Hello.
I ate a spectacular BLT,
but Stuff still Happened.
So what's up?
Dear listener, I had every intention
of making today's main story be something uplifting.
In fact, I posted as much on Blue Sky
and all my other socials,
and then an hour later I checked the news.
Eughh
That, it was my hubris,
thinking I could do something fun.
Now, I've got some good stuff later on,
but this first story is gonna be heavy.
It is talking about the ongoing genocide
against the people of Gaza.
I'll put timestamps in the description.
If you're not in a place
to have this conversation right now,
you can always skip and come back to it later,
but that's the first topic.
Here we go.
This past week, Israel bombarded Gaza
with missile attacks and ground troop invasions,
completely just ending the ceasefire out of nowhere.
There was a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
It was supposed to be there for several months
while they exchanged hostages,
and they did exchange some hostages,
and then Israel said, "Fuck it."
During the brief ceasefire,
Hamas returned a few dozen of their hostages,
But Hamas wasn't returning the hostages fast enough,
and so Israel decided that the next course of action
is to directly put those hostages' lives at risk
by bombarding Gaza.
The first surprise bombardment out of the ceasefire
killed at least 400 people in Gaza,
including random men, women, and children
who have nothing to do with anything
and are just trying to survive.
They've been targeting hospitals,
places of worship, and schools,
as they've been doing this whole time,
and they've most recently destroyed
the only cancer hospital in Gaza.
I've spent more than the past year
covering Israel's actions against Gaza
in the wake of the Hamas attack against Israel.
Yeah, Hamas did some bad shit.
Israel then caused a man-made famine
and killed likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The conservative official death toll is 50,000.
It passed that recently, but there are estimations
that the secondary-degree effects of Israel's actions
puts the actual death toll
in the hundreds of thousands of souls.
Citizens of Israel are protesting Netanyahu's actions
en masse for all sorts of reasons.
The man is already facing corruption charges in court.
He is the prime minister of Israel,
and he's using his power to undermine the judicial system
that could potentially hold him accountable.
Sound familiar?
In addition to protesting a corrupt politician,
they're also protesting his escalation
of the attacks on Gaza,
and also the escalation of his rhetoric
into essentially total annihilation.
Empowered by the Trump administration,
they are talking much more about eradicating Gaza.
At the same time that Israel is bombing Gaza
and killing children by the hundreds,
they are also expanding their settlements
in the occupied West Bank.
Israel has settlements in occupied Palestinian territory,
and they essentially sign off on papers saying,
"Yeah, Israeli citizens are now allowed to go in
"and just take the homes of Palestinians."
This isn't empty land where they're just going in
and building a wonderful new place to live.
No, they're going in and quite literally
kicking people out of their existing homes.
Israeli citizens are protesting this.
People across the world are protesting this,
and most importantly, Jews are protesting this.
I wanna talk about Zionism and how it's not Judaism.
The two are not the same.
In fact, the majority of Zionists are not Jewish.
They're evangelical Christians.
Zionism is a political ideology
that first was shut out into the world
between the late 1800s and early 1900s.
It is predicated on an actual Jewish belief
about the return to the homeland.
There is a belief that there is going to be
a divine intervention or a miracle
that essentially allows Jews to return
to what we call Palestine.
Zionism is essentially the belief
that we should use military action
to force this to happen rather than the miracle.
Or rather they're like, nah,
we're gonna make a miracle happen
by ethnically cleansing the people who currently live there.
But why are evangelical Christians supporting this?
Unfortunately, the answer is a death cult.
The reestablishment of Israel
and the return of Jews to their homeland
is a step in a prophecy towards the second coming of Christ
that evangelical Christians subscribe to.
The second coming of Christ being, of course,
the herald of the apocalypse, the rapture.
They are quite literally trying to muster up
political and military force to establish Israel
as a step towards a prophecy that ends with all of us dying.
I wish I was making this up.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of reading you can do about it.
I've linked to it in today's newsletter.
It's really fucked up.
But I just want to make it abundantly,
extraordinarily, extremely clear
that to be against the state of Israel
is not to be anti-Semitic.
I am not a religious person,
but I do have religious family,
and I am looking forward to spending time
with my Jewish family having a Seder for Passover next month.
I have nothing but respect for Jewish culture,
Jewish traditions, and the Jewish faith.
That's not Zionism.
It's why we've seen so many Jews and Jewish faith leaders
at anti-Israel protests,
because it doesn't stand for them, and it's insulting.
This is a geopolitical militaristic plan
that is leveraging their faith
as a shield against criticism.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot that we can do
as individual people to help this situation,
but you can talk to the people in your life and inform them.
Let them know what's going on.
Tell them about this.
While people are unable to afford food here at home,
we are sending billions of dollars of military aid
to help a country that is not us protect themselves,
quote unquote, from the people who already lived there.
Weird how the people who were living there
aren't super thrilled about a bunch of foreigners coming in
and colonizing their land.
I feel like there's a story in, I don't know,
maybe this country's history that could like inform us
as to how much of an atrocity this is,
but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that.
Moving on to policy.
I guess this is policy, but really it's just kind of a treat
just to kind of lighten the mood a bit.
The original creator of the Pirates Booty brand of snacks,
the like puffed cheese corn things,
has lost his damn mind.
Robert Ehrlich.
He lives in a small town on Long Island called Seacliff,
where he recently declared himself to be the mayor.
They recently had a mayoral election.
The incumbent mayor was running unopposed for a third term,
and a week before the election,
he walked into the town center and said, "I'm the mayor.
"Give me their office, and all of you are fired."
To which the municipal employees were like...
"What?"
They said that they've never seen this guy
in any sort of civics context before,
and they were like, "What, are y'all right there, guy?
"You need help?"
So this dude has a coffee shop
where he's been collecting votes.
I'm doing massive air quotes right now.
He spent the past like four years
basically telling people to vote for him,
and then he would just like collect their quote unquote vote,
and then he claimed that those were valid in this election.
But in reality, after the election happened,
he lost 1,064 votes to 62.
But he doesn't believe that.
He says it was rigged, he says it doesn't count,
and he says that back in 1268,
the Vatican took three years to choose a pope,
which is why he's allowed to use the votes
that he collected over four years to become mayor.
He claims that he now holds the record
for the longest election, beating out that pope.
Get fuckin' bent, Pope!
When asked by reporters if he's going to run
in two years to try to actually become the mayor,
his response was, "I am the mayor.
"Why would I have to run if I'm already the mayor?"
So that's fun.
Several European countries and Canada
have issued travel advisories against the United States,
given how dangerous it is to try to come here
as anyone who's not a US citizen right now.
Denmark, Canada, Finland, Germany, and the UK
have all issued advisories
and updated their travel information for going to the US,
basically saying, "Comply, because otherwise,
"they're going to detain and torture you."
A Welsh tourist was recently detained by ICE for 19 days,
held in a detention facility
with 24-7 fluorescent lighting because of nothing.
She was transported in chains and handcuffs.
The crime that she committed, being here as a visitor.
She was here on a tourist visa,
and she was staying with people
in exchange for helping them out around the house.
And ICE somehow took that as unlawful employment
and detained her.
She's literally an artist just visiting America,
staying with some people, helping them out
around the house so that she can crash in a bed.
And they detained her for 19 days and deported her.
She's back home with her dog, whose name is Bojangles.
This, of course, comes right after last week,
where I talked about a German national
that was detained by ICE despite having a US green card,
and he was essentially brutalized,
borderline tortured by ICE agents at Boston Logan Airport.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has enacted
a 1700s wartime law that gives him the authority
to essentially just deport people who are brown.
It's called the Alien Enemies Act,
and he basically said that we are at war
with a South American gang,
and so he's identifying random people
that he claims are associated with that gang
without proof and deporting them
to a foreign prison in El Salvador
that was explicitly built
to effectively torture its inmates.
We do not know who the administration has sent
in total to this prison.
There's not information,
and they are stonewalling judges who are demanding it.
They were supposed to have turned the plane around,
made air when a judge caught wind that this was happening,
but they didn't.
There also may be a professional soccer player there,
and ICE mistook his tattoo celebrating his favorite
soccer team as a gang tattoo.
Because racism,
I'm gonna be super, super clear about this,
that these people have not had charges brought against them
and had no due process,
and we don't even know the roster of people
that were deported.
It very well could be that there are
full legal US citizens among them.
We straight up don't know.
And so yeah, it's not really a good idea
to come to the US right now.
Sorry, tourism industry and trade and general stability.
Promo, this is the self promo section.
I have a Patreon and a merch store
and a website and a Discord community.
End of promo.
Technology.
I'm gonna brutalize this.
Arve Hjalmar Holmen is a resident of Norway,
and he asked ChatGPT, "Hey, what do you think about me?"
He prompted ChatGPT asking,
"Who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?"
To which it responded, quote,
"He was the father of two young boys, aged seven and 10,
who were tragically found dead in a pond near their home."
Oh.
So this man was a little shocked
because he does have two kids,
and they are about that age, and they also are alive.
And so he's filed a complaint with OpenAI,
who was like, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no,
we've upgraded our systems, don't worry about it."
It's unclear exactly where the bug in the system was
that accused the user of double homicide
against their own family, but you know, it happened.
Hopefully they patched that out.
Meanwhile, over in the UK, the United Kaaaangdom,
a human rights activist named Tanya O'Carroll
has sued META and, well, won a settlement.
Back in 2022, she sued META over use
of her personal information to sell targeted ads against her,
META being the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Now, the UK is a country that has a lot of problems,
but they also have some kind of privacy laws,
unlike the United States.
And she basically argued that they were not respecting
her right to privacy, and they were using her data
against her wishes to target ads to her.
And so Facebook came to the table and said, "Okay, fine.
We'll stop doing that for you specifically.
What a resolution."
But regulatory agencies in the UK are taking another look
because this does set precedent, and hey,
maybe Facebook shouldn't be able to do that.
Facebook makes 98% of their revenue off of selling ads
based on data they've collected about you and sold.
They've done a very good job over the past 20 years
of convincing the entire general public
to not care about their data
and put no value on it whatsoever,
so that they can make billions
and fund Mark Zuckerberg's weird midlife crisis.
A few years back, Apple made a tweak to iOS
that changed the way that apps
are able to actually track people.
They had to request specific access to track you,
and you could just say, "No."
This was so catastrophic to Facebook's business model
that they took out multiple full page ads in newspapers
and launched a whole campaign against it.
They were essentially saying, "If we can't use data
that people don't even know we're collecting about them,
we're gonna not have a business,"
to which I would say,
"Okay."
Oh, speaking of data,
there's an AI company called Clearview AI
that has been making waves and headlines for a while
because what they're doing is scraping public data
and trying to create a massive searchable database
of everyone.
You know when you watch a movie
and there's the spy agency or whatever
and there's the big screen
and they've got some footage, they zoom in,
they get the perps face
and they're like, "Run facial recognition."
Then another box pops up
and it scans through a whole bunch of faces
until one of them is like, "Match found!"
They're trying to build that.
And they have actually built that.
They've basically just scraped as much information
as they can from the internet, from social media,
and creating profiles on everyone
so that they can do an image search for your face
from security footage.
But recently, 404 Media, shout out,
they're doing amazing work right now.
But 404 Media recently broke that Clearview
was trying to purchase hundreds of millions
of arrest records, including mug shots,
social security numbers, cell phone numbers,
home addresses, and more.
They tried to strike a deal with an organization
that has a big database of crime records
for attorneys to use.
They can use it to make a case
and reference former cases and whatnot.
But Clearview was like, "I want that."
Clearview and the other company that had this data,
they entered a contract and that fell apart
and now they hate each other.
Clearview paid them a million dollars,
which is fucking nothing for that much data,
and that money has not been returned
because of a cited breach of contract.
But Clearview also says that the other people
breached contract and now it's going to courts
and hopefully they eat each other alive.
Clearview exists to sell their products
to law enforcement and investigative agencies.
So...
yike.
Let's talk about science.
Science stuff.
This is fucking crazy.
This is, okay, here we go.
This is one of the best things I think I've gotten
a chance to talk about in quite some time.
It didn't really happen super recently, but last month.
A research team at Purdue University
released a new open source computer model called NuFold
that is essentially going to enhance our understanding
of RNA research by decades.
Let's take a step back.
RNA, it's the younger brother to DNA,
the spindly little dudes that make us exist.
RNA is something we don't have a super good grasp on.
We get it, but we don't have the best handle on it.
But it's also the key to a lot of medical advancements
that we're hoping to have soon.
There are treatments and vaccinations and therapies
that can be done if we get a stronger understanding
of the structure of RNA.
Like specific RNA structures.
But the problem is it's very difficult right now
to just figure that out aside from trial
and error experimentation.
But this research group has created a computer model
that can essentially aid in the prediction
of what an RNA structure would look like
at the atomic level.
Now I'm not gonna pretend
that I actually understand all of this,
but largely it summarizes to this.
Medical research has a need to be able to visualize
and sequence proteins and other components of being a person.
And the better we can do that,
the faster we can iterate on treatments and medication.
And this is a huge step in that direction.
Anyway, you don't wanna be an alpha male,
but you definitely don't wanna be an alpha gal.
Alpha gal syndrome or AGS is a thing that you can contract
after being bit by a certain type of tick,
which can give you an allergy to red meat,
like full on anaphylactic shock allergy.
Ticks are tiny little blood sucking insects
and they're not great.
In fact, they suck a lot.
They cause a lot of diseases.
Anaphylactic shock red meat disease.
But specifically AGS was associated with lone star ticks
as opposed to holding like a deer tick,
which is more commonly associated with Lyme disease.
This is different from that,
except recent cases suggest that there might be
other types of ticks that are able to give somebody AGS.
There have been cases reported up and down the East Coast
of the United States and into the Midwest
in regions where the lone star tick is not usually found.
So there's more research going into this,
but I wanna be very clear, don't freak out.
This isn't new and this isn't escalating at a rate
that merits you to freak out and never go outside again.
But in general, if you go out into the deep woods
or you're walking around some tall grass
going on a hike or whatever,
check yourself for ticks afterwards
and check your friends and check your pets, all of it.
And unfortunately, yeah, check all of the crevices,
all of them, even that one.
Lightning round
A historic fort in England suffered damage to its walls
after somebody assaulted it
by shooting 40 golf balls at it.
Damn, it's hella artillery.
Google is paying out nearly $30 million
to settle an anti-discrimination case
in which they were accused of uplifting white
and Asian employees more than anyone else.
The Trump administration released the files
on the JFK assassination,
which is the conspiracy theory equivalent
of jingling some keys.
Like, yeah, it's not, it's fishy.
Are we on this still?
An Australian woman got caught trying to sell
two partially digested toes
that a dog threw up on the internet.
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
And finally for today, Blue Sky,
which I am on and you should follow me on,
made more money selling shirts making fun of Mark Zuckerberg
than they have on their actual offering
of selling custom domains.
On Blue Sky, your handle is like a website, it's a domain,
and they have an option to purchase a custom one.
And they made a shirt making fun of Mark Zuckerberg
and that has outpaced sales already.
Time to pivot.
Thank you so much for listening
to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus content,
and my shirt making fun of Mark Zuckerberg.
I do have a merch store, but I don't have that
in my merch store.
Anyway, my name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.