Suppose you manage a large company, and you want your 500 managers to be able to call each other wherever they may be. So you have to go into a store selling cellphones 500 times to buy one cellphone each time?

People buy things in bulk all the time to resell them individually at a profit. How can it possibly be illegal to buy 100 cellphones?

In fact, retail stores selling cellphones must constantly buy them in bulk to resell them. Why can't anyone who wishes begin a retail business of their own for this purpose?

If there were any good reason to suspect these people, couldn't the Keystone Kops involved in this operation have simply waited and watched these individuals to see what they did with the phones?

And you clowns in the higher echelons of the federal government, can you name one thing you've ever done that makes us safer from terrorists after 9/11 ? (Squandering our money and military resources in Iraq, thus vastly increasing the number of U.S.-haters around the world, doesn't count.)

I didn't think so.

The article, in its summary, states that

. . . crisis pregnancy centers are spreading criminal misinformation with support from the government

After reading the article three times, I still do not see where this claim comes from, and am perplexed.

Also, what's the problem with buying lower-priced generics instead of from Ortho-McNeil?

And what kind of pills are these (it's not stated in the article) ?

And what is the connection between the "infiltration" of poor black neighborhoods with crisis birth control clinics, and the contradictory-sounding "Now many clinics are considering a dramatic reduction in services, hours and birth control choices offered; and some locations may close entirely" ???

Just curious.

I have no reason to doubt the author's statement that the incidence of rape in Kenya is high.

But quoting the statistic that, on average, one rape occurs every 30 minutes is not relevant to whether or not the rate is high.

The significance of "once every 30 minutes" depends entirely on the size of the female population of Kenya. If there are about 17.5 million females in Kenya (not far from the actual figure), then that frequency is equivalent to saying that, each year, 1 out of 1000 females in Kenya is raped. (Or as such stats are usually reported in the U.S., 100 out of 100,000.)

On the web I found that during 1995, according to a Bureau of Justice survey, "In 1995, 354,670 women were the victims of a rape or sexual assault." (If this website can be trusted: http://www.paralumun.com/issuesrapestats.htm .)

This is very close to 200 rapes per 100,000 females per year. (I am not distinguishing between rape and "sexual assault" because I don't know the difference.)

More than zero rapes is too high, by any standard. But it's interesting that when you standardize your statistics for comparison, you find out that the U.S. appears to have twice the incidence of rape in Kenya -- or at least did about 10 years ago.

It is extremely unfortunate that Salon felt it had to go so far in retracting Debbie Nathan's article -- but I strongly suspect Shea's proposed explanation is the right one: Some jerk or organization that felt such an opinion piece should not be given exposure on the Web made a threat against Salon that Salon felt it could not fend off, and so it gave in to the pressure; possibly all of us letter-writers who would normally deplore such censorship would have done the identical thing in Salon's place.

But this episode does bring to light the fact that despite Salon's not infrequently stunning journalism, it also has piss-poor standards of fact-checking. Or as far as I can tell, nonexistent standards of fact-checking.

It also has piss-poor standards of covering the range of topics that any truly respected news source would cover.

Have you noticed all the science articles recently? Hey, it's not really important for the well-informed person to know anything about science, anyway.

Or maybe it actually is.

Esp. to Art Guerrilla: You say that the naked baby pictures you have on your computer are child porn. I'm pretty sure they're not, since the letter of the law includes a phrase like "displaying the genitals in a prurient manner", and I'd be very surprised if your photos fit that description. (As photographers Sally Mann, and Jock Sturges, each eventually proved about their unprovocative art photos in court, after a huge hassle for each of them.)

I'm a big fan of freedom of speech and even more so freedom of thought. But the problem is that a demand for child porn creates the incentive -- and reality -- of producing it, which almost certainly risks serious harm to the children involved, since they are almost certainly not capable of truly informed consent.

Maybe you don't, but I do see the need to eliminate the market for child porn as much as possible.

(On the other hand, it's also a possibility that allowing those who get off on child porn to have access to it may lessen their getting off by acting out their fantasies in the real world. Especially if the material is extremely old, so any further harm to the subjects of the photos is extremely unlikely, maybe this route would lead to the least harm, ultimately, to children. Then again, it's also possible that such access would "fan the flames" of their desires -- I have no idea.)

P.S. I agree with anyone who condemns in the strongest terms the incarceration (or other punishment) of someone because of their private journal entries per se. No matter what the content. This is so un-American that it's astounding it could happen here -- but it did, as Rob Anderson and perhaps others have pointed out.