Weekly Roundup

You Alright, Louisiana?

Louisiana is setting a new standard for "wait, they can just do that?"

Endeavorance

07 May 2026 — 9 min read

A Cheesy Score

Texas police have put a man behind bars for living the dream we all share: ordering eight hundred trays of macaroni and cheese.

Okay, he did a bit more than that, but still. The dream.

A recently fired Chick-fil-A employee returned to his former place of work, went behind the counter, and entered an order of 800 catering trays of mac and cheese. Valued at about $100 USD in the current market, that totaled to around 80 grand.

Our hero alleged suspect, Keyshun Jones, then refunded the orders (wait, wait no, I wanted those) to his credit card, netting him the cheesy dosh.

Unfortunately, this was like, the most obvious possible crime. Like, the dude went to a register and said, "hello, yes, give my bank account obviously fraudulent refunds." So he was arrested. Like, a lot.

Anyway the real story here is that the BBC—which is where I saw this story first—made sure to report that the caloric content of each tray of mac and cheese nears 10,000 calories. Hard hitting reporting with all the facts. Thanks, Brits.

Louisiana: Home of Delicious Food and Fucked Up Politics

There is quite a lot of bullshit going down in the state politics of Louisiana. I mean, there's quite a lot of bullshit going down in all of the politics at pretty much all levels in the US, but still, what's happening in Louisiana is on another level.

First, let's talk about Calvin Duncan. Duncan was convicted by jury of first degree murder, landing him life in prison. One small problem: he wasn't guilty.

During his nearly 30 years in prison, he taught himself law, becoming a "jailhouse lawyer" to help himself and other inmates navigate the legal complexities of their cases. He took a plea deal from the state after new evidence came up in his case, including evidence that the cops lied in the original hearing. Instead of a big public show of admitting fault, the state offered a plea deal, which Duncan took to get out of jail. The deal lowered the conviction enough to let him out on time served in 2011.

He and enrolled in law school to get his formal law degree and was formally exonerated by Louisiana's factual innocence policy in 2021.

Duncan would go on to be a strong advocate for criminal justice reform, much to the annoyance of various elected officials. He would also go on to run for office, specifically running to be the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal District Court—a role which has real meaningful impacts on the clerical side of the justice system.

The incumbent clerk, Darren Lombard, has routinely called Duncan a "murderer," maintaining that the claim of exoneration is "disputed," which is largely… not the case. Like at all. Unless "disputed" means "I disagree, personally, based on my own feelings."

Other elected officials lined up to oppose Duncan's story. When Duncan filed a claim with the state for compensation for wrongful conviction, then-Attorney-General Jeff Landry pushed back. Landry would go on to become Governor, and his successor threatened Duncan's law license if he didn't drop the case.

Fast forward to now. Duncan won his election. By a lot. 68% of the vote. Then, the Republicans in the state legislature worked alongside Governor Landry to pass a new law which eliminates the seat that Duncan won before he would start his term.

Of course, the state claims this is to consolidate government positions and save money. That claim is overt bullshit, as this move would "save" on the order of—at best—tens of thousands for the city, with unknown long-term consequences.

It's safe to say that people are pretty pissed. The state is being sued left and right over it. A US District Judge granted a restraining order for Duncan, finding the bill preventing him from taking office to be unconstitutional. So he showed up for work. Shortly after, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay, upholding the bill, and giving Duncan a very short first work day.

At time of writing, this is a legal jumble with no clear outcome. It's an overt attempt by the state to prevent a single dude—who several elected officials personally have a beef with due to their inability to admit fault—from taking office after a landslide electoral victory.

But That's not All!

That was one half of the bullshit. Or, not even, really. We're just gettin' started!

Let's talk Gerrymandering.

For those who live in more normal political environments, here's a quick overview of what gerrymandering is and why it's mentioned so often in US Politics.

Gerrymandering is named after Elbridge Gerry, a former Vice President of the US and before that, the governor of Massachusetts. He was infamous for signing a bill that reworked state districts resulting in a district that looked kinda like a mythical salamander, so people mushed that with "Gerry" to get "Gerrymander."

The original cartoon that spawned the name

In short, when politicians do gerrymandering, it means they are drawing the lines on the electoral maps to carve up the voting base in order to create districts more likely to favor one party or another. It means politicians can choose their voters, and is a massive part of why the US is so backwards: we have intentionally inaccurate representation.

Gerrymandering happens from both parties. Recently, there's been an escalating gerrymandering battle across the United States, starting from Texas deciding to redraw their map out of cycle.

Typically, electoral maps are redrawn every decade with the census. As the 2026 midterms approach, Texas was like, "eh, fuck that, actually," and pushed through a new congressional map which swapped five districts to be more likely to go for Republicans than Democrats. After a ton of legal battle, our wildly busted Supreme Court said that Texas can use the map for this election. Notably, the choice to do the out-of-band redistricting was entirely pushed through by the state legislature without a vote from the people.

California responded, proposing a new, similarly-hyper-gerrymandered map, but put it up to a vote rather than just passing it as a bill. This gave them a lot more legal cover for their approach, since the vote passed handily with 64% of the vote.

Since then, states (quite literally) left and right have been trying to redraw their voting districts before the midterms, as the Republicans appear poised for a massive rout, possibly ending their absolute stranglehold on the US government and putting the continued efforts by Trump and his crew on ice.

Now, back to Louisiana. They joined in on the fight, seeking to redraw their district map. Before the redraw, Louisiana had two majority Black districts out of six to better align with the state's approximately 33% Black population. That only came after a lawsuit over the map before that, which had a single majority Black district, packing most of the Black voters into one district.

That second district they added was just too much for some other Louisiana voters, and a coalition of self-described "non-African-American voters" sued over the map that had 2 out of 6 majority Black districts, ultimately kicking off a legal battle that ended with the Supreme Court of the United States claiming that the map was unlawful, citing that the creation of a second majority Black district was a racist gerrymander itself. The decision guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was a landmark bill for minority voting rights in the United States.

With this decision, if a state's politicians gerrymander their districts to clearly disenfranchise minorities, anyone who wishes to sue to stop the redistricting must specifically prove conscious, racist intent on behalf of the state.

Said plainly, the bar for preventing politicians from gerrymandering as hard as they can is now unreachably high.

Capping off the bullshit, Governor Landry signed an executive order postponing the already-started congressional primary elections in Louisiana so that the state can redraw their districts before holding the vote. With some mail-in ballots already returned, they're trying to stop the voting so they can squeeze out one or both of the currently Democrat-leaning districts before turning around and being like, "okie, you can vote now :3"

It's one thing to change the rules when you're losing. That's what they've been doing this whole time. It's another to change the rules when you've lost.

To be sure, this isn't all just because of Louisiana. John Roberts, the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court, has targeted the Voting Rights Act his whole life. Undermining minority representation has been his pet project for decades. With the current political environment being as braindead as it is, he can get away with claiming the classic, "oh, acknowledging race is the actual racism" line, setting up the continued destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

I could go on about this for basically ever. The SCOTUS has clearly asymmetrically applied rulings about whether or not a given district map can be used based on election timing and party favor. It's cynical and insulting at this point. But thankfully, it's not happening in a vacuum. The voters, journalists, activists, and legal experts in Louisiana aren't just rolling over. They're fighting tooth and nail—which they REALLY should not have to be doing—to maintain a semblance of their democracy.

The People Watching Through Your Eyes

The age of smart glasses is upon us, dear reader. It's actually been upon us for a little while now. Recall that Google announced Google Glass back in 2012. There was a bit of a lull for a while after the initial reaction to Glass, but eventually some new contenders would hit the market.

Today, one of the leading vendors is Meta (The Zuckerberg Corp) with their Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. And it's 2026, not 2012, so expectations of remotely reasonable social repercussions for tech companies are just kinda out the window. And so, we get this story: an investigation uncovering the real humans working at a data firm in Kenya where workers review video recorded from Meta's glasses in order to categorize them for AI training.

Put plainly, there's an office of people who review video recorded by the Meta glasses so that they can explain to the AI training systems what the video is. It is an act of manual labor to train AI systems, since there's no inherent way to just tell an AI system what is what. It has no basis for reality.

The workers at Sama—the contracted firm at the center of the controversy—described seeing private moments such as people using the bathroom, changing their clothes, or having sex. Some folks are definitely making those videos on purpose, while others may be accidentally recording.

One worker from Sama mentioned a video where a man took the glasses off and set them on his nightstand, seemingly believing them to be off. The video kept recording, and a woman walked in to the room and changed in full view of the camera.

Since this story broke, Meta has been on their back foot more than usual, but nothing earth shattering has truly befallen the company. The terms of service for the glasses explicitly state that all data processing goes through Meta's infrastructure, which in turn has third party processors. Meta says they're no longer working with Sama, but the reality is that any and all data collected by the glasses will be sent to Meta's servers.

None of this begins to scratch at the other side of the equation, which is the growing trend of men wearing these glasses and harassing women for content, not to mention an in-development feature touted by Meta which they claim will be able to use AI to identify people that a glasses wearer is looking at, and immediately display information about that person, such as their name.

Trust me when I say that ethics courses in Computer Science colleges are desperately lacking at best. Evidence: see above.