Little bits: Opting out of ads, or not; About Boris; Republican Party authoritarianism

From the Lying to Consumers Is Fun & Profitable Files: The Digital Advertising Alliance runs a website that allegedly lets people opt out of being tracked by the 123 companies that track people on the internet and then use or sell the stolen information for profit. I went there to opt out of all of them. I apparently successfully opted out of 48, but 75 of the opt-out requests were "not completed." I tried to opt out of those 75 four more times, but was unable to do so each time.

While opting out was underway

Opting-out was done

Final result, oops 75 won't let me escape their 

capitalist clutches, bwahahahaha!

Trying again does not work

Some of the ones that kept me trapped

Companies starting with letter A

Temporarily unavailable means 

permanently unavailable 

Oooh! Google kept me trapped

So did FreeWheel, GroundTruth and GumGum

So did Xaxis, Yahoo, Yieldmo & Ziff Davis

(Yieldmo = yields more profit)

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About Boris: At the Safari Park north of San Diego, there's a part of the park that has lots of different cacti, aloe and other interesting succulents and caudiciform plants from all over the world. One of the cacti we walk past to get to that area is Boris. 

See why we call him Boris?

The other Boris

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In another sign of increasing anti-democracy authoritarian sentiment among Republican elites, the GOP in Florida has imposed a loyalty pledge on Republican candidates before they will be allowed on the ballot. Radical Republican hostility toward free and fair elections could not be much clearer. The Hill writes:

Former President Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and their fellow Republican candidates vying for the White House in 2024 will have to pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee in order to get on the primary ballot in the Sunshine State, the state GOP said.

“The pledge – which is the word-for-word the same language as the RNC pledge – was requested and passed by our members to ensure maximum unity heading into the General Election,” Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler told The Hill.

“The days of party grifters such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger using Republican Party resources to secure a title and then weaponize that title against our own team must end. Contested primaries are part of the process, but we must always remember that the Democrats are the true threat to the America we love, and we must be unified to defeat every single one of them,” Ziegler said.

If that isn't blatant authoritarianism with Party über alles in der Welt as the guiding moral value, what is it? Tolerance of honest dissent? 

Even worse, those hypocrite elites have the gall to call Cheney and Kinzinger grifters. That is the pot calling the kettle black. Voters put those two in power, but Republican elites do not care what voters want. They care about what they want first and foremost, mindless, blind loyalty to the morally rotted authoritarian GOP. Other than campaign contributions, most everything else is just silly froth to the elites. 

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The AP writes about a split in the Methodist Church over the LGBQT issue:

More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.

Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year.

Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.   

But amid increased defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches, many conservatives decided to launch the separate Global Methodist Church, saying they believed the sexuality issues reflected deeper theological differences.

A lot of Christians do not love LGBTQ people. One might even say some hate them. One can only wonder what those "deeper theological differences" might be? Did God say that LGBQT people should be discriminated against?