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.

Listen to shows about good books!

After the atrociously long time I've been spending away from this blog, I needed to update with some new information about...radio!

New episodes of Culture Wars radio have been archived at http://www.culturewars.libsyn.com/, including last week's discussion with award-winning science fiction author Elizabeth Bear about the serious side of SF. She just came out with a new book as well, Chill , which is well worth a read.

Plus, give the show a listen and let us know what you think about a book by Jersey Shore stars Ronnie and J-Woww! Recently someone asked me if that was some sort of an early April Fools day practical joke. Unfortunately it's not.

As promised...

A new episode of Culture Wars is ready for listening at www.culturewars.libsyn.com

Listen to me and Ernabel Demillo interview crime writer Steve Weddle about mysteries, thrillers, true crime that's too spectacular to believe, and just what exactly is "flash fiction."

And don't forget to e-mail the show and let us know what you think about a new "Tiger" app for your iPhone that lets you erase all signs of a text message when you're having an affair. And should school kids be celebrating O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman, and Ru Paul during Black History Month??

Chime in by e-mailing us at wspcradio@gmail.com

Mother Nature's war on Wars

Unfortunately, an East Coast storm that's supposed to turn into a "blockbuster" and something "paralizing" to the area is creating a havoc on the WSPC broadcasat studios.

But Culture Wars will definitely return for a new episode once we're rescued and from all this snow, and definitely on March 4, featuring special guest author Steve Weddle. Steve will be talking about crime writing and the love for the dark side in gritty noir thrillers, crime reporting, and he'll tell us all about flash fiction.

In the meantime, you can also check out some of his writing at http://www.dosomedamage.blogspot.com/

More Culture Wars on tap!

Yesterday's episode of my Culture Wars radio show is available on podcast now, so give it a listen by going to www.culturewars.libsyn.com

Our guest was James D. Agresti, author of Rational Conclusions, discussing whether or not one can prove the objective truth of the Bible. Definitely check it out and see if he's right or not.

And you can't miss our discussion of cat cuisine!! Would you try a delicious helping of cat stew?

Teenagers should have sex!

So the headline got your attention. Cool!

What I am actually getting at with this post is a slightly spoilerish comment on the new romantic comedy Valentine's Day. I try to keep from giving anything major away about the film, but the main point of this piece will deal with several characters on the end of the movie. So if you want to know absolutely nothing about the end of the film, don't read any further than this paragraph. Go catch the flick, then come back and read the rest of the post.

So, where were we?

This big, all-star-cast romantic comedy came out over the Valentine's Day weekend and the movie is pretty much what I expected from it, except for a very peculiar turn of events on the end. Or, perhaps not so peculiar given the times we're living in and the growing cultural influence - or growing cultural threat!!! - of some of my favorite people in the world...you know, all the wing-nuts I've been complaining about here in regards to Howard Stern and the meaning of a study on the sex lives of teen boys.

Now as I understand it, the film is not getting positive reviews for the most part. Some reviews I've read, like one on the Ain't It Cool page, were downright vitriolic. The reviewer said it inspired hatred in him and the desire to shoot baby ducks...or something to that effect. And yes, I agree, the film was not great at all. It was mostly predictable and formulaic. Maybe aside from two characters - a traveler on a plane who strikes up a conversation with Julia Roberts, and a little kid who has a crush on someone in his class - you can predict exactly what will happen to every single character. But, come on, this is a romantic comedy called Valentine's Day, released on the Valentine's Day weekend. Who's expecting an Oscar-worthy picture here full of "very important performances?" Nobody! This is the sort of film a lot of guys will be dragged to by girlfriends and wives. Just take it for what it is. But then there is that ending...

OK, again, SPOILERS coming up...

The plot of the film follows a huge cast of characters and their trials and tribulations on Valentine's Day. It basically has two types of characters, the ones who think they're happily in love and looking forward to a great Valentine's Day, and ones who are single, with a bad track record of relationships, and who detest the holiday. Of course, the ones who think their relationships are perfect suddenly face some serious and painful crises, and the cynical ones wind up finding true love. And among all these characters we have two teenage couples. What happens to both these couples on the end is kind of mind-boggling.

One couple is kind of average and awkward, yet in love and planning on losing their virginity together on Valentine's Day during their lunch break. The other couple - pictured above, teen superstars of the moment, Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift - are the buff track star and his hot, but slightly ditzy, dancer girlfriend. Although it's not stated clearly, the track star and the dancer might also be heading for major sex at some point on Valentine's Day. The girl, in fact, drags a giant bear around with her for most of the movie (the gift from the runner), shows it off to everyone, and gushes about what a great guy her boyfriend is and how much they're in love. Watching this, you think there's going to be some major sex action going on between them before V-Day is over. Except there's no sex! Neither of the teenage couples winds up having sex!!

What happens instead, is that the girl from the average couple gets a gentle lecture from the grandfather of a kid she's babysitting about the importance of waiting until they're older, until the time is right, etc. and so forth. A very ABC Family Channel moment. Naturally, the girl takes the speech to heart, tells her boyfriend that they should wait, and they wind up just "making out" instead. Making out, of course, is just kissing without going all the way, mind you. And the guy almost looks relieved that his girlfriend doesn't want to do it after all. As a matter of fact, he appears to behave very much like the majority of the teenage boys in that study the Parents Television Council PR spokesperson never read.

Now, I can kind of see this happening. There's nothing wrong with this.

Except the hot runner/dancer couple don't have sex either! That, on the other hand, makes no sense. In fact, up until the end of the film, I thought that they probably had sex already, and probably had a LOT of sex. There is one scene where they're interviewed for a V-Day fluff news piece by a camera crew and they're so horny they can barely keep their hands off each other. Now despite this scene, I can somehow kind of buy that they maybe haven't yet had sex. Maybe they, too, were planning on it and preparing for V-Day. But for them to suddenly stay all proper and chaste and Parents TV Council, Focus on the Family-approved just makes no sense. I mean, just go back and see the film again and watch those two characters up until their final scene in the movie. Those two are so hot for each other that there's no way they would not screw that night.

As a side note, it's also bizarre that for a movie called Valentine's Day, a movie that's all about love, one that's full of a lot of actors who've made some pretty steamy films in the past and whose fans might expect some pretty steamy stuff from again...you know, in a film called frigging Valentine's Day...there's NO SEX!!!! Nobody has sex in this film! And the Anne Hathaway character's phone sex doesn't count.

But back to the teenagers. How in the hell does this film end up with neither of these couples in bed and having loud, raunchy sex until all hours of the morning? Whatever happened to the evil, immoral Hollywood film makers out to corrupt the values of America, all on the urging of Satan's whisper in their ears?

It's perhaps because that the evil, immoral, libertine Hollywood is not as radical as bunch of Puritanical control freaks like the religious conservative far right claim. It's perhaps because Hollywood is really timid to its core, especially when a band of regressive, demented yahoos who like to threaten boycotts and letter-writing campaigns when every single film or TV program is not a cartoon about baby Jesus or Kirk Cameron kissing his real wife start writing complaints every time "hell" or "damn" is said on TV. Maybe someone got worried about that the film would become too "controversial" if teenagers actually had sex...even off-screen sex.

Could this film not have stayed "moral" if maybe one teenage couple had sex whereas the other one decided to listen to the old folks and wait? Like maybe if the film aspired to be more complex than a Disney Channel family sitcom? Like maybe if reflected a real world where decent people who loved each other could have different viewpoints about sex and lived different lifestyles?

Sex is a perfectly natural part of life and there is nothing wrong with it being dealt with honestly in films. Teenagers wanting to have sex and actually having sex is also normal and natural. Throughout history and up until about a hundred years or so ago, teenagers around 17 or 18 years old (the age of the characters in the film), would have been married and would have had three children already. Teenagers are perfectly capable of understanding the implications of sex and being able to deal with the emotional ramifications of sex. It makes absolutely no biological, evolutionary sense that a human should not be able to mentally and emotionally handle a sexual relationship at the time his or her body reaches its full reproductive capabilities...

Oh, but wait a minute, we mentioned evolution, didn't we? That's also a blasphemous idea that was whispered into the ears of evil men by Satan himself.

Or perhaps this film is not an entire cop-out after all. Credit should be given the movie makers for at least making two of the characters gay!