Poor Mojo's Newswire

When the age was raised to 21 in the mid-1980s, the goal was to reduce highway fatalities. But everyone knows that the 21 age limit hasn't stopped minors from drinking.

And now some experts believe it's actually contributing to an increase in extreme drinking.

This is what the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, John McCardell, believes and it's why he started the movement dedicated to lowering the age back to 18. It may seem counterintuitive, but he argues that lowering the age will make kids safer.

I don't know about you. But I'm sick of all the Facebook hype. For the record, I am not on Facebook, and the recent fuss about privacy doesn't affect me -- I'm not a disgruntled user with an axe to grind. What I don't get is how Facebook has become such a phenomenon. Our sister publication Fortune even recently published a story about the company called "How Facebook is taking over our lives." It's a great story...even though Facebook hasn't taken over my life.... And after sitting at a computer typing all day, the last thing I want to do when I get home is sit in front of another computer so I can upload photos to my Wall and read 25 random things about a high school classmate I haven't spoken to in 18 years. I also don't feel the need to constantly update an entire network of friends about the daily minutiae of my life. My brother recently harassed me over the phone about why I wasn't on Facebook. My response was, "You want my status update? I'm about to hang up on you."

In a community-based study, individuals living in areas with the highest concentration of fast-food restaurants were at 13% higher risk of stroke than those in areas with the lowest density, Lewis B. Morgenstern, M.D., of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues reported here at the American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference. "Where we live and where our kids go to school has a profound effect on our health," Dr. Morgenstern said. Although it's tempting to blame fast food, Brian Silver, M.D., of Henry Ford Hospital in East Lansing, Mich., who was not involved in the study, agreed that fast food might be just another marker for community risk factors.

There's good reason to be concerned about teens being self-pornographers. But many, especially legal experts, are disturbed by the fact that a healthy horn-dog of a teenager could be grouped in the same criminal category as a clinically ill pedophile. "These cases are picturing these teenagers as both predators and victims of themselves," says Amy Adler, a law professor at New York University who has studied child porn laws. "Child porn law was founded on a very different vision of what the major threat was." That major threat, of course, is supposed to be adults who produce and peddle child smut. Reed Lee, a Chicago attorney and board member of the Free Speech Coalition, says: "A law to protect victims shouldn't send those very victims to jail."... ... it's tough to impress those kinds of nuances on kids, says Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Jeffrey Douglas. He once spoke to a high school class and tried to explain that, even though everyone seems to be "sexting," it "can literally destroy your life." The response? A boy rolled his eyes while making a grand jack-off gesture. "It's just the bullshit that adults tell them when they come to talk to them," he said. "It's tragically funny." Douglas points out that the bungled law reveals fascinating cultural conflicts about childhood and teen sexuality. "I think the problem originates from the pathological fear that our culture, particularly the legal part of the culture, takes toward juvenile sexuality." He has defended numerous child porn cases and says prosecutors will treat the exchange of trial evidence like "an undercover heroin deal." Douglas says, "The fear is so enormous that it's like you're dealing with something radioactive. They don't consider the context or the meaning." The context here is that teens are undertaking the sexploration that our porned culture at once dictates and forbids -- in the same way that girls are taught that there is desirable validation in their sexuality and then are shamed for actually being sexual....