The Loveshade Family Blog

What will get the most attention in American media: a few people shot, or millions of Americans being evicted from their homes?  If you've been following the news lately, you know the answer.  Words like "murder" and "rape" sell more newspapers, draw more TV viewers, and garner more web page hits than words like "homeless" and "foreclosures."

Saul Landau examines this and the black-and-white nature of America in a column linked below. 

I've been saying for years that Americans tend to see things in "black and white."  It's Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, American or Other.  And I'm disgusted with how the mass media has moved away from even a reasonable semblance of objectivity and fairness.  I feel nauseous trying to swallow Fox News' claim of being "fair and balanced."  Do people really believe that?

America is a strange mix.  PETA gains support from top celebrities to fight things like "animal cruelty" to eliminate four-legged performers from circuses, while other groups gain support to reinstate the draft forcing two-legged people to go to their deaths.  It's a nation where Utah is considering declaring the M1911 as the state gun while other states are pulling guns off college campuses.

But whichever side of the black-and-white fence they sit on, Americans love hearing stories about murder, rape, child abuse.  Stories about foreclosures get some notice, but not nearly as much.  It's much easier for the media to tap into a knee jerk reaction.  And it's easier to get people to listen to a gun shot than a whimper.

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See Saul Landau's column "Media loves massacres, not foreclosure stories" at http://www.progreso-weekly.com/2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2257:media-loves-massacres-not-foreclosure-stories&catid=38:in-the-united-states&Itemid=55

The photo of the M1911 A1 pistol in .45 ACP by Remington is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M1911_A1_pistol.jpg.  It is by M62 and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license and the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

An opinion by an individual member of The Loveshade Family does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the entire family.

Posted by Alden Loveshade at 01:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

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This entry's a little different than the usual as it doesn't deal directly with political or social issues.  Nor is it about a member of our family.  But it shows how cats and other animals can hug each other, and we think it's appropriate for Hug Day.

Here's the entry on Hug Day from the work in progress Ek-sen-trik-kuh Discordia: The Tales of Shamlicht:

"January 21 (21 Chaos): Hug Day (O).  Hug your friends.  Hug your loved ones.  Confound your enemies by offering them a hug.  Hugs are free, hugs are healthy, hugs are good.  Which is why they may be illegal in some jurisdictions."

Hug Day is both 4 December and 21 January.  So Happy Hug Day!

See a video with two cats hugging each other at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF2y8znRDBg

Photo is from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berberaapje.jpg  It's by frank wouters and was taken at the Apenheul Zoo, Antwerpen, Belgium.  It's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Posted by The Loveshade Family at 02:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

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This month on The Loveshade Family Blog, TawTew the Naturally Perfumed had a question.  'I have a question.'  See, I told you.  'I see two pictures of pregnant girls in a row on this blog and one on the loveshade.org home page.  I have to be curious why? Something going on? ;)'

Well...all right.  Discordian Division of the Ek-sen-triks CluborGuild member Olivia aka Ms. Candy Monkey aka Miss Monkey Candy is, according to a doctor and thesaurus.com, abundant, anticipating, carrying a child, enceinte, expectant, fecund, fertile, fraught, fruitful, gestating, gravid, heavy, hopeful, in family way, parous, parturient, preggers, productive, prolific, replete, teeming, with child.  That's right, the lad is harboring a growing parasite, probably of human origin.  In short, pregnant.

Of course that leaves the obvious question for the developing fetus, 'Who's your Daddy?'  No amniocentesis or CVS test has been performed, so I can't rule out the possibility of ALIEN IMPREGNATION.  Hey, I've seen it happen on The Sims.  And on X-Files.  And the founding vice-president and first Order of the Pineapple honoree is named Alien (hmm).  But there's an 85.37 percent chance the father is...well, let me put it this way.  I am currently known as Reverend Loveshade but am considering changing my name to Father Loveshade.

Goddess help us all.

Opinions expressed by a member of The Loveshade Family do not necessarily reflect the views or fecund state of the entire family.

Posted by Reverend Loveshade at 04:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (34)

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A group of anonymous types flooded YouTube with pornographic videos. It was bound to happen sooner or later.  In this case, many of them were hidden. A video might start out as a kid vid, then in the middle switch to porn.

What interests me the most is the debate this started. People said kids can find porn anyway, parents are responsible if they let their kids visit YouTube, and 'welcome to the internet'.  Others strongly disagreed. One said everyone who posted should get 25 years and be a registered sex offender (this one is rather odd as it came from the UK which doesn't publicly register sex offenders).

A few people said why are parents trying to protect their children from sex in the first place?  It goes back to the "keep the kids ignorant and they won't do it" argument that continually falls on its face.

So how do you keep kids safe from unwanted pregnancy?

As we pointed out in http://loveshade.org/blog/2011/01/low_teen_pregnancy_rate_challe.html, in America the more kids were "protected" from sex in the 1950s the more likely they were to get knocked up.  The teen pregnancy rate in America was lower in the sexually explicit 1990s than in the sexually repressive 1950s.  In the early 21st century it's the lowest it's ever been since they started measuring it.  And America's not alone. The teen pregnancy rate in the UK dropped 4 percent in a year as more young people were exposed to graphic sex.  Censorship doesn't work.

Kids have been exposed to graphic violence in America for a long time.  The United Kingdom is a little less open to violence or sex than America, but still rather confused.  Apparently Americans and Britains are both more worried about kids being exposed to murder than to making love.

'I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?' — Sharon Tate as quoted in Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders (2000) by Greg King

See an article and discussion about the Youtube incident at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8061979.stm and another about censorship at http://kafee.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/please-censor-the-internet-to-protect-my-children-from-evil/

Opinions expressed by an individual member of The Loveshade Family do not necessarily express the views of the whole family.

Posted by Reverend Loveshade at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

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Some things are just common sense.

Teenage girls who wear skimpy clothing are tempting teenage boys. Teen boys who see photos of naked females will be tempted even more, especially if those females are posing or behaving erotically.

The more teenagers and children learn about how to do something, the more likely they are to do it. Protecting our precious children from things they aren’t ready to handle makes them less likely to get in trouble.

But common sense also says the earth is flat, people can't fly in the air or breathe underwater, and a living thing that's too small to see can't possibly make you sick. In the modern world, common sense is often wrong.

So it is when it comes to teen pregnancy. According to a recent U. S. Government report, the teenage birth rate is at an all time low. This is for teens in a day when "girls dress like sluts and whores;" scantily dressed, hip-swinging and bosom-bouncing pop starlets singing songs are "giving the wrong message to our kids"; and the average teenager has ready access to incredibly explicit pornography that their parents only dreamed of seeing and their grandparents never imagined.

Compare this to America's 1950s. Girls dressed conservatively, female swimsuits covered more skin than they exposed, bra straps were always hidden, and Playboy magazine showed less flesh than National Geographic. But the highest rate of teen births since they began recording it in 1940 was in the highly conservative 1957. And in spite of what people say about pregnant teen minorities, the percentage of Americans who were Caucasian was much higher then than it is now. (When statistics linking pregnancy to race take poverty into account, teen pregnancy rates are very similar from race to race at the same socio-economic level.)

Some blame--excuse us, credit--the drop in the teen pregnancy rate to the Recession. Obviously, the fact that teens now have much greater access to information about sex could not have been a factor in them being more responsible. The less they know, the less they'll do, right?

And yet some of the same people who claim that sex education in school leads to more sex will make another claim: educating teens about tobacco and other naughty drugs will reduce their use.  But somehow this blanket claim doesn't add up.

The 40-year-long War on Drugs, which in some states such as Texas has resulted in 60 percent of inmates being incarcerated for drug-related offenses, has not reduced usage of illegal use of "controlled substances" at all. Billions and billions have been spent fighting illegal drugs with no visible affect. But contrarily, tobacco use has gone down. And millions and millions of pornographic stories, pictures, and videos along with more sex education have accompanied less and less teen pregnancy.  It appears that education and available information are much more effective than declaring a "war on _____."

Some will say, rightly, that American females are waiting longer to get married. Some of those 1957 pregnant teens were married. But those people likely won't say that a much higher percentage of teens got married back then because they were already pregnant.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40767570/

For more on the failed War on Drugs, see http://loveshade.org/blog/2010/05/war_on_drugs_40_years_of_fail.html

The image of reproductive girl was provided by the United States Government and is thus in the public domain.  http://www.girlshealth.gov/teenguide/reproductive/index.cfm

Posted by The Loveshade Family at 03:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

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