Random News: November 30, 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.

---

Good morning. It’s November 30, 2024, and it’s a Saturday. I’m in my robe and have a cup of Peet’s Brazil, and it’s delicious. Let’s see what’s going on around this crazy-ass world.

• Li’l Donnie Dump had dinner with an actual leader last night… Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
• As you know, Dumpy has promised massive hikes in tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada starting on the first day of his administration, specifically calling for a 25% tariff on all products sent to the US.
• And now he’s looking for a way out without losing face.
• Dump is going to look like the world’s biggest idiot once prices skyrocket and people start losing jobs as a result. His own biggest supporters — well, at least some of them — won’t stand for being jobless and poverty-stricken.
• Trudeau is playing it perfectly.
• He said, “One of the things that is really important to understand is that Donald Trump, when he makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out. There’s no question about it. Our responsibility is to point out that in this way he would be actually not just be harming Canadians, who work so well with the United States; he’d actually be raising prices for American citizens as well and hurting American industry and businesses.”
• Correct.
• The subtext, if you have trouble comprehending politicalese, is that Dumpy is not serious, has no intention of acting on this campaign promise, and wants to seem like he gets a win when there’s none to be had.
• Either way, if these tariffs go into effect as Dump has promised, you can count on severe hardships for you and your family starting very soon.
• Let’s move on.
• How are things going to Dump’s key cabinet picks? Not so great.
• Take, for example, Dumpy’s pick to be the secretary of defense, Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth.
• His own mother, Penelope Hegseth, accused her son of routinely mistreating women and displaying a lack of character.
• In an email that got published by the New York Times yesterday, Pete’s mom wrote, “You are an abuser of women – that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.”
• She continued, “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
• Apparently Mrs. Hegseth had written the email while angry about Pete’s acrimonious divorce from his second wife, Samantha, the mother of three of his children.
• Still, moms are pretty good judges of character. Something to keep in mind.
• Hegseth is already facing questions over payments he made to a woman who accused him of sexual assault — an encounter that he insists was consensual and she says was rape.
• What does this stuff matter in regard to him leading the entire US military? Well, a lot.
• “I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles,” Pete Hegseth said on a podcast this month. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”
• But that’s far different from how women who have filled such roles see their achievement.
• With thousands of women in combat units past and present, Hegseth’s “notions” — as one Army veteran recently labeled them — could affect many futures.
• Women are currently members of the country’s most elite forces. While acknowledging that conversations about military readiness are always important, decorated female veterans called Hegseth’s views on what women in uniform contribute outdated, uninformed, and inaccurate.
• And I agree.
• Moving on.
• Let’s head to the International Desk for a moment.
• Today, thousands of Syrian insurgents fanned out inside Aleppo in vehicles with improvised armor and pickups, deploying to landmarks such as the old citadel, a day after they entered Syria’s largest city facing little resistance from government troops.
• Two airstrikes on the city’s edge late yesterday targeted insurgent reinforcements and hit near residential areas. A war monitor said 20 fighters were killed.
• The surprise takeover is a huge embarrassment for Syrian President Bashar Assad, who managed to regain total control of the city in 2016, after expelling insurgents and thousands of civilians from its eastern neighborhoods following a grueling military campaign in which his forces were backed by Russia, Iran, and its allied groups.
• If you’re wondering who are the good guys and who are the bad guys here… join the club. In some aspects, this feels like one terrorist group attacking another.
• And really, violence of this nature is never good and ends up mostly harming the people who happen to live in the area under attack.
• Let’s move on.
• I want to once again mention what will likely happen with Dumpy’s pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he’s confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
• But don’t listen to me. Listen to Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the first Dump administration. Yesterday he issued a stark warning.
• “You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” he said. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
• “We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
• Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had people around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.
• All I will say is this: while the government may lessen requirements to get vaccines, you — as a person and possibly as a parent — can make up your own mind.
• No one wants to see their children suffering from these very preventable diseases just because some fucking politician is a wackjob.
• Moving on.
• Here’s a concept for all the guys who call themselves “alpha males” while threatening and belittling women: it used to be that an actual man was one who protected the rights and dignity of women.
• But immediately after the election, there’s been a huge spike in misogynistic rhetoric,  including some extremely violent misogyny.
• The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a social post from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
• Fuentes’ post had 35 million views on X within 24 hours.
• Misogynistic attacks have been part of the social media landscape for years. But disinformation said language glorifying violence against women or celebrating the possibility of their rights being stripped away has spiked sky-high since the election.
• Online declarations for women to “Get back in the kitchen” or to “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, have spread rapidly.
• The top 10 posts on X calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views collectively.
• Anonymous rape threats have been left on the TikTok videos of women denouncing the election results.
• And those are in the best-known public spaces on the web. In places like 4chan forums, the men are calling for “rape squads” and the adoption of policies in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian book and TV series depicting the dehumanization and brutalization of women.
• I’ll be offering some advice in future installments of Random News in terms of how to ensure your safety against such “men.”
• And now, The Weather: “Alien” by Gaspard Eden
• It’s been awhile, so let’s do a chart, going back 40 years from today.
• It’s late November 1984. I’m in my junior year of high school, and here’s the top of the Billboard 200 Albums chart. I remember this time well… pretty much fucking up in school, playing in a rock cover band, and smoking way too much weed.
• 1. Purple Rain (Soundtrack) (Prince And The Revolution). 2. Born In The U.S.A. (Bruce Springsteen). 3. Private Dancer (Tina Turner). 4. The Woman In Red (Soundtrack) (Stevie Wonder). 5. Volume One (The Honeydrippers). 6. Big Bam Boom (Daryl Hall John Oates). 7. Sports (Huey Lewis & The News). 8. Can't Slow Down (Lionel Richie). 9. Suddenly (Billy Ocean). 10. She's So Unusual (Cyndi Lauper). 11. Tonight (David Bowie). 12. The Unforgettable Fire (U2). 13. Break Out (The Pointer Sisters). 14. Chicago 17 (Chicago). 15. 1100 Bel Air Place (Julio Iglesias). 16. I Feel For You (Chaka Khan). 17. Heartbeat City (The Cars). 18. Eddie & The Cruisers (Soundtrack) (John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band). 19. Emotion (Barbra Streisand). 20. Animalize (KISS).
• From the Sports Desk… who’s hot in the NBA?
• Eastern Conference: Cavaliers (17-3), Celtics (16-3), Magic (14-7), Knicks (11-8), Heat (9-8).
• Western Conference: Thunder (15-4), Rockets (14-6), Warriors (12-6), Grizzlies (13-7), Nuggets (10-7).
• Today in history… In Paris, representatives from the United States and Great Britain sign preliminary peace articles (1782). The Democratic-Republican-controlled United States Senate begins an impeachment trial of Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase (1804). The Confederate Army of Tennessee suffers heavy losses in an attack on the Union Army of the Ohio in the Battle of Franklin (1864). The first-ever international football match takes place at Hamilton Crescent, Glasgow, between Scotland and England (1872). A German engineer patents front-wheel drive for automobiles (1900). The Soviet Red Army crosses the Finnish border in several places and bomb Helsinki and several other Finnish cities, starting the Winter War (1939). The SS-Einsatzgruppen round up 11,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto and kill them in the Rumbula massacre (1941). In Sylacauga, AL, the Hodges meteorite crashes through a roof and hits a woman taking an afternoon nap (1954). Michael Jackson's sixth solo studio album, ‘Thriller’, is released worldwide, ultimately becoming the best-selling record album in history (1982). Exxon and Mobil sign a US$73.7 billion agreement to merge, thus creating ExxonMobil, the world's largest company (1999). In Seattle, WA, demonstrations against a World Trade Organization meeting by anti-globalization protesters catch police unprepared and force the cancellation of opening ceremonies (1999). NASA launches STS-97, the 101st Space Shuttle mission (2000). The AI chatbot ChatGPT is launched by OpenAI (2022).
• November 30 is the birthday of admiral Andrea Doria (1486), satirist Jonathan Swift (1667), novelist Mark Twain (1835), physician/activist Martha Ripley (1843), singer/guitarist Brownie McGhee (1915), actor Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (1918), police officer/activist Elliott Blackstone (1924), activist/politician Shirley Chisholm (1924), actor Richard Crenna (1926), actor Robert Guillaume (1927), TV host/producer Dick Clark (1929), lawyer/criminal G. Gordon Liddy (1930), NFL coach Bill Walsh (1931), actor/director Woody Allen (1935), activist Abbie Hoffman (1936), film director Ridley Scott (1937), bass player/songwriter Roger Glover (1945), playwright/director David Mamet (1947), actor Mandy Patinkin (1952), singer-songwriter Billy Idol (1955), singer-songwriter Stacey Q (1958), singer-songwriter Cherie Currie (1959), NFL/MLB player Bo Jackson (1962), actor Ben Stiller (1965), DJ/music producer Steve Aoki (1977), singer Clay Aiken (1978), and model Chrissy Teigen (1985).

Time to shower and get dressed and do things. Enjoy your day.