Hello. I defeated the drill at the outer wall.
But stuff still happened. So what's up? A lot.
I'm going to do things a little differently today.
The first segment of this is just going to be
dedicated to trying to cover the state of the
situation in the states, the state of the states,
the state state. I want to say upfront, it's
not great. It's just not. And I wish I had better
words, and I'm going to do what I can to give
a glimmer of hope. But here we go. Let's start
off by talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This
name has come up a whole bunch of times in this
series. Very brief recap, Kilmar was mistakenly,
in air quotes, deported to CICOT, the torture
prison in El Salvador. He had been living in
the States for years, has a wife, child, wasn't
supposed to be deported, wasn't supposed to be
deported to El Salvador especially. but was deported
to El Salvador. At which time the US government
was adamant that he was out of their jurisdiction
and there was no way they could possibly bring
him back. So he was brought back and the DOJ
hit him with human trafficking charges based
on a traffic stop that resulted in a simple warning
for an expired license from 2022. They did not
dig into this until after there was already a
media firestorm about them fucking up and deporting
him by accident. And the traffic stop was literally
just for speeding and the cop said you have a
lot of people in your car. And that's what they're
using for the basis of charging a man with human
trafficking. So at time of recording, which is
Saturday the... What day is it? The 24th. At
time of recording, he's been released. Hey, Future
Endeavorance here. Since recording this, he's
now back in ICE custody. They required him to
come turn himself back in. Because reasons, okay?
He finally went back home to his family and his
son, and now he's being informed that they're
gonna try to deport him to Uganda. Yes, the United
States went after this man and said, hey, we're
going to cut you a deal. We'll deport you to
Costa Rica if you plead guilty to human trafficking
charges. Presumably trying to give him some kind
of a plea deal that makes them look good for
this. But he didn't take it. And there is a court
order that he's allowed to make a case against
his deportation. And so now they're trying to
punish him by deporting him to a completely different
continent than before. This man has not been
found guilty of a crime. She hasn't. A little
bit of an added bonus, Kristi Noem, when finding
out that he was going to be released from jail
at the request of a judge, blasted the judge,
getting all upset and calling them an activist
judge, a liberal from Maryland that just wants
to get the spotlight. The judge that released
him is from Tennessee. But literally nothing
matters, as evidenced by this next section. Because
on the topic of deportations, you've probably
heard of Alligator Alcatraz, which is the nickname
that they've given the concentration camp in
Florida, as well as possibly the Speedway Slammer,
another one in Indiana. So first, there's a court
order from a judge that requires that the Florida
concentration camp that they call Alligator Alcatraz
must be shut down. That order is already being
ignored. Essentially what's going on is there's
a court case that argues that this facility is
detrimental to the environment that it's in,
which is the Everglades. The government threw
this facility together in basically no time at
all, and so there was no environmental impact
report or anything like that, and so on those
grounds, the judge was like, you gotta stop.
It's not the human rights violations or the horrific
conditions there, it's the environmental stuff,
which is important too, but hey, maybe let's
care about people. So DeSantis has already said
that he's not going to be deterred by that judge
and they're going to fight that in court. I have
my doubts that it's going away. And now there's
another one we're adding to the list, because
apparently naming concentration camps is just
so much fun. We got to give them all good brand
names, because that's what this administration
is all about. So say hello to the Lone Star Lockup,
a brand new concentration camp in Texas, except
it's not really all that new. It's at Fort Bliss,
which was previously used to detain Japanese
Americans during the World War II internment.
So hey, at least we've got pedigree there. We've
got the books which go back and learn from history.
Here's how we can infringe on rights. Oh great,
wonderful. Now I want to be clear. I've had a
few people try to use their Judaism to argue
that calling these things concentration camps
is insulting to Jews. I want to address that.
I'm quoting Jewish researchers in referring to
these as concentration camps. Jewish people don't
have a monopoly on determining what is and is
not a concentration camp. That there are more
than just the one instance in history. Obviously,
we should be careful about not downplaying the
Holocaust. That is not what's happening here,
though. What's happening here is identifying
that our current tax dollars are going towards
facilities that violate human rights. One last
thing about the migration stuff, the State Department
has now said that they're going to review all
55 million active visas. They're going to be
looking through social media profiles and ensuring
that you aren't dissenting against the United
States. Which is basically what the foundation
of our country is all about. Popping over to
the Supreme Court, our favorite current institution,
they have ruled that the Trump administration
can cut $800 million of medical research. Now
$800 million of medical research being cut sounds
like a lot. until you recall that the Trump administration
has actually slashed 12 billion dollars of medical
research funds. This was specifically targeting
a chunk of those funds that were being held up
in court because they were being appealed. Because
what are we doing? Why are we getting rid of
medical research grants? This is not a partisan
thing. I don't know when this became a partisan
thing. We need to study illness so that we can
make cures for sick. But because they hate universities
and have been spending decades labeling them
as, like, liberal indoctrination sites, they're
trying to punish them by getting rid of research
grants, which just hurts everyone. I'm tired
of people who aren't experts asserting that the
experts shouldn't be listened to because they
have a bias. That bias being knowledge of the
subject. Anyway, this is all still just this
week. Let's keep going. Alina Habba! I've never
actually looked up how to pronounce her name,
and I don't care enough. So we're gonna say Habba.
Hababa. So she's a former lawyer of Trump's,
and was appointed to a position of interim federal
prosecutor for New Jersey. She's been in that
position for months, despite having no prosecutorial
experience whatsoever, and people are like, why
is this happening? After getting the appointment,
she proudly said that she was looking forward
to turning New Jersey red. Which is not a thing
a federal prosecutor does. Anyway, they tried
to unseat her, and they kind of did. Again, she
was appointed as an interim prosecutor, and her
term was ending, and they were like, get this
person out of here, let's put somebody competent
here. But then the Justice Department got involved
and undid that. Like, literally, the Attorney
General was like, no, this specific person gets
this specific job. But a judge had ruled that
she had that position illegally. And so her decisions
from that position should be overturned. But
that judge's decision to overturn the decisions
that she made is now on hold because the Justice
Department is putting together an appeal to explain
why this person with, again, no prosecutorial
experience and only really was a former lawyer
to Trump, should be a federal prosecutor for
a state at all. Let's jump over to how we are
now a socialist country. That's right, Donald
Trump has finally embraced socialism, and Bernie
Sanders is supporting him in this, as the United
States now has a 10 % stake in Intel. Is that
weird? Yep. Yep. The Republican Party has just
screamed communism and socialism at literally
everything. And while there's... Examples of
state stakes in companies that aren't necessarily
socialist or communist is not typically a thing
that happens in free market capitalism, which
is like their whole vibe. Now, there's some mixed
reactions from the conservatives in this. Of
course, the Magaside is like, this is great.
This is so smart. Forty chess. But some other
conservatives like Rand Paul are saying this
is they're saying the thing. They're doing the
meme saying it's socialism. As I said, Bernie
Sanders is actually in support of this. What
has essentially happened is Trump was taking
money that was already penned to be a grant to
Intel and instead reworked it and got some money
from a different fund to purchase stock instead.
In theory, that could mean returns on the investment
that are like material, like just money returns.
In actuality, it's probably not gonna do anything.
This was supposed to just be a grant that goes
to Intel, and while I'm not a huge fan of just
giving billions upon billions of dollars to companies
that have billions upon billions of dollars,
I think that money could maybe go towards, I
don't know, feeding people? Housing people? But
it's also also still a non -voting stake in the
company. So like... The United States just owns
10 % of a company and can't do anything with
that, because. Not to mention, like, literally
just a couple weeks ago Trump was harassing the
CEO of Intel and saying that he should resign,
and then now this is happening. But let's leave
the theoretical world and go back into the real
world, where there's military in the streets.
God, I am just, this is just, it's so all over
the place. Thousands of deployed National Guard
are patrolling the streets of DC. There are still
hundreds of them in Los Angeles. It is now coming
out that the Trump administration plans to send
the Guard into 19 more states, most of which
are Republican controlled states, so presumably
he's doing that so that they don't push back
on him or even cooperate with him. The National
Guard that is going to be going to these 19 states
will technically be operating under the state,
but they're given permission to... further federal
causes. So it's technically a stop hitting yourself,
stop hitting yourself kind of situation. But
additionally, the Washington Post reported that
the Pentagon has been drafting plans for deploying
the military to Chicago, which is wild. Chicago
is another one of those cities that the Republicans
love to rail on, primarily because there's a
lot of black people there. They'll never actually
admit that, but they use dog whistles like saying
that it's overrun with violence and gangs. Look
no further than how frequently they love to quote
statistics around like race and incarceration
rates. That's what the dog whistle about crime
comes from. To be clear, they want to deploy
the National Guard to places that did not vote
for Trump. DC did not vote for Trump and does
not want that. And his response to that is they
don't get a say in what they want. The mayors
of these cities are pointing to the fact that
their policies to address crime are working.
Crimes dropping in Chicago and Baltimore and
DC. But I shouldn't even waste breath making
that argument because it's not about that. It's
not about the crime. It's not about the optics.
They don't care. They're just saying words to
give ammo to people to allow this to happen.
A large contingent of people who are supporting
this just take everything that Trump says at
face value. And when he contradicts himself,
they take what he said more recently, or what
he said that was more palatable, at face value.
That's true for all of his officials. Like, Hegseth
can go retweet posts saying that women shouldn't
have the right to vote. But because he didn't
go on national television and say the words,
I think women shouldn't have the right to vote,
They don't believe that's the case. So it's not
about making sense. It's not about making a legal
argument for this to happen It's not about anything
except for giving red meat to their base by way
of deploying the military To the places that
they've been told are overrun with liberals Imagine
if the actual problem was just that it was overrun
with liberals I mean it kind of is like you want
to go get a breakfast sandwich But the only thing
you can find is like a an $18 like brioche breakfast
sandwich thing That is the problem with liberals
ruining our cities. I want my breakfast sandwich
to kill me. Okay, I think I was just trying to
give myself a little bit of a break there vis
-a -vis breakfast sandwiches. Let's keep going.
Gerrymandered. You've probably been aware of
Texas's effort to redraw their district map and
gerrymander it really severely for Republicans.
I want to talk real quick about what gerrymandering
is, especially for people who are not from the
states. Real quick. In the United States, we
have districts. Each district has a representative.
Those representatives go to Congress. The districts
are drawn on a map by the states, like the state
legislatures. So politicians are the ones that
are choosing the districts. And it is legal for
them to craft districts that favor certain demographics.
As long as a court doesn't rule it to be racist
and unconstitutional, as long as they can sneak
it by, they can draw whatever the fuck map they
want. That is what's happening in Texas. Texas
has more Democrats than Republicans. You probably
think of Texas as a deep red state, largely because
of gerrymandering. Now, both parties do this,
but the reason that this Texas situation is so
outlandish is because this is not a time where
redistricting usually happens. We do a census
every 10 years on the zero, and usually that's
when the redistricting happens. But there's nothing
legally stopping that. Which is another example
of just how fragile the United States' systems
are. Like, we put so much emphasis on, just be
chill about it, dog. But they're not being chill.
And they passed a redistricted map that is, ah,
boring. It completely obliterates representation
for Hispanic and Black people in Texas at large.
And it adds five additional safe red seats to
the state. And so the response to that has been
that California's governor Gavin Newsom has been
threatening to redistrict California as a retaliation
against Texas's redistricting. And that takes
more effort because California has extra steps
that it has to jump through before they can actually
do a redistricting. So where we're at right now
is for anyone who's talking about how there's
never going to be elections again, they are currently
fighting to try to make it so that they win the
next election. So I think we can use that as
a reason why we should expect there to be elections.
But what they're doing is trying to make it so
that the election won't do anything. The Republicans
are at risk of losing their majority in the House,
possibly in the Senate. And if that happens,
Trump's term is effectively over. So they're
doing everything they can to make sure that the
House cannot be taken by Democrats by changing
the literal game. Should we have gerrymandering?
No, right? Like, it's bad. Yeah, obviously. The
best thing to do would be to have every state
not do this. But that's not the world we live
in, that's not the situation, and calling for
decency in the face of one party literally changing
the game is how you lose. I'm not a Democrat,
but I can't fault them for doing what they're
doing right now. It's the right political move.
Alright, almost done with state stuff. Truly
just an unbelievable amount of bullshit, and
I skip stuff. Sock the Epstein files! We still
don't have the full unredacted Epstein files,
which is a thing that a lot of people in Trump's
periphery were talking very loudly about delivering
once they were in office. Of course, that tune
changed. They were like, oh, there are no, there's
no, there's no list. And stop asking. Most recently,
there has been released audio of an interview
with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's girlfriend
slash human trafficking associate, in which she
said there is no black book, like there is no
list of clients. She also said that she never
saw Trump do anything inappropriate. Very trustworthy
statement from a very trustworthy person. Now,
we knew that there was not going to be an actual
list. This is not a movie. There's not a little
black book that says all of these people are
child rapists. But we also know that it's not
like nothing went down there. So it would be
pretty fucking nice to not be completely lied
to for just a second to see anyone ever face
some kind of consequences for the molestation
of children. For the enterprise of the molestation
of children. But the Republican -controlled House
Oversight Committee now has a small subset of
pages from the Epstein files, like 3 % of them,
and they're going over them and will make a decision
on what to release, if anything. I'm not holding
my breath. Okay. I'm so thirsty. One sec. Okay.
I'm gonna end this section by saying I know things
are bleak. I know things are rough right now.
Trust me, I have to sift through this stuff,
figure out what I can even include. I have to
trace things as they're developing over time.
I know there's a lot going on right now. I know
it feels like we are careening towards the end,
but I want to say this. This will pass. That
doesn't mean it's gonna pass. effortlessly. That
doesn't mean that we're going to be completely
fine on the other side of it. That doesn't even
mean that we're all going to survive this. But
this will pass. Trump is dying. Like, he doesn't
take an expert. You can look at his face and
see that he is dying. And whether it happens
tomorrow, in a couple of weeks, or in a couple
of years, the man's not long for this work. And
while a lot of people rightfully say that Trump
going away won't fix our problems, won't end
all of this, I do want to note Do you really
think JD Vance has what it takes to take over
the MAGA throne? I see people online say that
they would vote for him, but I also see people
online say the dumbest imaginable shit every
day. The fervor, the deification is all specifically
Trump. And while, yeah, him getting out of office
by way of leaving this mortal coil is not going
to solve the fundamental problems of the United
States of America, at least we won't have to
deal with the fallout of him making an assumption
about some dumb bullshit he doesn't understand,
and everyone in his periphery falling over themselves
to make that happen. There's a lot of things
that industry leaders are doing right now, that
they're trying to butter him up, they're trying
to stay on his good side. There are things that
he is doing that they are really not into, and
they're just kind of biding their time until
they can push back when he's gone, because they
don't want to piss him off by contradicting him
right now. Okay, let's take a breather, because
I need a breather. stretch, you know? And hey,
maybe a great way for you to relax would be to
head to isupport .dev, where you can find links
to my Patreon, my Ko -Fi, my YouTube memberships,
and you can support me. Anyone supporting me
across any of those platforms gets access to
behind -the -scenes content, bonus content, and
early access to playtests of the tabletop role
-playing game that I've been designing called
Presenia. You can learn all about all of that
at isupport .dev. Thank you. Elsewhere, over
in the UK, they've been arresting people for
t -shirts. Fashion police. Except it's not fashion
police. It's, um, they don't want people expressing
support for Palestine. Cops in the UK have been
arresting people for wearing shirts that support
Palestine Action, which is a group that has been
deemed a terrorist organization by the UK. So
wearing their shirt amounts to supporting a terrorist
organization, apparently, enough to just arrest
people who are otherwise just sitting in protest.
Like quite literally, these protests are as peaceful
as they get. People sitting silently on the ground
wearing a shirt and holding a sign and they're
being arrested. There's even footage of like
an 80 year old woman being arrested. Now, that's
awful. And it's especially awful because right
now the famine is official. in Gaza. International
experts have now formally declared it a famine.
That's happening. And yet they're so focused
on trying to arrest people for simply wearing
a shirt in favor of freeing Palestine that they
accidentally arrested a guy who was wearing a
slightly different shirt. Miles Pickering, a
visionary, designed a shirt that says Plasticine
Action. The shirt is an anti -AI and animating
shirt. Plasticine. Action, but cops saw that
and they were like, ah and arrested him and then
a few minutes later They're like, oh, it doesn't
say Palestine action. So we can't actually arrest
you which begs the question If all of these people
who are currently arrested had like one letter
different on their shirt would they not have
been? What are we even doing anymore? I'll tell
you what we're doing. We are sharing the East
blue all the way to Indonesia In Indonesia, there
has been a protest that started with students
and has just been growing and growing ever since,
and it is represented by the flying of the Monkey
D. Luffy Jolly Roger from One Piece. So the government
of Indonesia is not super popular right now,
and when they cut 25 % of funding to higher education,
students were like, what in the fuck? They formed
a protest movement called Dark Indonesia, and
they started to fly the Luffy flag. This picked
up steam and it has just kind of become a symbol
for general resistance and a movement towards
something new for Indonesia. The government of
Indonesia made this specifically worse for themselves
by saying that this flag was like a national
security threat and implying that people were
being paid to do this. Where have I heard that
before? Anyway, that just made them fly the flag
more. So well done. Solidarity. I hope that you
get a better life. I hope we do too. Yee -haw.
I ate the, um, the yap -yap fruit. It gave me
the power to yap. Moving on. Technology! A little
while back, I talked about an effort from the
UK demanding Apple to essentially create a security
backdoor for the UK government to access encrypted
data. Apple is actually kind of pretty good at
data privacy. Like, not perfect. Far from it.
But from the big carriers, they actually give
you a lot of tools to do full end -to -end encryption.
One of those tools is to fully end -to -end encrypt
all of your files in iCloud, which makes it so
that only you can access the files. Apple has
data stored on their servers, but it's unintelligible
gobbledygook. So even if a government came in
and said, give us the files, Apple couldn't do
anything. They're like, here's a bunch of garbage.
The only way that garbage can be read is with
the key that's in your computer. But the UK didn't
want that. They didn't like that. Stop it, is
what they said. And Apple said no. But recently,
they dropped that request and are no longer asking
Apple to do that because Apple was like, no,
we'll just pull out of your market. This is not
the first time that a government has asked Apple
to break their own security. And the US did this
infamously. They once had the FBI harass Apple
to open someone's iPhone. They had a suspect's
iPhone and they were like, we can't open it.
We can't unlock it. Apple, you need to make it
so that we can unlock this so that we can get
the evidence out of it. And Apple was like, no,
we're not going to give you a back door into
our devices. Governments have a weird relationship
with encryption. They're always like, encryption
is important. And all these foreign nations that
are impeding on their citizens' privacy are bad.
Anyway, stop using encryption. Over in Mississippi,
you are not able to access Blue Sky through their
primary app. Mississippi is one of the several
states that has recently passed an ID verification
law for online access to content that could be
potentially dangerous to minors. But the specifics
of the Mississippi law make it so that Blue Sky
doesn't even want to bother. Because Blue Sky
can have porn on it in theory, they would have
to verify the identity of everyone using their
platform. And they're not going to do that. It's
expensive and dangerous and it's being challenged
in court, so it might not even be a thing that
they have to do for a very long time anyway.
In the meantime, they've just blocked access
entirely for the state of Mississippi. I want
to say again one more time, because apparently
I'm not saying it loud enough. This is not the
tech policy that we're asking for. Please, please
stop. Please stop making me give you my ID to
look at memes. Oh, also, uh, Grok. A few weeks
ago, I talked about how ChatGPT had a bunch of
conversations leaked onto the internet, and now
it's happening for Grok. Grok, which is Elon
Musk's AI, has an option to share conversations.
When you do that, it creates a link. Those links
to those conversations were then indexed by Google.
So you could literally search, like, Grok conversation
and find private conversations that people made
a link to share to one other person, unknowingly
putting it on the public internet. So that's
neat. You can just Google someone's private conversation
with a chatbot. It's truly bizarre how frequently
these apps are just being busted. Like, I've
never heard of so many frequent instances of
just like, oh yeah, user data is just out there,
unsecured. It's almost like we're moving too
fast and breaking too many things. Lightning
round! Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida,
ordered the removal of a rainbow crosswalk that
was made in memoriam of the people who died at
the Pulse nightclub shooting. This is done because
of hate, and locals have already repainted the
crosswalk. The Cambridge Dictionary has added
words such as skibbidi and delulu in the most
recent edition. I want to be clear, that's fine.
I don't care. That's fine with me. Words change.
Words are made up. If you're pressed about that,
you're delulu. James Dobson, a chief architect
of the modern evangelical movement in the US,
beefed it. He did. The CEO of Target has stepped
down as Target is facing a bunch of financial
issues because everyone's boycotting them. Everyone.
And finally, for today, archaeologists and skateboarders
will be working together to excavate an old skate
park in Scotland. To be clear, it's not like
an ancient... Skate park that would be so rad.
Oh my god Imagine you're like at a dig site and
you just you take your little sweepy thingy and
you start sweeping away And it's a fucking half
-pipe awesome rad cool Thank you so much for
listening to today's episode of stuff keeps happening
head to skh .news for sources bonus content and
a skate park from Scotland that I put there That's
unexcavated My name is Enderence, we'll talk
again soon, take care, and be well.