It Took Congress Nine Months To Approve $600 Stimulus Checks For COVID Struck, Broke Americans And Only SEVEN Days To Impeach Trump!

 

 

 

Shows you how worried congress is about the American people, when they care more about some whack jobs breaching the state capitol building than they do about seeing that millions of unemployed, damn near homeless Americans are suffering due to a PLANDEMIC that is not their fault. As you can see, for what our so-called congressional representatives want, they get, and in record time. But when it comes to doing what they should for those who pay their damn salaries, they cannot ever seem to reach a general consensus, but yet, it took them no time to impeach Donald Trump for the second time as though he was the one who led the charge and stormed the capitol.

Whatever reason those people stormed the capitol, regardless of what Donald Trump said, they would have gone ahead and went in there anyway since it has been stated that they were given a tour of the capitol the previous day and so how is it Trump’s fault that some fed up whack jobs stormed the capitol? But either way, it is quite telling that Nancy Pelosi and crew are well aware of the fact that millions of Americans have already been evicted. They know all about the lines that have formed at food banks all across this country and they are well aware that millions have joined the ranks of the unemployed. And yet, knowing ALL of that, it still took congress NINE fucking months to put together a stimulus bill that mainly handed money to foreign governments while stingily handing American taxpayers, whose dollars, are being put to use to aid others in foreign countries, a measly $600 of their money.

Second Trump impeachment trial takes U.S. into uncharted waters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – America will be in uncharted territory when the U.S. Senate meets as soon as next week for the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, a case against the outgoing president that one Democrat preparing for arguments called “shockingly evident.”

At first Mitch McConnell claimed that he was not calling the senate back early for an impeachment trial, but I guess all that has changed. Someone wants to make damn sure that Donald Trump never has a chance to run for president, ever again. In fact, it is so blatantly obvious that the purpose of the capitol riot was to add further fuel to the flame to roast Trump’s ass and roast it good. It was not good enough that the election was stolen from him, someone had to make sure that Trump would never, ever get the chance to even step near the Oval Office, much less enter it.

This speaks to what I have been saying all along in that there were no lengths at which someone was not willing to go to make damn certain that Trump not only ‘lost’ the election, but also will never be allowed to run for office of the presidency, ever. To say that I have never seen anything like this, is to put it mildly. Never in the history of my time on this earth, have I ever witnessed a take down of a sitting president of this magnitude and along with that, even more, the erosion of any rights we thought we had left. Censorship is at an all time high and with just a couple of corporations owning social media platforms, free speech has been effectively shut down and yet they tell us that America is a democratic republic. How so? Because it is resembling a dictatorship, more and more each day. There is no such thing as “fair and balanced reporting.” The talking heads just parrot, day after day what has been put before them by those who control all our lives and we call this living? Who the hell is happy? Who the hell is not sitting somewhere high, drunk and zoned out? Is anyone wondering why America has a big, huge drug problem? Seriously??!! Look at the shit that we are exposed to everyday and tell me, how on earth are we supposed to remain sane and drug and alcohol free? Ain’t no fucking way unless your ass is already too zombiefried to know what your reality is.

What I fail to understand is why no one seems to have had a clue that we would end up here. How could we have failed so miserably to see where we were headed? I mean, the signs were everywhere. When this ‘new technology’ was touted as being the wave of the future and how connected we all would be via devices that could make it so, why did we not question this? We just blindly stood in line for smartphones that have taken the place of our brains. When once we used to flip open a book and find the nearest coffee shop or vacuum repair shop, we now click on Google and search via that route and not only has Google taken over as a search tool for whatever we are looking for, but Google has also taken over the means by which many people try and get their voices heard, via Youtube. Then we have Facebook that has been stealing and selling peoples data all over the place. Twitter has shut down a sitting president’s account, claiming that he went against their TOS, and that changes on a whim. And if the president of the United States cannot even get his message across to the people whom he is presiding over thanks to the fact that the mainstream media is owned by a handful of rich white men, then what does that say for the rest of us? We are in too deep now. And they know it. “Who are ‘they’,” you ask? They are not ‘us’ and that is all you need to know because ‘they’ are why the police force has been militarized. They are why we have been hearing about ‘curfews’ and being put on lockdown, for our own good of course. It is not for our own good, but for the good of those who are our mortal enemy, but since we were too busy staring down at those devices they sold us that further enriched ‘them’, we are now at the point of no return.

We are coming to the next phase. It’s called, “Papers, please!” Does that sound familiar? It should. It was, reportedly, heard throughout the reign of Hitler in Nazi Germany. Quite actually, we were already there, what with a National ID and next, we are going to have to present a “vaccination card.” So yes indeed, we are in the phase of “Papers, please!” Hell, we need papers for everything from our birth certificate, to our social security card, driver’s license or state ID, vehicle registration, insurance card, car inspection papers, passport, marriage certificate, divorce decree and don’t forget the information that the various credit reporting agencies have on us. But when you look around you, do you see any signs of freedom, democracy or justice? Get back to me on that, will ya?

This Is Exactly Who And What We Are!

Take a good look at the picture and tell me that this is not who and what we are!

Whatever happened to protecting family that you love??!! But a goddamn phone??!!! Seriously??!!!

When I saw this shit in a store, I just had to take a picture of it to show just how stupid we are; how completely gone we are in that most of us can just bypass a display of this type and think nothing of it because it is true for most. I don’t have a smartphone and I will never use one and so for me, what the hell do I need to protect a damn device for? I don’t.

“Protect the things you love.”

And there is no picture of family, friends and other loved ones. This is a picture of a white woman staring at a smartphone with a cover on it and the words, “Protect the things you love.” There are no pictures of a smiling baby in her arms with the caption, “Protect what you love.” There is a smartphone in a woman’s hand and we are told that it is something that we love and so protect it at all costs because it is more important than your own children, your spouse, your mother, your father and even you. Protect that damn phone!

“Protect the things you love.”

There is no need to protect your health. Don’t love ‘good health’. Protect a phone that is going to help cause your death because 5G technology is going to see to that. And if you are any doubt as to the truth in what I just wrote, go here if you feel the need to learn why 5G cellphone technology is going to kill your ass.

5G isn’t yet widely available, but it’s coming!

US 5G Rollout

Verizon: Fixed and mobile 5G is live in a few areas
AT&T: Mobile 5G for select customers in 19 cities; wider coverage in 2019
T-Mobile: Commercial 5G launch in second half of 2019; nationwide coverage expected in 2020
Sprint: Deploying 5G to four markets on May 31
U.S. Cellular: 5G services coming in second half of 2019
C Spire: Fixed 5G services in Mississippi
Charter: Testing 5G, but no solid rollout plans
Starry: Fixed 5G currently in Boston, Denver, LA, New York City, and Washington DC

“Protect the things you love.”

Never mind that this thing is going to kill you and your family. “Protect this thing you love.” Never mind that no one is sounding the alarm over what the harmful technology behind cellphones is doing to you as you “protect this thing you love.”

“Protect the things you love.”

Smartphones, personal assistants, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, killer cellphone towers and radiation from those towers are what you love because if you didn’t, you’d be screeching and wailing that someone needs to put a stop to this shit. But you won’t. You’ve got friends all across the globe who ‘like’ everything you post on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and in order for them to ‘like’ your shit, you need that killer technology. You need it more than you need those who are in your immediate vicinity because look around you. There are nothing but cell towers and people looking down at smartphones as if their very lives depend on what is scrolling down a screen. I actually mourn decades long gone because we did not have this stupid shit. We had not embraced, with fervor, that which is going to kill us. We don’t even look up and see that we are being fucked up because we are liking being hypnotized by these gadgets that have dumbed us down and made us apathetic and complacent. We don’t need to get up off the couch to do anything because there is an app for everything on that goddamn smartphone that we “protect because we love it.” How sad is that? That smartphone is the first thing you pick up in the morning before you even see your own child. That smartphone is the last thing you look at before you close your eyes to sleep. And you make sure that it’s charging. You have no idea how sad assed you really are; none! Because you’ve been brainwashed, willingly into complying with everything that’s being done to strip away any rights we ever had because now when you look up, you’re at an airport forced to damn near strip naked to be searched before you board a plane and the only reason you know this is because you have got to hand that smartphone over to a TSA official, who seventeen years ago, was never even thought of. But by all the christians in hell, you’d beat the shit out of that TSA agent if he failed to hand you back this thing you love, your smartphone. It’s your lifeline.

You have never questioned why after September 11, 2001, a mere two months later, you’re being damn near strip searched and/or radiated in order to board a plane. The Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002. The Patriot Act was passed in 2005. And each and every single one of these events cost us our ‘freedom’. Although truth be told, those of us who are American descendants of slaves never had any freedoms to begin with. But we have to be violated at airports the same as whites.

September 11, 2001 was an excuse to bring to an end, any pretense that this shithole was ever about freedom, justice and rights and yet, we sit somewhere not even noticing that what we are directed to protect is a goddamn smartphone when what we should have been protecting was each other and in doing so, we would have said, “Hell no!” to The Department of Homeland Security, to the Patriot Act, to TSA agents and to every entity this fucked up useless ass government started up for the express purpose of stripping ‘U.S.’ of any rights we ever thought we had.

“Protect the things you love.”

Oh, you’re doing that alright! Since a smartphone is most definitely, what you love! Family, freedom, justice, rights? Who needs ’em??!!

 

You Can’t Reason With The Stupid!

 

If their smartphones should go dead,
there’ll be many filled with dread.

If the lights go out and stay,
then there’ll be no games to play.

When there are no more distractions, will they open their eyes and see,
that the world is filled with people beyond just you and me.

But will the selfish become caring or simply wail for their toys,
and of those who’ve known the truth, will they be heard above the noise?

If you’re ever in any doubt as to how Americans will act,
just look at all the times their credit card’s been hacked.

These are people who never learn, they will never rally around.
Their heads are in the clouds, their feet don’t touch the ground.

You can’t reason with the stupid and believe me, I did try!
I finally gave it up, do I need to tell you why?

These are the very people who when polled are quite unsure,
if the economy is improving or if they’re sinking in manure.

When a world is in crisis with people fleeing left and right,
Americans’ only concern is what will fill them with delight.

Give them their distractions so that they don’t have to see
a child stumbling across the desert because she is a refugee.

Written by,
Shelby I. Courtland
©2014 Shelby I. Courtland

Truer words were never typed, written or spoken.

 

 

 

This Is Why I Give Up On So Called ‘Humans’, ‘Humans’ Will Do Anything For Money

A fellow blogger that I follow had posted some beautiful poetry and I went to his blog and he had also posted a video and when I clicked on the video, the blogger and his wife were sitting down to engage in what they called, ‘mukbang’. Now, I had never heard of this mukbang before and so when I watched what it consists of, I found that mukbang is about sitting down, eating copious amounts of food and that this trend got its start in South Korea back in the early 2000s. When I clicked to stop the video from playing, videos just popped up on the screen with people who were already morbidly obese sitting somewhere shoveling garbage into their mouths with expressions of incredible rapture on their face as though they were enjoying the nectar of the gods. It has been stated that this phenomenon has caught on for many different reasons; some being that others watch people gorge themselves and it reduces their longing for unhealthy foods, others seem to get a kick out of encouraging people to ever more heights of gluttony to the point whereas they will send them money to continue to engage in gluttony. Youtube is shelling out big bucks to multiple mukbangers who have hundreds of thousands or even a million subscribers because of ad revenue on these mukbang sites and even other corporations are using these people to promote their ‘food’ on their Youtube channel by paying for the ‘food’ these people consume while sitting somewhere with expressions of intense rapture on their face as they overindulge.

Unfortunately, the vast number of mukbangers seem to be American descendants of slaves who have, once again, picked up something that should never have been touched, much less so enthusiastically embraced. Eating yourself to death when American descendants of slaves already have a higher prevalence of diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol and obesity than the general population is not something that should be embraced at all. Again I ask the question, what the hell is wrong with us that we will take up everything that we shouldn’t? I just don’t understand any of this.

Inside ‘mukbang’: How some professional binge-eaters earn thousands

In Korea, and now the U.S., people are watching strangers binge eat on YouTube. And many of the top stars are earning big bucks each monthFor years, people have been heading to YouTube to spend upwards of 60 minutes at a time to watch strangers consume 4,000 or more calories in one sitting. Not only that, many of these viewers are paying to indulge in this binge-viewing, binge-eating privilege. Today, this viral trend is only growing in the U.S.

It’s called mukbang (pronounced “mook-bong”), and it translates to “eating broadcast” in South Korea, where professional mukbangers can make up to $9,000 a month.

This is hard to watch, but I am posting this so that it may just get through to someone in that this is not something that you should take up and run with.

This woman, clearly, has no business starting this mukbang nonsense when she is as big as a whale. This is just gross and obscene. And with a small child in the house, she is setting  the worst possible example. Look at her arm. As big as she is, there is no way that this woman can wipe her own ass, much less bathe herself. She is the very last person who should be asking people to give her ideas on what foods they would like to see her stuff her face with also while stating that someone else will do the cooking, enabling her to kill herself.

 

And if that is not bad enough,

 

She has her young daughter participating in this mess!

Her child is looking up to her for guidance and this is what she is learning. Where is child welfare?

 

This next one is even more sickening!

She actually sits there and eats a sandwich with three ‘meat’ patties on it, a huge helping of fries, a fish sandwich and washes it all down with lemonade. Meanwhile, her young daughter sits beside her with a container of fries during this mukbang. For the love of !!!!!

 

In my opinion, this is a clear case for the intervention of child services. Please go to her Youtube channel and you’ll find out all her business. Her channel is called, “Toya’s Goodies” and “Goodie” is her last name. This heifer sits down and does nothing but watches TV and eats all day and night.

And next up heifer number two and ‘biggie getting bigger’!

Here we have a married couple who lives with the wife’s mother in order to continue to eat copious amounts of food and travel America meeting up with others to post more videos of this mess together.

Look at all the animals that it took to feed these obese ‘humans’ who are doing this mess to get paid by one corporation to eat dead animals prepped in Supermarkets by yet another corporation while other ‘humans’ subscribe, like and even help pay for meals for these ‘humans’ to consume. This is just whacked!

Seriously???!!!!!!

 

Such as this is why I hardly blog anymore because what is the point? How can any sane person take up this disgusting display of gluttony? And for money! Everyone has gone crazy!

This man claims to have just completed his nursing training. Really??!!

 

His wife just completed her nursing training as well, or so she claims, and she also engages in this nonsense and the two have included their children in these mukbang videos as well. Child welfare, head on over to their channel and find out their specifics and take the children. Their channel is ‘Beastmode’ and ‘Queenbeast’. Yeah! They are certainly ‘beastly’ to their two children.

 

The next picture is a picture of this man’s wife and one of their children participating in this unhealthy mess!

If the adults want to act crazy, fine. But to include their children in this nonsense is just beyond the end of enough!

And this woman claims to have finished nursing school. She’ll more than likely drop dead over one of her patients. And I would certainly not want her as a nurse if she can happily feed her children such as this and see nothing wrong with it.

Here is a ‘mukbang’ with both husband, wife and their two kids. I am just outraged! They called this one their “MCDONALDS FAMILY MUKBANG!! “

 

While doing research for this, I discovered that the majority of mukbangers are American descendants of slaves. Now, those in the above picture are Haitian. But the rest are American descendants of slaves and why we would take up something from South Korea and run with it is beyond me. Those people are not prone to fat like many in our group are. And to promote grossly unhealthy eating habits is absolutely appalling and to include your children in this mess makes it even worse. As I always say, “I no longer despair FOR us. I despair OF us!

To those of you who are reading this, think long and hard about the choices you make because they can and will have a most lasting detrimental impact on you and your health and that of your children. If you don’t care about yourself, at least try and pretend to care about your children. Are Youtube dollars worth the health, well being and safety of your children? Is eating yourself to death while pursuing a nursing degree an act of sanity? Is encouraging your spouse to engage with you in unhealthy eating really a great way to grow old together in reasonably good health? What is wrong with you? Morbid obesity, heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer and much more are not worth Youtube subscribers, likes and Youtube dollars. You can’t spend money when you are dead. No one on Youtube is going to give a shit when you are no longer posting mukbang videos due to the fact that the Fire Department in your area had to come in with a forklift and get your dead carcass out of the building and to the morgue. Something to think about because this shit’s not funny. I feel so sorry for the children of these people because they don’t know any better, but the parents should!

It gets worse!

As if what they are about to eat is bad enough, in the next picture they include their child in this mess. Child Protective Services, where are you when children of parents like this need you??!!!

 

The child is going to grow up to be just like these two horrors!

Where are the ‘parenting skills’ because who told these two obese idiots that it was okay to include children in this gluttony?

 

And again!

Lawd have mercy!

 

Are we all sickened by this display yet?

These people do this mess, day after day after day and “Coldest Water” sponsor many of them. Is “Coldest Water” going to also pay for their funeral?

 

Because surely, they are headed for an early demise.

Okay, I’ve seen all that I can take at this point!

Freedom Rider: Social Media’s Danger to the Black Left

 

Margaret Kimberley is, once again, saying what I have been saying ALL along.

Of course Black Agenda Report utilizes social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to communicate with readers. Any individual or organization who needs to connect with large groups of people does so as well. But our adversaries know that too and have embarked on unprecedented efforts to diminish black and left voices or silence them altogether. The change was announced quite publicly in November 2016 when the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post presented the infamous Propornotlist. This anonymous group claimed that some 200 sites, including Black Agenda Report, were susceptible to Russian propaganda, hence the propaganda or not label.

Social media is dangerous precisely because we use it voluntarily. We voluntarily provide personal information to strangers at Facebook, which is seen as harmless and even benign. But Facebook recently decided that planned demonstrations against white supremacists in Washington were created on orders from the Kremlin and removed their information from the site which everyone uses to promote their activity.

The dystopian world of the novel 1984 is here but in an even worse way than Orwell imagined. In his imagination Big Brother interposed himself into the lives of ordinary people. But in 2018 the people are giving their enemies information that may be used to harm them. Humans are loathe to go backwards but that is what we must start considering. We may well have to time travel to the days of rotary phones and pieces of paper. Otherwise we are giving our enemies ammunition that they will surely use.

 

Telling ALL your business on Facebook and tweeting where you are going to be on Twitter and using YouTube to post videos from your home would be great if we had any rights left, but we don’t. The government can come and yank you up out of your chair and haul you away, detain you indefinitely and not ever give you a reason why. Just ask those who are still detained in Guantanamo and in secret facilities stationed all across this planet.

As Margaret Kimberley said, “people are giving their enemies information that may be used to harm them and any individual or organization who needs to connect with large groups of people does so as well. But our adversaries know that too and have embarked on unprecedented efforts to diminish black and left voices or silence them altogether.”

And though I am not on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform, I also know that what I post on WordPress is and can be used against me at any time. However, with that having been said, I have used this platform to try and discourage people from relying on the very tools we have been relying on in order to pass information back and forth because at least by limiting ourselves as much as possible, we make it harder for so-called ‘Big Brother’ to know our every move. For instance, why do you think I have posted multiple times, the need to use cash instead of opting for that credit/debit card? It is to limit to some extent, our purchase history to those who are targeting us for surveillance. At least with cash, they cannot trace everything we buy, but they most certainly can with credit/debit cards and also, cash cannot be hacked, credit/debit cards are still being hacked even with the chip that’s been newly installed in some of them.

Also, don’t forget that Facebook has allowed third parties to make use of your information without your knowledge and you have been targeted for certain ads based on the information you supplied to Facebook. Many of you have ditched your landline phones and instead opted for smartphones which are touted at every opportunity for a reason; the reason being that every single tap of that phone sends information about you to spy central. The NSA, The CIA, The FBI and god only knows what other governmental agency is gathering data on us to be used against us in case we ever were to get our act together and attempt to beat back against those who are our oppressors. Because make no mistake, they are watching everything we do because there are more of us than there are of them and they are well aware of that fact. Why do you think the police have been told to kill and they will never be found guilty? Because they are the line of defense between us and our oppressors. I would not trust a cop as far as I could throw him/her since they have already sided with those who oppress us all.

There is a reason that we are constantly bombarded with Russia is behind this and Russia did that because then they can claim that our sites are actually controlled by Russian agents and that comments are made by Russian bots and so shut that shit down. Dissent is to be kept in check because an awakened population is a dangerous population. Keep the sheeple distracted and hypnotized and they are unaware of how fucked they are. As long as the smartphones are working and people are playing on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter and sharing photos on Instagram and purchasing upgraded smartphones, all is well. But the minute that shit ceases, there will be hell to pay because then the ‘powers that be’ know that the oppressed people of this world have awakened and are not going to sit still for being spoon fed fake ass employment numbers, false economic figures and they will figure out that they are being fed shit and told it’s caviar.

Go back to landline phones before they are completely phased out. I would suggest that ‘enter the carrier pigeons, but I just read that pigeons are dying out. So, there goes that avenue. However, don’t forget that before the previous few decades, people did manage to come together in massive protests. The Civil Rights Movement is proof of that, the Montgomery Bus Boycott is proof of that. Black people know the deal and we have been trying to teach it to whites since, forever. Even if you have to read back through history as to how people communicated with one another, do that if you can’t remember. But it is essential that we pull back from these so-called ‘social media’ platforms that were designed to spy on us and go back to the basics. It is essential that we ditch this new technology that has hijacked our lives. What serious need have you for Alexa and Siri? It is not too late yet, but we are getting there and I wouldn’t fight against going back if I were you. Believe me, those who pull the strings of the puppet politicians all across this planet do not have our best interest at heart. Just look around. Can’t you tell? From Amazon workers who have to piss in containers in order not to miss deadlines to get your order shipped to you, from Apple product makers overseas who would rather jump out of an 8th story window and commit suicide than continue under horrid working conditions to Walmart workers who have to apply for food stamps to feed their children and Medicaid to get them health care to workers at Disney World and Disney Land who have to live in motels because they don’t make enough to rent even a studio apartment or a room in a rooming house; those people are being shitted on and those of us who are using Apple products, who are shopping at Walmart, who are purchasing everything online from Amazon, who are running to Disney World and Disney Land, are complicit in what the ‘elites’ are doing to those who are in the same predicament that each and every one of us will soon be in. You had better recognize and get with the program that what is happening to them, we are not immune to it happening to us.

We once had sustainable communities where we looked out for one another. We don’t have that anymore. We don’t know who our neighbor is, but yet, we are chatting via Facebook live with someone clear across the planet. What can they do for us when the shit is hitting the fan in our neighborhood? Not a damn thing. Put those overpriced products of distraction down and recognize what is important and what is important is our REAL relationship with the people we live around. Those relationships are what will matter. Do all you can to preserve them. Help your neighbor when you can and you will find that the way things used to be before the advent of the internet, social media and smartphones was the better way. Technology is not our friend and I hope that we will realize this before it is too late.

I Was Not Caught Up In The Facebook Data Breach! Were You Caught Up In The Facebook Data Breach?

 

You probably were!

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has found itself under fire for permitting a third-party application managed by a notorious political outfit to scoop up the details of 50m of its users for use in targeted advertising.

As explosive revelations continue to come to light, spearheaded by whistleblower Christopher Wylie, Facebook has found itself arguing the semantics of what constitutes a “data breach.” But for the millions of users whose account details were abused without consent, it may be useful to now check their app settings.

Yeah! Check your app settings. I don’t have to because I don’t have a smartphone, nor am I on Facebook because you see, I figured out from the gitgo that any entity that wanted as much information about a person as Facebook wanted, was up to no good. Apparently, not many of you were concerned about that fact. Facebook and other platforms calling themselves, ‘social media’ are set up for the express purpose of stealing your information to use for nefarious purposes and many of you stupidly allow this just so that you can communicate with folks that you think you need to communicate with. Some of you say that it is easy to set up meetings with others who are in a particular group or that Facebook has made it easy to connect with long lost family members or school friends and so this, apparently, more than makes up for the fact that the information that you had to supply to Facebook is now in the hands of who the hell knows who. And if you think that since this data breach has surfaced, that you will hear the whole truth and nothing but the truth, are you really THAT stupid? Probably!

Let me ask you this. Can you recall a time before there was a Facebook? How diminished was your life before Facebook? So? What? You had no REAL friends before Facebook and so now that you have Facebook and you’ve got ‘followers’, you now feel as though your life is complete? How many times do you meet face to face with those newfound friends and family members? How many have you had to ‘unfollow’ because their politics clashed with yours or they wrote something that just pissed you off?

We have turned our entire lives over to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit and some I’ve probably never heard of and we are fine with that because we are made to feel as though we belong to a ‘community’ when in reality, we’re just hooked up in the matrix. You cannot get unplugged now because they’ve got you locked in good and tight. How in the world could you function without that smartphone filled with apps? You cannot do a damn thing without that smartphone. It is the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you put down at night because it is filled with everything you think you need. How sad is that? But then, you’re not sad, are you? You’ve got ‘friends’ all over the world. You’ve found long lost relatives who were lost to you for decades and now you get to share with them the fact that you are going on vacation in just a few short months and the kids have grown so big and if not for that smartphone and Facebook, you’d never have ‘virtually met’ and you can’t wait to meet in real time.

Oh what a joy technology is until you find out that with that technology comes a price; the price of your privacy. But then, that’s not a problem because the reason why some entity has access to almost every detail of your life is because you were willing to give up any pretense of privacy you had when you neglected to read the fine print before accepting the TOS(Terms of Service). And now a data breach has been recently ‘discovered’ and your information is in the hands of political organizations, and just about every app you have installed on that smartphone of yours.

“When you install an app, you give it permission to access your public profile, which includes your name, profile pictures, username, user ID (account number), networks and any info you choose to make publicly available,” the U.S. social networking giant says online. “You also give the app other info to personalize your experience, including your friends list, gender, age range and locale.”

So not only have you given up your information to an app, you’ve also given up information regarding those ‘friends’ you have. And now every name on your ‘friend’ list has been accessed by every app that you’ve installed and that information does what? Just sits there harmlessly collecting dust? Don’t be naive. That information is being gathered about you and is being sold and distributed. But the good news is, you’ve got a shitload of ‘friends’ and that makes it all worth while.

As social media sites continue to gather extensive information about their users’ attitudes and behavior, public concern is growing that this information could be exploited,” said Rachel Neaman, CEO of Corsham Institute, a digital rights group. “Whether the issue is legitimate advertising…or fake news, it’s high time that the public were given insight into how they are being targeted and by whom.”

Targeted and exploited? Who cares? Facebook and other social media entities are all good! They connect us to people we wouldn’t ordinarily connect with and for that, we’d give our right arm. Well, wouldn’t we? Apparently, since we’ve given them everything else.