few years older, he just might have killed his mother in her sleep and torched the house.

The real villains in this piece are not the Americans who reached out to help abandoned kids, but the corrupt Russian adoption services who can’t give accurate medical histories of the children they placed with adoptive parents. There are a lot of orphaned and abandoned children in the U.S. who need adoption as well, and a system that is honest when it comes to “special needs” children. Americans looking to adopt should start at home.

So the woman who sent Artyom back to mother Russia, given the emerging facts of this case, did nothing wrong. Perhaps she saved her own life.

And little Artyom might one day grow up and have a successful career in the Russian Mafia.

Just a bit strange...

OK, this was a pretty lengthy New York Times article I still can't quite sense of: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html

If you have an uncontrollable compulsion to photograph food and post it online, you might want to check it.

I'm especially unsure of what to make of the psychobable explaining it.