United States

Where We're Going

A poll shows that sentiment about the direction of the United States has severely dropped among even Republicans. What does that really mean?

Endeavorance

22 Sep 2025 — 12 min read

Which Way We Goin'?

Alright statefolk, which way are we going?

Are we going the wrong way? Almost assuredly. But what does that mean?

A poll has been making the rounds recently, showing a huge negative swing in optimism about the direction of the country among Republicans. Democrats and Independents are quite pessimistic as well, but have been quite low this whole time. The notable figure is the drop of optimism from Republicans, going from 70% to 49% believing the country is moving in the right direction in just a few months.

What caused this? Are they turning on the Trump administration? Probably not. While things are obviously bad in terms of the economy, immigration reform, public health, housing, employment, homelessness, education, public safety, reproduction rates, and well, okay—everything is fucking dogshit. Unfortunately, the Trump administration and those who supported it never cared about those things. It was always about retribution against the straw men in their heads.

For those who were duped by the lies of the Trump campaign and voted for him in the hopes that he'd fix the economy, that is clearly not panning out. According to interviews, reasons for souring outlooks range from not being able to find equitable work to feeling like there is an escalation in political strife and violence, or violence at large.

It's fair to assume the Charlie Kirk assassination caused a major shift in sentiment, especially since it is exceedingly rare that disengaged white conservatives see a white conservative get shot. But the reactions afterwards, including the intense crackdown from the Trump administration. For example, the pulling of Jimmy Kimmel's show over a joke he made about the MAGA world bending over backwards to claim Kirk's shooter was antifa—something made whole by a report showing that the feds have not managed to link the shooter to any leftist group.

Of course, plenty of Democrats decried the DeKimmelation of late night television, while Republicans seemed to be split between cheering on the administrations continued attacks on speech, while others actually managed to realize that protecting free speech from government overreach was actually a part of their party's ideology.

Regardless of stance, we have an administration that is working to target critics, while announcing plans to "crack down on left wing terrorism" which is not a thing in this country. They're willing to fire officials for producing reports that have unflattering numbers, and are moving to end other reports such as the annual report on hunger, which they have branded as "overly politicized."

Ultimately, where are we going? If Republicans truly are becoming more pessimistic about the future that they eagerly worked towards for decades, are we possibly at the cusp of change? At the end of the day, culture war "victories" don't feed your family. They don't cure your illness or look after your elderly parents while you have to work. Legislating against trans athletes doesn't make our water safer to drink, and it doesn't regulate corporations to limit pollution and provide gainful employment to local workers.

The pessimist in me assumes this is a blip in response to the overplayed hand of the Trump admin in the wake of the Kirk assassination. Shit is just rancid right now, and I don't see how anyone could really be happy. Another part of me wants to believe that the bend will eventually break, and that we'll see some kind of actual shift in the near future.

Until then, lemme remind you that there are a lot of people out there who want the same things you do, but haven't been given the time, space, or perspective to find a productive way to bring about the change they want. That desperation and lack of direction is a recipe for driving towards unhelpful ideologies, often from people who work tirelessly to capitalize on people's feelings of abandonment.

I see you, and we'll figure this out. Or at least, we'll try.

Stateside

The TikTok Deal That Was(n't?)

It looks more and more like the TikTok "sale" is going through here in the US, as the White House announced a deal where Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz—three massive tech investors and conglomerates in the US—will purchase the majority of the app's US presence.

Details are still scant since we're going off of mostly just whatever dribbled out of Trump's mouth during press conferences, but it seems as though Oracle will be in charge of stewarding data, while a new US-specific app will roll out, which users will have to move over to.

As for the Great Algorithm of TikTok, we have no idea what's happening there. It seems like the Chinese company will "lease" the algorithm, which sounds a lot like doing the same thing it was always doing, but with more steps. The latest I could find is that Oracle will "retrain" the algorithm, whatever that means.

I've got pretty low hopes for all of this, especially considering that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is a massive Trump supporter and election denier, while his son now owns CBS and Paramount, where they are working to place Bari Weiss, a conservative journalist with a long history of raging against "Wokeism," as editor in chief of CBS News.

So yeah. Now's a great time to sign up for a free (or paid support!) subscription to Stuff Keeps Happening if you aren't already 👀

Lynchings in Mississippi

Two men were found dead, hanging from trees in Mississippi just hours apart from each other.

The first man was Trey Reed, a Black 21-year-old student of Delta State University. While initial reports circulated that he was found with broken bones, this was later refuted. Regardless, local authorities immediately stated they did not suspect foul play, with the coroner labeling it a suicide after the autopsy. Reed's family and community strongly resent this unfortunately common outcome, and will be seeking a private secondary autopsy which will be funded by former NFL player Colin Kaepernick's foundation.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175147/lynching-by-race-state-and-race/

Just a few hours later, Cory Zukatis, a white homeless man, was found dead, hanging from another tree, where the local police officials didn't immediately weigh in on the suspicion of foul play or suicide, citing that they never do that until the autopsy is over. Hey, maybe they can go talk to the Delta State officials on that topic.

The two events are grim in their own right, but made so much worse given the history of lynching of Black people in the southern US, especially Mississippi. The speed at which authorities ruled a Black man hanging from a tree as a suicide, confidently ruling out foul play, is tone deaf to put it mildly.

It's No Longer H-1Free

On Friday, the Trump administration blindsided the tech industry with a massive change to the H-1B visa program: applications for the visa will now cost employers $100,000.

H-1B visas are a program that intends to bring in high skilled workers to the US, arguably existing to help fill gaps in the talent pool, as well as to bring in expertise from around the world. In practice, it has become a deeply abused system by employers who use it to undercut salaries, underpay foreign workers, and essentially hold employees hostage under threat of losing their visa.

Workers rights organizations for years have been sounding the alarm about H-1B visas being ride for abuse, but tech companies especially (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc) hire foreign workers by the thousands or tens of thousands, often undercutting their value by hiring them at the minimum required salary or at a lower level than they may be qualified for otherwise.

70% of H-1B visas are awarded to Indian foreign nationals to come and work in the United States. India's higher education system puts a heavy emphasis on global employment, with H-1B visas being a mainstay option.

As this all rolled out, since it's this administration, it was a mess. The change was announced with very little warning or context, and set off alarms across the world as companies originally understood the change to mean that any H-1B holder not currently on US soil would have to return by midnight that night or face a $100,000 fee. The administration has since clarified that the charge is only for new applicants—something that probably should have been considered and included in the original text.

We still don't know what this will do, but it's going to be a huge hit to the tech industry. Personally, I believe we've long needed a change to the H-1B program, as it has enabled tech companies to exploit foreign workers while undermining job availability stateside. Of course, this move is more likely to cause them to just fully offshore the work, rather than hiring more Americans.

Elsewhere

Treaty of the Seas

The Ocean. Love it. Lot's of water; some plants and animals, too. Actually, lot's of plants and animals.

60 countries have signed on to a joint treaty which breaks new ground by establishing protected international waters in an effort to preserve marine life for the stability of the planet.

Threats to marine life threaten the entire planet. Nothing here is disconnected. Protecting marine life (including plants!) keeps the Earth's systems working properly, and ensure that our ecosystems are producing enough oxygen for us to, like, breathe or whatever.

A healthy ocean is also crucial for addressing climate change, as the ocean acts as a massive CO2 sink, helping to slow the pace of warming from greenhouse gasses.

The treaty goes into effect next year, and while there are some major holdouts still (US and China are iffy, Russia and Japan are iffier), it's a step in the right direction from an international community.

Now, hopefully it actually get enforced.

From France with Love

Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France and wife to President Emmanuel Macron, is going to use "scientific evidence" to prove that she is a biological woman in a defamation case against US-based right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, who has been steadfastly asserting that Brigitte was actually born "biologically male" and is trans.

The wife.

Of a president.

Of a foreign nation.

Is submitting scientific evidence to a court of law.

To prove she was "born a woman".

To a podcaster.

End of segment.

Urine A Bad Situtation

Over in China, two teenagers have been hit with about the equivalent of $300,000 in fines after they were caught urinating into hotpot broth at a huge hotpot restaurant in Shanghai.

The restaurant has since had to offer massive refunds and additional compensation to patrons who dined there, as well as having to replace equipment and deal with the reputational damage.

The teens parents were also charged with failing to "fulfill their duty of guardianship," holding them financially accountable. The teens were drunk at the time and recorded and posted their actions to the internet, which in a way warms my heart a bit to know that teenagers will still do the dumbest shit, regardless of country of origin.

Silly teenagers.

Uh, anyway, China is also growing their renewable energy infrastructure at a rate that is going to leave the United States and possibly the rest of the world in the fucking dust.

An Oddly Defensive Stance

In a truly baffling series of statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that Israel was not behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Netanyahu drew raised eyebrows by posting about praying for Charlie nearly instantly after the shooting, before we really had a drop of clarity into what was happening. He then went on to make further statements about Charlie Kirk was a "lion-hearted friend of Israel" despite reports that Kirk was starting to distance from Israel. He has also gone on to say this conspiracy may be "Qatari funded," after having recently bombed Qatar, which is a US ally.

Far more importantly than anything having to do with the death of one Charlie Kirk is that Israel killed 31 Yemeni journalists on September 10th through multiple airstrikes against newspaper offices while journalists were finalizing that week's issue. This is the second largest attack on journalists ever recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Science & Tech

Nvidia Buys Intel Stock

In a surprise announcement, Nvidia has purchased $5 Billion of stock in Intel as the two companies announced a partnership to develop chips which cross-integrate products for personal computers and datacenters.

Buzzwords!

Intel hasn't been doing great financially, and the United States is run by a guy who doesn't understand basic economics, while the leader of the closest thing we have to an opposition party doesn't even use a smartphone. So right after the US Government announced a purchase of about $10 Billion in Intel stock, we get this announcement, which reads to me like a bit of a frantic push to look like we've not fallen behind in semiconductors.

We don't know a ton about the partnership yet, but it seems like Intel will produce CPUs for datacenters and PCs which will better integrate NVidia's AI and graphics chips across machines to position both companies a bit better.

That said, China also just reportedly banned the purchase of Nvidia's AI chips in China, because everything has to be a trade war all the time now.

Good Good Colors

You know Jackson Pollock? The painter whose iconic abstract art style formed the basis of countless extremely boring takes about how "abstract art is not really art"? Well, turns out it's art—in fact, it's SO art that scientists put in effort to learn the literal molecular makeup of the pigments in order to better identify counterfeits.

So some scientists took a sample of some blue paint from a large Pollock painting, curious what specific pigment he had used. Speculation was that he used an old blue pigment called "manganese blue," but it hadn't been confirmed. They set out to change that.

They took the sample, hit it with a bunch of lasers (lasers make science work better) and created a sort of molecular vibration signature of the paint in order to compare it to other substances. Turns out, they were right! It was indeed that blue.

Not the worlds biggest revelation, but it's still pretty neato in my book. Here's a bonus tidbit of nostalgia for folks who grew up in the US in the 80's and 90's: manganese blue was the pigment used to mix with concrete to form the blue concrete lining of pools. They phased it out over time though.

Gaming

Horizon: Zero Intellectual Property

Gargantuan Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent is striking back at Sony after Sony accused Tencent of copying their "Horizon" game series intellectual property.

So Tencent recently showed off their brand new title, "Light of Motiram," a game where you roam a world filled with robot animals as a tribal-style hunter, featuring a red-haired protagonist with a bow. Here's a picture:

This game has absolutely nothing to do with—nor is remotely similar to—Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game where you roam a world filled with robot animals as a tribal-style hunter, featuring a red-haired protagonist with a bow. Here's a picture:

So it should be fairly unsurprising that Sony is suing Tencent for infringing on intellectual property, but Tencent is now claiming that Sony is trying to dominate too broad of a genre, arguing that the games are wholly different.

The reality is the games are pretty different, but it's painfully obvious that the marketing, theme, and style was at the very least directly inspired by the Horizon franchise. Not to mention that marketing materials like this can be produced for the express purpose of stirring up this kind of chatter as a marketing tactic. But the gameplay does look fairly different. Still, two giant tech conglomerates fighting over petty shit like this is still quite hilarious. Or sad. Or both.

What I find most amusing about this is how Horizon infamously came out right before the original release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which in turn sucked all of the air out of the room, only for Breath of the Wild to go on and have this exact same scenario occur when MiHoYo announced Genshin Impact:

NSFW Game Stuff

Developers of erotic video games have been dealing with the fallout of the current wave of puritanism washing over basically all parts of our culture.

I previously talked about the open letter sent by anti-porn group Collective Shout to payment processing companies, asking for them to disallow gaming storefronts from selling adult games. Since then, popular indie storefront Itch has had to all but halt payments for such titles, and gaming juggernaut Steam is struggling with its own hurdles.

Seemingly in an attempt to skirt the issue, Valve (the company behind Steam) has implemented a policy for adult content in games where developers cannot add new adult content to games that have already been released. Instead, the content must be delivered as a new DLC title, which in turn goes through the standard content review, unlike simple updates.

Sentiment from developers around this seems to be primarily that Valve is doing what it can to not just throw their hands up and say it's not worth the hassle to have adult content on their storefront. But none of this was remotely a concern before the action from Collective Shout caused PayPal, Mastercard, Stripe, and other processors to privately twist the arm of digital storefronts while publicly stating they haven't done so.