Bad

Below is a list of horribly bad, true things that have happened, many of them perpetrated by the US government.

  • 2017.01.22: Russia just decriminalized spousal abuse that doesn't result in "grave bodily harm":
  • 2016.12.05: Even within jail, minorities have it worse --
  • 2016.11.22: Are you an American citizen peacefully opposing the status quo, especially when lots of money is involved? Expect this treatment:
  • 2016.10.26: AT&T secretly collects data about you and sells it to police without requiring a warrant:
  • 2016.09.02: Chris Hedges on what's in store for the US based on his experience covering other countries:
  • 2016.08.28: During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" said something positive about Bernie Sanders, Debbie Wasserman Schultz called up the president of MSNBC to ensure that MSNBC would be more pro-Hillary Clinton and anti-Bernie Sanders. At the time, Schultz was the head of the DNC (Democratic National Committee), which determines how many debates there are. She is Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager, and was forced to resign after WikiLeaks published proof that high-ranking DNC officials, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had abused their power within the DNC to unfairly favor Hillary over Bernie.

  • 2016.08.21: The Nixon administration cracked down on drugs as an excuse to target black and the anti-war left:

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

  • 2016.08.15: "Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies". In Orwell's 1984, "to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense." "Microsoft’s Realtime Crowd Insights could potentially pick out the stern faces of dissenters, or angry faces of future protestors, all in a matter of seconds."

  • 2016.08.15: The world's first confirmed target of the NSA's PRISM program is a peaceful pro-democracy activist in New Zealand:

More than 190 pages of top-secret NSA logs of intercepted communications dated between May and August 2012 show that the agency used the controversial internet surveillance system PRISM to eavesdrop on Fullman and other Fiji pro-democracy advocates’ Gmail and Facebook messages.

The man wrongly targeted "says he gets pulled out of airline queues for security searches every time he travels, and he has had trouble finding work since news reports following the raids in 2012 linked him to a Fiji assassination plan."

  • 2016.07.30: Explicit anti-black voter disenfranchisement:

North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. "This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID..." So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people... The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina's 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting.

  • 2016.06.10: As of March 2016, global warming has caused a 2°C increase in global temperature:



  • 2016.05.07: Obama's hypocrisy:


  • 2016.02.27: Lying FBI forensics people:

EDIT: Sounds like there's something called "Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange" that is quantum-resistant. Whew.

Note

This page has been updated since October 2015, and the dates above are the dates when each entry was created/when I found out about the event noted, not necessarily when the event occurred.