Some describe it as a cult or a sect, but in reality the term ? derived from the word “emotional” ? encapsulates a trend that is becoming hugely popular among Britain’s schoolchildren.

A trans-Atlantic import, its followers dress in black, favouring tight jeans, T-shirts, studded belts and sneakers or skater shoes.

Hair is all-important: often dyed black and straightened, it is worn in a long fringe brushed to one side of the face.

Music also plays a critical role.

Emos like guitar-based rock with emotional lyrics.

American bands such as My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte and Blink 182 are particular favourites.

…

My Chemical Romance made it to No.1 in the UK chart with Welcome To The Black Parade in October 2006 – the ‘black parade’ is a place where all emos believe they will go when they die [emphasis ed. at BoM]

Wow! And this from a paper which is published in a country that brought the world The Smiths, The Cure, and The Sex Pistols, none of which were as dangerous for children by influencing depression or anarchy (or a weird love of toast and fax machines) like Emo bands!

That’s right, lock your children up ladies and gents! The Plain White Ts are going to make your children commit suicide in numbers that would make the Japanese envious.

Wait, the Plain White Ts can’t be emo! They’re plain white ts. Now, if they were plain black ts, maybe…but only if they teach kids about joining the black parade.

Ah, the Daily Mail: scare mongering that even FOX News can find excessive!

Now, however, Ms. Rowling (AKA Mrs. Murray) says that her child cannot be photographed in public! Yesterday, a British court of appeals overturned a ruling against Ms. Rowling in a lawsuit the billionaire author initiated against a publication who wished to print photos of her son. The court’s ruling was that ordinary people would expect a level of privacy when wandering about in public insomuch as they would not expect their child to be photographed.

Really?

Maybe that’s the way it is in England, but in America, you can photograph people in public, famous or not. You cannot reprint without permission if the person is not famous and is clearly the subject of the photograph, but famous people are not held to this same standard (obviously — without such there would be no tabloid press to speak of) and even this standard of privacy in public is not uniform. For the most part, if a photographer takes a photo of you and your child in public at a public event, in a crowd, etc. it’s going to be published, probably whether you like it or not.

Now, about Ms. Rowling: yes, her son was the subject of the photograph, but guess what sweetheart, you are famous, and so is your husband and your children because they are caught in the reflected glow of the light of fame that hangs around you. Sure, when you were a frumpy single mother toiling away in coffee shops at your labor of love while your child napped (if that story’s even true — there is some debate) you never imagined this would be your life. But then your books exploded. Now, you could have kept yourself hidden away like J.D. Salinger, or even just led a ho-hum life like Stephen King or John Grisham, neither of which are photographed constantly despite being their work being guarenteed on the best seller list. Oh no. You got the hair done, the nose fixed, the face lifted or at least botoxed. You’ve had work done, you’ve bought glamour girl clothes, and you’ve gone out in public, seeking that attention that you do deserve. I don’t begrudge you that. You earned it, live it up.

However, just as I’d say to any Hollywood starlet turned mother, you’ve made the bed, and now you have to lie in it. You’re a famous face by your own doing and you cannot try to protect your children from the limelight. It won’t happen. If you’re lucky, you’ll go back to having some sort of cult status and your child will either emulate you with bad writing or just drop off the face of the earth and lead a normal life, like Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, respectively.

But that’s if you’re lucky and if you do your damnedest to stop suing people and just live a quiet, normal life away from all the Hollywood premiers and parties and shit. Fade away and collect your millions every year. If you stay in the spotlight, your children will stay in the spotlight. If you are lucky, your child will be the next Stella McCartney or Sean Lennon. If you are not, your son will be the male version of Paris Hilton.

Having said that, I’m sure you can imagine how happy I am that the US 9th District Court of Appeals has decided that the information on laptops are able to be searched, seized, and confiscated indefinitely by border control.

It all stems from a case, apparently, where an individual traveling from the Philippians to the United States was stopped by DHS / US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and his laptop searched. It was there that they discovered child pornography and the man was promptly arrested and charged as appropriate. His attorney argued that the man’s 4th Amendment rights were violated, but the 9th District jurists decided differently. When you go through customs, you should have no expected right to privacy or expectation of 4th amendment protection, essentially.

The usual arguments about “you shouldn’t worry about it unless you have something to hide” are easily put down like a second place Kentucky Derby horse (Is it too soon? It is, isn’t it?) There are many reasons an individual may want to keep the contents of their laptops hidden from prying eyes. First of all, there are private photos that may end up in the wrong hands, like the young woman who became an unwitting porn star at her local Best Buy. Or there are the numerous businessmen and attorneys who travel internationally for business with private, sensitive information. CNet points out that journalists too are effected as their anonymous sources’ identities could be compromised. Will there be a separate line for CIA agents working under cover or will we have many more Valerie Plames in the near future? And then there are the artists and writers and photographers whose work may be deemed as illegal and offensive by one agent and artistic and acceptable by another.

Remember the trouble Nabakov had with Lolita, kids? Now imagine just trying to be the publisher bringing that over on a laptop and it getting into the hands of a John Wayne customs officer going to save the kidlets from the terrorists and pedophiles like he’s the next Chris Hansen.

Was it always this way, or is this yet another sweeping power of the executive branch granted to us from on high by the great and powerful George W. Bush? Only time may tell. Over at the Consumerist, several readers had rather inventive suggestions for combating ICE, or at least messing with them, including renaming all of your files “kiddie p0rn” and changing every icon on your desktop to a link to your own downloaded copy of 2girls1cup. Some others suggested traveling with a completely empty laptop and doing all work from a remote server inside the country or keeping all of your information on the SD card tucked neatly away inside your camera with your vacation photos or using your iPod’s disk usage feature.

CNet, however, has a different approach: encrypt first, ask questions later. Additionally, they recommend:

1. Shut your computer down for at least five minutes before entering customs, as this will erase passwords stored in RAM
2. Erase your cookies, cache, browser history, and saved passwords
3. The Feds may install spyware on your hard drive — keep your spyware detection software as up to date as possible and, if your computer gets confiscated, boot from a DVD or other OS to see if anything on your hard drive has been tampered with.
4. The Feds may also try to get to your memory through FireWire ports — guard against it by “setting an Open Firmware password disables physical memory access for FireWire devices”
5. Finally, conceal your data so that know one even knows it’s there. Remember kids, encrypted data is suspicious, but you can’t be suspicious of something you can’t see.

These were some of the reactions of (fictional) people to the news that Margaret B. Jones (real name: Margaret Seltzer) not only published fiction as fact, but that she made up 99% of her life for recent interviews.

Ms. Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Ms. Seltzer and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Ms. Seltzer’s older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw the article and called Riverhead to tell editors that Ms. Seltzer’s story was untrue.

That’s a Thanksgiving dinner I’d love to sit in on!

If you didn’t read it, the article the New York Times is referring to above is “A Refugee from Gang Land which was in last Thursday’s Style section. It was basically a “lifestyles of the not rich and soon to be famous for not being rich” piece about this half-white, half-native American girl (with a little girl of her own) who overcame life in “Big Mom’s” foster home, being a Blood (which she stated she was still a member of, by the way), and watching all of her foster siblings die or drift away, to become a successful graduate from the University of Oregon with a degree in ethnic studies and writer of a soon-to-be runaway best selling memoir.

Except that she’s an upper class all-white girl (no half Native American blood here!) who went to a posh private school in Hollywood with her biological sister and future whistleblower. There was never a foster mother or family, no gangs, no slogging through a job in Starbucks while going to school, no drug deals, no shotgun deaths, and no University of Oregon.

Instead, after high school, this privileged white girl worked with gang members and, essentially, stole their stories to pass off as her own memoir. That’s classy!

Naturally, her publisher is pulling the book. No word on whether or not her “less than $100,000″ advance is going to be returned.

I read the original story on Friday morning (I’m always behind on the news!) and thought something about her just didn’t seem right. There was too much *trying* to be ghetto without really getting there. Her speech was too good; her sentences weren’t peppered with dropped gs or urban words like “conversate”. But whatever, maybe being out of ‘the hood’ for eight years had a middle glass effect on people.

Today, after reading the NYTimes’ news story today, I reread the prior articles and was kind of caught off guard. The story about the “uncle” drug dealer her daughter wrote to in prison, the alleged (and did the writer see said tattoo?) bulldog tattoo that spans her small back, the photos of her foster family, the dirty shoe box of Big Mom’s recipies: all lies. Why did she buy the ghetto clothes, invite gang members into her home, adopt pit bulls — all things observed by the author of the article — if she never lived that way? How entrenched into this bizarre fantasy did she become to cover her tracks, and did she really never suspect when the New York Times showed up on her doorstep with a writer and photographer to do a photo essay and article on her life that no one from her real, privileged life woud go “Hey, wait a minute….”?

Naive, they called this girl? How about straight-up stupid.

(In case you’re wondering about how this is “round three” of fake memoirs, in addition to James Frey, a Belgian author was exposed today was faking her memoir about the Holocaust in which she lived in a Warsaw ghetto and was saved by the Nazis from wolves. Really? Kept safe from Nazis by wolves? And people believed this? That’s it, I’m being kept safe from George W. Bush’s wiretapping scheme by technology given to me by my alien father from Alpha Centauri.)

Ms. “Jones” also gave a recent interview with NPR; listen to her pull the best snow job since Tony Snow!

In his semi-annual report to the US Congress, Mr Bernanke said the Fed would continue to “act in a timely manner as needed to support growth”.

Analysts said his comments increased the likelihood of another rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting on 18 March.

Are you kidding me?

Okay, it seems counterintuitive for any rational American to be upset about interests rates being cut, I mean, it’s going to prevent a recession, right?

WRONG!

Here’s what happens when the fed cuts rates: mortgage, loan, and credit APRs decrease by fractions of a percent, which the Fed hopes will spur people taking out newer, bigger loans at the lower APR to pay off those old, high ones, also known as refinancing (re-fi). When people re-fi, banks can try and sell more money than they need to them, so that the borrowers can spend the extra cash while paying the same amount on their home or credit card (with credit cards, it’s called a balance transfer onto a newly opened account. Car loans are immune to this sort of re-fi). Even if you just take the exact amount to pay off the high interest balance and end up with lower monthly payments overall, this will free up your wallet for extra spending and spur the economy.

Now, here’s the problem: It Doesn’t Work Like That.

What will happen is that your credit card rate will decease by a fraction of a percent. If you are in such dire straights that you need to refi to free up cash to pay on that soon-to-be-repo’d house, sorry, but your credit probably sucks so much right now that no one’s going to lend to you anyway. So you fail, or more accurately, the Fed fails you.

And then there are those of us who have high-yield savings accounts and little to no debt. All this is doing is decreasing your savings because that tiny fraction of a percent you’re saving on my credit cards (assuming that you don’t pay your cards in full every month like I do) isn’t going to make up for the half a percent (or more) hit your bank account interest rate (you know, what they pay *you*) will take, so if you’re are responsible borrower, you lose too! The Fed fails again!

The only people who will benefit are those Middle Class Jerks who live beyond their means, who bounce from 0% card to 0% card with their massive balances from vacations to wherever the $160k-$80k/year people go, who’ll refi their homes to make repairs, who’ll buy repo’d homes and cars and flip them in a few years, who have no savings or retirement accounts because Social Security will take care of things, who vote Republicican….

…I’ve said too much, haven’t I?

We who live in the so-called Blue States also like to believe ourselves superior to those hicks from the sticks in the Bible Belt, those inbred Red State types. They ignore all evidence, we say, and just run with their eagerly embraced ignorance.

Wrong on both counts, lads.

A controversy has been brewing on the Web since a “60 Minutes” segment failed to appear on a CBS affiliated TV station in Alabama last night. The report covered a bitter flashpoint between Democrats and the Bush administration: the case of Don Siegelman, a former Democratic governor of Alabama who was jailed for corruption last June.

So hot was the anticipation of the segment in left-leaning circles that one political site published an article, “Bama TIVOs at the ready for ‘60 Minutes’.” But many Alabamans did not see initial broadcast of the report, which included new allegations that Karl Rove, President Bush’s former top adviser, waged a campaign against Mr. Siegelman.

Instead, just before the segment was to start, people in the northern part of the state who were tuned in to WHNT-TV, Channel 19 in Huntsville, found this on their screen instead:

We apologize that you missed the first segment of 60 Minutes tonight featuring ‘The Prosecution of Don Siegelman.’ It was a technical problem with CBS out of New York.

LINK: Media Blackout Update: Pakistan and Alabama?

Except, when reached for comment, CBS said there was no difficulty. It was a transmissions problem on Channel 19’s end, probably due to an editorial decision.

What?

“There is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.” I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama “could only have been an editorial call.”

Of course, then Channel 19 back-peddled faster than the President trying to reverse a bicycle. It was the receiver in Alabama that caused the problem. It was absolutely, positively not an editorial decision.

But the assurance alone seemed unlikely to appease all of his viewers. According to Mr. Pylant, the problem was fixed quickly, resulting in only 12 minutes of down time. But that mostly covered the controversial segment, which lasted about 13 minutes. (”Strange coincidence,” one viewer called it.)

Afterward, the station took measures to counteract any appearance of censorship, while also presumably bringing in some nice ratings for its own local programming. The missed segment was broadcast on the local newscast later on Sunday evening, and posted on its Web site. (Hmm.)

I wonder how much else in Alabama and our neighboring Red States ends up down the Memory Hole? At least Pakistan, Iran, China, and other censorship-embracing countries are upfront about their tactical measures to keep bad press from the eyes and ears of the viewing public.

I can’t help but wonder if maybe election coverage in some areas isn’t dissimilar to the time Diamond Joe Quimby ran against Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons, complete with computer-added flames and devil horns over the Democratic candidate? Maybe news about such liberal concerns as the never-ending war in Iraq or extraordinary rendition is spun harder and faster than a certain President’s door on nickel-beer night (to steal a joke from SNL.) Perhaps they haven’t seen any news media but those of happy Iraqi children dancing on Saddam Hussein’s grave and refugees returning home since George Bush declared mission accomplished. Maybe all the news about Iraq not being tied to Al Qaeda and there being no WMDs in the country were not broadcast to the Bible Belt due to technical difficulties. Maybe extraordinary rendition is still a complement that Simon Cowell gives to American Dreamz Idol hopefuls and completely lacks any sinister connotations due to network problems.

Maybe the reason the Southern Democrats have disappeared is because the media has as well. Maybe they hate the liberal media so much because the liberal media too often is just a dark black screen of technical difficulties.

Maybe, in the South, the revolution will not be televised.

In Britain a widely publicized — and since discredited — research paper published in 1998 started a scare over the safety of the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, drawing a potential link to autism. Though the premise of the research did not concern thimerosal, vaccination rates plunged in Britain. Over the next two to six years, outbreaks of measles soared in Britain and Ireland, causing at least three deaths and hundreds of children to be hospitalized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/arts/television/23ston.html

The world is already grossly overpopulated — and mostly by stupid people — so, to all those parents out there who aren’t getting their kids vaccinated against deadly childhood diseases:

THANKS! AND KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK!

See Also:

• NYTimes: Study Finds Vaccine Preservative Is Not Linked to Risks of Autism (January 8, 2008)
• NYTimes: Vaccine Compound Is Harmless, Study Says, as Autism Debate Rages (September 27, 2007)
• NYTimes: Opening Statements in Case On Autism and Vaccinations (June 12, 2007)

BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5318204.stm

George Bush apparently has never heard of the InterTubes or at least does not know about Godwin’s law, which is that if you invoke Hitler or Nazis in order to win an argument that has nothing to do with Hitler or Nazis and/or mention Hitler or Nazis for the purpose of hyperbole or a straw man argument, you invalidate your argument and lose.

Admittedly, this is a fine line to skate. You can validly use Hitler, Nazis, or The Holocaust in an argument about said subjects, or in which the subject himself is one of the above. Margaret says:

Godwin’s law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one’s opponent) with Hitler or Nazis or their actions. It does not apply to discussions directly addressing genocide, propaganda, or other mainstays of the Nazi regime.

Therefore, saying, for example, that Pol Pot was Cambodia’s Hitler, does not invoke Godwin’s law and therefore negate the argument. Saying, for example, that if pacifists who believe war is always wrong were alive in the 1940s, Hitler would rule the world, does. It is a straw man being tossed about to stir up feelings and evade the actual argument, which is a pro vs. con of pacifism and war/conflict. Unless, of course, it isn’t and the argument is one of time and space and we’re talking about time travel where the pacifist would travel back in time to try and kill Hitler, but then the argument would be about Hitler and Godwin’s law would not apply.

Having said all that, this week, George Bush took Godwin’s Law and thrust it into real life: “Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them,” he said.

One may, of course, argue that this is a valid comparison like the Pol Pot example above, except for the following:

1. Osama Bin Laden has not committed genocide.
2. Osama Bin Laden is not the leader of a country or a significant number of people. In fact, but most accounts, Al Qaeda isn’t even a threat anymore.
3. Osama Bin Laden is impotent. Well, power-wise. He releases a videotape (what, you can’t go digital and put it on YouTube? Some terrorist!) and we sit and wait. And wait. And wait some more. Nothing happens because his words do not mean anything. He’s just like the crazy old homeless man on the street who used to be somebody, a contender perhaps, but is now just a crazy old man who lives out in the elements spouting out non-sensical rhetoric.

“I personally don’t believe Al Qaeda exists as a robust organization anymore.” –Wayne White, a former Bush Administration top intelligence official for the State Department.

A more apt comparison for Bin Laden would be a bunny boiler, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: he had this great and massive love affair with the United States when we used Afghanistan to fight the Russians we didn’t like, but then we left him for wars on other fronts, used up and wasted. Like a Kleenex: soft, strong, and disposable. And like every jilted woman, Bin Laden wants payback, except instead of being short and feminine, this is a hulking 6′6″ guerrilla fighter we’ve fucked and run from, and the man’s going to have his revenge, served cold. He doesn’t care about dozens of virgins in some metaphysical paradise; he wants his love back, and if he can’t have us (US), then no one can!

Now, see, that is an apt comparison to strike fear in the hearts of men. Few of us alive today were alive for Hitler, but damn, we know about Fatal Attraction! Watch out, Michael Douglas, he’s coming for you!!!

In writing this article/entry, I wanted to find a photo of Elizabeth Wurtzel not already used by the NYTimes, which showed what I imagined to be a more dignified, grown up, partner-in-a-law-firm-ready Lizzy. This was the best I could find, but then again, it’s hard to have a non-coked-out photo when your life’s work has been built around the idea of being a coked out train wreck.

I forget where I heard it first, the news that Lizzy was going to Law School, that is. I believe it was sometime after More, Now, Again came out, sometime around the time that the atrocious film version of Prozac Nation was canned (almost forever) due to her comments about Buildings Fall Down Day, that she was numb to it, that it was an art project. I knew then when that interview, which painted her as difficult and as mentally ill as always, missing her interview appointment so that she ended up being interviewed in her hotel room in her pajamas, hit the papers, the girl would never write again…at least not a best seller.

So I was right, but not for a lack of trying. She then churned out More. Now. Again, which was critically panned, and The Bitch Rules, later renamed Radical Sanity, even later renamed The Secret of Life, which most reviewers didn’t even bother with, and the advice in which gave me some ideas which later turned out to be, at worst, seriously bad advice.

So, with an LSAT score no more than two points higher than mine, she went to Yale, the lucky bitch. She went, she took time off, she went again, she graduated. And now, according to the NYTimes, being a notorious drug addict with a mugshot that is quite easy to find if you know how to google, for a shoplifting incident she herself chronicled, with a FTW (Stands for “Fuck the World) tattoo visible in most unairbrushed, post-Prozac Nation photos, the girl who posed naked for the cover of one of her books is having difficulty finding a job in the uptight New England land once settled by Puritans who haven’t moved out since? I never would have guessed.

Looks like I will have to step in and fill the void. Quick, someone get me a drug dealer, a cigarette, and a cocktail, stat. And a typewriter or something. Yale Law School, here I come.

The reverend was found wearing two wetsuits, a diving mask, several belts and other bondage gear which had been used to hogtie him, leading many in the pastor’s flock to suspect foul play.

That is, until the autopsy results came in.

Officially, the medical examiner has recorded the cause of death as “accidental mechanical asphyxia” — most likely auto-erotic asphyxiation, although that term is not used in the report, as he was found with a condom-covered dildo in his arse. Which is ashame, as sex toys such as dildos are illegal in the state of Alabama. Of course, various fundamentalist websites still contest, eventhough the autopsy shows no signs of struggle, defensive marks, or any other indicators of foul play (and in fact rules out foul play), that the Reverend, who was completely under liberal radar until now, was murdered.

Yes, and Pastor Ted was raped.

Interestingly, the toxicology report is “attached” rather than filed in as “unremarkable” like much else on the autopsy report, suggesting the pastor may or may not have had various drugs (prescription or otherwise) in his system at the time of death. Considering his age and weight, this may be completely innocuous — or not.

Not that any of that should have any bearing on anything else except that his personal effects include something which is illegal in the state of residence — perhaps not of note to prosecute him as much as much as to say, “hey look, even this pastor likes a kink in his sex life — maybe dildos don’t make baby Jesus cry after all!” But instead, the Conservatives will divorce themselves from him, the Liberals will condemn him as a hypocrite, and civil libertarians such as myself will sit there, scratch our heads like we did over Larry Craig, and say “Why does anyone care what goes on in the bedroom (or mens room, in the Senator’s case) of consenting adults?”

Link: The Rev’s Autopsy Report on TSG.