One thing criminal prosecutors have learned in the era of the DNA test is that innocent people will confess to crimes they didn't commit under sufficient duress during interrogation.

The police would scare a confession out of an innocent person and the guilty person would be out there reoffending with impunity because the case had already been solved.

I worry that coercive interrogation tactics give us a false sense of security that we might end up paying dearly for later on.

If Mukasey can't see what's at stake here, then out with him. He's endangering us all.

Popping vitamin D pills is both cheap and safe, says Schwartz, and may prove to have not only a therapeutic effect but a preventative one as well.

He forgot to add that vitamin D isn't 100% safe. You can ruin your kidneys if you take more than your body needs, and then it could kill you.

It's not like vitamin C where an overdose will come out in your pee.

I've discovered through trial and error that I need to do BOTH -- take vitamin D AND exercise outdoors with part of my body uncovered by sunscreen -- in order to keep my estrogen-sensitive autoimmune illness from flaring up.

Taking vitamin D AND getting sun exposure once a week seems to work better for me doing either one alone.

Since most breast cancers are sensitive to estrogen, I'm not surprised that the things I do to stay healthy are also correlated with a reduced risk of breast cancer.

For me, real bigotry begins with the hubris and arrogance of those like Bill O'Reilly...

I wish it was just hubris and arrogance we had to worry about.

I think most dangerous bigotry begins when the California state prison guards use racial segregation as a tool for managing an overcrowded prison system.

Recently the separatism practiced in prison has spilled out onto the streets of Los Angeles in the form of ethnic cleansing in certain gang neighborhoods.

Maybe Axelrod should start modeling that.

Soviet condoms were prohibitively thick. Soviet men were sexist and refused to wear them.

The Soviet planned economy did not plan for the Pill.

Soviet life was so dull and regulated that the adults ended up living like teenagers, indulging in recreational adultery whenever someone had an apartment free for the afternoon.

And most Soviet apartments, the ones that went to normal people, were tiny. You had to apply to the government to get a bigger place with an extra room, and you could wait for years and maybe never get one.

Those are many of the factors that went into the abortion rate in the USSR.

By the way -- in the USSR, once a kid went into an orphanage, he or she didn't come out again until adulthood. They didn't believe in adoption. They believed children who went into an orphanage were too damaged to make it in a regular family ever again.

When I was in Moscow I heard about how mothers were treated in Soviet maternity wards. The nurses would slap them and mock them during labor pain, call them whores and tell them the pain was good because it would make them think twice the next time they opened their legs to some man.

The newborn was quickly taken away and tightly swaddled in a separate ward. The mother wasn't even allowed to see her own baby for over a week.

You can imagine how sympathetic they were to post-partum depression.

There were many, many reasons why the abortion rate was so high in the USSR.

Sorry, to inform, but other methods of birth control in Russia are available.

Sorry to inform, but there were NO other options available in the Soviet Union, and that's when and how people learned this behavior.

Remember, the Russia you visited has only existed a very short amount of time. Before 1991 it was called the Soviet Union, and there was virtually no birth control available when it was the Soviet Union.

So it's been less than 16 years since Western birth control was made legal in Russia.

You know that, right?

Do you think the Russian people were able to unlearn their Soviet habits in just 16 years?

I think we should compare the numerical abortion rate in the USSR with the current numerical abortion rate in modern Russia.

Then we can see how much the introduction of Western birth control has changed the picture since the time when THERE WERE NO OTHER METHODS OF BIRTH CONTROL AVAILABLE.

Let's see if we can compare the actual numbers and see whether birth control has changed the dire Soviet situation.

Since you're the expert here, then you must have those numbers right?

So let's see them.

Sleeping with the man who raped her daughter?

It sounds like it's the mother who's out of control.

Simcha Jacobovici has the best archaeology show on TV. If you have History International, give it a try.

but the bottom line is, what other president has faced a calamity like 9/11

and gone out and done something as stupid as attack another country that had nothing to do with the attack on ours?

That song still makes me cry. Punk's not supposed to make you cry is it? If someone wants to know how the eighties felt, that's one of the songs they should listen to.

It's not easy making things people will remember and care about after you're dead. I've been around lots of geniuses and I see that people can only concentrate on so much at one time. Sometimes it's the personal relationships that get left on the bus.

What is the natural life cycle of an artist? Maybe all this behavior that has been judged as an aberration is part of the natural dynamics.

Pushkin didn't have cocaine but he had dueling. Why did he have to fight that duel?

If we made a documentary about every successful artist, would a pattern emerge across time?