Tuesday, January 29, 2019

The US in Decline

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

So I'm tooling around the internet, minding my own business, when this pops up:

As numerous US states introduce bills that would require or encourage ‘Bible literacy’ classes in public schools, President Trump has given the proposals the thumbs-up, calling the idea “great!”

Lawmakers in six states have introduced ‘Bible literacy’ bills, aimed at encouraging high schoolers to brush up on the Old and New Testaments alongside their regular subjects.

Um, didn't we already go through all this, like, fifteen years ago or so? Of course Florida is one of the six states, natch, so I guess its time to dust off my copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and get serious about my Pastafarianism. I must admit I've been neglectful of worshiping His Noodly Goodness lately, but I just remedied that by polishing off an entire package of ramen.

Speaking of which, am I the only one who cannot eat ramen without thinking of this movie? Right? Guys? Hello? (sigh....)

Anybody remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil"? I realize that we all now know that was never anything but a lie, but this is completely over the top:

Google and other online ad companies use intimate personal information like political beliefs, religion, sexual orientation, and even diseases and disabilities to target users for advertising

...

In response to a TechCrunch article republishing the category lists, Google released a statement claiming they prohibit advertisers from targeting based on “sensitive categories such as race, sexual orientation, health conditions, pregnancy status, etc.” They do not explain why multiple categories under each of those headers can be found on their “Publisher Verticals” list.

This is all passed around to internet advertisers through something called "real-time bidding" where basically anyone with the cash can get a list of people who did Google searches for information on AIDS or local drug treatment centers. The US government could care less, of course. Whatever the multi-nationals want to do is perfectly legal, even when it isn't. However, more civilized places like Europe are at least starting to push back. We'll see how far they get before the Great Orange Gollum tries to do a Venezuela on them.

And then we have the whole shit-storm over some Catholic kids in DC wearing MAGA hats. The original "narrative" (a word that is now synonymous with "damned lies") was that a bunch of over-entitled white male punks surrounded a Native American medicine man/chief and proceeded to mock and threaten him. The response of the Tolerance Brigade was the typical intolerance we've all come to know and love, with so-called adults declaring that 16-year-old kids should be punched in the face and thrown into a wood chipper. The entire narrative was shown to truly be a damned lie by the simple act of watching, in their entirety, any of the dozens of videos of the sad-ass episode that were posted within minutes of the actual event. Every word out of Mr. Native American's mouth is a lie; he is no kind of medicine man, chief, leader or anything else. He's some homeless vagrant who also claims to be a Vietnam Vet while never having stepped foot in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the real instigators of the entire dust-up, a bunch of loons who call themselves the Black Hebrew Israelites (think Westboro Baptist Church in blackface), have been... er... white-washed out of the entire "incident" by the MSM. But no matter; the Tolerance Brigade is also psychic! They know exactly what those little MAGA-ty shits were thinking! Even though they did absolutely nothing other than act with a maturity far beyond their years by refusing to be provoked, they still deserve to be punched and thrown into a wood chipper.

So get comfy on the couch, kids and grab some popcorn because the US decline is entering the bat-shit crazy phase.

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