Random News: May 30, 2025

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 May 30, 2025, and if you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again! I'm your dude with news. As always these days, there’s a lot of it, so let’s see what we can prioritize in the time that we have.

• In typical whipsaw fashion, yesterday saw both a second federal court blocking the bulk of Dumpy’s tariffs, followed quickly by a federal appeals court temporarily halting a similar decision from a federal trade court
• So for now, Dump’s ridiculous tariffs — aka huge taxes on the American people — remain back on.
• Ask me again in a couple of hours what the status is. It’s genuinely the worst economic policy ever implemented by any administration in the aspect that no business in America can plan ahead for their pricing, their procurement of materials, or anything else that allows them to confidently do business.
• Day by day, hour by hour, we don’t know if the goods we import have no tariff, 10% tariff, 145% tariff, 50% tariff, and so on.
• That type of wishy-washy, back-and-forth bullshit makes it impossible to do business along a retail supply chain, the backbone of business in the world.
• It’s now to the point that Wall Street is using Dump’s inability to stick with a tariff plan that financial analysts have taken to calling the on-again, off-again moves as “TACO trade” or the “TACO theory,” and have to plan on investment advice as such.
• That’s the acronym for "Trump Always Chickens Out,” if you hadn’t heard.
• How many times has President TACO threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs since he took office? 10 different times now. And that level of uncertainty has done nothing but ruined businesses in the USA.
• It’s pointless to get into the minutia of shit that may change before I finish writing this column. So let’s just move on for now.
• Dump is shaking up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leadership amid continued frustrations within the White House about the level of immigration arrests and deportations conducted by the agency.
• If you’re unclear on the concept, Dump wants them arresting many more people than they already are.
• In it’s most simple terms, if there’s a person with brown skin in the USA, Dump wants to know why they’re still here.
• Kenneth Genalo will no longer lead the ICE branch tasked with carrying out arrests and deportations, called Enforcement and Removal Operations. 
• ERO has been spearheading Dump's immoral campaign to ramp up efforts to locate, arrest,  and deport unauthorized migrants across the country. Additionally, Robert Hammer will no longer be the head of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations.
• As the Department of Homeland Security's investigative arm, HSI is a specialized law enforcement agency that has historically focused on combating transnational crime, like child exploitation and human trafficking, but many of its agents have been diverted by the Dump administration to support immigration arrest and deportation efforts.
• Stephen Miller, the White House's deputy chief of staff and one of the world’s most despicable human beings, said this week that the administration is pushing ICE to carry out "a minimum" of 3,000 arrests per day.
• When you set quotas on any kind of law enforcement, it forces them to abandon the standards of investigation to truly ascertain whether the people being detailed, arrested, and jailed are guilty or innocent.
• So with all these terrible immigration stories as of late… I’d expect them to start ramping up in a big way.
• In related news…
• This morning, a divided Supreme Court cleared the way for the Dump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who have been allowed to live and work in the United States while their immigration cases play out.
• The ruling is the second time in recent weeks the high court has given Dumpy permission to terminate programs that protect immigrants fleeing countries racked by war or economic turmoil.
• Earlier this month, the justices allowed the administration to revoke temporary protections that have allowed a different group of nearly 350,000 Venezuelans to live and work in the United States.
• Immigrant advocates said the revocation of status and work permits for roughly 900,000 migrants is largely unprecedented and will have devastating impacts on migrant communities across the country.
• And in more related news…
• People both inside and outside the State Department were struggling yesterday to understand how a new plan to revoke Chinese students’ visas will work — and whether it will end up being a blanket ban on Chinese nationals studying in the United States.
• Embassies had yet to receive official instructions on how to implement the plan, which also includes revising visa criteria to increase scrutiny of future applicants from China and Hong Kong.
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security will “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students studying in “critical fields.”
• But that isn’t easy to put into practice, and the manner in which it is done will say a lot about the Dump administration’s ultimate goals.
• Whatever those are.
• Reviewing all Chinese student visas could be a daunting task for the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. There were around 277,000 Chinese students in the United States during the 2023 to 2024 school term.
• Fucking pricks.
• Moving on.
• Yesterday, the Supreme Court sharply narrowed the scope of a key environmental statute. The decision makes it easier to win approval for highways, bridges, pipelines, wind farms, and other infrastructure projects.
• And it does so by fucking the environment. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is considered the nation's premier environmental law because it sets up a regulatory regime under which the federal government seeks information from a wide array of agencies about the impact of proposed infrastructure projects before they're built.
• At issue in yesterday's case was the proposed building of an 88-mile stretch of railroad that would connect Utah's oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national freight rail network. Once built, the new rail lines would facilitate the transportation of crude oil to refineries in Texas and Louisiana along the Gulf Coast.
• The U.S. Court of Appeals had ruled in the case that the NTSB had violated NEPA by failing to consider the environmental effects from oil drilling and production — referred to as upstream — and oil refining and distribution, known as downstream.
• The Supreme Court, however, reversed that ruling, and in so doing dramatically limited the 1970 law.
• Of note: their vote was unanimous, though Justice Neil Gorsuch did not take part in deliberations, and the court's three liberals wrote a more limited concurring opinion. The Court's conservatives, however, took a major whack at the NEPA law.
• So much for this once-beautiful land.
• In other news…
• Many people in Texas were really excited about Elon Musk moving SpaceX to a city that they named Starbase.
• Except now, residents there have been notified that they might “lose the right to continue using” their property as they do today. The new town is considering a new zoning ordinance and citywide map.
• The notice, sent to property owners in a proposed “Mixed Use District,” would allow for “residential, office, retail, and small-scale service uses.”
• As of early this year, the population of Starbase stood at around 500 people, with around 260 directly employed by SpaceX. Most other residents of Starbase are relatives of SpaceX employees.
• The company town includes the launch facility where SpaceX conducts test flights of its massive Starship rocket, and company-owned land covering a 1.6-square-mile area.
• I thought Texans were strong people who allegedly liked their individualism and independence? And now they have to let some geek from South Africa tell them how they can use their own property?
• Shrug.
• And now, The Weather: “Salt” by Triathalon
• Let’s… not do a chart. Instead, we’re gonna flash back to this date in 1983, when a huge music festival was happening in Southern California.
• It was called the Us Festival, and it was held at a time when big music fests had not been a think since the days of Woodstock and Monterey Pop and all that form the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
• I was at the end of my freshman year of high school, and it was definitely a big fucking deal. They divided the three-day festival — which was oddly on a Saturday, Sunday, and Monday — into genres.
• Day one (May 28) was New Wave day. The lineup: Divinyls, INXS, Wall of Voodoo, Oingo Boingo, Flock of Seagulls, The English Beat, Men at Work, and headlining the day, The Clash.
• Day two (May 29) was Hard Rock/Metal day. Lineup: Motley Crue, Joe Walsh, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Triumph, Scorpions, and headliner Van Halen.
• Day three (May 30) was Pop day. Lineup: Little Steven, Berlin, Quarterflash, U2, Missing Persons, Pretenders, John Cougar, Stevie Nicks, and the big headliner, David Bowie — who was HUGE at that moment via his ‘Let’s Dance’ album.
• From the Sports Desk… more exciting playoff action in multiple sports. Thank the sports gods that we’re getting toward the end of this shit.
• In the NBA: there will be a game 6 in the Eastern Conference finals after the Knicks beat the Pacers 111-94. Indiana leads the series 3-2.
• In the NHL: but the Oilers ended the Stars’ run in their game 5, winning 6-3 and punching a ticket to the Stanley Cup finals.
• Game 1 between Edmonton and Florida will be on Wednesday June 4.
• Today in history… Titus and his Roman legions breach the Second Wall of Jerusalem (70). Beginning of the Peasants' Revolt in England (1381). In Rouen, France, the 19-year-old Joan of Arc is burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal (1431). Johann Sebastian Bach assumed the office of Thomaskantor in Leipzig, presenting his first new cantata, ‘Die Elenden sollen essen, BWV 75’ (1723). The Kansas–Nebraska Act becomes law establishing the U.S. territories of Kansas and Nebraska (1854). Decoration Day — the predecessor of the modern "Memorial Day” — is observed in the United States for the first time (1868). At the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the first Indianapolis 500 ends with Ray Harroun in his Marmon Wasp becoming the first winner of the 500-mile auto race (1911). The Lincoln Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C. (1922). Chicago police shoot and kill ten labor demonstrators (1937). Mariner 9 is launched to map 70% of the surface, and to study temporal changes in the atmosphere and surface, of Mars (1971). Spain joins NATO (1982). Nigeria passes a law banning same-sex marriage (2013). Donald Trump is convicted of falsifying business records in his New York trial, the first time a former President of the United States has been found guilty in a criminal case (2024).
• May 30 is the birthday of mathematician Grace Andrews (1869), film director Howard Hawks (1896), actor Stepin Fetchit (1902), voice actor Mel Blanc (1908), clarinetist/bandleader Benny Goodman (1909), NFL player Gale Sayers (1943), actor Colm Meany (1953), drummer Topper Headon (1955), actor Ted McGinley (1958), singer-songwriter Wynona Judd (1964), songwriter/guitarist Tom Morello (1964), singer-songwriter Stephen Malkmus (1966), singer-songwriter Idina Menzel (1971), MLB player Manny Ramirez (1972), and singer CeeLo Green (1975).

I am out of time for this news activity. Much more to discuss over the weekend, as usual. Enjoy your day.