Hello
I used a blue shell to secure my victory.
But Stuff still Happened.
So what's up?
You're up, Europe.
I had to.
Last week was a lot.
Zelensky met with Trump and J.D. Vance
and they chewed him out about not being
thankful enough during the four year long
onslaught he's been defending his country from.
Priorities.
Blazing fast recap just for context:
Zelenskyy of Ukraine went to the
White House to meet with Trump and Vance.
He was intended to sign a deal where the U.S. could mine for minerals
in Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees.
Apparently when Zelensky got there, the deal was not actually all that
good for him and he was like, "What the fuck?"
And then they chewed him out saying he wasn't thankful enough.
On live television.
To everyone.
In the world.
And so countries across the globe, allies and enemies of the United
States, all took a collective moment to give their best
"Uh-What the fuck?"
So let's take a look at what this
means, what the fallout is going to entail,
and what the future looks like here.
The United States and the European Union are—have been—besties.
They're tied together by a bunch of
alliances, both trade and military, most notably NATO,
which is one of the biggest and most
successful alliances the world has seen.
Successful doesn't mean necessarily good for everyone, but successful.
Now take a second and think about the EU as its own
kind of country.
Like it's a union, it's a bloc, right?
It's difficult to kind of compare one to one,
but if you think about the United
States as a bloc of 50 small countries,
that's the EU is similar.
And so these two groups of a ton of people
were like, "Hey, let's just go ahead and vibe."
But Trump has long been anti-NATO and there's
various reasons to be anti-NATO and he doesn't
probably have one, aside from he hates NATO because he's been told to.
And so this isn't unexpected.
Trump has been trying to get rid of NATO since his first term,
but this is a massive escalation.
What we're looking at now is leaders from the EU are making moves.
They're positioning themselves to not have
to have a dependency on the United States.
From a security and trade standpoint,
they are trying to find a new path forward, a future for Europe that
does not depend on American alliances.
Is that a bad thing? No, not objectively.
No, it would be better if the US was
partnering with their allies to bring prosperity and safety to the
people who live in those countries.
That'd be nice.
But if the US is gonna shit the bed, it's
nice to see the EU taking steps proactively
to prepare for what's next.
The EU does like a popcorn method for determining who the "true" leader
of the alliance is at any given moment,
and it currently lands in Poland.
Their prime minister, Donald Tusk, which is... that's hilarious.
Anyway, he already said they're gonna be taking steps to insulate
themselves from the fluctuations of American politics.
One of our strongest, longest, and most successful alliances
is breaking apart because we are too volatile of a country.
They look at our current leadership and they see that Donald Trump has
previously stated that the EU was explicitly created to "screw the US."
He's also threatening them with tariffs,
just like he threatened Mexico and Canada with
tariffs that are now retaliating those tariffs.
And the EU also said they were to retaliate with more tariffs.
And again, they're all like, "Hey, we're allies.
What are you doing?"
An actual negotiation with an allied
country shouldn't be taking place on Twitter,
where everyone who wants to benefit from that chaos can benefit.
But that's kind of seemingly the point.
So let's zoom out. Let's look at a map, right?
Here's a map of the world.
We're gonna picture it.
If you look at that map of Earth, beautiful.
You'll notice that there's a handful of big blobs.
And we're gonna focus on three of the biggest blobs.
The United States, Russia, and China.
Yeah
Obviously there's some other big blobs.
Let's focus on those three because they're global superpowers.
The US is seemingly siding with Russia in the Ukraine-Russia war.
Russia invaded Ukraine through their sovereign borders,
and Ukraine has been defending for four years.
If Ukraine stops fighting, they cease to exist.
If Russia stops fighting, they just...
Just life goes on.
But Trump has said that Zelensky doesn't want peace,
and is also considering a deal proposed by Putin
to give the US mineral rights to mine on the annexed land of Ukraine
if they side with Russia.
So the deal with our ally to mine their minerals in exchange for bombs,
I don't like that to begin with, is now trashed and instead will mine
for minerals in annexed land from our allies
in exchange for supporting our adversary, which makes just total sense.
So given that there seems to be a US-Russia alliance forming,
that kind of leaves one major blob from that map left.
And that's China.
The EU wants to insulate from American political fluctuations.
China is an economic powerhouse as well as a militaristic one.
They're also deeply involved in geopolitical negotiations
and are generally stable compared to the US.
The unbridled hatred for China is pretty unique to the US.
Other countries have their own
opinions that aren't super great about China,
but the "China!" that's mostly just us.
And so if you are a group of nations looking to find stability
and your previous biggest ally is going crazy,
but there's this other group over here that like,
you work with currently, but they're not your number one guy.
You might want to find a new number one guy.
Now, the only real winner here is China.
American citizens are going to lose on this.
EU citizens are going to lose on this.
Ukraine is going to lose on this.
Hell, Russia kind of wins a little bit, but not really.
They're not doing great from this war either.
This is just beyond the wrong time to isolate
from the world and piss off all of our allies.
But that's exactly what's happening.
This is going to cause prices to skyrocket, markets to drop,
and general stability to evaporate.
For America, EU is just going to shift their suppliers.
China is going to be happy about it.
One final note on this.
I previously talked about a poll that
showed that the average American thinks
that we spend about 33% of our annual government budget on foreign aid.
And that is a big reason why people are like,
"We need to pull back. We need to break these alliances.
They are pillaging us."
But the reality is that we actually spend
about 1% of our annual budget on foreign aid.
And new polling shows that a staggering 89% of Americans,
including 84% of Republicans,
agree that 1% of our budget is a
reasonable amount to spend on foreign aid.
Guess what? That's the number already.
Wow!
I think a lot of people get like military aid and foreign aid confused
because we do send an assload of money overseas for bombs.
Like the foreign aid budget is in like the 60 billion-ish zone
and the military aid budget is in the hundreds of billions zone.
Love it.
Hey, we're going to get back to the rest of the stuff here in a second,
but I do... I got to plug stuff.
I'm plugging my own stuff.
I'm not going to sell you shitty earbuds.
I love making content for you and it's really wonderful.
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If you want to support my work, a great
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Yep.
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Anything and everything helps a ton and is deeply, deeply appreciated.
Back to stuff.
Gaming!
Alright, funny card game where number goes up.
If you haven't played Balatro, Balatro, however it's pronounced,
I've actually read that it's
pronounced however you want to pronounce it.
It's a good game.
It's essentially a poker-themed, solitaire, roguelike.
It's really, really, really, really extremely good.
So good that it nearly won Game of the Year last year.
It's a game that was built by a dude.
It's just a random indie game, nearly won Game of the Year.
And this card game was rated 18 plus
in the EU from their PEGI rating system,
which caused a bit of a stir, like it's literally a card game.
You just, you play, it's like a deck of cards and you play them.
Now PEGI gave them the 18 plus
rating because the game looks like poker.
It's themed after poker, but it's not poker.
There's no betting involved.
It uses a standard deck of cards and it
uses the hands that you play in poker,
and that's about it.
Otherwise, it uses chips as the name for points.
The game is so hilariously not poker.
Like it is, it is just so far from poker that anyone who has played it
would immediately see that an 18 plus rating is absurd.
The developer was not particularly
happy about it and appealed the rating.
This was months ago and PEGI has now
announced that they're actually like,
"Oh yeah, whoops, we're going to drop that to 13 plus."
And it was so dumb that they've also announced
they're going to be reviewing their
guidelines for ratings for gambling stuff.
We love bananas here. That's all.
I can't believe the words that are about to come out of my mouth,
but EA is going to do something kind of neat.
They are releasing the source code
for four older Command and Conquer game,
like open source, like freely licensed under GPL.
The games are Command and Conquer,
Red Alert, Command and Conquer Renegade,
and Command and Conquer Generals.
Now there's already a project called OpenRA
that is an open source community project to rebuild these games,
but this is the actual source code of
the original games released for free,
which will hopefully supercharge any community-based efforts
to make like a compendium of these games.
That would make me happy.
I'm a Red Alert 2 boyo through and through.
What can I say?
Kirov reporting.
Technology.
Skype is kill.
Microsoft has announced that Skype is dead.
It's going away. It's buried.
It's gone in a month or two.
In May? In May.
They are shifting their focus instead to the universally acclaimed
Microsoft Teams platform.
Now to be fair, Skype was also fucked as a platform.
Like Skype has been historically messy as hell,
but everyone used it.
It was just the thing that everyone had.
No one wanted to use it, but we all had it.
Microsoft acquired Skype in like 2010 in
what could have been an incredible deal
and then mismanaged the absolute hell out of it.
And now we're here.
Imagine a world where they actually put in effort to make it better
and then the start of the pandemic hit
and they could have actually done very well.
But instead we got Zoom.
Zoom. Zoom.
That's me being video conferencing software.
Instagram Reels kind of mass traumatized people.
A quote-unquote glitch on Wednesday
caused Instagram Reels to start serving
horrifically violent content to everyone.
People were just scrolling on Instagram Reels
and suddenly saw videos of people being brutally killed
in horrific ways.
Just video after video after video of unconscionable violence.
A ton of people are reporting being just messed up by it.
Some people saying they couldn't sleep.
Some people saying that they just feel broken inside.
It's well known that content moderation
staffers at Meta are routinely traumatized
by the things that they have to see to do moderation work.
But Meta has also been pulling back on their moderation
and trying to do less of it since Trump came into power.
Then lo and behold this happened.
Who'd have thunk it?
They claim that they've fixed the glitch.
But I would really like to know what a glitch is that's like,
yes, take all of these videos of
people dying and serve them to everyone.
Like, oops, we made the block button the show to everyone button.
Dang
Policy Stuff
The United States has passed the Republican-led budget bill.
It's a proposal that's going to fuck all of us over really bad.
Now, we don't know exactly what's going to happen.
There is no specifics on this yet.
To be very, very clear, they've passed
a proposal for basically a framework,
not a line item thing that has any direct information.
So anyone claiming that there's no tax on tips or no tax on overtime
or any specific policy in this is lying.
They don't, there's no information on that yet.
What there is information on is essentially
where they want to see money moved to and from.
And we know they want to move a ton of money
away from Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid.
They've listed that as a place to move money away from.
Or rather, they're targeting the type of money
in the government that goes towards those services
and they want to cut an amount from that budget that would necessitate
cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security.
It's complicated, but hey, it's not like someone just has a spreadsheet
and they're twiddling some numbers.
Like, it's a whole thing.
Medicaid is a healthcare program to help cover people who are
impoverished or at risk and need healthcare coverage.
There's a lot of vulnerable people who depend on Medicaid
and they want to cut that, but they don't
seem to want to cut the military budget,
which interestingly, Medicaid costs hundreds of billions of dollars
less per year than the military budget.
But according to Republicans, Medicaid is unsustainable.
You know, keeping our, keeping our citizens alive.
Can't be, we can't be wasting money on stuff like that.
All right, this is less policy and more, what's going on here?
If you are not paying attention to the depths of the MAGA world, I'm
jealous of you and keep doing that,
but they are still obsessed with the whole Jeffrey Epstein situation.
And specifically, they are obsessed with
the release of "The Epstein Documents."
They basically believe that there is a
document that can be released that just says, like,
"Hillary Clinton eats babies. Confirmed."
Like, that is almost literally what they're looking for.
If you remember the whole "Pizza Gate" thing and they quite literally
believe that Democrats are eating babies
to, like, gain immortality or
something like that, it's, it's bizonkers.
But they want "The Epstein Documents" because
it's a piece of their giant conspiracy puzzle.
And Attorney General Pam Bondi was like, "Yeah,
I'm going to release those Epstein documents."
So people got all excited and they actually
called up a bunch of right-wing influencers
to the White House to give them binders as props that were labeled with
big bold letters that said, "The Epstein Files."
They were waving them around like, "Haha, we
got them! The Democrats are in for it now!"
And then they, the timeline to release the
documents came to went and they didn't get released.
And then they eventually did get released.
And it was just a bunch of redacted
documents that were already released before.
There was, like, one new thing that
kind of had some stuff in it, but no.
They are almost definitely running into the problem that Donald Trump
is heavily implicated with all the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.
They're not about to just screw over their guy.
So while absolutely Bill Clinton should be investigated, and anyone who
is doing stuff with Jeffrey Epstein,
like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, should all be
investigated, do we think that's going to happen?
Can I get a show of hands?
So that's fun.
They're, they're having a time over there and there's a whole bunch of
infighting happening now because of it,
because they're like, "Oh, you, you betrayed us.
Oh, no, they're, they're working on it. Oh, no.
My conspiracy must have this set of
parameters. Otherwise, my life is a lie."
And I can't deal with that fact.
So...
Lightning round.
Some guy tried to smuggle drugs onto an airplane under his toupee.
Must have not been a pretty convincing toupee."
Speaking of airplanes, an Australian
couple was on a Qatar Airlines flight
when the staff put a dead person in the seat next to them.
Apparently a woman died on the flight in the
aisle next to them and the staff couldn't move her.
And they were just like, "Hey, can y'all scoot over one seat?"
And the couple was like, "Sure."
The staff then put the dead body in the seat that they scooted from.
Yep.
They're doing a Fyre Festival 2, for some godawful reason.
Money.
A man was killed by a booby trap set up in a
house owned by his family, but it was vacant.
He opened the door and was shot with a rigged shotgun and died.
The cops, being the cops, pointed to this situation and said, "See?
This is why it's so dangerous to be a cop.
Never mind that the dead guy isn't a cop, but...
Let's make this about us."
A woman was caught trying to blow up cars at a Tesla dealership.
She did it once before, and then went
back to the same dealership to do it again,
where she got caught.
Why would you go back to the same one?
Jeff Bezos sent an email to Washington Post authors saying that he
wants them to focus the opinion section
on individual liberty and free markets.
And the opinion writers were like, "Fuck that."
Causing some major departures.
This is the newspaper that broke Watergate.
I just want to remind you of that.
That is how far the WAPO has fallen.
Oh, also, speaking of Jeff Bezos, he is
sending his fiancé and Katy Perry into space.
That's a real thing that's happening.
And finally for today, it turns out the Pope is in stable condition.
And if that changes by the time this is posted,
I'm gonna be so mad, because I like have
checked so many times over the past week.
But according to the words, he is doing okay.
Just want to give you that update.
Couldn't leave you hanging from last time.
Thank you so much for listening to
today's episode of "Stuff Keeps Happening."
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus
content, and the world's first D5000.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.