Heads up, before anything else, there will be
exactly no April Fool's jokes in this episode.
Anyone who says otherwise is a charlatan. Do not believe them.
Hello
I guessed the number of beans in the jar
but Stuff still Happened
So what's up?
Protests. A lot of them.
We're gonna talk protests for a little bit.
First we're gonna talk about the Tesla protest,
and then we're gonna talk about upcoming protests,
and then we're gonna talk about how to do protests.
And then we're gonna talk about a lot more stuff.
There's a lot in this one. Let's keep moving.
So over the past week and weekend, there were a whole
bunch of protests at Tesla showrooms around the
country and beyond.
People gathered at the showrooms
to peacefully protest with signs and yelling and... protestin'
Specifically, they're protesting Elon
Musk, and specifically, specifically, they're
protesting the whole "he's a Nazi" thing.
Remember that time that he went on stage in front of
the entire world and did a Nazi salute twice,
and then some fucking chuds tried to say that's
a Roman salute, and then that whole meme started?
Well, the man still definitely did Nazi salutes,
and then definitely supported the Nazi party in Germany
And has definitely been a complete
fucking knob for years.
So people aren't particularly
thrilled that this fucking tool, who is
insultingly bad at Path of Exile, is basically in charge of
the federal government.
Now while a lot of the
protests have been peaceful, I do want to acknowledge
that there have been a few instances of violent
vandalism at these Tesla facilities.
Chargers on fire, cars on fire, Tesla and fire usually go hand in hand
I don't see what the problem is.
But this has made Musk and Trump very big mad, and
they're using the Justice Department to specifically
go after these people who are doing things to
Tesla facilities and treating them as domestic
terrorists, and threatening to send them to the
same prison that they're sending the deportees to
out of the country.
Classic punishment for
arson in the US is deporting them to a prison in El Salvador
Now, should you set things on fire?
The law says no.
But morally, should you be setting
things on fire, especially at Tesla dealerships?
The law says no.
But moving on
There are large
scale protests planned for April 5th. They are
called the hands-off protests. I will link to
some information about them in the description
slash newsletter slash whatever.
These protests are planned for basically everywhere, like every
single state in a bunch of countries across the
world to protest Trump and Musk as they continue
to sit in the White House and fondle each other
while whispering about tariffs and I don't know,
staff reductions and stuff
Like an authoritarian oroborous
But moreover, I want to
talk to you about protest safety and things you
should be doing if you're planning to go to a protest
These are things to maximize your impact
by way of keeping yourself safe and not ruining for everyone else
So quickly, I'm going to
go through five little tippies. Tippie tippies.
Tip tip tip tips for you. That was a normal thing
that I just did with my mouth.
1. Leave your tech at home
Phone, smartwatch, anything with a
screen, anything with a radio, leave it at home.
If you absolutely, absolutely need to have a phone
of some kind, purchase a burner phone with cash
and ditch it as soon as you can.
Do not use your credit card that creates a paper trail.
Leave all your crap at home.
Two, turn your body into an info sheet
If you're going to a protest, you don't
know what's going to happen to you. And that's just,
that's just part of the deal. I'm not saying
that to scare you, but it's true. You're most likely
going to be perfectly fine. But in the event that
the piggies decide to arrest you, take your stuff,
strip you or whatever, you need to make sure
that you've got the information that you need
on your person, quite literally. You can write
it down on a piece of paper as well, but if you've
got that in your bag and they take your bag,
you're screwed. So take a, like a permanent marker and
write a few things on yourself. Here's some
examples. Jot down an emergency contact, the
phone number and just the first name of someone
that should be called in the event of an emergency.
Write down the name and number of a lawyer who
can come and represent you. There are usually
lawyers that are doing pro bono work to help
protesters and protest organizers usually have
a few that they know of So chat with them, try to get a number
Also any medical information,
like allergies to medications or conditions that
a doctor should be aware of in the event that you
are unfortunately knocked out and brought to a hospital
If they can pull up your sleeve and see
like, Oh, this person's allergic to penicillin.
That can quite literally save your life.
3. Don't talk to cops.
Don't do it. Don't talk to the cops.
Not even if they're being nice and not even if
they're just making small talk.
They are not your
friend. They are allowed to lie to you and they
are trying to get you to incriminate yourself.
Remember you have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can and will be used against
you in a court of law.
The only things you
should say to a cop are, "I am not answering
questions without my lawyer present," or
"I would like a phone call"
...with which to get lawyer.
Seriously, if nothing else, if you do
nothing else, don't talk to cops.
4. Wear something practical and comfortable. Don't listen to
people who tell you to get like tactical shit or wear
like higher shoes so that you change your height
so that the cops won't be able to recognize you.
Like, no, just wear what's comfortable
because you might be in it for like 48 hours.
Again, you don't know what's going to happen to you.
You might be in a jail cell overnight. You might go
home totally fine. You don't know.
Plan accordingly.
Wear something that you're comfortable in.
Bring a change of an outer layer in a bag if you've
got it, but just don't wear big flowy stuff. Don't
don't wear stupid shoes. Like wear a practical thing.
5. look out for each other
Bring water. Bring maybe some first aid stuff. Use
water to wash out any pepper spray and tear gas.
Don't use anything else but water. Please, please.
And remember, this is not about you. This is about
the protest and the message.
Do not make it about yourself. Do not make it about making yourself
into a martyr. Don't start shit and don't get up
in cops' faces. It doesn't seem straightforward,
but now is not the time to fight like that
because doing that imperils a lot of people around you,
especially in the US where altercations with
cops can quickly turn deadly. And dying is not as
effective as making a statement and then
continuing to go on and help other people.
Heroics don't
happen because they're sought out. They happen
because someone acted in a time of necessity.
Don't seek it out.
I'm not saying that you got
to drop your fantasy about being the big hero,
although you should do that,
but I'm saying be
thoughtful and remember, it's not about you.
You are one of a collective. This is about the
collective and their impact.
So there's that. Go forth, protest, have fun, do all that good
stuff. Mostly, meet some amazing people.
You're going to find some really awesome people if
you go to a protest. So make some friends.
Okay, moving on.
I'm talking to you. I have a
Patreon, patreon.com slash endeavorants. You should
check it out if you want to support me. Also
head to skh.news for sources and a newsletter,
which is free. And there's also some paid support tiers.
That's the end. We're moving on
I can't with the, with the self promo. I can't do it.
Policy!
A Tufts University doctoral student
and Fulbright scholar was abducted by federal
agents in plain clothes as she was walking to dinner.
Rümeysa Öztürk got abducted. As I said,
plain clothes officers walked up to her wearing
a mask saying where the cops come with us.
She's a student here on a visa from Turkey in the
Fulbright program, which is a program where we
exchange students to bring in different perspectives
and cultures and intelligence from around the
world to help academia be better.
This student, who again is a doctoral student, she's in her
thirties. She wrote an op-ed for her school paper
a year ago, requesting for the school to
acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.
That is all she did. And
apparently that was enough for ICE to take her and
the state has revoked her visa.
They're now trying
to deport her, but a judge has recently halted that.
This is insane.
I'm so incredibly tired
of people trying to make the argument that folks
who are here on a green card or a visa straight up
deserve to be kicked out if they remotely
criticize the state. Like what a bullshit take.
You don't get to be a person who's like, "ah, don't
tread on me. And also the government is allowed to
determine who can say what."
The executive branch does not get to just
put limitations on freedom of speech just because
it makes them sad.
This foreign exchange student
who's doing research was critical of Israel.
Now we're going to deport her!
It's gross and dumb.
And in the United States, freedom of speech is supposed
to be the bedrock of our society. You know, the
whole first amendment thing.
And you can argue till you're blue in the face about whether or
not people with visas or green cards should be just
overtly patriotic and never criticize the
country. Otherwise they're not grateful for being here.
That's still just gross and weirdly exceptionalist
And it also is an endorsement of whoever is in
power at that time, having the ability to say
this is acceptable. This is not. And last I checked,
the United States is not governed by philosopher kings
America is currently governed by a half-wit
moron who bankrupted a casino. And prior to
that, a barely alive husk of a human who spent his
earlier years pushing back against integration in schools.
So maybe don't pick an authority figure
to determine what is and is not okay to say,
regardless of country of origin.
Because if the U.S. State Department needs to deport a 31 year
old researcher who wrote an op-ed in a college
newspaper because that is a threat to
national security, then we have failed as a country.
Oh, speaking of national security!
As I was uploading last week's episode of stuff keeps
happening, it broke that a bunch of top
ranking government officials had a signal group chat
where they were discussing plans to bomb Yemen.
And they added the editor in chief of the Atlantic
magazine to said group chat.
That is a real thing
that happened like a week ago.
And we're already over it!
It's just crazy. Like we should not be over it.
Here's the thing: If they did this for
this one group chat, they absolutely have many more.
Signal is not approved for this use case.
And it's not like they all just coordinated. Hey,
let's all install signal to have this one conversation here.
This is a problem.
This was us getting a
look into just how little this administration
actually cares about national security, which
we knew we knew they never actually cared. And we
knew they never actually cared when it came to
Hillary with her email server that they screeched
about for years.
That is not a defense of Hillary.
She shouldn't have had that email server. And also
they shouldn't be doing this.
But for reason, I don't think that anything is going to really
come of this because one, who is going to do
anything about it? And two, Pete Hegseth apparently
has been bringing his wife to meetings with
defense ministers from foreign countries.
But honest to god, despite that being not okay, she's
probably more qualified than Pete Hegseth.
Maybe it's just for the best.
The administration's take on all of this with the whole signal chat
thing is, is no big deal. Mistakes happen. We need to move on.
Which like, I'm not going to sit here
and point out the hypocrisy. It's not worth it.
Let's go around the world.
Let's go around the world!
Dizzy.
We're good.
Oh, hey, the Greenland thing. Greenland, Greenland.
JD Vance went there
because the US is still talking about wanting
to take it over.
He was there for like
literally a handful of hours and nobody there wanted him
there. They were pretty upset about it. But
during his time there, he addressed some people at a
military base, he insulted Denmark and then
implied that Greenland should separate from Denmark and
then join the United States.
Now you should know that most political
parties in that very Greenland have decided to
form a coalition to say fuck you to the US.
They're not about it. They're really, really, really
not about it. At all.
Turkey, there's unrest.
That's putting it mildly.
There's a lot of protests in Turkey.
So Turkey's
leader, Erdogan, has been in power for like over
20 years and is essentially a dictator. He's
most recently been doing everything he can to stop a
potential opposition party from unseating him.
This time it was by arresting the mayor of Istanbul,
who is the leader of said opposition party
and most likely person to be able to actually
unseat Erdogan.
So amidst ongoing protests,
this arrest happens and that cranks it up to 11.
It goes from like, hey, we're not happy with the
state of things and our government isn't really
doing anything to fix stuff to our government is
actively trying to make it so that we have no voice.
And of course, these protests are then
met with the government clamping down saying that
you can't do gatherings. You can't hold
demonstrations. And they're saying, fuck you, we're
going to hold demonstrations. And the
government's like, well, we're going to arrest all of you.
And it's, it's, it's escalating pretty quick.
In Canada, there's going to be an election in a month.
God, imagine election season lasting a month.
So Justin, "I only did blackface that one time" Trudeau
stepped down and was replaced by Mark Carney
Both of them are in the Liberal Party
and Carney recently called a snap election, which
is essentially going to just be the Liberal Party
versus the Conservative Party to boil it down to the basics.
Now, pre-Trump, the Conservative Party
in Canada was surging in the polls and it was
really looking likely that the Liberals were just
going to crash out.
And then Trump came into
power and started talking about Canada being
the 51st state and saying Governor Trudeau
and then slapping all those tariffs on Canada.
And Canadians are fucking pissed.
And so they're kind of looking at the Conservatives and being
like, Hey, actually, we don't want that. Like
they're looking at what's going on in America.
And they're like, this is insane. We don't
want any of that.
And so the graphs of the polling
between these parties is hysterical. It is just
a complete inversion.
So the vote is on April 28.
We'll see just how much Canadians are pissed off.
In Myanmar, there was a massive 7.7
magnitude earthquake.
It's been more than a
century since they've seen an earthquake of this scale.
And unfortunately, the devastation is widespread
and massive. At time of recording, the death toll
has surpassed 1700 people with thousands more missing and injured.
Myanmar is not in a great
way right now. There's been ongoing civil war and
some parties of the civil war have offered to do a
ceasefire to help with the aid efforts, but
it's tenuous at best.
Meanwhile, Israel is bombing
Lebanon again. They've broken their ceasefire.
They signed in November and dropped a bomb on a
residential building in a suburb of Beirut.
The Israeli government issued an evacuation warning
beforehand by posting a picture of the building
that they were going to bomb
So the people who live in this building were
scrambling to flee and inform the other folks who
lived there who didn't see the X over their house
and then boom, plume of smoke. Israel used their
favorite excuse of there's terrorists here. So
we're going to bomb it, which is not an excuse.
"There are terrorists there. So we're going to
bomb it" is not an argument.
One, "terrorist" is
subjective. Two, that's not how anything works.
You don't have the authority to bomb other countries.
It is just war. All you're doing is war,
especially when you're saying, well, we believe there to be
some terrorists somewhere in this building
that otherwise is populated entirely by civilians.
That's not using civilians as a shield. That's
just logistics.
There are plenty of buildings
in every country that have governmental operations
as well as other shit going on.
And in this case,
like it or not, Hezbollah is government operation.
So that's that's fun. Yep.
Lightning Round
Elon Musk has sold Twitter to himself.
he is lumping Twitter into his AI company.
So that means Twitter is now owned by X AI and is like entirely
just an AI bullshit thing now.
So hey, this is your reminder:
Get the fuck off of Twitter.
DNA testing app 23 and me might
possibly be transferring users DNA data to a
new owner as they're facing bankruptcy.
Stop giving your biological data to tech companies.
Over 1.5 million photos of users from
dating apps, particularly queer and kink based
dating apps have been leaked online.
Sorry, not leaked. They were just not protected by
the developers of the apps.
They were just publicly available.
The apps include SM people,
Chica, Trans Love, pink and British anything that's
developed by mad mobile apps. So look into that.
And finally, for today, rumor has it that you'll
be able to preorder a Nintendo switch to as soon as April.
I'm gonna switch to uh,
I didn't have a second part of this joke.
I'm gonna switch to my outro.
Thank you so much
for listening to today's episode of stuff
keeps happening head to skh.news for sources, bonus
content and my secret as to how I guessed about
the beans. My name is Endeavorance. I'll be back
on Monday. Take care and be well.