Welcome to #SMH Fridays! Obviously, that’s Internet speak for “shaking my head” Fridays, but you already knew that. 

Here at Red Alert Politics we spend entirely too much time on the internet and some of the things that we see out there are just absolutely astonishing/mind-blowing/horrifying/disgusting/trendy/weird/insert any adjective here. As such, we have decided to start #SMH Fridays as a way to share those stories with you.


In this weekly series, our staff members will share their favorite “That’s So Internet” story in this post, along with their unfiltered commentary. Here’s last week’s edition for the gist of what it’s all about. Enjoy!

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Ashley Dobson

There was a lot going on in the news this week, but it seemed like a good portion of my Facebook feed only wanted to talk about the world's most ass-inine story.

News outlets all over the web proclaimed, "Woman in Coma After Her Butt Implants Explode During Squat Routine."

The story apparently went something like this:

"Serena Beuford, 27, is in a coma after her butt implants popped while she was working out, WOAI reports. She was at a local Boston gym doing squats when the implants broke down. Beuford apparently yelled that her butt was gone before she collapsed. According to several sources, a patron at the gym, Jewel, said this is what happened: "I heard a loud popping noise followed by the woman falling to the floor. She was screaming my ass is gone! I had no idea what she was talking about until I saw her cushion like butt missing when EMS took her out the gym. She used to always show off her butt in the gym and tried to get guys attention with her work outs." ...According to her sister, Beuford was filming an Instagram video and hoped to get famous for her 64-inch butt. She had gotten the implants from an unlicensed clinic that is now under investigation. Doctors say Beuford will require surgery, as the exploding implants caused some serious damage to her rectum, colon, and lower intestines."


Too bad the story is completely fake.

Cosmopolitan, local news stations in Boston, and even NBC ran the story before discovering that the original "news" item came from a fake news site called Newswatch33. Cosmo even tried to make theirs into a PSA about the dangers of getting unlicensed implants, using poor Serena as the tragic victim of this growing problem.

Fake butt explosions. This is the state of news today.

Is there anything else to do but #SMH?

 

Maria Santos

This week Lena Dunham wrote a heartrending piece for the New Yorker on why her boyfriend doesn’t want to marry her—and how she’s tragically justifying that to herself, because feminism?

You see, Lena Dunham’s boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, once “struggled” with the concept of supporting straight marriage, as long as gay marriage remained illegal. This struggle was “real and raw for Jack,” she writes, so they made a vow: they would not get married until it was legal for all their gay friends to do the same. 

Dunham loved Antonoff’s principled stand, and “said it proudly whenever I had the chance, with the grandiosity and intimations of sacrifice you hear from certain lesser vegans.”

This year, of course, all that changed. After the gay marriage decision, suddenly, Lena found herself subjected to the same external and internal pressure as every other 20-or-30-something in a serious relationship—“So, when’s the wedding??” her friends texted.

And because she’s Lena, and everything in her life happens in the public sphere, she tweeted:

But Jack was seemingly not very interested in all this talk of marriage. Lena wonders, “Had a perfectly earnest moral and political stance actually been a convenient stalling tactic?”

There’s much more to the essay, which goes on to detail Lena’s own conflicted feelings about the whole business of marriage—a girl raised by a diehard feminist, who still longs for “the fluffy white dress”—but in the end, we come to the truly sad part:

I wondered just how many straight couples with showy progressive politics were facing the same conversations and questions (along with newly empowered L.G.B.T.Q. couples). All around the country, were guys with asymmetrical haircuts and girls with tattoos turning away from each other in bed and muttering things like, “I thought you were more serious about this?” […] I like living in that uncertainty while other people celebrate their hard-won right to have just what they grew up dreaming of, with no caveats. I like admitting that my feminism and my femininity are not fully formed or in perfect harmony. I like being a guest, for now. Aunt Bonnie, keep the dress in the box. But don’t throw it away.

It’s hard to get through this essay and believe that Lena—or her millions of fans—are actually happy with an ideology even they admit forces them into a disharmonious world of contradictions.

Meghan Keenan


[caption id="attachment_141318" align="aligncenter" width="5070"] (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File) 

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Coming back from over a week of traveling outside the country and being extremely out of the loop, I was shocked to discover upon my return that Donald Trump is now leading several national polls of Republican primary voters.

The most recent Fox News poll on Thursday showed Trump leading the crowded GOP field holding 18 percent of the vote. 44 percent of voters said Trump is “basically right” in his comments about the Mexican government sending drugs and rapists to the U.S., while 59 percent of Republicans say they admire Trump, and more and more people seem to be applauding him for his ‘tell it like it is’ attitude.

Trump also topped a national poll conducted by Suffolk University and USA TODAY released on Tuesday.

I’m confused as to how within a week or two he went from the laughingstock of the Republican field to the top contender…but I guess we can take comfort in the fact that only 25 percent of Americans take Trump seriously as a candidate, and he still trails far behind Hillary.

Ryan James Girdusky

I have been talking about crime and immigration even before the arrival of Donald Trump to the presidential race or the murder of Kate Steinle. It has always been my philosophy that America should only be taking the best, brightest, and most law-abiding from the rest of the world.

First and foremost, obviously not a majority of immigrants commit crimes-- that shouldn't be shocking or enlightening --but the official number of crimes committed by immigrants is depressed by government statistics. Not just crimes committed by illegal immigrants but also by people who come to this country legally. The crimes they commit is a bigger slap in the face because our immigration officials checked them out first, and they still averted the rule of law.

For years now, liberals, libertarians, and open border advocates have come out with the same responses, saying that illegals don't commit crime at the same level as Americans and most crimes are simple harmless drug crimes.

But the truth is that we have absolutely no idea how many immigrants commit crimes.  The government does not do a thorough search, often times working only with criminal convicts who self-report that they're in the country illegally.

Congress requested in 2011 an official total of all criminal aliens in the country. The Government Accountability Office reported there were an absolute minimum estimate of 351,000 between federal, state, and local facilities but admitted that this number was "a portion of the total population of criminal aliens who may be incarcerated at the state and local level."

The GAO excluded all legal immigrants in state and local prisons, convicted illegal aliens for whom the state did not request reimbursements from the federal government, prisoners whose country of birth wasn't determined, naturalized immigrants, anchor babies, immigrants without at least one felony or two misdemeanors, immigration detainees, and immigrants who received Reagan's 1986 amnesty.

So here are some quick facts about immigration and crime that very few are reporting:
 -According to a study by the University of Illinois at Chicago, 70 percent of illegal immigrants and 44 percent of Latinos are less likely to report a crime to the police if they have been a victim. Proving that the number of crimes authorities even know about is smaller than those being committed. -The United States Sentencing Commission's Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics reported in 2012 that 46 percent of federal offenses were committed by non-citizens including 9 percent of all murderers, 31 percent of all drug traffickers, 49 percent of all kidnappers, 31 percent of all money launderers, 17 percent of all auto thieves, and 24 percent of all federal-level fraud. Non-citizens represent 8.6 percent of the nation's adult population and those numbers don't even include legal immigrants who are citizens. -The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprise 20 percent of inmates in prisons and jails. The foreign-born are 15.4 percent of the nation’s adult population. -The Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 26.4 percent of inmates in federal prisons are non-U.S. citizens. Non-citizens are 8.6 percent of the nation’s adult population. -According to Mark Spencer, the president of the Phoenix police union, illegal aliens made up 50 percent of all the arrests for DUIs and drug dealing in Arizona in 2010. -Of the 8,145 criminal aliens released by the local police of sanctuary cities from January 2014 to September 2014, a total of 1,900 were re-arrested in the next eight months for committing over 4,300 crimes according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

While I emphasized earlier that most immigrants, legal or illegal, do not commit heinous crimes, there is more to the official numbers than the media is informing us and it makes me SMH!