Hello
I usurped Soviet rule with my telekinesis,
but Stuff still Happened.
So what's up?
Mitch McConnell has announced that he will not be seeking
reelection after the end of his current term.
So let's talk about the legacy of Mitch McConnell.
Let's start with the basics.
This man has been in the United States Senate for 40 years
and has served over a decade as the leader
of the Republicans in the Senate.
There's no denying the fact that he has had
a gargantuan impact on the trajectory of American politics.
That's his whole thing.
So let's dig into some of those specifics
and talk about just why he is so reviled.
Let's start with his home state, Kentucky.
He is a senator.
The Senate in the US has a hundred members,
two per state, in order to give
equal representation to each state.
This means that the senator from Kentucky,
a state that I and most people in this country don't live in,
has been essentially dictating the course of our politics
for my entire life.
You might've thought it was the president.
No, not really.
At time of writing, which again,
reminder is 40 years into this man's residency
in the Senate, Kentucky is 43rd in the economy
and 46th in healthcare among the states.
During COVID, half of Kentuckians lost income
and Mitch McConnell adjourned the Senate
before hearing anything about COVID relief.
He infamously spearheaded the pushback against Obamacare/ACA.
If he had successfully repealed it, which he almost did,
he would have removed healthcare
from almost half a million of his constituents.
All the while, he cozied up to coal barons
and gave massive tax breaks to CEOs of coal companies
who fucked around and lost the pensions of their miners.
Kentucky is big coal country, but that means coal miners.
A lot more miners who are actually doing the work.
Yeah, he's done everything he could to empower the people
that ruined those guys' lives.
So that's nice.
Well done.
Let's zoom out
The national stage.
So again, Mitch McConnell has been the leader
of the Republicans, either the Senate majority
or minority leader for about a decade.
He's not currently doing that now,
but up until very recently he was.
During that time, he famously called himself
the Grim Reaper of the Senate,
saying that nothing was gonna pass under his rule.
Like outright his statement was to cause American democracy
to grind to a halt and get nothing done.
If you've ever wondered why we don't do anything,
that's why.
I mean, there's obviously more factors than just that,
but his impact cannot be overstated*
I remember seeing this man go up
onto the floor of Congress and genuinely make the case
that making voting day a national holiday is socialist,
as if that's a bad thing.
Anyway, he would go on to block Obama
from ceding a Supreme Court justice, Merrick Garland.
Merrick Garland was appointed about a year out
from the next presidential election,
to which Mitch McConnell said, "Nah, nah, nah, that won't do.
"It's too close to the election.
"The American people deserve to have a say in this.
"I refuse to even have a vote on this candidate."
The Senate has to confirm Supreme Court justices
and Mitch McConnell was in charge of the Senate.
And he just said, "No.
"I'm just gonna not do that."
And he did that for a year.
And then under Trump, he sat three justices,
one of whom was sat 28 days before the election.
Strange that, weird.
He's also one of the main reasons
that we have Citizens United.
He fought hard to remove caps
on how much money corporations can put into politics.
He argued "money is speech and speech is democracy."
And because of that, companies should be able to pour
an unlimited amount of money into our election,
because it's just not fair
that these giant faceless corporations
aren't being represented as much as the people
in this government.
I sure am glad that Palantir has more of a vote than I do.
He loudly championed Trump's tax plan in 2017,
saying that it was gonna be a pivotal moment
for the American economy.
And that has turned out to be an abject failure.
It was entirely tax cuts for the rich.
And now that we've had enough time since 2017
to analyze the economic fallout,
it has been a complete and total disaster.
Mitch McConnell is a career politician
who focused on changing the game
to make it all about preventing things from happening
while enriching yourself.
That is just his legacy.
While that sounds like,
oh, that could be anyone in Congress,
he is the prototype.
He is the one that normalized this beyond any doubt.
He is the one that would go up and say,
look, I'm going to just flaunt my political power
and abuse it.
I'm going to completely ignore any kind of history
and just do what I want.
And no one can stop me.
Does that sound familiar?
I could go on and on and on about just how much hypocrisy
this man embodies, but it doesn't matter
because these people don't feel that shame.
And so we near the end of Mitch McConnell
in the United States Senate,
which again has been for more than my whole life.
I have not known a world in which this man
did not have his finger on the scales of our future.
And so hopefully now you too understand
why Mitch McConnell deserves to burn forever
in whatever hell he believes in.
And I will update you as to when the next best
gender neutral bathroom is unveiled after he's buried.
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There's all sorts of designs.
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Anyway, thanks for being here.
All right, moving on.
Let's talk about gamers and entertainment.
But first gamers
Pokemon Go delete your data.
Pokemon Go developer Niantic, Niantic, Niantic,
they're selling off their gaming division.
Does that sound confusing?
That's because they were mostly a data collection company.
Yes, the company that makes Pokemon Go
is selling off Pokemon Go
to a Saudi mobile game developer company,
because they already got the data they wanted
and now they can just go to do contracting stuff.
Pokemon Go being a very strongly geolocation focused app,
it was all about getting people to walk around,
collect data and map out the earth and whatnot.
It was entirely just using you to generate data
so that they can make money.
All wrapped up in a Pokemon game
because what better way to get people to do what you want
than make them think they're just playing a game.
It's insidious.
It's gross.
It's nasty.
But everyone who did play Pokemon Go agreed to this.
Technically, it was in the terms of service.
That doesn't make it okay, but it makes it legal.
Now you might be like, oh, I don't care.
What are they gonna do with my data?
Who cares?
I get it.
The point is they fucked everyone over.
Hey kids, come play this Pokemon game.
Anyway, we're gonna go contract out this data
to whoever the highest bidder is now.
Like regardless of your personal sentiment
on whether or not your personal data
is something you care about or not.
That's not the important thing here.
It is the mass surveillance.
That's just generally not a thing we want,
especially in the hands of private corporations,
who again, only look for profit.
I am not out here to hype up governments
and tell you that every government
as it exists today is good.
But at least the abstract concept
of the governing body of a people
is a group that is trying to work for the people,
not for themselves.
In theory, a public organization
is working for the betterment of the public,
not enriching themselves,
which is exactly what every private company
that's collecting all of your data is trying to do.
Anyway, I said, let's talk about gamers,
but now we're gonna talk about the gamer,
the CEO of GameStop.
This man, the CEO of GameStop, went full capital G gamer
because they're selling off their Canadian
and French wings of the company.
And he was like, "Ugh, we're so,
they're all woke and terrible."
I shit you not.
The CEO of an actual company went on to Twitter
and publicly posted an email address saying,
"Hey, email this address if you wanna put it in an offer
to buy our Canadian and French wings.
You get the wokeness and liberalism for free."
Like, bro, what?
Here's the quote.
Email m&a at GameStop.com
if you're interested in buying GameStop Canada
or Micromania France.
High taxes, liberalism, socialism,
progressivism, wokeness, and DEI
included at no additional cost if you buy today.
You're an adult.
You're a human adult.
Do you hear yourself or read yourself?
It was a tweet.
I'm so far and beyond done with people saying woke and DEI
about everything.
You sound moronic.
If you can't get through the day without being upset
about Black people and women existing,
I think you have some self-reflection to do.
Anyway, Korra has some explaining to do.
This is not gamer.
This is just entertainment now.
That's right.
We've got Avatar news.
I'm actually so fucking excited, y'all.
We got official word that there's gonna be a new entry
in the Avatar The Last Airbender series,
a new show starring a new Avatar.
It takes place after Korra.
They're already greenlit for two seasons
and it is being developed by the original showrunners.
It is going to be titled Avatar Seven Havens,
and it apparently takes place after Korra
and the world has kind of gone to shit,
and the Avatar is now considered the destroyer of humanity
instead of the savior.
It's gonna be starring an earthbending Avatar,
and I'm hype, and I'm hype, and I'm hype.
Bonus thing, we're getting a new Avatar book as well,
and it stars the most niche imaginable character
from the Avatar universe.
If you're watching this and you're like,
"I know nothing about Avatar.
"Why are you talking about this so much?"
Deal with it.
The character who's going to be the star
of a new upcoming Avatar novel
is the girl that Zuko went on a date with
in Tales of Ba Sing Se.
Just that random girl that was all up in Zuko's face
and was like, "Hi, I'm cute," and Zuko was like,
"Fine, I'll date you," and then he ran away.
Her.
She was too good for him anyway.
So that's neat.
Hold on to that.
Hold on to the neat, we're going back in.
Technology.
Last week I talked about Apple being asked by the UK
to give the UK government a backdoor
into Apple's encrypted iCloud data protection stuff.
We have an update.
Apple has said, "No, we're not gonna do that.
"We're just gonna completely get rid of that feature
"in the UK."
So they kind of basically did that.
Apple is removing the ability for users in the UK
to use the end-to-end encryption option for iCloud.
This was in response to the UK government saying,
"We wanna be able to access the encrypted data."
This basically just does that without compromising
the security system for other users.
It's more of a containment of the possible fallout
rather than completely capitulating.
But Apple has now gone on record saying,
"We will never build a backdoor."
So we'll see.
Their track record does show that.
It does, I gotta give them that.
If you followed my content for any extended period of time,
you may have heard me talk about how Silicon Valley
and Tech at Large is literally a cult.
That's what this part's about.
Between Elon Musk thinking he needs to populate the world
with his "genius DNA" and Peter Thiel injecting himself
with the blood of the young,
there's weird shit going on.
And all of it comes from the same place,
the deeply rooted history of eugenics in Silicon Valley.
It is storied and terrible.
It's why you hear tech bros talk so frequently about IQ.
IQ is deeply tied to eugenics,
and that's why they're so into it.
They might not realize that's why,
but it all follows the same pattern of,
"Oh, I'm amazing.
"I'm the smartest person who ever lived.
"And I have so much money now.
"And it's my job to fix everything by making it in my image."
They liken themselves as gods, basically.
And so what comes out of all of this is a delusion
that they are the ones who must save the world.
And so they start coming up with these ideas
and they start trying to apply
what they think solutions look like to humanity.
Now remember, these are tech bros.
They've got computer science degrees.
And I'm talking as somebody
who has a computer science degree
and worked in tech for 15 years, surrounded by these people.
I know how they think.
They look at a problem and they think,
"How can I solve this through the lens
"of my technology experience?"
That is why Silicon Valley is constantly coming out
with solutions to problems that no one had,
We don't need self-driving cars
and a credit card that can store all of your credit cards.
We need food distribution mechanisms.
But one manifestation of this are rationalists,
which are a borderline religious level group of people
who believe that they can solve the world's problems
with like math and logic to optimize the problems away.
If you've ever heard the term effective altruism,
it's the same circle.
It's not all the same thing,
but they're all in the same groups.
There's a ton of different names for this
that all try to sound good on the surface,
but underneath, when you dig down,
you just get back to eugenics.
So one of these groups has a spinoff group
called the Zizians, or the Center for Applied Rationalists.
There's basically a cult that's been out there
doing murders across the country,
and their leader just recently got arrested.
I'm not gonna dig into the very specifics
of that one subgroup and what they've been doing.
There's tons of reporting on that.
You can go search Zizians if you want to.
The point I'm trying to make is this isn't just hyperbole.
I'm not looking at people who I disagree with
and saying, "They're in a cult!"
It's literal.
There are compounds in the mountains.
There are myriad tech oligarchs
who are putting untold millions of dollars
into trying to reverse aging
because they're afraid of death,
because it equalizes them with the rest of us.
There's a long documented history of eugenics research
at the universities that all of the big tech firms
prioritize hiring from.
It's all out there.
It's all just there, out in the open.
But there's so much trust and money
put into Silicon Valley that it just festers uninhibited.
During my time in tech,
there were essentially two types of people that I worked with.
People who wanted to fuck off,
never touch a computer again, and become farmers,
and people who thought that they were one startup away
from being king of Earth.
And unfortunately, the split is approximately 50-50.
But fuck that.
Let's talk about the Humane AI Pin,
which is now just a brick.
You might remember last year,
this company called Humane came out with an AI pin
like you wore it on your shirt,
that you would talk to,
and it had like a little mini projector
to project stuff on your hand.
And it was trying to be an AI assistant.
They build it as the next thing after smartphone.
So much so that it didn't integrate
with your phone or computer.
It was its own standalone device with its own subscription.
And it didn't work.
It was really, really, really bad.
It was terrible.
And it was universally lambasted by reviewers.
And now they're being sold to HP,
and they're shutting down.
In a few days, every Humane AI Pin will cease to function.
It'll just become a $700 paperweight.
We love e-waste.
So that's a fun end to the chapter
of a gold rush for AI hardware.
Can we stop now?
Lightning round.
A man in Florida shot two people
who he thought were Palestinian.
And so he tried to kill them.
Turns out they were Israeli.
And also posted about how much
they hated Palestinians online.
The US government once again fired a bunch of officials
that they're now trying to rehire.
This time in the USDA,
people who were working to try to stop bird flu.
After some political bluster and back and forth,
the governor of New York has stated
that she will not be removing Eric Adams
as the mayor of New York City.
An entire police department in Alabama is on leave
after a grand jury said that they should entirely
shut down the department because the department
has been operating more like a criminal organization
than a police office.
Great.
Now do the rest of them.
At time of recording, Pope Francis is not doing great.
He's been dealing with pneumonia.
He's been in critical condition in the hospital
and he's been having like cardiac events
is what they're saying.
It very well may be the case that by the time
this video goes up, we live in a Popeless world.
And finally for today, the new US Secretary of Energy
said that he would love to see Australia
get into the uranium production game.
Australia is already one of the world's largest
producers of uranium.
What a real country.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode
of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus content,
and a secret on how you can stop time.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday unless you've stopped time.
Take care and be well.