Random News: November 18, 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 November 18, 2024, and it’s a Monday. As such, I’ve got a busy day ahead, but that’s okay. As usual, I’ll do what I can in the time that I have. That’s all I can do.

• Let’s do some news.
• President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use a powerful American long-range weapon for limited strikes inside Russia in response to North Korea’s deployment of thousands of troops to aid Moscow’s war effort.
• The easing of restrictions on allowing Kyiv to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to hit targets inside Russia is a significant reversal in U.S. policy and comes as some 10,000 elite North Korean troops have been sent to Kursk, a region of Russia along Ukraine’s northern border, to help Moscow’s forces retake territory gained by Ukraine.
• The Biden administration fears that more North Korean special forces units could follow in support of this effort.
• The Kremlin wasn’t happy about this. Today they warned that Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russia adds “fuel to the fire” of the war and would escalate international tensions even higher.
• In any case, we’re just two months out from Donnie Dump retaking the White House, and he’s claimed he intends to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, though without offering details of how he will do so.
• But I think we can guess.
• Moving on.
• Yesterday evening, I attended a Zoom call via Mobilize for People Power United. The topic was “The Fight Against Project 2025.”
• It was a very thorough presentation which — appropriately — was mostly about raising awareness of what Project 2025 is and how it may be implemented. For people like me, who’ve been digging into Project 2025 for months, some of the info was remedial.
• You can easily find all the published info about the 900+ page document, which is a blueprint for authoritarian control of the USA.
• However, the part that I thought was important was the secret and as-yet unpublished section that they refer to as Pillar IV, aka the 180-day playbook.
• It begins the moment Dump is sworn in on January 20, 2025, and represents an immediate takeover of all the systems of checks and balances to consolidate power under Dump.
• They plan on using a series of executive orders that have already been drafted, and will be enacted on the first day of Dump’s second term.
• It’s been reported by credible sources that they include an order invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement
• I can tell you that if Dump and his team of evil face no strong opposition, America will be a very different and very dark place within six months.
• And people like me — and tens of thousands more — who inform you about these things will be silenced.
• Stay awake and aware, friends. And please get involved. Be one of the good and brave people, and you’ll win. Cower on the sidelines and you won’t.
• Let’s move on.
• Leaders in Ohio condemned a group of neo-Nazis parading around part of Columbus carrying flags with swastikas on Saturday afternoon.
• Columbus public safety dispatchers received multiple 911 calls about a group of individuals marching in the city's Short North.
• Video shows about a dozen people wearing black pants, shirts, and head coverings and red masks covering their mouths marching down the street. Three of the people were carrying black flags with red swastikas.
• Mayor Andrew Ginther released a statement saying the city rejects the "cowardly display" and that it "stands squarely against hatred and bigotry."
• City attorney, Zach Klein, said, "This is not who we are, and we will not tolerate or normalize this disgusting ideology in any form.”
• Is walking around with Nazi flags legal? In fact, it is… which is a good lead-in to ur next section.
• Today’s edition of “Hey, You Have Rights!” continues our discussion of the most important of rights… the 1st Amendment.
• To refresh your memory, here it is again…
• “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
• Yesterday we covered the first section… the Establishment Clause and its effect on the separation of church and state.
• Today let’s look at part 1… “(Congress shall make no law) abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
• What is “free speech?” It’s the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference, or restraint by the government.
• Key word at the end there… by the government. Can your speech be limited in various ways by other people? Yes. By private companies? Yes.
• Do you have the right to say or write or do anything you want whenever and wherever you want without various repercussions? No. Don’t be an idiot. Of course not.
• The 1st Amendment down’t stop you from getting fired if you call your boss an asshole. The 1st Amendment won’t save you from getting hit in the face for being a Nazi (through your right to parade around with swastikas is actually covered in this amendment).
• But per the 1st Amendment, you can’t be arrested or imprisoned or otherwise punished by the government for expressing yourself. That’s it.
• Freedom of the press is very similar. It means the right of individuals to express themselves through publication and dissemination of information, ideas, and opinions without interference, constraint, or prosecution by the government.
• There have been dozens upon dozens of 1st Amendment challenges and cases and appeals over the years. Is burning an American flag covered under the amendment? Yes.
• But what if your speech creates a “clear and present” danger? The old example is a person yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, causing a panic, and people die from trampling each other to get out. Is that protected speech?
• The act of the speech in that case is not a crime… but the results of what transpires after is, when done maliciously.
• The 1st Amendment has been put to test a lot in areas like social media. Does Facebook or Bluesky or other platforms have the right to censor or remove my posts?
• Yes, of course they do. They are private companies. If I want to publish my thoughts on my own platform that I own, I am welcome to do that.
• Political speech is perhaps the most important freedom offered by the 1st Amendment. The ability to publicly criticize even the most prominent politicians and leaders without fear of retaliation is the core of 1st Amendment protections.
• I like the way the Supreme Court put it…
• “For it is a prized American privilege to speak one's mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public institutions. And an enforced silence, however limited, solely in the name of preserving the dignity of the bench would probably engender resentment, suspicion, and contempt much more than it would enhance respect.”
• Even a hint of a politician who threatens your right to criticize them is a major red flag. This is one of the most important concepts of our nation.
• You can spend years studying all the ways the 1st Amendment’s free speech clause has been implemented and still not get through them all.
• Defamation, school speech, Internet access, obscenity, compelled speech, campaign finance… those and about a hundred more topics are still just the tip of the iceberg.
• But just looking through a few of the most well known landmark cases will tell you that this is the Amendment that is by far that most important to American life.
• We’ll continue with the next section of the 1st Amendment in tomorrow’s edition of “Hey, You Have Rights!”
• Moving on.
• In our continuing coverage of Dump’s nightmare cabinet picks, yesterday he said he was naming Brendan Carr as the next Federal Communications Commission chairman, positioning the regulatory agency to do battle against social media companies and TV broadcasters that Republicans portray as too liberal.
• Carr, 45, already wrote an aggressive agenda about the FCC in Project 2025. He’s a big supporter of Elon Musk.
• Shrug. Fuck them all.
• But I think you’ll see a noticeable change — not for the good — in how news broadcasts and social media posts are allowed to criticize government leaders… a direct violation of everything I just told you above about the 1st Amendment.
• Let’s move on.
• There are many groups of people who are having buyer’s remorse over their vote for Dumpy.
• I didn’t mention this, but, sadly, the day after the election, there was a spike in Google searches for “how to change my vote.”
• You can’t change your vote. I think most of you know this. I hope so anyway. Which is why it’s all the more important that you understand who and what you’re voting for in the first place.
• A prime example: Arab Americans.
• Just a week after winning a majority of the vote in several of the nation’s largest Arab-majority cities, Dump has filled top administration posts with staunch Israel supporters, including an ambassador to Israel who has claimed “there is no such thing as Palestinians.”
• The selections have prompted mixed reactions among Arab Americans and Muslims in Michigan, which went for Trump along with all six other battleground states.
• Amin Hashmi, a Pakistani American in Michigan who voted for Dump, urged him to stay true to his campaign commitments to bring peace. Regarding his appointments of people who will absolutely not be on the side of the Arabic world, Hashmi said, “I am disappointed but not surprised.”
• He urged Dumpy to “keep the promise you made to the people of Arab descent in Michigan.”
• These poor folks are going to learn the hard way that keeping promises is one thing that Dump has never done, and will never do.
• Osama Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab American News, said, “Now people are coming to us and saying, ‘Look what you’ve done.’”
• Welp.
• Moving on.
• SpaceX and Amazon are at the forefront of a corporate-led effort to monumentally change workers’ rights.
• They are going after the National Labor Relations Board. Today, attorneys for the two companies will try to convince a panel of judges at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that the labor agency, created by Congress in 1935, is unconstitutional.
• A ruling in favor of the companies could make it much harder for workers to form unions and take collective action in pursuit of better wages and working conditions.
• That would be an enormous setback for labor groups, who have enjoyed unprecedented support from the Biden administration, and a win for companies that have spent considerable amounts of resources over the past four years trying to keep unions out of their workplaces.
• This is another extraordinary danger to your rights that never would have happened under a Kamala Harris administration. Oh well. We tried to tell you.
• Moving on.
• Spirit Airlines filed for bankruptcy protection today. You may recall that they attempted and failed to sell their airline to JetBlue.
• Spirit has lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020 and faces looming debt payments totaling more than $1 billion over the next year.
• They say that they expect to operate as normal as it works its way through a prearranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy process and that customers can continue to book and fly without interruption.
• Their stock price dropped 25% on Friday after news of the pending bankruptcy hit. Spirit’s stock is down by 97% since late 2018. Yikes.
• In other news…
• Apparently the cool new thing to do is to live… in fucking nowhere.
• It was already common for decades for people tome their homes in suburbs… towns and cities away from a major city center but still within a reasonable commute.
• But the big explosion in housing in recent years has been to the exurbs… outlying communities on the outer margins of metro areas — some as far away as 60 miles from a city’s center.
• Those places had some of the fastest-growing populations last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Those communities are primarily in the South, like Anna, TX on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area; Fort Mill, SC (which is outside Charlotte, North Carolina); Lebanon, TN outside Nashville; and Polk County, FL’s Haines City (located between Tampa and Orlando.
• And now, The Weather: “Add Up My Love” by Clairo
• From the Sports Desk… the Kansas City Chiefs (9-1) not only got their first loss of the NFL season yesterday; they also dropped out of first place in the standings… a position now held by the Detroit Lions (9-1).
• I think the Lions, who’ve won their past 8 straight games, are a better team. So are the Bills, currently at 9-2.
• Today in history… The Visigoths, led by king Alaric I, cross the Alps and invade northern Italy (401). A dike in the Netherlands breaks, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people (1421). Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women are arrested for voting illegally in the United States presidential election (1872). Two United States warships are sent to Nicaragua after 500 revolutionaries, including two Americans, are executed (1909). In their campaign for women's voting rights, hundreds of suffragettes march to the British Parliament in London, and several are beaten by police (1910). Release of the animated short ‘Steamboat Willie’, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon (1928). The first push-button telephone goes into service (1963). In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple to a mass murder–suicide that claimed 918 lives in all (1978). Massachusetts rules that the state's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, making it the first state in the US to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples (2003).
• November 18 is the birthday of physicist August Kundt (1839), politician Carl Vinson (1883), statistician George Gallup (1901), actress Imogene Coca (1908), singer-songwriter/producer Johnny Mercer (1909), astronaut Alan Shepard (1923), singer-songwriter Hank Ballard (1927), trumpeter Don Cherry (1936), author Margaret Atwood (1939), astronomer Edwin C. Krupp (1944), NFL player Jack Tatum (1948), drummer/songwriter Herman Rarebell (1949), bassist Rudy Sarzo (1950), singer-songwriter/guitarist John Parr (1952), comedian Kevin Nealon (1953), composer Carter Burwell (1954), NFL player Warren Moon (1956), singer-songwriter Kim Wilde (1960), MLB player Gary Sheffield (1968), actor Owen Wilson (1968), NBA player Sam Cassell (1969), singer-songwriter/guitarist Duncan Sheik (1969), weirdo journalist Megyn Kelly (1970), and actress Chloë Sevigny (1974).

Beyond work, my only exciting plan for the day is getting my hair cut at a place I haven’t tried before. Wish me luck that they don’t make me look like an idiot. Enjoy your day.