all thanks to retrograde mythologies of post-'60s Americana

Au contraire. This mindset has been going on since the 20's, as anyone who's ever seen the hilarious/pathetic Reefer Madness can attest. The post-60s moronity around this issue has its direct roots in the earlier part of the 20th century, when paper barons put out their financial and political power to stop the threat of a plant that has many, many uses other than just getting high. If you want to understand why pot is illegal, and why the resistance to its legalization is so strong, you must go far beyond its recreational use, to all its other uses. THERE is where you'll find the answers.

The high is just the excuse, the easy hook on which faux moralists can hang the rest of us, playing on people's paranoia to distract them from the real issues - money, power, and control of some of the country's most lucrative industries.

Way to pre-judge something you've admitted you don't know anything about.

Guess my assessment of you as a level-headed critic just ended, Andrew. Thanks for the wake-up call.

Why are the writers on Broadsheet so obsessed with the idea of "creepy"?

Why do they see anything that they do not personally agree with as "creepy"?

Why is anyone and everyone whose actions they do not support "creepy"?

What is with that word? Does it give you what you so charmingly call (in your eleventh-grade way) a "girl-stiffy"?

Because people who use adolescent descriptors such as "creepy" and "eww" are not taken seriously among adults.

So what? Some people like making weird stuff. Are you really going to claim this is somehow a new thing? Just because you don't see them on the shelves of Walmart doesn't mean things like this haven't been around for centuries. The vaults of the Vatican are full of paintings depicting stuff like Jesus schtupping the Magdalene, to give just one example.

People like sex, some people are kinky, some people like making crafts. Ergo, there will always be some people making crafty items involving kinky sex. BFD.

Parents wouldn't feel the need even to consider home schooling if public schools in America provided a good education in a safe environment. But the fact is, they don't. What passes for education these days is more than a little horrible. When kids can reach college age barely being able to spell, something is hideously wrong.

My sister lives in Spain, where she married and has a son. Diego is four years old. FOUR YEARS OLD. Keep that in mind as I describe the following.

He goes to a public school, at what we would term pre-school/kindergarten level. He recites classical poetry. He can identify several Renaissance artists by their style alone. He has the basics of ethics and civics. He's mastered writing the alphabet and quite a number of words and is starting on sentences this year. He's beginning basic arithmetic.

He's FOUR. And he's in no way unusual. My sis says pretty much all the kids in his class, a typical middle-class group, are on his level. This is NORMAL.

And we have adults in this country who can't find Brazil on a map, or think there are ten Eiffel Towers in Paris, or believe the sun goes round the Earth.

Yeah, great education system in America. Is it any wonder some parents don't want their kids within a mile of a public school?

I picked up D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths at the library when I was 7 years old. It immersed me in a world I'd had no idea existed - that of mytholody, metaphor, and the concept that everything has a meaning. Or that anything could have meanings different from what the prevailing culture insisted they had. For instance, Artemis and Hera were revelations, for I'd never come across the idea that women could be powerful. That book laid the foundation for my love of reading, history, art, and culture, all cultures. Other countries, other times, could have stories just as amazing and even MORE amazing than those of my own! Imagine that!

I always felt sorry for the kids who hated such things, because they seemed stuck in the passive mode, and didn't seem to realize that they could just pick up books on their own and learn whatever they wanted to learn. Huzzah for Andrew and Leslie, who are laying the foundation for everything that will come later.

Oh, and the calculus issue? Easy. When it comes time to teach things like mathematics, find a tutor for those more technical subjects. What with the whole home-school industry, I'm sure there are people around who will take up the slack of those subjects in which the parents have no expertise.

I posted a comment at the video page. The ONLY comments, going back about 300 or so, were people mocking the video. So of course the VERY BRAVE anti-woman creator shut down the thread. Have you ever seen one of these people who could tolerate disagreement for any length of time?

Spoken like someone who'll never have to face being pregnant. Bravo.

We're just a couple of frozen embryos!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAx895TzarE

Classic stuff from the 80's. I first heard it on the Doctor Demento Show.

It's a spambot that's been hitting Salon for the past couple of months. If you see one of those, hit the "Flag" button under it and put "SPAM" in the popup. The site monitors will respond to that faster. That's what I do, and it gets taken care of pretty quickly.

Oh, and this is nothing. The first time I saw that, it hit a letters thread with 35 comments. Took me 20 minutes to flag all of them.