Hello
I was able to leave the Hotel California,
but Stuff still Happened.
So what's up?
All right, preamble, I've got a story to tell you.
I have been an Elon Musk hater
since far before it was cool.
Backstory, I have spent over half of my life
as a professional technologist and software engineer.
I do content full-time now,
but that was my job before this.
In my time in tech, I met many a tech bro,
and of course they all like Musk.
I wanna say it was like 2013-ish
when I was originally putting Musk in the,
solidly in the "fuck this guy, he actually sucks" camp.
I remember having a colleague that was all about him
and like wanted to work at Tesla,
wanted to have a Tesla.
Fast forward a few years,
I think around the time of like the miners
that were stuck in a cave and Musk was like,
"I'm gonna make a submarine to get them out."
"Also, the guy who's currently leading the effort
to free them is a pedophile!"
Yeah, around that time, that coworker of mine was like,
"Okay, actually this guy is just crazy."
I know that we've now got those like bumper stickers
on Teslas that say something along the lines of like,
"I bought this before I knew Elon was terrible."
But we've known he's terrible for a long time.
People just haven't been paying attention.
And so it is triply frustrating for me
when I see people defending him up and down,
like some kind of genius,
when anyone who actually understands this stuff
knows that he is a moron at best and malicious at worst.
So with that out of the way,
let's talk about two of his goons
who have sort of like risen to the top of the radar
right now.
There's too much to cover, but let's focus on these.
The first up is 25 year old Marco Elez,
who recently resigned from his position in Doge
after a Wall Street Journal report
connected him to a now deleted Twitter account
that posted just overtly racist things,
self-described racist things.
He literally posted saying,
"I was racist before it was cool."
Hence my opening line of this show.
Now the Wall Street Journal published this article,
the guy resigned, and then Musk took to Twitter
where he posted a poll to his followers saying,
"Should I rehire him?"
And then J.D. Vance jumped on and was like,
"You know, he said some pretty bad things,
but we shouldn't reward journalists
who try to destroy people."
"And so for that reason, we should rehire the guy,
despite the fact that he said
we should normalize hating Indian people,
and my wife is Indian."
That's me being J.D. Vance, I guess.
So some back and forth happens,
and a whole bunch of stans on Twitter
are all encouraging Elon to rehire this "kid."
They keep saying it's just some kid,
and he made a mistake, and he has learned.
This was so long ago, and he's grown since then.
He's 25, and he was posting as recently as December,
like 2024, like a month and a half ago.
But I'm sure the 25-year-old who was 25
when posting that he was a racist,
learned a lot since then.
And so all the discussion was like,
"Oh, but this is America.
You're allowed to harbor whatever opinions you want,
and you shouldn't be punished for that.
That's a thought crime."
I feel like if you are in a position
in the federal government of America,
and you overtly state,
"I think that there are certain groups of people
"by skin color that are worthless,"
you probably shouldn't be in the federal government,
or alive.
He was literally calling for a eugenics-based
immigration policy.
Like, it's not, ugh.
And Elon then rolls up and says,
"To err is human, to forgive divine."
Because he thinks he's a fucking god.
But for some reason, forgive in this case
means fully reinstate and completely ignore
the abhorrent points of view espoused by this person,
and reinstall them as having direct access
to Treasury Department servers.
I feel like there's a different version of forgiveness
that we could do.
Like, saying, "Oh, well, you know,
"we're not gonna charge you with a hate crime,
"but you're not gonna work this job anymore."
I don't know.
I feel like, I feel like that's fair.
And so ultimately he's been reinstated,
because obviously, and a bunch of people
are arguing why 25 means kid,
and should be forgiven for having racist points of views.
Never let them live this down.
Never, ever, never.
Because if just a few parameters here
were just shifted a bit, this kid would be in jail.
But let's move on to the other one
that actually gets a bit wackier,
this time, 19-year-old Edward Coristine.
He also goes by Big Balls online.
If you're wondering what he looks like,
he looks like this, you shouldn't be surprised.
The 19-year-old who calls himself Big Balls
is now in a, quote, "elite team"
that is among the people who have access
to your personal information.
I mean your social security number,
your banking information.
Why does he have access?
I don't know.
What does that have to do with cleaning up
waste in the government?
I don't know.
But this kid, who is actually a kid,
because he's fucking 19, just two years ago,
when he was 17, was fired by his internship
for leaking company secrets.
Oh, maybe that was just like a little mistake.
Maybe he was just, you know,
didn't know the protocol and leaked it.
He was actively embedded in a well-known cybercrime ring.
He was bragging to them about having access
to the servers of the company he was working for,
which was a cybersecurity company.
Except it's also a cybersecurity company
that has a history of employing criminal black hat hackers.
The company, called Path Networks,
if you want to look up a thing,
just to dig a little deeper yourself,
you can Google about Cosmo the God.
That is a person that they previously employed.
After being fired from this company,
he went back to his hacker friends
and he was looking for a good source for DDoS for hire.
DDoS is distributed denial of service.
It's essentially a brute force cyber attack
where you try to take down a server by overwhelming it.
And if you want to look further
into some of the rings he was involved in,
you can just start by searching "The Com"
It's a whole rabbit hole.
If you're bored one day, go for it.
But in the newsletter, I've linked a very extensive piece
by KrebsOnSecurity that goes through all of this
and explains the actors involved,
the companies involved, and what all this stuff means.
So anyway, Big Balls also had an LLC called Tesla.Sexy,
starting to see a trend here.
And also on his own LinkedIn profile,
his most recent experience is listed as camp counselor.
And so ultimately a 19 year old
who leaks company information and has direct ties
to criminal hacking rings is now employed in the government
and has direct access to your information.
And there are people actively cheering this on
because they don't know what they're cheering on.
And if they do, and that's what they want,
then they're just busted.
I don't know what to say,
because I am 100% for a complete audit
of the money being moved around in this country.
There's too much of it going to places
that we don't know about.
The DOD hasn't been able to pass the audit in how long?
But that's not what they're fucking with.
They're trying.
I would be shocked if they did anything material there.
But instead they're digging through files
that they shouldn't have access to about citizens
Not the government officials,
who are also mostly just a political civil servants
who just keep the lights on.
The people that we're mad at as a reminder
are the elected officials who are taking
an untold amount of money from business interests.
That is where there is corruption.
People like Elon Musk himself,
who is a government contractor,
is now in charge of the systems that move money
to government contractors.
That is explicitly the corruption
that we need to get rid of.
But instead we're rehiring self-described racists,
and for some reason a 19 year old with no prior experience
has top secret access to everything.
I cannot tell you how much of my time was spent
just managing junior engineers around the ages of 19 to 25
and fixing all of their mistakes.
That was my job for like a decade,
was just preventing junior engineers from crashing systems.
And for some reason I don't think these guys
are magically exempt from the inherent dumbassery
of being a young man, a young white privileged man.
So yes, let's root out corruption.
Yes, let's get money out of politics.
I don't think that's what's happening right now.
Anyway, speaking of crime,
let's talk about a couple of heists.
Now I regret to inform you that I don't have
a big complete heist for you,
but instead I got two smaller things
and hopefully they add up to feel pretty good.
First off, how about them egg prices?
Because someone just stole 100,000 eggs
from a distribution truck in Pennsylvania.
Given the current price of eggs
due to inflation and bird flu and everything,
that amounts to about 40 grand worth of eggs.
That could be double tomorrow, who knows?
So this took place in Greencastle, PA,
if you're around that area and one of your friends is like,
hey, we're gonna do the ultimate omelet party.
Maybe question the source a bit, or don't.
You didn't see nothing.
And for the second one, this is just beautiful.
I love this.
Visionary storegoer, Dylan Rockwell,
had a literal crime ring.
He had a ring that he would wear
that had the barcode for tomato soup from Walmart on it.
He'd get what he wanted to buy in quotations
and he'd walk up to the self checkout and scan it.
The ring, that is.
Power tools, soup.
A new jacket, soup.
A $300 grill, soup.
Anyway, he got caught
and the local police were like, okay, that's pretty genius.
Thanks for your ingenuity.
He was charged with felony burgleury...
buh
he was charged with felony burglary and misdemeanor theft,
but he probably should be charged
with actually being a genius.
All right, policy stuff.
We're back, buckle up.
As of now, the Trump administration has effectively asked
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop operations.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
which is difficult to say even with the abbreviation,
was established in 2008 after the financial crisis
that fucked us all.
This is one of the few agencies whose explicit purpose
is to just protect the wallets of average citizens.
Since their inception,
they've returned about $20 billion back to US citizens
from banks that were taking advantage of us.
And so it has been a big target
of anyone with big corporate donors for a long time,
Again, if I wanted to materially improve the lives
of the people in this country
by helping to ensure that their tax money
is going towards causes that they expect them to go towards,
this wouldn't be one of the ways that I get rid of waste.
Investments in this agency result in more dollars out
back in your pocket than dollars in.
So every dollar that you pay to this agency
through your taxes, you've made more money,
purely just from disrupting schemes
from banks and financial institutions.
So there's that, they wanna get rid of that.
Meanwhile, Marco Rubio, who, by the way,
is our Secretary of State now.
Marco Rubio.
Anyway, little Marco is threatening Panama,
saying that if they don't do more
to reduce Chinese influence,
then America will have to "do what's necessary
to protect its national interests."
This comes on the heels of Trump loudly talking
about wanting to take the Panama Canal back,
as well as annex Greenland and Canada.
As I said last time, it was never a joke.
And recently, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada,
was overheard saying that it is a very real threat,
that Trump wants the minerals
and just resources from Canada.
None of which seems to be reducing federal spending,
which again, is something I would very much like to see.
Google would like to explicitly do evil
as they've updated their AI ethics principles
to remove wording that says that they wouldn't deploy
AI applications that could, quote, "cause harm."
They put out a blog post justifying the change,
being like, "It's a matter of national security and whatnot."
I would counter that by saying that I just recently
rewatched "Captain America Winter Soldier,"
and that's the plot of that movie.
Like specifically, that is the plot of the Nazis
in that movie, Hydra.
They're like, "Hey, we are gonna deploy this AI system
that takes out people using an algorithm."
And maybe we shouldn't have that be a thing, said...
...the good guys.
Now I'm not much of a deep thinker here,
but I watched that movie and I'm pretty sure
the Nazis were the bad guys.
Last thing on policy, it's the De-FART-ment of Education.
I didn't have a joke planned for this one,
just deal with it.
So the White House is working real hard to get rid
of the Department of Education,
and this has been a Republican talking point
for a long time.
Like it was established in the, what, 80s-ish,
and since then they've just been like, "I hate this thing!"
Mostly because Reagan was like, "I hate this thing!"
That's me being Reagan.
I have a very broad set of talents here.
Now again, all for audits, but let's talk about
what the Department of Education does and does not do,
because it is critically important to understand
what you're criticizing.
So the Department of Education does provide grants
and support and research so that we can have
cutting edge education methods in theory,
which I agree, we don't.
But it also ensures that federal civil rights are upheld,
like not allowing schools to be segregated
and ensuring that schools are ADA compliant.
The Department of Education is legally barred federally
from dictating course material.
That is not a thing that the Department of Education does.
They also don't define the requirements for being a teacher.
So they can't do something like say,
"Oh, you must be of this political affiliation,"
or whatever.
They just straight up cannot do that.
That is already illegal.
Well, that would be illegal regardless, but still.
However, there is absolutely some gray area
where the Department of Education
provides that federal funding,
but there is a catch there that you have to adhere
to federal anti-discrimination laws.
So if you have a school that is against
including disabled people and anyone who's not white,
then you don't get federal funding,
which is apparently a problem.
The proposed alternative for the Department of Education
from Republicans is school choice and a voucher program,
which essentially just takes money
that would have gone towards the Department of Education
to be distributed across the country as needed,
and instead goes to coupons
that you can give to private schools,
which is usually synonymous with religious schools.
So they want to take a taxpayer-funded system
and turn them into a new direct way
to funnel money into private schools
under the guise of competition.
And let's just ignore the fact that
if you don't have decent wealth and accommodations,
you can't actually still go to those public schools,
and also those public schools can just straight up say,
"Oh, we don't allow black students,"
despite taking federal tax dollars.
So again, not reducing waste,
just moving your money into the pockets
of the people that they want it to go to.
Anyway, um...
Lightning round.
Surfers and skater boys, I'm so sorry,
but Quicksilver, Volcom, and Billabong are all closing.
Bankrupt.
US tech conglomerate Honeywell
is splitting into three different companies,
so they currently produce thermostats and aerospace stuff,
and that's not necessarily going to be the case anymore.
Mitch McConnell fell down some stairs
again
and survived
again.
Why
According to a recent study,
there may be about seven grams of microplastics
in your brain.
For reference, that's about as much plastic as you need
to make a plastic spoon.
Don't worry, I padded the...
We're gonna end that, we're gonna end with a good one.
We just gotta get through the rest.
A hacker has claimed to have stolen
about 20 million user credentials from OpenAI
and posted them on the dark web.
We don't know if that's true,
the investigations are ongoing.
Over the weekend, there was a huge PlayStation network outage,
and people were big mad.
Like, the amount of salt that was generated online,
we would never have to worry about snow again.
And finally for today, a historically Black church
in Washington, DC, won a lawsuit against the Proud Boys.
During a 2020 campaign rally for Trump,
the Proud Boys vandalized the church.
The church sued them and won,
and the Proud Boys never paid up for their penalties.
And so they were just recently awarded
the Proud Boys trademark.
And so now a black church in DC owns the trademark
for the Proud Boys, so if they try to do any kind of like,
advertising material or t-shirts or whatever,
they gotta clear it with them.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode
of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus content and sources.
My name is Endeavorance, I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.