Hello
I shiftedthe balance of the sun and the moon
but Stuff still Happened.
So what's up?
I'm going to talk for a
while about polygraphs and what polygraphs are.
Spoiler, it's not an org chart for a polycule.
The Department of Homeland Security and the United
States recently announced that they're going
to start doing a polygraph lie detector test on
everyone in the agency to try to find who leaked
information to the media.
There were two planned
raids by ICE in two different cities that were
leaked and they were like, "Well, we don't like
that. We don't like it when people know where
we're planning to try to storm, define people, to
round up human beings and ship them elsewhere.
I don't like that. I'm the government and I don't like that.
And so, yeah, they're systematically
attempting to go through and find leakers slash
essentially create an environment where it's
too dangerous to be a whistleblower.
You know,
doing that thing where you keep our government
honest by alerting your countrymen when there's a
danger from within?
But anyway, that's not...
I'm going to talk about polygraphs.
Specifically,
what are they? How are they used? Are they
allowed to be used this way? Can the government do this?
Can the private sector do this? That's not very
specific. I'm just listing off all the questions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's an
interesting subject and there's not a lot of
info that is digestible. So let's dig in.
So first, let's start with a fun little history
factoid that I learned during this research.
The first attempt at figuring out how to do lie
detection that we know of comes from China
way, way, way back. They believed with some actual
evidence that there is a link between lying and
being stressed and a link between being stressed
and a dry mouth.
And so they had a method where
before they questioned someone, they would say,
"Hey, put this dry rice in your mouth."
Now answer our questions with the rice in your mouth.
After they were done, you'd spit out the rice and if it
wasn't wet enough,
you're a fucking liar.
Get out of here with your dry-ass mouth.
I don't wanna hear nothing from that sandpaper tongue of yours.
Anyway, we moved on from rice in the mouth to
the squiggly lines. It's much better, except not,
It was invented by John A. Larson in 1921
probably brother to Brie Larson, if my timeline is correct
It does a handful of things.
It's called a polygraph because it
graphs multiple things about a person.
It doesn't graph how cute you are though.
If it did, that would be a constant 100.
Uh,
I'm in a weird headspace. I don't know.
Among things measured are your respiratory rate,
your pulse, blood pressure, sweat gland activity,
and any like muscle tremors that you got going on.
The idea is that they track these things and
they get like a baseline and then they ask you
questions and see your physiological reactions
to the questions to determine if you're lying
to me because you're a liar.
Now if you ask the American Polygraph Association, they'll tell
you that it has an accuracy up to 95 percent,
which sounds pretty good until you remember that
you just asked the American Polygraph Association.
Look, every hobby is valid,
but that's just
like, I can't think of anything. Like that's
boring. Come on, you guys.
Yeah the American Polygraph Association has a lot of reading
material and scientific studies that seem really
good, all about how great polygraphs are and not
a lot of dissent. So when I was researching this,
that just covered the vast majority of what I was
finding when I was trying to find non-biased
information was the biased information. So I dug
a bit deeper and found there are competing
studies that are outside of the influence of that
association or really any international polygraph
association that puts the efficacy rate closer to
50 percent
which is half, that's half of
accurate. It's about a coin flip. It's exactly a coin flip.
Now, what's the actual number? We don't know.
It's not a hard science. It has a lot of flaws built
into the system from the person giving the
test, having to properly interpret the results, to
the person taking the test, having to not have an
anxiety disorder.
If you have an anxiety disorder,
that might cause you to be nervous and
might either ruin the test or show up as a false positive.
And then you've got potential bias in
the interviewer. If you're doing the interview
and you don't like the person, you might be a
little biased to interpret the results differently.
Of course, people who are skilled with a
polygraph, which is a really interesting sequence of words,
they have worked to try to push past this.
They're trying to be reputable. They're trying to do the
best job they can and give you that 95 percent
accuracy number. But there's really no way to be sure
Because of this uncertainty, polygraphs
are often not permissible in court, at least
civilian court. It is permissible in military
court and in public sector stuff in general.
There is a law on the books is called the, um,
where did I put it? Found it. It's the Employee
Polygraph Protection Act of 1988. I probably could
have just probably could have just figured that one out myself.
But basically, this law says, hey,
employers cannot use a polygraph to hire people
or fire people and cannot subject their
employees to a polygraph unless the employee agrees and
maintains consent throughout. This does not
apply to the public sector or government. So the NSA,
CIA and FBI all require a polygraph test as
a part of their security clearance process.
I have a computer science degree and I went to
school at a place where a lot of defense contractors
like to try to pluck off new grads. So I had a
lot of friends who were getting security clearances.
The number of times I've told some random dude
on the phone that like my, my drunk friend from
college probably doesn't have any connections
to the Chinese government. It's off the charts,
but I'm well aware that a part of that, a
very normal part of that is a polygraph test,
depending on your level of clearance.
This is just standard. It's just normal. It's a little
weird. I don't know why we're still doing it, but it is.
So is lie detection complete bullshit?
No, not necessarily. It very well could be that a
skilled polygraph examiner is able to suss out
most of the time if something is a lie or
not with most candidates.
That's possible,
but there's not a guarantee.
So at the end of the day, this is legal. There's nothing really
out of the ordinary here. It's a bit weird how
they're using a polygraph to essentially just
scare a bunch of people en masse, but that's
what government organizations do when they want to
seize control.
I think the main takeaway here is
that this current administration, which claims to
be a very transparent administration, still has a
lot of reasons to keep the populace in the dark.
They are very loud and angry about leakers.
And I've heard the arguments saying, Oh, well,
there's legal channels to blow the whistle. They
should have used those methods. That was really
popular when Edward Snowden came out with his
whistle blowing. People were like, he shouldn't
have done that. He should have gone through
the proper channels. Now he's just made a mess.
I would argue two things. If the mess is primarily
that the citizens are upset because they found out
the government is spying on them. That's, that's
not really his fault.
And I'm not going to defend
Edward Snowden and every single thing he's
ever done. But I will say that a legal channel for
whistle blowing is not the best option if you're
blowing the whistle on the people who make legal channels.
It's the same thing as like, Oh, I don't
want to go to HR and cause a stir because HR exists
to protect the company and so on and so forth.
Recall that if someone's blowing the whistle and,
and taking that big of a chance against the
American government, they're probably doing so
because they can't sleep at night with whatever
information they've got.
Cool. Um, yep.
Hello dear person. Thank you for being here. I'm going
to plug my stuff real quick.
We've got, we've got
more things to talk about, but I got to, I'm
going to talk about me
First of all, I would,
I would recommend you head to skh.news and
you can sign up for the newsletter for free
or you can support me with a five or $10
paid subscription. That support really, really,
really does help. And I really dearly appreciate
it. Thank you all so much. That's also where you
will find more information, all of the sources
that are linked to everything and just generally
stuff.
You can also head to merch from.dev and
browse the various items I have for sale on there,
all sorts of stuff from, uh, reasonable
to unreasonable.
And of course, as always,
I absolutely understand that money is not
wonderful for a lot of people right now. So at
the very least, just sharing this content, it
helps a ton. Thank you. Moving on.
POLICY
A Fox News host, a domestic abuser, an alcoholic, and
the United States secretary of defense walk into a
bar. The bartender says, hi, Pete Hegseth.
Yep I woke up again today and somehow Pete Hegseth is
the secretary of defense still,
which is concerning.
What's also concerning is that he has reportedly
ordered the department of defense to cease all
offensive cyber operations against Russia.
I want to say right here that the Pentagon has denied
this report.
Believe who you want to believe,
but let's just entertain that this is true. And
he is pulling back from cyber operations against Russia
Holy damn
There are cyber attacks
happening constantly between major state actors.
The big ones would be the United States,
Russia, China, and North Korea...
...and South Korea and
Australia and the UK and Japan...
There's a lot of countries doing a lot of cyber.
They're all cybering
But these are state sponsored hacks.
These are not your average, Oh, just change your
password and protect your data
I'm talking about targeted attacks against
infrastructure, shutting down hospitals, taking
entire energy systems offline.
That is what cyber
attacks are. It's not stealing your datums
Now, of course, the DOD has defensive
cyber operations as well, but as the old adage
goes, the best defense is continuing to pay a
bunch of trans femme people in network security
to go after hacker groups in foreign countries.
Yeah.
Shout out to the like 98% of network
security infrastructure engineers who are trans.
We see you
But for real, we, we have
already been hit with massive attacks. There's this
huge attack that's been ongoing with an
investigation going into it called the salt
typhoon hacks, and they've been targeting major
infrastructure and the Trump administration just
dissolved the board that was looking into it.
So I don't know what's going on with the US and their
cyber command right now, but they're seemingly
just giving up or at least they're doing something.
But I am, I am sorry if you are an international listener. This is,
this is a very US centric episode.
Here's the thing: I like doing foreign news coverage.
I really, really enjoy it, but my home country is
on fire
Literally!
A lot!
So anyway, uh, the United
States is one week from the government shutting down, again!
We really like doing this.
We really like waiting till the last possible second to pass
a bill to keep the government open because it lets
the parties just point fingers at each other. And
that's just good for everyone.
There have been a ton of government shutdowns recently, ever since
Reagan, who had eight shutdowns in his eight years
of presidency. It's just been a lot of them.
And at the very least, if we're not shutting down,
we're getting down to the last minute.
The United States Congress has to pass a budget. And if they
don't, the government doesn't get paid so they
can't operate. Doing this usually results in a much
higher bill for taxpayers because the
government being shut down is deeply expensive.
During Trump's first presidency, we saw the longest
government shutdown in US history at over a
month, 35 days.
And we're now careening towards
another shutdown, but this time the Republicans
own all of the US government.
So where we're at
right now is the Republicans have just drafted
a bill that contains a bunch of hard no's for
Democrats. They know that the Democrats are going
to fight back against this bill, but they also
know that there's not much time left to do anything.
So if the Democrats go after this bill, the
Republicans get to be like, ha, see, look,
they want to shut down the government. It's not
our fault. Despite being in power.
There are also
Republicans who actively want to cause a shutdown
because they believe that the government bad. And
so we shut the government down and that's
going to somehow be good for everybody.
And like...
I get it
but that's not how any kind
of logic works. And unfortunately for us,
we are not senators. And so if the
government shuts down, we deal with that.
Unlike them
who still get paid.
So I want to be clear:
This is not a Democrat or Republican thing necessarily.
I mean, it's waivers back and forth, but it's,
it's always this. It's always both parties trying
to find a way to frame the other party as the
reason that the government's about to shut the
fuck down. And y'all, this is the one thing
that you have to do is fund the government.
I fully believe that if the United States government
shuts down, all sitting members of Congress and Senate
should be fucking removed.
If you cannot keep
the government open, then what are you doing
collecting a paycheck from the government that's closed?
Anyway, um, moving on.
Let's talk about Gaza
and what might be next for Gaza.
So after Israel did the war crimes that every country,
except for the United States and Israel agrees
are war crimes, Gaza is in a really bad way. It's
essentially unlivable right now. It is covered
in rubble and munitions. It needs external aid. If
it's going to get back on its feet, it's an entire
population of people who have been through some of
the worst conditions in recent memory.
But there's a plan. Egypt has proposed a plan
to essentially install an interim government of
experts and international peacekeepers who can
oversee the transition back to getting Gaza
up and running.
This plan has buy-in from local
Arab leaders as well as European leaders. It does
not have buy-in from the United States and Israel.
The United States has its own plan from Trump,
who almost definitely was told by Benjamin Netanyahu
that if he supports removing all of the Gazans
from Gaza, then he can have it. And so Trump keeps
talking about how he wants to take Gaza,
demolish it and build essentially a beach resort
Because he's Trump. Of course that's what he wants to do
He wants to call it the "Riviera of the Middle East"
I'm shocked that he doesn't want to call it Trump Town
I have seen what happens when Donald Trump
has too much influence over a municipality.
It's called Atlantic City and it's hell on earth.
Anyway, the last thing that I'll say about this
is if you look at a map, the US is not particularly
close to Gaza. Gaza also doesn't have a large
contingent of United States supporters living there
And so some common criticism of Trump's
plan is that it sounds a lot like ethnic cleansing
and conquest.
Maybe because of all the
Ethnic cleansing and conquest that it includes.
Gaming
Hell of a pivot. I did not order this well
Anyway....
This past week we got confirmation
that there's going to be a Tony Hawk 3 and 4 remake
We got the Tony Hawk 1 and 2 remakes a
few years ago and it was fucking amazing. If this
is anywhere near as good as that, I am so hyped.
I am a longtime fan of Anthony Hawk's
professional skateboarder.
Do you like a funny card game,
but also want to feel a lot of feelings?
The developer of Balatro, LocalThunk,
recently posted a bit of a timeline of the
development of the game that's got the good,
the bad, the ugly, and the amazing. It's genuinely
a wonderful read, especially if you're a creative
type who has a lot of experience in having a
million projects and not having a good time
seeing all of them through. Couldn't be me!
But for real, it goes into everything from why he was
making the game to begin with to what it was like
to launch a game like this and have a single day
of your life completely pivot everything that you know
As well as the struggles running into anxiety
attacks and not understanding them. It's a really
great post. I highly recommend it. It's linked in
the newsletter. I will also make sure that it's
linked in whatever show notes, description stuff.
Lightning Round
If you lost your sense of taste
or smell from COVID, there may be some hope. There
is a new procedure that has started in the UK
that is showing some pretty promising results.
The Department of Justice
in the US is going to investigate companies that
supply eggs, given how high the prices of eggs
are. I'm sure there's just no other thing that
we could be looking into
Over 30 guards at a
juvenile detention facility in California have
been charged with staging gladiator-style
fights among the kids who are in prison there.
Tucker Carlson interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried,
the guy who was at the center of the whole FTX
crypto implosion. That guy is being locked up in
a prison that actually also holds Diddy. So he did
the interview with Tucker Carlson and during the
interview called Diddy a nice guy, but now he's in
solitary confinement because it was not an
approved interview. It was seemingly just a
publicity stunt to try to get Trump to pardon
him. I don't know. Weird play dawg.
Some guy in Florida
swallowed $770,000 worth of jewelry that he stole
He was trying to hide the evidence from
the cops as he was being arrested and he was just
like, "Oh!" They x-rayed him and found it
He also was heard saying, "I should have just thrown them
out the window." Like, my guy.
I should probably
mention this guy has like dozens of warrants
in like multiple states. I don't know, man.
Try a different line of work.
A SpaceX test launch
exploded and it made debris fall all over the
Gulf of Mexico.
And finally for today, Stonehenge's
archaeological cousin might actually be older than Stonehenge
There's a prehistoric monument in the
UK called Flagstones and recent research shows
that it might actually be older than Stonehenge,
which might also mean that it could be the
blueprint that was used for Stonehenge or like
the first try.
We don't know for sure. There's a
lot more work to do here based on that. They now
need to double check the age of Stonehenge and
figure out what's really going on here. But yo,
history is zagging on us.
Hi, hello, jump scare
Merch.
Couple of things that I wanted to include in this episode
that happened like while I was recording slash producing,
so here we go.
The first is Canada has a new prime minister.
They've replaced Justin Trudeau with Mark Carney,
who used to be their big bank boy.
He ran their central bank,
and he's got some fighting words for Trump.
He was like, Canada is not up for grabs, stop it.
It's the same party that Trudeau was,
so don't expect a seismic shift.
The second thing is that federal ICE agents
have arrested a Palestinian protester at Columbia University.
His name is Mahmed Khalil,
and he was involved in some of the protests
at Columbia University that were pro-Palestine.
He is here on a green card, married to a US citizen
who is eight months pregnant, and ICE has abducted him,
and we don't really know where he is.
He is here legally.
They had no reason to arrest him.
He has his papers.
He's here legally, but Marco Rubio,
the Secretary of State, is now saying
that the US will start revoking green cards
of people they don't like,
so if you use your right to free speech
to protest something that the US government disagrees with,
they are now signaling that it doesn't matter.
Even if you're here legally,
they'll do paperwork to make it so that they can
hold you hostage somewhere
while your eight months pregnant wife
tries to figure out where you are,
so reminder,
ICE are the Nazis.
This is the government sending in federal agents
to abduct people
not even just "illegals,"
which are, reminder, it's not illegal
to be here as an undocumented citizen.
It's not illegal.
It is a civil offense.
That's it.
All right, bye.
Thank you so much for
listening to today's episode of Stuff
Keeps Happening. Head to skh.news for sources,
bonus content, and my schematics for how I
built Stonehenge. My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday. Take care and be well.