You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

The humorist Dave Barry would sometimes get stories from his staff that he would riff on and often reminded his readers, “You can’t make stuff like this up!” 

 

That has become the new norm in the news. Idiots we have always had, but never have they been given so much public voice and the bar keeps getting lower and lower. Amongst the unbelievable stories of the last month:

 

• The new law in Georgia making it a crime to offer food or drink to voters standing on line.

 

• Republicans fighting the repeal of the 28-year Alabama law that you can’t teach yoga (because of Hindu indoctrination. )

 

• Larry Kudlow, former economic advisor to the POTUS-who-never-should-have-been  and commentator on FOX Business News, claiming that Biden’s proposed climate policies would mean you could only grill brussels sprouts at your 4^thof July barbecue and you’d have to drink plant-based beer (cutting out the usual meat-based beer?). 

 

But there’s more. This  just hot off the Associated News Press:

 

A private school founded by an anti-vaccination activist in South Florida has warned teachers and staff against taking the COVID-19 vaccine, saying it will not employ anyone who has received the shot.

The Centner Academy in Miami sent a notice to parents on Monday informing them of a new policy for its two campuses for about 300 students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. Teachers or staff who have already taken the vaccine were told to continue reporting to school but to stay separated from students.

Co-founder Leila Centner told employees in a letter last week that she made the policy decision with a “very heavy heart." Centner asked those who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine to wait until the end of the school year, and even then recommended holding off.

Centner stood by the decision Tuesday in a statement sent to The Associated Press, which featured the biologically impossible claim that unvaccinated women have experienced miscarriages and other reproductive problems just by standing in proximity to vaccinated people.

May I remind you that this is the leader of a school, an educational institution charged with the task of teaching children to think, to distinguish truth from fiction, to show them how scientists must back up their claims, how mathematicians can’t just say “1+1 =3 because I say so,” how historians can’t claim that America fulfilled its promise that “all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights.” And so on. 

And because future American citizens are going to schools like this, they’re likely to believe this breaking story:

“Yesterday police taking out their ticket book accidentally mistook their gun for a pencil and wounded a man who was giving brussels sprouts and meat-based beer to voters standing on line. A pregnant woman nearby started chanting ‘Hare Krishna’ after stretching her muscles in a suspiciously yoga-like way and then was rushed to the hospital because she started to miscarry having stood next to some vaccinated women. Commenting on the story, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed the whole incident on Jewish space lasers, while Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh said, ‘Hey, I like beer too!’ 

God Bless America.