Weekly Roundup

SKH Roundup: March 9th 2026

Taxpayer dollars are for bombs and makeup exclusively

Endeavorance

09 Mar 2026 — 7 min read

"This War Is a Great Idea," Says Group of the Dumbest Motherfuckers Imaginable

The US and Israel are continuing their attacks of Iran and Lebanon as this absolutely unnecessary war looks to be headed towards even more escalation as reports now say that Trump is considering US ground troop deployment in Iran. This would be a gargantuan mistake, but so was being goaded by Evangelical Christian Zionists into starting a full scale war with Iran.

As oil markets continue to implode due to global shipping disruptions from the war, gas prices in the US jumped an average of 27 cents per gallon over the week, averaging $3.25 nationwide according to AAA.

The attacks have taken the lives of more than 1,300 souls, many of whom have been civilians. Israel and the US have begun to strike oil refineries and infrastructure like water plants, causing ecological disaster in the region as oil fires burn and unleash hellish plumes of smoke into the air.

In Beirut, Israel has been conducting more military operations. They claim to be in Lebanon to attack Hezbollah. The Israeli government has issued evacuation orders for large swaths of southern Lebanon, displacing tens of thousands of civilians. Just this weekend, Israel carried out an operation in Lebanon which they claim was to retrieve the remains of an Israeli airman from a raid from 40 years ago (shocker, still at it). During the operation, Israeli forces on the ground in Lebanon killed at least 41 people, only 3 of whom were soldiers. The rest were civilians, including kids.

They went on to dig up a grave in Lebanon only to not find the remains.

My point is we're being lied to about basically everything happening overseas, and it's fascinating given the advancements in technology since the last major time our government tried to launch such an operation so far away. We can see this happening in realtime while they tell us that it's simply targeted strikes against just the Big Bad Guys.

If there's a god out there, I don't think they intended for the sanctity of life to waver based on longitude.

New Crime: Driving While Trans (in Kansas)

Lawmakers in Kansas recently passed a bill into law which directly attacks transgender and intersex residents of the state.

The bill does a few different things but the big two are:

Immediately revokes any drivers license whose "gender" marker differs from "sex assigned at birth"
Creates a $1,000 bounty for people who report other citizens who "use the wrong bathroom"

We'll start with the drivers license stuff. The bill starts off by asserting that "gender" and "sex assigned at birth" now mean the same thing for state legal codes. It then goes on to state that given these new definitions, any document that does not match gender and sex assigned at birth will be immediately void.

When I say "immediately," I don't mean there will be a future date where the enforcement starts immediately. I mean now. When the bill was passed, suddenly those licenses (and birth certificates, in some cases) were voided. An entire class of citizens informed that they can no longer legally drive to work.

For the bathroom bill side of things, it first makes it a violation of the law to use a multi-occupant gendered bathroom if it is not the one that is designated for your sex assigned at birth. There's a few exceptions, such as parents bringing their children. But that has an age limit of 9 years old so the second your kid turns 10, apparently they become a sexual predator inside of a bathroom.

For the "bounty" side of the bill, it states that a plaintiff can file a lawsuit up to two years out from an incident in which they were "aggrieved by the invasion of such individual's personal privacy or is otherwise harmed by a violation of [this law] by an individual of the opposite sex." Doing so may earn them $1,000 as a reward. The bill also offers to forward the $1,000 bounty to local governments for reporting violations.

Multiple trans residents of Kansas along with the ACLU are suing to push back on this bullshit, because it is indeed bullshit. Trans rights are human rights. Laws like this make things worse for everyone, not just trans folks.

What Happened to Kristi Noem?

I'll tell you what happened: I am the Light Yagami of news. I had just finished a draft about Noem's corruption in her role as head of DHS, only to tab out of my draft and into my news feed where I saw she'd been fired. My keyboard is tied directly to the fabrics of reality, and when I finish writing a draft newsletter, reality shifts intentionally to undermine me.

Uh, so anyway.

Thirteen months into her tenure as the Secretary of Murdering Civilians and Calling Them Terrorists After The Fact, Kristi Noem has been fired assigned to a different role. Replacing her as head of the Department of Homeland Security will be Markwayne Mullin, a senator from Oklahoma. His replacement will be appointed by the governor of Oklahoma.

Noem oversaw this initial surge in ICE activity with masked agents killing people in the street. But what actually took her down? Was it the puppy killing? The photo-op in front of dehumanized prisoners in a foreign torture prison? The constant lies? Nope—it was, oh. No, it was the constant lies, actually.

"I'm going to stand in front of a jail cell full of half naked foreign men because I love my country and I'd do anything for it" — Kristi Noem, probably

Among the many Hague-worthy things she did during her tenure, she directed a $220,000,000 ad campaign to be produced largely by a company run by the spouse of her own staffer, using a days-old shell company to try and throw off the trail. The ad campaign was ostensibly some kind of fear tactic to scare immigrants into fleeing the country, featuring various shots of Kristi Noem trying to look all hard.

The shell company, called "Safe America Media, LLC" was not even two weeks old when it got the lion's share of the advertising contract, only for it to turn out that a previously undisclosed subcontractor for "Safe America Media, LLC" was "The Strategy Group," which was the one tied to Noem and her staffers. Turns out, this is often frowned upon.

Finally, during a recent hearing, Noem flailed wildly before making a claim that would ultimately fell her: the assertion that Trump approved of the ad spend. Trump contradicted her under-oath testimony, and hours later we got the news that she'd be "moving to a new role" as… oh no.

Agents of SHIELD

Kristi Noem will be the Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas. I am not joking.

Because our leadership is indistinguishable from the worst smelling cafeteria table of a sundowning suburban town's middle school, they recently hosted the "Shield of the Americas" summit. Like the superhero franchise. Yeaahahay.

This is a play on "Summit of the Americas," and was essentially an ideological gathering of generally Trump-aligned South American states where the Trump admin pushed what they are unironically calling the, "Donroe Doctrine," as a play on "Monroe Doctrine," because again: they have axe-body-spray-brain.

It's a serious condition.

The Monroe Doctrine is a 200 year old US foreign policy concept that can basically be summarized as, "if anyone (specifically Europe) tries to interfere in the western hemisphere, that can be considered aggression towards the US." The Donroe Doctrine appears to be taking that concept and using it as a basis for subjugating other countries and territories like Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, and Greenland.

This would not be the first time a president "extended" the Monroe Doctrine. Teddy Roosevelt brought about the Roosevelt Corollary which is quite similar to what Trump is doing now: the concept that the US has the right to intervene in South America to secure "civilized society."

At the summit, the Administration pushed for the use of military force against drug cartels in South America, as Ecuador and the US collaborated on anti-cartel military action recently. Ultimately, it was a gathering of countries that would likely be the easiest to get on board with letting the US conduct whatever military operations it wants in the region, which sure seems to amount to full-on colonialism, with Trump suggesting a "friendly takeover" of Cuba.

We wanted affordable healthcare.

OpenAI? More Like OpenA-BYE

(they can't all be winners)

Last week I talked about the sudden kerfuffle between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over what the US government can do with a private company's AI product. During that time, OpenAI decided to take to the world wide web to tell everyone: "hey! We're working with this facist-ass government, too! And we're more okay with it than Anthropic."

Fast forward a week and "Cancel ChatGPT" has become a thing, as users boycott OpenAI by uninstalling ChatGPT en masse.

The uninstalls and shift in public opinion on ChatGPT was enough to propel Anthropic's Claude to the top of the app store, overtaking ChatGPT. ChatGPT has also seen some review bombing and all that good stuff.

It's very cool that people were able to make such a visible impact, and estimates have the uninstalls at over 2.5 million people over the first week.

It'd be nice to see this continue. I would hope that it would expand into corporate contracts, because that is where they really make their money. For a lot of tech companies, direct-to-consumer offerings are mostly for visibility. It's almost like advertising: get people to use your product personally and they'll bring it to their company who would have money for a contract. Those contracts are where the real money is at.

So uninstall the chatbot app if you'd like. Though, I'd still maintain that just switching from ChatGPT to Claude is pretty much a lateral move morally. They're still actively hoping to work with the DoD.