5

China's "Social Credit" System Is Now Up And Running

"Imagine a future where your whole life was scored like social media, and a bad score means you lose your rights!" That was the seemingly preposterous premise of a 2016 Black Mirror episode featuring Bryce Dallas Howard. Apparently, it is now a reality in China. The government is slowly rolling out a "social credit" system, wherein every citizen gets a score that, if too low, can wall them off from the routine amenities of modern life.

The stated purpose of the system is to help citizens "trust each other again," though I wonder if the people who were denied plane or train tickets 23 million times last year for committing often-minor offenses are feeling more or less trusting than before. The kind of stuff that can get you discredited varies wildly, from tax evasion to acting like a dickhead on the bus, all the way down to leaving a bicycle on a footpath or not paying bills on time. To be fair, they're still ironing out the wrinkles and are assuring everyone that it will eventually be much, much worse.

For example, the system denied a guy a plane ticket back home (stranding him 1,200 miles away) because he was deemed "untrustworthy" for having failed to carry out a court order two years prior. He must've done some fucked-up shit, right? Nope. He was ordered to issue a written apology, which was then deemed "insincere." Oh, well, he must've committed some horrible crime that warranted an extremely sincere apology, right? Ha! No. He's a lawyer, and his offense was mishandling a client's statement, which it turned out wasn't even his fault. Weird, it's almost like it's arbitrary and dystopian by design, and they want everyone to constantly live in a state of cowed paranoia.

4

Someone Killed Five Women In A Bank, And It Barely Made Headlines

I remember a time when it would have been a pretty fucking big story if a man executed five random women in a bank, apparently for the hell of it. But this incident in Sebring, Florida occurred 1) after so many other mass shootings and 2) in the middle of an All Trump All The Time news cycle -- in this case, right at the climax of the U.S. government shutdown over the border wall funding back in January.

So it barely made headlines when Zephen Xaver allegedly walked into a SunTrust Bank on a weekday afternoon with a gun he'd bought the week before. He, or someone who did an almost magical job of framing him, shot five people execution-style: four bank employees and one customer, all women. He then called the police himself and told them what he had done.

And no, this wasn't a robbery gone awry. Police say Xaver had no intention of walking out with any money. He also had no connection to anyone in the bank, ruling out some kind of personal vendetta. In fact, investigators haven't discovered a motive for any of this, but as with most mass shooters, it wasn't exactly out of the blue. The guy's ex-girlfriend says he used to constantly talk about death, and even got kicked out of school for "having a dream that he killed everybody in his class." She tried warning people that he was going to kill someone, but no one intervened, because the modern world still doesn't know how to.

3

An 11-Year-Old Student Was Arrested After Refusing To Stand For The Pledge Of Allegiance

It's weird how the "football players shouldn't protest the anthem" crowd didn't make a big stink out of this story about a black child who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and the substitute teacher who then had him arrested. It's almost like they wouldn't give a shit about this kind of stuff if they weren't being egged on by a vast culture war industrial complex.

The boy had been refusing to stand for the pledge all year out of protest. That was well within his rights, and everyone seemed to acknowledge that. But then a substitute named Ana Alvarez filled in for his regular teacher. She asked the boy why he wasn't standing for the pledge, and he told her he didn't feel like pledging allegiance to a racist country. She later told the police that she asked the boy, "why if it was so bad here he did not go to another place to live."

My gut tells me that the boy's wife and four kids, along with his job at the auto plant, make leaving the country all but impossible, but then my brain tells me that he's 11 and she's an idiot. To her absurd question, the boy answered: "They brought me here."

Alvarez, who, in the political cartoon I'm imagining was at some point kicked in the head by a horse that said "Fox News" on it, replied by saying, "Well you can always go back, because I came here from Cuba, and the day I feel I'm not welcome here anymore, I would find another place to live." She says the boy got disruptive, so the school's "resource officer" was called in and the boy was arrested. Note: Children of any age can be arrested in Florida. That sounds harsh, but will you still think that way when you're mugged in a dark Miami alley by a gang of hardcore toddlers? I think not.

2

A Man Was Arrested For A Pot Cookie, Then Died In Jail From Neglect

Chris Howard was on probation after a New Year's DUI. On the following Valentine's Day, he and his girlfriend shared a pot cookie. He wound up in jail the next day when he violated his probation by failing a drug test, because imagine a world in which people like this were allowed to just sit at home on their sofas in peace.

Then things got much, much worse. Chris's girlfriend says he hadn't eaten much on the day of his arrest. This normally wouldn't be a big deal, but Chris had a genetic disorder called medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency, less obnoxiously referred to as MCADD. The condition prevents the body from converting fats to energy, especially if the sufferer hasn't eaten much. People with MCADD are prone to seizures, but Chris had never had one until he was in the jail cell.

Deputies saw Chris experiencing what was very clearly a medical emergency, and so, against the advice of the county jail's nursing staff, they put him in a solitary observation cell. Why? Well as one deputy explained it:

1

Cities Across America Are Being Held Hostage By Ransomware

Looks like we're bookending this list with corny sci-fi plots come to life, and why the hell not? "Evil hackers are holding entire cities for ransom, threatening to leave them in ruins if their demands aren't met! Can super-hacker Jax Cyberman (Emilio Estevez) defrag the mainframe in time?"