Random News: October 5, 2024

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 October 5, 2024, and it’s a Saturday. The sky is a lovely shade of silvery gray, and I’m in a robe, sipping this large cup of Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend. Seems like a good time to check the news.

• All of the real facts about Hurricane Helene’s destruction are devastating enough, with businesses and homes destroyed, whole communities nearly wiped out, hundreds of lives lost, hundreds of people missing.
• However, that’s not enough for the MAGA world, where misinformation and hoaxes about Helene are clouding the recovery process.
• Extremist groups, disinformation agents, hucksters, and politicians are exploiting the disaster to spread false claims and conspiracy theories about it and the government’s response.
• Donnie Dump, perhaps recalling his own time as president when he withheld help to blue states who’s gone through disasters, is claiming that the federal government is intentionally withholding aid to Republican disaster victims.
• Far-right extremist groups invent lies on social media that officials plan to bulldoze affected communities and seize the land from residents. Paranoid freaks assert that Washington used weather control technology to steer Helene toward Republican voters.
• Do you assume these people are just weirdos in basements? The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, posted a completely false statement to his 200 million followers that private relief flights to North Carolina were being blocked by the Federal Aviation Administration.
• 100% untrue. Fuck you, Elmo.
• Thankfully, there are some sane people who are refuting this bullshit, like North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin, a Republican who urged his constituents not to give into hoaxes.
• This week on Facebook, Corbin posted, “Friends can I ask a small favor? Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet... Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you.”
• The reality is that the response to Helene is the largest in North Carolina state history, including thousands of members of the National Guard and other recovery workers, millions of meals, dozens of aircraft, thousands of chainsaws, and more.
• And now, 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty's Infantry Battalion Task Force are heading to western North Carolina to help with recovery efforts, per an order from the Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden.
• The troops will join the North Carolina National Guard in delivering supplies, food, and water to isolated communities.
• At local, state, and federal levels, help and aid is being offered to North Carolina and other affected states at unprecedented levels of quantity and speed. regardless of the resources being made available, on a disaster of this scale, these things take time.
• But stop the conspiracy bullshit. It makes matters way worse for everyone involved.
• Let’s move on.
• Here’s some surprising good news form the Supreme Court. It happens so rarely that I note when it comes up.
• Yesterday, the SCOTUS refused to block the Biden administration’s new anti-pollution regulations, rules that impose tougher standards on mercury emissions from coal-fired plants and that regulate methane emissions from crude-oil and natural gas facilities.
• Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, and methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Limiting them is part of the EPA’s effort to fight climate change.
• Industry groups, and some two dozen Republican-run states challenged the rules, going quickly to the Supreme Court to ask that the regulations be blocked while litigation takes place in the lowers courts.
• But the justices— surprisingly, given the way they have handled similar cases in the recent past — rejected the emergency pleas, telling the challengers to litigate their claims in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia before coming to them for help. There were no noted dissents.
• Always remember: businesses want to make their money now. Today. Meet this month’s quota. And the future — even when it includes imminent death or people and animals, and the long-term extinction of our species — is not something that factors into the balance sheet today.
• So my gratitude goes to the SCOTUS on this occasion.
• Moving on.
• Kamala Harris is unstoppable in important swing states. Yesterday, she held two event in Michigan… one in Detroit, and the other in Flint.
• A crowd of thousands cheered as Harris took the stage at the Dort Financial Center in Flint. She spoke about affordable housing, fighting for labor unions, reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade that were taking away by Dumpy, and encouraged her supporters to research Dumpy’s Project 2025.
• Among many special guests at the Flint rally was Michigan native NBA legend Magic Johnson, who noted, “We have to do all we can to elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States. She wants to build up a middle class, and I know something about the middle-class because I come from a middle-class family.”
• In other news…
• Republican Dan Foreman, an Idaho state senator, gave a message to a Democratic candidate this week at a bipartisan forum. He said to the brown-skinned woman, "I’m so sick of your liberal bullshit. Why don’t you go back to where you came from?”
• The candidate, Trish Carter-Goodheart, is a member of the Nez Perce Tribe. The Nez Perce Tribe has lived on the Columbia River Plateau in the Pacific Northwest for more than 11,500 years.
• Where is Carter-Goodheart supposed to go, Dan?
• After being called out on this, Forman doubled down via a social post.
• “Here is a news flash for the lefties out there. There is no systemic racism in America or Idaho,” Foreman said.
• Okay Dan.
• Then he added, “There is no such thing as your self-proclaimed ‘Women’s Reproductive Rights.’”
• Ladies and gentlemen, there you have it; the Republican Party in a sentence. This is why we’re voting for Kamala Harris to be our President in 30 days. And fuck Dan Foreman. I hope he gets eaten by a bear.
• Let’s move on.
• Monday October 7 is the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians and the ensuing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, and it may be a motivating factor for violent extremists and hate crime perpetrators to engage in violence, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned yesterday.
• The statement said that Jewish, Muslim, or Arab venues such as synagogues and mosques present attractive targets for violent attacks or for hoax threats by a variety of threat actors.
• I agree. Be safe out there, Jewish and Muslim friends.
• In other news…
• It’s been awhile since we spoke about the fact that the state of Oklahoma, in direct violation of our country’s rules about the separation of church and state, have mandated Christian bibles in every school classroom.
• Now the situation has gotten worse.
• Oklahoma’s Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is defending the process for how the state will select newly mandated Bibles in classrooms after a report was released that the criteria is so narrow that essentially no Bibles qualify — besides ones being sold by Dumpy.
• Yes, you read it correctly.
• Walters has specified a Bible that is bound by leather or material like leather, has the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and is the New King James version of the Old and New Testament.
• That criteria leaves only the Dumpy Bible as a choice, and Walters has asked for $3 million to buy 55,000 copies of the Bible — at over $54 each — for Oklahoma classrooms.
• Can you imagining being a non-Christian student who is mandated by law to attend a public school and not only having someone else’s religion forced upon you, but that the tax money in the state is going to line the pockets of Donnie Dump?
• I hope some smart people find ways to sue the living fuck out of the state and Walters himself.
• Let’s move on.
• Back to another story about Hurricane Helene that we have yet to cover here: what happened at a Tennessee business called Impact Plastics.
• 11 of their plant workers were swept away by Hurricane Helene’s deadly floodwaters after they tried to leave the facility. Only five were rescued. Four people who worked at the plant are still missing, and two have been confirmed dead.
• Families of the victims and Impact Plastics workers are outraged, demanding answers about why employees were made to work during extreme weather conditions, and some were told they couldn’t leave as warnings of heavy rainfall in the flood-prone area poured in.
• The company is denying those claims, saying no employee was stopped from leaving. But now two state investigations are looking into the tragedy.
• And two surviving employees are contradicting the claims. They asked if they could leave work after seeing they flooding outside and were told no.
• And Impact Plastics is claiming that there were zero workplace deaths, as the company’s founder says nobody perished on company property.
• Fucking prick.
• And now, The Weather: “Gazing at Footwear” by Being Dead
• From the Sports Desk… I completely fucked up when I wrote that Major League Baseball’s Divisional Series were kicking off yesterday. That’s actually today.
• Here’s the schedule: 
• American League: 6-seed Detroit Tigers at 2-seed Cleveland Guardians, 5-seed Kansas City Royals at 1-seed New York Yankees.
• National League: 6-seed New York Mets at 2-seed Philadelphia Phillies, 4-seed San Diego Padres at 1-seed Los Angeles Dodgers.
• The Divisional Series is best 3 out of 5. Good luck to your team (unless they’re playing the Dodgers… then the opposite of that).
• Today in history… Heraclius arrives at Constantinople, kills Byzantine Emperor Phocas, and becomes emperor (610). King Louis the Pious — my 38th great grandfather — is crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope (816). Louis IX, Duke of Bavaria expels Jews from his jurisdiction (1450). The Women's March on Versailles effectively terminates royal authority (1789). The Army of the Northwest defeats a British and Native Canadian force threatening Detroit (1813). An aircraft successfully destroys another aircraft with gunfire for the first time (1914). The World Series is the first to be broadcast on radio (1921). A six-month strike by Hollywood set decorators turns into a bloody riot at the gates of the Warner Brothers studio (1945). President Truman makes the first televised Oval Office address (1947). The first of the James Bond film series, based on the novels by Ian Fleming, ‘Dr. No’, is released in Britain (1962). The first Beatles single "Love Me Do" is released in Britain (1962). A reactor at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station near Detroit suffers a partial meltdown (1966). The Public Broadcasting Service is founded (1970). Tylenol products are recalled after bottles in Chicago laced with cyanide cause seven deaths (1982). Mass demonstrations in Serbia force the resignation of Slobodan Milošević (2000). 
• October 5 is the birthday of painter Francesco Guardi (1712), US president Chester A. Arthur (1829), film director Louis Lumière (1864), physicist Robert H. Goddard (1882), comedian/actor Larry Fine (1902), businessman Ray Kroc (1902), actor Donald Pleasence (1919), cartoonist Bil Keane (1922), poet/politician Václav Havel (1936), singer-songwriter/guitarist Steve Miller (1943), singer Russell Mael (1948), musician B. W. Stevenson (1949), guitarist Fast Eddie Clarke (1950), singer-songwriter Bob Geldof (1951), keyboardist/composer Harold Faltermeyer (1952), comedian Bernie Mac (1957), astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958), actor Daniel Baldwin (1960), singer-songwriter Pato Banton (1961), NHL player Mario Lemieux (1965), NHL player Patrick Roy (1965), NBA player Rex Chapman (1967), NBA player Grant Hill (1972), and actress Kate Winslet (1975).

Okay. Time to shower and dress myself. Side note: for you Second Life people, I’m playing a very short 10-minute set as part of a huge benefit show at Hotel Chelsea for their hostess A fiya, who’s facing a very serious medical situation. My tiny set is at 3pm, if anyone wants to drop by and donate. Enjoy your day.