The Merchants of Cool

You can view the other four parts of this series on YouTube.

I'd also like to give a plug to Naomi Klein's No Logo, which features a lot of the concepts seen in this documentary.

12 Year Old Speaks Out on Abortion

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Dad at 13

The Sun reports...

BOY dad Alfie Patten yesterday admitted he does not know how much nappies cost — but said: “I think it’s a lot.”

Baby-faced Alfie, who is 13 but looks more like eight, became a father four days ago when his girlfriend Chantelle Steadman gave birth to 7lb 3oz Maisie Roxanne.

He told how he and Chantelle, 15, decided against an abortion after discovering she was pregnant.

Just more content for the "What is this world turning into?" section of this site.

Red Tide At Gloucester High

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head. - Time

Ha, blaming movies for problems like these. Where are these girls at Wakefield High? WHS is compromised of smart teens who make smart choices, right?

Political Apathy In America

Generation Y, also known as Echo Boomers, consists of 18- to 24-year-olds who are voting less and lack a major interest in politics and voting.

In 2006, USA Today reported that among a survey of 650 18- to 30-year-olds, 69 percent said they were most likely going to vote in November, and 80 percent said they were registered to vote.

Yet another survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press said that among a survey of 1,804 adults, 40 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds are not registered to vote.

"Voter turnout rates have dropped a lot," said Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "There are a lot of people who don't see voting as a duty."

Theiss-Morse said members of both Generations X and Y believe their votes don't make a difference, and if their parents don't vote, they likely view voting as a waste of time. - Daily Nebraskan

Ben kind of stressed this with his latest Darfur Update.