You know, like the ones who think that the Jews blew up the World Trade Center and who keep insisting that Building Seven wasn't seriously damaged and ablaze when it most manifestly was?

He blames conspiracy when simple stupidly (fueled in this case by panic) suffices.

In 1976, there were still plenty of people around -- though all of them were quite elderly -- who had lived through the 1918 pandemic. They knew what a pandemic looked like, and their memories helped drive the official response. (Oh, and by the way, pharmaceutical companies tend to lose money on vaccines. So there's no profit for them in a flu outbreak.)

And no, you aren't going to be part of the elite, reigning over us Great Unwashed. You're going to be down in the muck with us, sorry!

The middle class -- especially an educated middle class -- is essential to freedom and democracy. (See also: De Tocqueville, Alexis.) Right-wing policies of the past half-century have been all about destroying the middle class: http://www.mahablog.com/2009/02/17/how-conservatism-is-destroying-america/

That's essentially his argument against Dawkins et al. It's a remarkably childish one, just packed with the sort of special pleading and goalpost-moving he used to fiercely attack back before his brains fell out of his skull.

I haven't read any source material on phlogiston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) and 'powder of sympathy' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_of_sympathy), yet I can have a reasonably strong assurance that the former doesn't exist and the latter doesn't work (unless you're using it to torture dogs and not as a navigation tool).

What is safer: Gradually confronting and mastering new challenges and opportunities until you are fully ready to take on real-world situations by the time you hit eighteen, or being kept "safe" (read: helpless, dependent, and undeveloped) until you hit that magic Age of Adulthood?

As we're already finding out, this is a vicious cycle and a self-fulfilling one: Skenazy herself bemoans that her own son feels that he must call her on his cellphone -- from inside their own house! -- rather than made a simple and benign decision on his own. If her kid is that way, the really cocooned kids are even worse off -- and their parents look at how helpless their cocooned kids are and say "See? SEE?! They can't be let out of the cocoon! EVER!"

Life is a lot less risky if you're trained on how to face it -- AND on how to use your own judgment skills, instead of forever depending on Mommy and Daddy right up until you're 18 or 21 or 30 or whatever the new magical Age of Adulthood is.

So yes, she does think that a sane discussion about birth control and empowering women go hand in hand with other good works.

I went to college in Missouri, which at the time (early 1980s) was 21 across the board for booze (18 being old enough to fight and die in a war but not to drink, apparently). However, the college was not far from the Kansas border, and at that time Kansas still allowed 18-year-olds to drink if they drank 3.2 (low-alcohol) beer.

Those of us who grew up with parents and family who drank the occasional drink at family get-togethers didn't let ourselves go crazy when confronted by this relative freedom. We'd had beer, we knew what it was like, and while we liked it, it wasn't the be-all and end-all of our lives.

Those who didn't grow up learning how to behave sensibly around alcohol -- and who as a consequence went screaming hog wild when they were out of their parents' direct control for the first time in their lives -- were the ones whose cars sometimes didn't safely make the drive back into Missouri on those twisting, turning roads at three a.m. after their very first night out on the town. (It was a rare year when, out of a student body of 350 at the start, at least one freshman from a hyper-sheltering or hyper-strict family wasn't killed in the first month of the first part of the school year.)

I also knew a girl from a very religious, very anti-choice family. This girl was one of many who fell for the old "if you use birth control that makes you a slut" myth, and as a result had three abortions in two years. You'd think that going on The Pill or even using barrier methods would have been a lot easier on her body, but of course then her local druggist would know and would have told everyone else in her small town about it (horrors!), whereas a discreet out-of-state abortion every nine or so months was a lot easier to hide from the folks back home.