508 - Overboard in Iran, Savannah Guthrie, & ICE Electric Gloves

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I’m driving between Long Island and Manhattan with a hemorrhoid the size of a balloon, so naturally my brain goes to the USS Abraham Lincoln, where exhausted sailors reportedly keep trying to go overboard after an endlessly extended deployment. We’re already humiliated in Iran; now everybody’s apparently trying to doggy-paddle away from the war.

I can understand being homesick and fried, but you did join the military. What did you imagine the assignment was, a global hug tour? The Navy says there’s no broader increase in suicidal thinking, while reports mention delayed family notification, rotten food, missing supplies, plumbing problems, and people on that ship preventing other people from jumping. Everything’s fine, obviously. We’re winning.

I turn the whole thing into a deranged pirate-ship fantasy because it’s so absurd: splashes all day, some Blackbeard-type officer screaming at the crew, steak rewards for discipline. But the actual picture is bleak—thousands of people deployed for more than eight months, with no public date for coming home, and families left trying to figure out what happened.

A lot of people feel like you represented them, and they may have complicated feelings watching you change. You don’t owe anybody an explanation, but if people feel disappointed, what would you want to say?

That Savannah Guthrie question to Chrissy Metz is wild. If a doctor tells me I’m in real danger, I’m allowed to try not to explode. Good for Chrissy Metz for using a GLP-one if that’s what helps her. Being heavy shouldn’t mean people abuse you; it also shouldn’t mean you’re required to stay unhealthy so strangers can feel politically affirmed.

This is the disease: instead of saying, be decent to people and let them make health choices, we made obesity into an identity obligation. Then morning television acts like a woman seeking treatment has betrayed a constituency. And Savannah is asking this while I’m still wondering what on earth happened to her mother. Maybe answer that before interrogating somebody over losing weight.

ICE is facing criticism over force and arrests, and says it wants a new tool for people who refuse officers’ commands: thousands of devices called zap gloves. The manufacturer’s videos show a painful electric reaction, while officials say the gloves can be switched on with a button and are meant to avoid guns or pepper spray.

Electric shock gloves are supposedly humane now. You can secure a border without turning loose a paramilitary carnival of untrained people grabbing strangers with pain devices. The company says the shock is localized and officers should avoid using it on children, older people, pregnant women, and severely disabled people—which is a sentence that should make everyone stop and stare at the wall.

I’m skeptical of every gadget that arrives under the banner of safety. We restrained and arrested people for a long time before this. These gloves, license-plate readers, facial recognition, biometrics, phones, cameras—none of it stays limited to the original target. They’re building a surveillance web at incredible speed, probably because they expect AI, war, climate, or economic shocks to make society very hard to manage.

Michigan reported two deaths among medically vulnerable people linked to a foodborne parasite outbreak. Federal officials connected cases in many states and nearly two hundred hospitalizations to lettuce imported from Mexico that had been served at Taco Bell locations.

RIP to the Taco Bell casualties. I still have nostalgia for it: you’re seventeen, high with friends, and it’s somehow the greatest food on earth. I just hope their final order was a good one, not one of those disasters where the beans have escaped and the whole thing looks like it was assembled during a hostage situation.

And apparently millions of men are leaving work. Fine—work is miserable, the old manufacturing and finance ladders are gone, and the new economy is gaming, streaming, crypto, apps nobody needs, pranks, OnlyFans, all of it. I’m only half kidding: if your kid says they’re headed to Miami to become an internet mogul, support them. The traditional route isn’t promising them a house anymore.

Don’t lecture them about internships like it’s 2004. Their jobs may look insane to you, but that’s the ecosystem now. Let them try to build something weird online; be proud where you can. In this country, everybody is being told they need to become either a mogul or a whore. That’s grim, but love your children anyway.