Random News: June 5, 2023

DISCLAIMER: Zak's Random News is very random and doesn't cover many things, and not everything may be accurate, because I'm just some guy. Go find a real news source.

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Good morning. It’s June 5, 2023, and it’s a Monday. I’m in my typical Monday mode, trying to figure out what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing, which is also my general mode in life, so let’s learn some stuff together…

• I thought that in my all-month salute to Pride, we could learn the origins of the Rainbow flag.
• Gilbert Baker was an Army veteran who learned to sew after an honorable discharge. In 1974, he met Harvey Milk, an influential gay leader, who challenged Baker to devise a symbol of pride for the gay community.
• They’d previously been making use of a pink triangle, the Nazi symbol to identify and stigmatize men interned as homosexuals in the concentration camps. The community sought a new inspiring symbol.
• Baker’s first design had eight stripes, but soon moved to a seven-stripe version due to unavailability of pink fabric.
• But since 1979, the official flag has had six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.
• There are other flags and symbols associated with the LGBTQIA+ community. We’ll discuss those at a later date.
• And now, the news.
• Something super weird happened in the skies above the Washington, D.C. area yesterday, and for the moment we can only speculate what the details are.
• A private jet — a Cessna Citation, if you’re interested — departed from a small airport Sunday in Tennessee with a flight plan that had it bound for Long Island, NY, but it turned around after reaching its destination and flew over the District of Columbia.
• That is a big no-no for aviators. The area over D.C., with the White House and Congress and our military installations and so on, is a no-fly zone. Residents of the area reported en masse about a very large boom sound shortly thereafter.
• That boom was a squadron of F-16 fighter planes, who scrambled from Joint Base Andrews, along with other military aircraft. They were authorized by commanders to fly at supersonic speeds to intercept the private jet, causing the boom.
• However, the military jets and air traffic controllers were unable to make contact with the plane, and it crashed in a mountainous area of Virginia about 3:30pm. Virginia State Police said Sunday there appeared to be no survivors.
• The military says it didn’t shoot down the plane, nor did their intercepting fighters cause the crash. It’s all pretty freaky, man.
• In other news…
• Here’s some comedy for you. Remember last week how the House of Representatives voted on the debt ceiling bill, and one rep, a certain Lauren Boebert (R-CO) had been mouthing off about it for weeks prior, and then wasn’t even there to cast her vote?
• BoBo claimed afterward that her no-show was some kind of bizarre protest. However, a video from that evening shows the congresswoman frantically running up the steps of the Capitol trying to make it inside before the vote.
• ”They closed it," said a news producer on the video, referring to the completion of the vote inside as Boebert desperately rushes toward the doors. "They closed it?" Boebert responds incredulously, and then turns to continue her futile sprint in heels.
• Where was BoBo while she was supposed to be voting to represent the citizens of her Colorado district? No one knows. Well, she knows, but she’s not saying.
• Moving on…
• Got some breaking… news? 
• Former guy Donald Trump’s lawyers were just spotted this morning entering the Justice Department. This comes as sources say that special counsel Jack Smith is moving toward a charging decision in the classified documents case.
• Is shit about to get real? Stay tuned and I guess we’ll see! Or not. I don’t know anything.
• Here’s some news that should freak some people out.
• A Knoxville, TN woman was charged with hiring a hitman through the dark web to murder the wife of a man she met on match.com. Yikes.
• Melody Sasser allegedly hired this hitman through the dark web hosted site “Online Killers Market”. The “order for murder” was made by an account linked to Sasser during the investigation and had a description that said the hitman was to kill a woman in Prattville, AL.
• So, first, don’t try to have people killed. Second, everything you do online is 100% trackable and traceable. Literally everything. And it’s easier than ever before the find your ass.
• In this case, Coinhub ATMs take photos of of every user during each transaction, and photos from an ATM linked to specific transactions matched Sasser’s Tennessee driver’s license picture and her open source Facebook profile picture. Also, the phone number used to identify the customer at the ATM also matched the phone number Sasser listed on her driver’s license and in her contact information with Knoxville Utilities Board.
• So whatever evil scheme you’re planning, it’s not gonna work. Sasser is expected in federal court in Knoxville on June 8.
• And now, The Weather: “yes i have eaten so many lemons yes i am so bitte” by bar italia
• One note about the quickly-approaching 2024 presidential election cycle: AI is going to really fuck things up.
• You’ll see videos of candidates in situations that never happened. You’ll hear words spoken in their voice that they never said. It’s going to be horrible, and it’s going to be weaponized.
• It’s only going to get worse as time goes by, so good luck to us all. We’re gonna need it.
• From the Sports Desk… well, well, well. Like many others, I was convinced that the underdog Miami Heat were about to be sweet in the NBA Finals by the Denver Nuggets, but this Heat team is scrappy as fuck. They won game 2 in Denver 111-108.
• The Finals head back to Miami for Game 3 on Wednesday at 8:30pm EDT.
• Today in history… The Qing dynasty Manchu forces led by the Shunzhi Emperor take Beijing during the collapse of the Ming dynasty (1644). Houston is incorporated by the Republic of Texas (1837). Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom's Cabin, starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper (1851). Denmark amends its constitution to allow women's suffrage (1915). Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the first American Jew to hold such a position (1916). In a speech at Harvard University, the United States Secretary of State George Marshall calls for economic aid to war-torn Europe, aka the Marshall Plan (1947). Elvis Presley introduces his new single, "Hound Dog", on ‘The Milton Berle Show’, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements (1956). Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan (1968). The ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report’ of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that five people in Los Angeles, CA, have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS (1981). The Tank Man halts the progress of a column of advancing tanks for over half an hour after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (1989). The Bose–Einstein condensate is first created (1995). Montenegro becomes the 29th member of NATO (2017).
• June 5 is the birthday of Mexican general/politician Pancho Villa (1878), economist John Maynard Keynes (1883), shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo (1898), physicist Dennis Gabor (1900), author/illustrator Richard Scarry (1919), journalist Bill Moyers (1934), Canadian prime minister Joe Clark (1939), singer-songwriter Laurie Anderson (1947), saxophonist Kenny G (1956), actor Jeff Garlin (1962), astronomer Michael E. Brown (1965), NHL player Martin Gélinas (1970), actor/rapper Mark Wahlberg (1971), NBA player Zydrunas Ilgauskas (1975), actor Nick Kroll (1978), and NFL player Sam Darnold (1997).

Okay. Well, I woke up sort of weird and freaked out, but I am more calm after writing all this shitty news. Perhaps its some bizarre aspect of knowing that my stresses are way less than many other people’s in some cathartic way. I don’t know if that’s a positive emotional reaction or not, but I’ll take it. Enjoy your day.