Nowhere in there was President Clinton dictating solutions. His point was that "the issue is complicated and unfortunate, so people give the guys in Congress a break 'cause they have a hard job". Next time, give the guy a break and read what he actually said.

As to the anon who went on about Clinton being a liar? It amazes me how, after six years of the most ostentatiously mendacious, obfuscatory and deliberately dishonest and deceitful administration in history, anybody can even remember that nonsense. It shows a mind so steeped in paralogia, it approaches the bizarre.

Showing our colors, are we, John? What an asshole.

Hear here! I could not agree with you more. The imagination is not stimulated by such stuff; rather, it is stunted. It is impossible for a child's powers of perception and creation to grow when their senses are filled with noise.

Likewise, they'll never learn to do their own questing and searching for answers if the adult world insists on TEACHING him all day long. Look here! Listen to this! Think about that! Being told what to think about is death to a child's ability to learn deeply, because she never gets a chance to decide for herself what she's interested in, which may not be whatever she's being TAUGHT at the moment. Those who buy such ideas seem to think that an empty mind is some kind of disease symptom; the Buddhists, among others, say it is the beginning of all knowledge. They've got a point there.

And good gods, not everything in life is a Lesson To Be Learned. A whole lot of life is just simple experience, to be felt and lived through and then remembered, coloring our paths from then on. Imagine walking in a beautiful redwood forest, on a slightly cool spring day, after a night of rain. How lovely the calls of birds, and the shadows, and the ladybugs and ivy and the sound of water in the distance. Beautiful, eh? Who wouldn't want to be there?

But now imagine somebody walking next to you, constantly grabbing your arm and pointing at things and saying, "See that? That's an elm tree, and it grows on the slopes of hills, and it's leaves fall in the autumn..." Ad nauseam. I think of that, and I think of how much fun it was when I was a kid to just hang out in my room and read a book, visiting worlds in my mind (the worlds I chose to visit), or hanging out with my dogs, or watching my mom cook. Like you said, boredom can be a blessing to a kid's imagination.

I just don't understand why parents get suckered into believing that blaring THINGS at their kids (especially babies!) is going to be of any kind of advantage to them. Do adults learn anything useful from ads? No? Then what makes them believe that something that's basically an ad is going to teach their kids anything? Especially the babies! What is up with THAT? Why can't babies just be allowed to be...you know, BABIES?

It's very strange.

I really can't see what's freaking you out here. No, it doesn't look like a real kid, but it's a robot. I wouldn't expect it to look like a real kid; I'd expect it to look like a mechanical representation of one.

The day they make a robot that can't be told from a human being - that day, I'll get freaked out. But these approximate simulacra don't bother me at all.

Some 25 years ago, I read an essay in Time Magazine about the Japanese and their efforts to create realistic robots. The writer, whose name I cannot recall, wrote about the fact that in Japanese culture there is no Frankenstein myth, no story about the awful dangers of trying to create a human or human analog. So because their culture does not contain the emotional/psychological baggage we drag around on this subject, they have no qualms about artificial humans, and no reason to find them "freaky" or "disgusting." Their roboticists find the concept fascinating and a chance to display real creativity, and perhaps create beauty. (Accompanying that essay was a photograph of a very beautiful robot, created to look like a geisha. Very primitive compared to CB2, in that she did not react to the world at all, but just made a few pre-programmed movements. But the point was well taken that this could become not only a science, but also an art form.)

It's a pity our culture can't relate to that way of thinking. Some of our prejudices are awfully silly, and cut us off from really interesting stuff.