Heist

Washington DC is Occupied

Donald Trump has deployed hundreds of national guard members and federal agents to the streets of DC in a deeply embarrassing show of fragility

Endeavorance

18 Aug 2025 — 12 min read

The Best Defense is More Defense

A string of heists across Philadelphia have authorities wondering what the hell is going on. New arrests might give them more info, but let's back up:

You know those armored cars? The classic targets of any good heist movie, but also the classic targets of actual crime? I mean, it's a box on wheels full of valuables. It's also module security theater. Stop one of them at gunpoint and the armored part of the "armored vehicle" isn't of much use.

And that's what happened.

A couple of thieves rolled up on a Brinks armored vehicle, held the driver at gunpoint, and went back to the car to steal about $700,000. It was another in a string of high profile thefts from armored vehicles, with a $2,000,000 theft topping the charts from back in June.

A US Attorney announced that three people have been arrested associated with the robberies. According to local investigators, they think one of the thieves is a former Brinks employee who was using insider knowledge to pull off the stunts. The suspect's attorney strongly denies that the man has any connection to any of this.

Stateside

Trump's DC Takeover

Here's the thing: I've been on break for a few weeks, so it'd make sense that a lot of stuff has happened over that time, therefore I'd have a lot to talk about here.

Unfortunately, a lot of stuff did happen, but so much of it happened that even just the past week had enough bullshit to take up this entire newsletter. So let's hit some of the higher level stuff eh?

First things first: Washington, DC is currently occupied by Trump-aligned forces. Quite literally. Last week, Trump announced that he would be deploying hundreds of national guard troops and federal agents to the streets of DC, while also federalizing the DC police force, putting them under his chain of command.

He argued—baselessly—that DC is overrun with violent crime gangs, which is of course laughable. There is nothing happening in DC that merits any of this. Instead, this is just a set of barely-legal things that Trump can do to continue the circus and look as if he's delivering "justice" against all the Woke Libs Who Destroyed Our Great Nation on tv.

It's a mess. It's weak. It's a huge waste of taxes and human energy. Instead of being with their families and improving their communities, federal agents are harassing random people going about their very normal lives in DC. Instead of focusing on their own lives and wellbeing, DC residents are out protesting and helping to ensure each other are safe in the face of overly-aggressive patrols looking for reasons to mess with people.

Then of course, we had Sandwich Guy—Sean Dunn, a man armed with nothing but a footlong Subway sandwich and a dream. He tossed a sandwich at a fed, which caused the actual top justice officials of the whole-ass United States of America to get involved and make a show out of charging the man with a felony.

A judge later agreed that's dumb as shit and released him, as the White House backed off on the charges.

That didn't stop people from taking note though: this administration is terrified of attacks with deli weapons.

Trump is now talking about extending his control of DC beyond the 30 day legal limit of the previously-unused statute he invoked to flood the streets of DC with agents. A liberal city filled with agents tasked with "rooting out crime" that isn't there because conservative voters who don't live there honestly think the cities are burned out hellholes.

Now other states are moving to send in their national guard troops to DC, as if it's some kind of war zone.

I cannot stress this enough: the streets of Washington, DC are home to farmers markets and book sales, primarily. It's cute and boring. The city has crime as any place with humans would. But now, there's literal military vehicles parked outside the train station, while DHS, ATF, and FBI agents roam the streets as people walk to coffee shops and look at monuments and sit on their stoops and visit the park. It's truly absurd.

Oh, and just to keep all the Trump bullshit to one section: he also met with Putin on Friday, accomplishing exactly nothing, as expected. Or rather, he kissed Putin's ass and repeated Russian talking points while saying that he had to go "make some phone calls" to other world leaders after his chat with Putin.

And since it's this administration, of course there's also some extra unbelievably dumb bonus tidbit: people found eight pages of accidentally left-behind intel printed off by US employees at a hotel in Alaska.

CDC Shooting

It's kinda wild how not-talked about this all was, so I wanna take a moment and highlight the recent shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) became a massive target of the far right especially during the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were never the favored three-letter-agency of the right, but they became synonymous with the devil when masking and COVID vaccines became a thing.

And of course, the amount of fake information about dangers regarding the COVID vaccine is insane, made worse by the fact that a literal anti-vaxx activist is our head of health and human services.

So on August 8th, a 30-year-old man from Georgia—whose family reported to officials out of concern for his mental wellbeing—took to the CDC's campus and unloaded hundreds of rounds of ammunition, killing one person, shattering a ton of windows, and causing thousands of employees to shelter in place for hours. His reason for doing so was his deeply held belief that the COVID vaccine did untold harm to himself and others.

His weapons were taken from his father, who is now working with authorities on the investigation, but investigators and representatives have been pretty damn clear: this was an anti-vaccination protest by way of attempting to massacre the people working at the CDC.

Off the Rails

Last Tuesday, a Union Pacific freight train catastrophically derailed, sending 35 cars into a crumpled, jackknifed mess. Some of the derailed cars had hazmats in them, but thankfully there are no reported injuries or need for evacuation.

One of the cars that was damaged contained propane. I'm waiting to hear if propane accessories were also on board, but officials set the propane ablaze about a day after the derailment to remove that as a factor.

Side note: I will never not believe that the people who get into jobs like this absolutely LOVE when they get the opportunity to say, "I mean yeah, best thing to do is set the shit on fire."

They're supposed to be in a straight line

There were a few small grass fires around the derailment site, but nothing that wasn't contained fairly rapidly. The cause of the derailment is still unknown.

Derailments happen more often than you'd think, but still: 35 derailed train cars including hazmats is a pretty significant deal, and seems to be happening more often than it should in absolute terms. I'd personally prefer fewer, but that's just me and my personal politics.

But bright side is that despite the catastrophic level of derailment, it was nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

Elsewhere

Air Canada Strike

Flight attendants for Air Canada are on strike, refusing an order from the government to return to work after negotiations for a fair contract broke down after months of talks.

Canada has a system in place where the government can order unions back to work in order to "protect the economy." Apparently worker's rights are not a part of the economy worth protecting.

Regardless, despite a call from the Canada Industrial Relations Board for the 10,000 flight attendants to return to work, they're instead going to not do that. In part because the dead of said Relations Board used to be a top advisor at—you guessed it—Air Canada. A strike of this type hasn't occurred in Canada in decades.

The workers are asking for more reasonable pay, specifically asking for pay during time on the ground and while boarding airplanes. Currently, flight attendants are primarily only paid for actual travel time, as if the rest of what they do while working isn't… work?

Forced Starvation in Gaza Continues

Gaza continues to endure a forced starvation at the hands of an Israeli blockade, while aid sites feature gangs of US Contractors and IDF soldiers spraying ammunition into crowds of starving human beings.

According to the UN, as of August 12th, at least 227 people have died of malnutrition and starvation in Gaza since October 2023, of which 103 were children. At least a third of the population goes days without food. Yet still, the Israeli military and even civilian activist groups have been working to block the movement of aid and supplies into the region.

Meanwhile Netanyahu has now publicly stated that he intends to take over Gaza entirely, despite the entire fucking world saying not to.

Israel is bombing Gaza City, and recently killed an entire team of journalists whom they had labeled "terrorists" just prior.

Not to sit idly by and watch children suffer, the current US Administration swooped into action and canceled medical-humanitarian visas for Palestinians from Gaza who had emergency medical evacuation needs seeking life-saving treatment in the US. This way, the suffering is more severe and in-line with our foreign policy.

Hard to Get Hard Now, Innit?

Over in the UK, the porn ban is not going great.

Background: they banned porn. Okay, that's not fully accurate. The UK passed one of those classic "think of the children!" laws where adults on the internet now have to prove their age in order to access material which may be deemed "unacceptable for kids" by the government.

What this means in practice is that any (above-board) platform which hosts content that may be considered "adult" in nature now requires people to share information like their credit card, photo ID, or even pictures of themselves in order to use the service.

This doesn't just mean porn—you gotta do it even just to use Spotify or Twitter.

Understandably, people are pissed. Not only is it simply obnoxious to have to jump through hoops to access a website, but this requirement opens up myriad security questions as we've seen other stories like the Tea app which had its verification info leaked online.

Of course, the inevitable happened: everyone started jumping on VPNs. So now, the next inevitable is happening: the UK government is talking about taking "a close look" at how people are using VPNs to see if there needs to be more policy around that.

Hey, uh, Lawmaker types? This isn't what we were talking about when we asked for comprehensive tech policy. We wanted like… ownership of our data, not a state mandated requirement to give our full government IDs to the tech companies that you've literally sued for exploiting user data.

Oh and US folks: stay frosty. We have at least one Senator who is pushing for a full porn ban here as well, and that's already started in a few states, so uh. whistles.

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Science & Tech

The Girls Are Fighting

Sam Altman and Elon Musk are continuing to publicly beef on the internet, most recently exchanging mean tweets at each other as billionaire titans of industry are expected to do.

While it genuinely doesn't matter why they're beefing, I'll share it anyway. Musk made the obviously Musky claim that Apple is favoring ChatGPT in the App Store over Twitter or Grok, to which Sam Altman (the head boy over at OpenAI/ChatGPT) replied by calling out Musk's storied history of kicking off people from Twitter who disagree with him and tweaking the algorithm to specifically show more Elon tweets to people.

While this is going on, another high level Elon associate has departed, this time one of the co-founders of Musk's xAI company who makes Grok. The former co-founder previously worked on AI projects and Google, and is choosing to split off to fund his own AI ventures.

All in all, I wish we had healthcare and paid artists, but instead two mega billionaires are slap-fighting with character-limited microblog posts.

AI Psychosis

Speaking of ChatGPT, I have a favor to ask of you: please do not date the computers.

After ChatGPT 5 launched recently, OpenAI decided to take down access to the previous generations of the chatbot, including the ever-confusingly named "GPT 4o" (NOT 4.0 of course).

People found that GPT 5 was a lot less personable than the previous iterations. The combination of the loss of existing chatbots along with the more robotic experience caused outrage among the… people who believe AI is their significant other cohort.

Lemme get this out of the way: I understand that people need comfort. I understand that people seek companionship, and I understand that there's people out there who have had meaningful impacts from "dating" an AI. And also: it's a product from a company, and it cannot feel feelings. These are not actual AIs. They're prediction machines designed to output text that makes you continue using them.

Regardless, the outcry was significant enough that OpenAI brought back access to their older models, and are looking into making GPT 5 "more personable" as an eventual replacement.

Separately, a 60-year-old man was recently admitted to a hospital after replacing table salt with sodium bromide in his diet. He had talked to ChatGPT about it in a hope of reducing his salt intake. ChatGPT wanted to appear helpful, so it gave him instructions which ultimately caused him to have visual and auditory hallucinations as well as paranoia that he was being poisoned.

So whether you're asking an LLM to validate your beliefs, asking for health tips, or seeking companionship: remember that it's literally just trying to optimize for "they liked that," and not anything else.

Gaming

Mario Kart World and PETA

PETA—the famous animal rights activist group—have expressed discontent with the current state of Nintendo's new Mario Kart World.

For those who have played Mario Kart World, you may be wondering: is PETA also underwhelmed by the new Grand Prix changes which make the experience fairly bland from all the connecting routes in the open world?

Unfortunately not. They're upset that the newly playable "cow" character has a nose ring.

Nintendo for whatever reason decided that the thing we all truly need in this life is to be able to race in Mario Kart as everyone's favorite classic Mario character: a cow. But the playable cow's nose ring, according to PETA, implies mistreatment of the animal.

This isn't PETA's first letter asking Nintendo to change something about a game. Back when Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out, PETA had a few words to say about how to play the game as a vegan, including avoiding the fishing and bug catching mechanics entirely.

Now honestly, this is more just PETA getting into headlines and pop culture than any kind of real legal action. The letter itself is not particularly litigious in tone, instead making several bovine puns throughout.

Still, the question remains: when will Cow get a mainline title?

Ongoing Steam/Itch Issues

Payment processors and gaming storefronts are still having a moment, as PayPal is no longer available as a payment method to buy games on Steam in a whole bunch of countries (US excluded).

Steam has been trying to shift blame for the ongoing fiasco onto the payment processors with varying levels of success. Payment processors like Visa and MasterCard have claimed they are agnostic towards content so long as it is "legal," but their actions—along with PayPal's—leave open a few questions, such as, "why are you lying?"

It is at this point in writing this newsletter that I realize just how much pearl clutching and prudeness are in the headlines right now. Like, I knew we were regressing in general, but we're really going into "create a database of adults accessing adult content on the internet because of outcry from religious extremist groups who hate anything sexual whatsoever."