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A Deeply Cursed Announcement

Someone tried to move into the White House the wrong way. Also, DeSantis is planning an announcement, a Mexican volcano is getting spicy and the stock market is easier to manipulate than you might think.

Endeavorance

May 24, 2023 — 3 min read

Quite stoppable force meets immovable object

A 19-year-old dude rammed a U-Haul truck into the barriers around the White House, seemingly hoping to harm the president. A Nazi flag was found at the site, and according to reports, the driver made "worrying statements" regarding his intentions to attack the POTUS and his family.

If you are not familiar with the setup in DC around there, lemme clear something up: a while back, they installed a full perimeter of poles that stick out of the ground, dotting their way around the entirety of the complex, hundreds of yards from the fence to the actual grounds of the White House. Each pole alone is capable of stopping basically anything that may try to hit it. A U-Haul, no matter how much it claims to be easier to load than competitors, is not going to register.

Are you ready for the most cursed sequence of words imaginable?

Here we go.

Ron DeSantis is reportedly going to be announcing his 2024 campaign tonight in a Twitter Space with Elon Musk.

A Twitter Space is a voice-only chatroom feature that came out during the height of the Clubhouse hype (a social platform that does basically the same thing). Listeners can ask to speak so its a pretty good format for public discussions between a panel of folks who can then bring on question-askers.

Elon Musk has already publicly voiced his support for DeSantis, despite also claiming that he is simply a "centrist" and that "both sides are bad." Apparently in his mind, DeSantis—who is currently leading the country in laws restricting bodily autonomy and actively banning speech in schools—is fine and good.

This is a good time to remind you that Elon Musk's ex left him for a trans woman, which is probably why Musk is so loudly anti-trans now, and thus, supportive of DeSantis.

Mexican volcano looking pretty spicy

3,000,000 people are possibly going to have to evacuate due to ongoing activity from an eruption of Popocatépetl, a volcano in central Mexico.

The volcano is smoking and smoldering and has been for a few weeks now. While local residents are used to seeing the volcano have a bit of sporadic activity, the alert level is now just below "get the hell out of there" territory, in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people may need to evacuate.

The evacuation order has not been given at this time and officials and disaster management organizations are keeping a solid eye on it. But like, damn. Hope that big ol' Earth pimple doesn't pop.

We're at the time where AI gags can tank the stock market

…maybe that's a sign that the stock market shouldn't exist?

Anyway, someone used an AI image generator to generate fake imagery of the Pentagon under attack in the US. The image was posted to Facebook, then reported to Twitter by an account with a blue check mark, where it proceeded to make the rounds like wildfire.

As the image got passed around, people got spooked enough that the DOW and S&P dipped momentarily as people sorted out what the hell was going on.

The original posting account, which also included some wording to make it sound like breaking news, has been banned. As a reminder, the blue checkmark no longer means "notable person" but now just means "this person is paying Elon Musk for a blue check mark on Twitter." Unfortunately, given the prior significance of the check mark, it is still pretty easy to make people think you're trustworthy if you've got one.

On this day

On this day in 1626, Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan for the equivalent of just over $1,500 of today's money. He purchased the land for the Dutch East India Company. The land became the city of New Amsterdam before ultimately becoming a kinda sleepy town called New York City.

Notably, it was "purchased" from local indigenous people. So...