Weekly Roundup

ICE Ignores Human Rights, Asks What That Means

...okay no, they didn't ask what that means. If only. Also, whales went around the world.

Endeavorance

28 May 2026 — 7 min read

Two Whales, One Heart

The Proclaimers proclaimed themselves to be the ones who would walk 500 miles—twice—for you. That's adorable, but they're gonna need to step their game up if they want to be on par with the romantic capabilities of humpback whales.

Researchers tracked two humpback whales who each traveled more than 14,000km across the globe to reach breeding grounds near Australia and Brazil, with one whale crossing each direction.

The first whale was spotted near Australia in 2007 and 2013, then off the coast of Brazil in 2019. The second was seen near Brazil in 2003, only to be found near Australia in 2025, having traveled more than 15,000km and breaking the record for, uh, most traveled whale.

You may be wondering: how the heck are we tracking humpback whales across the ocean? Chips or something? NOPE. The researchers compiled nearly 20,000 civilian-scientist photos of whale tails which can be used like a sort of fingerprint. They then used image recognition software to track and match the images to known whales, ultimately making the discovery.

By the by, you can head to https://happywhale.com/ if you want to help submit your own whale photos for research. It's an excellent way to non-invasively study these ginormous creatures.

The exact routes taken by these Big Boys (gender-neutral) are unknown since we're just working with the occasional location data point, but researchers believe it may be the result of something called the Southern Ocean Exchange: whales meeting up in Antarctic feeding grounds before presumably heading back to "her place," only in this case "her place" is like, the coast of Brazil.

So the next time you want to make a romantic gesture for your sweetheart, consider jumping into the ocean in Australia and swimming to Brazil. That should do it.

ICE Detention Center Hunger Strike

Just this week, detainees at a privately run ICE detention center in New Jersey launched a hunger strike which in mere days resulted in a sitting US Senator getting pepper sprayed by federal agents.

Delaney Hall is a privately operated detention center in New Jersey which currently claims to support "1,000 beds". It is operated by GEO Group, a private prison contractor which has made billions from ICE contracts, assisting in the mass detention of human beings that this administration campaigned on.

Around 300 people started a hunger strike in response to the inhumane conditions at the facility as well as the lack of due process. They've been getting rotten, worm-ridden food and little to no air conditioning, toilet paper, or even medical attention for patients with serious illness like cancer.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to the hunger strike by denying its existence:

"There is no hunger strike at Delaney Hall at this time"
— Markwayne Mullin, DHS head boy

Now, the DHS does have a point here. If you hit yourself on the head with a hammer several hundred times, it begins to make sense: the official definition of a "hunger strike" per the DHS is nine consecutive skipped meals or about 72 hours without food. Once that happens, they may start on their hunger strike protocols, which can escalate to force-feeding; a violation of medical ethics. They technically need to get approval from a judge before doing so. Technically.

In response to news of the strike, more protesters showed up at the facility, where they've been attempting to prevent ICE from ignoring the detainees. Protestors also attempted to prevent ICE from transferring the reported leader of the hunger strike to another facility.

New Jersey senator Andy Kim showed up to the protests and was caught up by pepper spray shot by ICE agents into the crowd of protestors. Agents denied New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill entry to the facility—a facility that is built to house nearly a thousand human beings within the state that she is the governor of. But it's privately operated (on behalf of the federal government) so, ha, I guess?

Doesn't seem quite "ha."

Anyway something very important here is that this is not new. ICE has been doing this to the people it detains for more than a decade, with hunger-strike detainee protests dating back to at least 2012 under Obama.

Of course, now it is being done with the deliberate intent to increase the scale. Our federal government is disappearing over a thousand people every day and stashing them away in private facilities with failing oversight while denying them basic human rights and then denying that denial.

In conclusion, every single person who has ever worked for ICE should be on trial for their part in crimes against humanity, and that was true before Trump took office. Now it's just more blatant and loudly evil on purpose. The intent is to terrify their targets while satisfying the weird bloodlust that MAGA voters have against migrants.

Trans Rights Remain Human Rights

Trans rights are human rights, and that still hasn't changed despite how many panels of old white men bang a gavel about it.

Aside from migrants, the other BIG SPOOKY that the US Government loves to hate are trans folks, who can be found dotted around the country wondering, "the fuck did I do to you?"

We are anticipating a ruling from the Supreme Court on two related cases: Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. Both cases stem from issues with trans athletes who were barred from playing by state laws in Idaho and West Virginia based on their identity. The ruling could have major impacts on the massive wave of anti-trans legislation that we've seen in the past decade and is expected by late June after arguments happened back in January.

West Virginia and Idaho are just two of the 27 states that have passed anti-trans sports legislation, targeting a group estimated to make up somewhere between just 1% to 3% of the population. Largely this legislation targets teenagers and children's sports, citing that it is "dangerous" to have trans kids in sports. Notably, there's no actual evidence of pre-pubescent physical aptitude for sports and no evidence of "unfairness" from trans athletes in high school sports. At the elite level, strict requirements are already in place in many cases.

To uphold this legislation, state governments have spent real time and energy investigating children's bodies by way of launching "sex verification investigations" and digging into legal paperwork to ensure that schools have "fair sports," whatever that means.

Trans teens are attacked, outed, and investigated by state officials, which is outrageous from the drop. The impacts go far beyond that 1% of people though, with reports of cisgender children being "accused" of being trans, or even a case of an 8th grade boy removed from basketball tryouts because of a clerical error with his birth certificate which had "F" as the sex.

The school district's official response was, "Our schools rely on a student's original birth certificate at birth to determine athletic eligibility."

I was unaware that—after you are born but before they put you in your mother's arms—the doctor assesses your sports aptitude so that a state government can use it as evidence when targeting their own population's students over what sport they want to play.

Again, we are talking about a tiny, tiny percent of the population. When you factor it down to just "trans children specifically trying to play sports," we get down into the single digits per state, mere double digits nationwide.

Regardless of the "sports" debate, these policies lead to random accusations of "transness," aggression from state officials towards literal children, and a constant imposition on private citizens' right to, well, privacy. Publicly dragging out a 15-year-old and having national discourse about their genitals is not a sign of a healthy country.

And as the saying goes: trans rights are human rights, and that still hasn't changed despite how many panels of old white men bang a gavel about it.

The Tech Industry that Hates Jobs

It's just about every other week that I feel like I'm talking about some massive tech layoff, and then this week comes around and somehow there's even more. So I did some digging to go over the history of these layoffs over the past few years in an industry that seems to want to have exactly zero employees.

If we look at layoffs just in May this year, we've got announcements from…

Coinbase laying off 14% of its workers, about 700 people
LinkedIn laying off around 5% of workers, about 875 people
Cisco laying off 4,000 people
PayPal laying off 20%, about 4,760 people
Cloudflare laying off 20%, about 1,100 people
Ticketmaster laying off 8%, about 350 people
Groupon laying off 25%, about 400 people
Intuit laying off 17%, about 3,000 people
Wix laying off 20%, about 1,000 people

And now, Meta has started another layoff of about 10% of their workforce, impacting around 8,000 employees who were laid off via email sent out at 4am local time. Neat.

Total estimates from CNBC and Layoffs.fyi put 2026 tech layoffs so far at 150,000+ jobs laid off across 130+ companies, which combined with 2025's layoffs brings the total to a nearly a quarter of a million jobs laid off. 2023 saw more than that in one year, largely due to the "rightsizing" of employee rosters after a bunch of companies hired like wildfire during the beginning of the pandemic.

The reasons for these layoffs vary, though as a former tech industry worker, lemme tell you to just flatly ignore the reasons most executives give for the layoffs. Especially if they cite AI as somehow fixing their productivity issues or something. The reality is that AI tools haven't had the payoff that they were hoping for, but the bubble has so much money flowing that it makes more sense to lay off workers and do more stock buybacks to keep pricing spiking before the inevitable burst.

Companies are even beginning to express regret for the quick jumps to laying off workers. Turns out, replacing a whole human being with a SaaS platform doesn't actually work that way.