Even Freud had a fake id

Everything gets so complicated!

Back in the day, one could get a fake driver's license just by using a razor blade and a little cut-and-paste action.  I never did this, of course, as I had no interest in drinking beer and/or Boone's Farm Apple Wine until I was well past 21, but some misguided youths whom I knew and rode around in cars with fell prey to demon Rum.

All right, all right, so I had a fake ID, but it was just so I could vote!

"Barbara Pierce," pictured here, is actually Barbara Pierce Bush, hard-drinking daughter of our wonderful 43rd president, former hard drinker George Wonderful Bush. She was caught with this fake ID in a New Haven, CT saloon during her father's ill-advised presidency.  A sharp-eyed security guard realized that there is no 160 Madison Ave in the tony 21210 zip code, that section of Baltimore where Roland Park, Mt. Washington, and Johns Hopkins University pick up their mail.  Ms Bush was a serial violator of the underage drinking laws in several states, and now look at the disgrace into which she has plunged her entire family! Her father is without work, her mother wrote a poorly-received autobiography, and her twin sister Jenna was forced to take a menial position on the Today show just to keep ahead of the taxman.

I certainly don't endorse chicanery, and I recommend that everyone with a penchant for overindulgence follow a wholly abstemious life path, but there's a better reason for that now for the under-21 crowd.

According to this article in the Albany Times-Union, some teens in upstate New York bought bogus beer-getters online from a Chinese company for 75 bucks each.  The people overseas at ID Chief farmed their work out to England, where the cards were made, but the main harvest they were after was a rich crop of personal information.  You see, along with the 75 semolians, these kids were supplying their names, birth dates, pictures and signatures, and this mistake will cause lifelong repercussions.

As it says in the article, "As these kids get older and try to get jobs, try to be stockbrokers, or get a mortgage, or credit cards, they will find in 90 percent of the cases that they have thousands in credit card debt, that they will have several mortgages they have yet to pay, holds on their licenses to states they've never been to, Interpol holds, because they gave their information to a foreign Web-based company," Saratoga County District Attorney James Murphy said. "All just to get a beer..."

It's funny.  We purchase shredders and grind our mail to confetti, we refuse to reveal any part of our Social Security numbers to anyone, we zealously guard our data lest it come back to haunt us in identity-theft schemes, and yet teens will gladly hand it over and pay for the privilege of assuming a mountain of debt.
Everything is just so complicated anymore!