Late Night Laugh: American Voters

On The American Culture Train

The Museum of Bad Art.

The Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA) is the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms.

The Museum of Velvet Paintings.

Welcome to the Velveteria, world famous museum of velvet paintings and epicenter of art. There will be around 300 paintings and a brand new blacklight room, lovely ladies, banditos, wahines, and all your favorites. Plus a very special shrine to the Virgin Mary… You will never be the same after a visit to the Velveteria.

Hurl, the New TV game show.

It’s “Hurl!,” a new TV game show that oozes under the lowest bar ever set by reality television…

“Hurl!,” which debuted last night on the G4 cable channel, is the first half-hour series that combines physical rigor with eating disorders and gastric distress. Contestants consume massive quantities of sure-to-bloat foods — chicken pot pie, franks ‘n’ beans, New England clam chowder — then engage in such activities as riding an amusement park Tilt-A-Whirl. The “winner” is the contestant who doesn’t lose his lunch. Or to be technical about it, who holds out the longest before he releases the hounds. Call it a pas de spew.

“Hurl!,” in other words, is for people who found “Fear Factor” much too nuanced and intellectually complex.

Why those dinner time telemarketers keep calling:

Two telemarketing companies that sell Dish Network Corp.’s satellite TV services have agreed to pay fines of $95,000 for ignoring the federal do-not-call list and hanging up on customers, federal regulators said Tuesday…

The FTC initially sought a $7 million settlement from Planet Earth and $4.37 million from Star Satellite.

Fines totaling $11.4 million reduced to $95,000. If the government were Walmart, they’d be out of business.

Here’s the deal- we still get calls from telemarketers and we can expect our taxes to go up- because the government won’t collect the fines they impose.

Obama’s Left-Wing Extremism: Who says there’s not much of a record to judge him by?

From The American Spectator:

Barack Obama has proposed increasing every major Federal tax. He supports increasing individual income tax rates, allowing the Bush tax cuts, which cut rates for all income levels, to expire. He has proposed almost doubling the capital gains tax rate, from 15% today to 28%. He supports more than doubling the tax on dividends, from 15% to as high as 39%. He has proposed numerous corporate tax increases. He supports increasing the death tax back to the stratospheric levels that applied before President Bush. He supports increasing the payroll tax on higher income earners.

In other words, if you run a profitable small business, you can expect to be plundered by the Obamanistas from every angle. If you work for a small business, you can expect to be looking for another job.

Indeed, as economics writer Amity Shlaes has written, Obama promises exactly the same economic policy Herbert Hoover used to turn a downturn in 1929 into the Great Depression. In addition to proposing steep tax increases, particularly sharply increasing the marginal rates that most affect the economy, Obama won the nomination attacking free trade all primary season, even promising voters to renegotiate NAFTA. Is this what our wobbly economy needs right now? Will this really open new opportunities for working people, or shut the door in their faces?

But Obama needs those tax increases to finance his promised massive increases in government spending approaching a trillion dollars over four years. All projections show that America cannot afford all the entitlement promises it has already made, with Federal spending projected to almost double relative to the economy over the next 35 years. Obama just ignores this looming crisis, and, instead, promises to add the largest entitlement of all, national health insurance.

All of these nationalized health programs around the world start by promising free health care for everyone, but end up with rigid, stifling bureaucracies designed to deny care to control runaway costs. Our nation’s health care problems can be solved without massive new government spending and control, and the deteriorating quality and freedom of choice in health care that inevitably involves. But instead of new and innovative ideas that would increase patient power and choice, Obama serves the Left that wants to use our health care problems as an excuse for more government power and control. Instead of the promise of a new unity and hope, Obama promises to take us back to the already failed ideas of the past.

BUT THIS IS ONLY the beginning. In legislation he has already introduced in Congress, Obama proposes a new global war on poverty financed by American taxpayers. The bill would commit the U.S. to the goal of the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit to reduce world poverty by 2015. The head of this UN project has already called for a new global tax to finance this goal. For now, Obama’s bill would increase U.S. foreign aid by $65 billion a year toward this end.

Obama also supports $60 billion over 10 years for a new National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that would finance more construction and repair of highways, bridges and other infrastructure. No new thinking here either. The last Federal highway bill devoted close to $300 billion to the same thing. The Army Corps of Engineers spends over $10 billion a year for more of the same.

Obama also proposes $72 billion for increased Federal spending on education, even though Bush increased such spending more rapidly than any other area (and even though education is actually a state and local responsibility). He proposes to spend $150 billion to put people to work building new “green technologies” as if no one can find a job unless the government provides one. Then there is $60 billion for an “energy plan” that is another bureaucratic boondoggle that will not create any new energy. There is $14 billion in new spending for a national service plan. Obama proposes as well to increase “assistance to state and local governments so that they don’t slash critical services like health care or education.” He also says, “I’ll double spending on quality after school programs.”

The price of liberty is an ever-rising crime rate

From The First Post:

For a century and more, we have been bent on liberating ourselves from the Victorian sense of sin and damnation. Liberation, not repression, has been the order of the day, and now we are surprised at the consequences: an increase in violent crime among the young who don’t even have the remnants of our old hell-fire terror.

If only parents could bother to teach their children the difference between right and wrong, the pundits cry, as if this would be enough. Realistically speaking, however, nothing short of restoring many of the older repressions, ­ not only sexual but across the board, ­ would be enough.

Ask today’s young what they have been put on earth to do, and the reply will be: realise my full potential; enjoy good personal and sexual relationships; enrich myself. If public service comes into it at all, it will be as a personal therapy – a way of feeling good. One’s duty today is to maximise pleasure.

In my time it was utterly different. It was all about painful self-denial and self-discipline rather than self-gratification; on sacrificing the present for the future. Of course self-enrichment came into it, but not because of the pleasure it involved – rather it was the pain, hard work and saving.

Nobody wants to go back to the repressive days. But neither do they want to pay the price for not doing so. Freedom is not for free and the idea that a little good parenting would do the trick is shockingly unrealistic. Yet this, along with equally inadequate and foolish anti-knife wheezes, are all the politicians dare to offer.

Expect crime rates to rise. Given the liberal culture, they are still surprisingly low.

The Pornification Of Girlhood

A most disturbing article from Quadrant:

…Trends in popular culture, the insidious creep of the cult of bodily perfection, the dominance of fad diets, billboards and magazines depicting flawless female forms, all play a part. Then there’s the commercial interests of companies marketing the promise of success in life through the bowling-ball breasts preferred by readers of Zoo.

Another significant factor is that the movement for women’s equality was overtaken by the movement for sexual licence—the sexual revolution. To be free has come to mean the freedom to wrap your legs around a pole, flash your breasts in public, girls-gone-wild style, or perform acts of the oral variety on school- boys at weekend parties in lieu of the (as traditionally understood) goodnight kiss.

IN AN AGE OF “Girl Power”, many girls are feeling powerless. They are facing unprecedented social pressure, their emotional and psychological well-being at risk in ways never before imagined.

To quote Brumberg, “More than any other group in the population, girls and their bodies have borne the brunt of twentieth-century social change, and we ignore that fact at our peril.” Part of that social change is the wallpapering of society with sexual imagery:

“We have backed off from traditional supervision or guidance of adolescent girls; yet we sustain a popular culture that is permeated by sexual imagery, so much so that many young women regard their bodies and sexual allure as [their] primary currency.”

This puts girls at risk. “Many young women … do not have the emotional resources to be truly autonomous or to withstand outside pressures from peers and boyfriends, whom they desperately want to please.” Psychologist and therapist Mary Pipher shares Brumberg’s concerns. In Reviving Ophelia (1994), she writes:

“girls are having more trouble now than they had thirty years ago … Girls today are much more oppressed. They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture … as they navigate a more dangerous world, girls are less protected.”

Girls are endangered by those with a keen desire to break down taboos that previously helped keep them out of harm’s way. The American Psychological Association (APA) quotes D.L. Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (2002):

“in the current environment, teen girls are encouraged to look sexy, yet they know little about what it means to be sexual, to have sexual desires, and to make rational and responsible decisions about pleasure and risk within intimate relationships that acknowledge their own desires. Younger girls imbued with adult sexuality may seem sexually appealing, and this may suggest their sexual availability and status as appropriate sexual objects.”

Girls are “being invited to see themselves not as healthy, active and imaginative girls, but as hot and sassy tweens on the prowl”, write Andrea Nauze and Emma Rush in Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of Children in Australia (2006). Fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus of Hannah Montana fame was simply following the script expected of her as a celebrity adolescent when she posed, topless and half-wrapped in a silky sheet, for Vanity Fair, with post-coital bed hair and ruby lips.

THE PRESSURE TO CONFORM to an idealised body type in a sex-saturated culture that values girls who are thin, sexy and “bad” is taking a massive toll. Despite the many opportunities available to them, girls today are struggling. Courtney E. Martin observes in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (2007) that self-hatred has become a rite of passage for teenage girls, pointing to “the frightening new normalcy of hating your body”. These girls may be good at lots of things. But that doesn’t really matter if their bodies are not like the images of thin airbrushed celebrities and models who are in their faces every day. Life seems to have become one big beauty pageant.

The body has become a project that a girl has to work on full-time. If she stops to even take a breath, she might gain weight. Too many girls are trying to imitate half-starved celebrities, and are obsessed with trying to conform to impossible-to-attain highly sexualised images. Some sobering statistics:

A Mission Australia national survey (2007) of 29,000 young people aged eleven to twenty-four found that body image was the most important problem for them—ahead of family conflict, stress, bullying, alcohol, drugs and suicide.

The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health found that between 40 per cent and 82 per cent of young women were dissatisfied with their weight and/or shape.

Close to 20 per cent of adolescent girls use fasting for two or more days to lose weight. Another 13 per cent use vomiting. Others rely on slimming pills, chewing but not swallowing food, smoking and laxative abuse, as found in the 2006 National Youth Cultures of Eating Study.

One in 100 adolescent girls suffers anorexia.

An estimated one in five is bulimic.

One in four teenage girls wants to have plastic surgery, according to reports in August last year.

Body Image Dissatisfaction (BID) is associated with emotional distress, obsessive thinking about appearance, unnecessary cosmetic surgery, depression, poor self-esteem, smoking and poor eating practices.

Some magazines for young girls claim they want to address the limited range of bodies shown in their magazines. For example, Girlfriend has what it calls a positive body image policy. Yet the Girlfriend editors also admit to digitally enhancing the women in its pages—including their own staff—with Photoshop.

Girlfriend says it wants to cater for women who are above a size 8, so it includes “large” women such as Scarlett Johansson, Kate Winslet, Beyoncé Knowles and Jessica Simpson. Well, that’s going to make average women everywhere feel better. Women with one or two curves and without a scarecrow profile are permitted coverage, provided they are extremely famous and beautiful—and not too “large”.

THE 2007 REPORT of the APA taskforce on the sexualisation of girls links the objectifying and sexualising of girls and young women with three of the most common mental health problems suffered by them: eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression. Yet objectification is reinforced through embedded sexual content everywhere you look. According to the APA, “A culture can be infused with sexualised representations of girls and women, suggesting that such sexualisation is good and normal.” This leads to girls and women feeling bad about themselves:

“there is evidence that sexualisation contributed to impaired cognitive performance in college-aged women, and related research suggests that viewing material that is sexually objectifying can contribute to body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, low self-esteem, depressive affect, and even physical health problems in high-school-aged girls and in young women.
“In addition to leading to feelings of shame and anxiety, sexualizing treatment and self-     objectification can generate feelings of disgust toward one’s physical self. Girls may feel they are “ugly” and “gross” or untouchable …”

The clearest evidence of pornography’s insidious take-over of the public space is billboards containing highly sexualised images of women and other forms of sexual messaging. Most complaints are dismissed by the Advertising Standards Board, which patronisingly implies that complainants are simply hung up about discussing sex with their children. The membership of the Board includes Catharine Lumby, who defends Hustler’s creator Larry Flynt as simply “bad taste”. Lumby has also provided evidence in support of Adultshop’s case for the loosening of restrictions on X-rated films.

Pin-ups in the office or workplace have been found in various cases in Australia to constitute sexual harassment. Why is it then that giant pin-ups in the public space do not? Dr Lauren Rosewarne asks this question in her 2008 book Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy. Dr Rosewarne highlights how the signs and symbols of pornography are now enmeshed in popular culture:

“While pin-up images are prohibited in a workplace, outdoor advertisements, which may contain references to pornography, are freely displayed … pornography can be interpreted as being one of the most potent contemporary influences on advertising … such advertisements are helping normalise pornographic images by displaying them in places where they are unavoidable and thus encouraging the acceptance of them. This process is known as mainstreaming … explicit sexual expression has become naturalised.”

So complete is the migration of images from porn into everyday advertising that an ad for hamburger company Bite Me features a woman in red bustier, her mouth perfectly rounded and amazed like a sex-doll, with meat spilling everywhere and tomato sauce splotched above her breast, all reminiscent of the classic porn “money shot”.

The Brisbane Times, after publishing an article titled “Beauties brave brazilian wax” in June last year, asked readers which they preferred, “bald” or “au naturel”? It gave lots of men the opportunity to rhapsodise about why they liked to have a “good perv” and didn’t like hair caught in their teeth.

Not long ago the Age embedded on its home page a video clip of a porn industry award show in the USA, with writhing porn stars grinding away, easily accessible for anyone visiting the Age online for a school project. The Age Life&Style blog “Ask Sam” ran a story, “Is porn making men too picky” in April 2008. It attracted forty pages of posts, most from porn devotees, including one man who declared, “porn is fantastic … hardcore is the way to go”.

This stuff is rife on television too. SBS screened the British documentary “Obscene Machines” in June 2005, repeated in April 2007. This film depicted women being penetrated by giant mechanical dildos with names like The Monster, The Intruder, The Probe, The Snake and The Trespasser. It also featured an older man showing us how he had sex with a life-size sex doll called Emma. Emma is wearing school uniform.

It was rated M15+. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found in February this year (almost a year after the film was screened the second time—it got away with it the first time) that it breached the code of practice. There were no penalties, no fines. SBS must have been trembling when it received ACMA’s letter.

It is often said that young people have to go “searching” for porn. More often now, it seems that the porn is searching for them, so ubiquitous and commonplace has it become…

Read it all.