My Kind of Law Enforcement

FINALLY, Authority I Can Get Behind

I am not a fan of Border Patrol. And I am not a fan of ICE.

But I am a fan of I-CE-DAT-BOOTY.

A man in Florida was cited by cops for driving a car that looked like a US border patrol truck with flashing lights in the style of law enforcement. However, the truck was not, in fact, a border patrol truck, and was instead a BOOTY PATROL truck.

The truck had flashing lights, glowing wheels and "BOOTY PATROL" stenciled on the back, doing the rounds presumably to ensure that all booty was up to code.

This is the forward progress I am looking for in the world, and yet again, cops step in to ruin everything.

Realtors Held Accountable, Kinda Sorta

A jury in the US has found that the National Association of Realtors was doing some shady conspiracy shit to inflate the cost of commissions for home sales.

The short version is this: large real estate firms were working to keep people paying unnecessarily high costs to increasingly unnecessary parties involved in the real estate sale process, driving up home prices and helping essentially nobody except the parasites.

They must now pay out almost $2 Billion in damages, possibly going higher than that.

The long version is: I don't actually know how better to explain it, because it gets into weird real estate law shit that I don't know anything about, but my simple brain sees "large corporate realtors got caught artificially increasing prices" and that's all I need to know.

NYC's Cop Mayor Being Investigated

So remember how people fucking hate the NYPD? Well, New Yorkers apparently didn't, as they elected Eric Adams—a cop—as mayor of New York City in their last election. Since then, he's done a lot of cop stuff, such as his aggressive approach to homelessness and staunch support of NYPD's general shittiness.

Now, an FBI investigation into Eric Adam's campaign was thrust into the spotlight when agents raided the home of Eric Adam's chief campaign fund-raiser as they investigate possible conspiracy with the Turkish government to fund Adam's campaign.

It's a whole-ass web of stuff, including foreign governments, shady corporations, kickbacks, bribes, the whole nine yards.

Anyway, color me shocked. The cop politician may have done corrupt things! Wild.

Sam Bankman-Fraud (too Easy I Know but I'm tired)

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of crypto company FTX which went down as one of the biggest corporate collapses in US history, has been found guilty on all charges in his fraud trial. He now stands convicted of at least $10 billion worth of fraud.

FTX was once a golden child of the crypto space, claiming to be the place that would make crypto accessible to people, acting as a stable financial institution for crypto, even getting its name on an arena for a smidge. Turns out, like much of crypto, it was a scam run by tech bros who had almost all of the hallmarks of a typical corporate criminal, without the forethought to actually think through their crimes before doing them.

The collapse of FTX has been compared to Enron, so much so that the guy who came in to take over Enron after its collapse was tapped to do the same for FTX, and his reaction when getting in there was essentially "dafuq happened here?"

On This day…

On this day in 1973, NASA launched the Mariner 10 space probe on a mission to Mercury. The probe was the first to reach Mercury, doing several flybys of the planet, as well as one pass by Venus. After about a year and a half of operation, it was decommissioned.

While passing by Venus, the Mariner also became the first space craft to send images of Venus back to Earth successfully. Prior missions reported data, but not imagery.

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• A new treatment has passed trial which targets… "super-gonorrhoea"
• Apple is shutting down its "Voice Plan" for apple music, which gave you access to their music library but only via Siri voice commands
• Disney will be working to acquire a controlling stake of Hulu from Comcast, citing that this move will "further Disney's streaming objectives"
• The Texas Rangers won the baseball World Series beating the Arizona Diamondbacks in the series 5-0 at game 5. That is my full extent of knowledge on the subject, as I did not even realize that event was happening.
• The Republican controlled US House of Representatives passed a $14.3 Billion aid package for Israel. Biden has said he would veto it, not because of the money or that it goes to Israel, but because of the removal of the money from the IRS (see the previous newsletter for more info)
• Meta is rolling out an ad-free subscription for Facebook and Instagram in the EU to comply with local privacy laws. A statement from Meta declared, “We’ll continue to advocate for an ad-supported internet"

Catch Me As a Guest on The Afictionados Podcast!

It has finally arrived! A while back, I joined Robyn and Casey on The Afictionados podcast to nerd out about LOST for a while. The episode is live now! You can search "Afictionados LOST" on your favorite podcast app, or check it out on iTunes here. You can also head to the Afictionados website for more information!