Random News: June 12, 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 June 12, 2025, and it’s a Thursday for some reason. I have a fantastic cup of Peet’s Big Bang here (yay) and I found out my kitchen sink was backed up (boo) so the day is starting off kinda good/bad. Life itself is often good/bad. I’ve had many worse mornings, and I’ll deal with the sink later. And speaking of coffee, you might need a fresh cup… we have a lot of info for you today.

• A Pride Note…
• LGBTQIA+ is a bunch of letters. I’ve told you before what they all mean.
• And you probably assume that all members of the LGBTQIA+ community fully support each other and act and solidarity 100% of the time.
• Nope!
• There are gay and lesbian people who feel like their community has been pushed together unfairly with the other acronym letters. I’m sure there are likely trans and other people who feel the same in reverse.
• They feel that that they merit their own community, which in some ways has little to do with the others.
• I’m not in a position to argue with them. But I will say this…
• Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and other people do share the commonality of being unjustly targeted for abuse and discrimination.
• They also share the aspects of being in a minority compared to the hetero world.
• And since there’s strength in numbers, I think it’s in their best interest to be welcoming and accommodating of other people who get mistreated in similar ways.
• I can’t — as an outsider — say that people within a community are right or wrong in their thoughts and feelings.
• But I’ll add that gay people are people… and people can be assholes. So try not to be an asshole, which is advice I’d offer to anyone of any gender or sexual orientation.
• Let’s do the news.
• Plans continue to ramp up for this coming Saturday June 14 — a nationwide day of defiance called “No Kings.”
• The organizers have announced that as of now, about 2,000 different activism events are scheduled across all 50 states.
• I feel compelled to explain to you folks what this is.. and what it isn’t. A “protest” is a very loose term that has many meanings.
• Some of you hear that words and envision people smashing windows and lighting fires.
• This is not that.
• This is a peaceful, organized protest action. It might get rowdy with people yelling and chanting and carrying signs. But that’s about it.
• Do not be afraid. Go to the No Kings site (link in comments) and find your local event. Then, on Saturday, go to it.
• You don’t have to do anything. Make a sign if you want, or don’t. Do wear comfy shoes and use sunscreen.
• I can damn near guarantee that you’ll feel energized and engaged as part of a community of people who feel as passionately as you do about the future of our nation.
• There is no other time. The time is now. If you sit this one out, you may not have the option of making your voice heard later.
• Be a good person and a good American and get the fuck out of your little safe cocoon and into the streets where people can see that you support them.
• You know who agrees with me? A lady named Hillary Clinton.
• This morning, she posted: “The right to peacefully protest is fundamental. It is in the Constitution. No president can nullify it—because in the United States of America, we have no kings. Join @indivisibleteam and more this weekend to make your voice heard: nokings.org.”
• If you want to find me that day, I’ll be near the corner of Maple Avenue and Torrance Boulevard in Torrance, CA, in front of city hall.
• Join me. Bring friends. Tell neighbors. I expect that millions of Americans will be involved. Please be part of it.
• To get your mindset right, there’s a German saying you should know.
• If there's a Nazi at the table and nine other people are sitting there talking to him, what do you have?
• You have a table with 10 Nazis.
• And what that means is that by not speaking out against evil, or by trying to reason with evil, or by avoiding evil and doing nothing at all… you’re now a part of evil. You are contributing to evil via your inaction.
• Are you evil? Ask yourself that. You probably say, “Of course not,” and I’m glad you feel that way.
• But if you stay home on Saturday June 14… you’re letting evil know that you’re okay with their actions. They will use your inaction as evidence that people agree with their plans.
• Stand. The. Fuck. Up.
• From the Fake News desk…
• I hear from people on social media who seem to think that huge portions of Los Angeles are smoldering piles of rubble. I assume this is based on some ridiculous tilted news source you get exposed to.
• Here’s a stat for you: the area where the curfew is in effect covers one square mile, or 0.02% of LA County.
• So 99.98% of the entire county is perfectly fine and leading our absolute normal lives. There are much more widespread and intense actions of civil unrest each time a sports team wins a major championship in any city.
• Let’s move on to related news.
• Were you told that the military could not be directly involved in law enforcement actions, per the laws that dictate their interactions with civilians during periods of unrest?
• Welp, so much for that.
• National Guard troops already have already detained civilians in the Los Angeles protests over immigration raids, the commander in charge said yesterday.
• Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman noted that they quickly turned them over to law enforcement. So fucking what? If there’s no invoking of the Insurrection Act, those soldiers have zero legal authority to be hands-on with protestors.
• Sherman, said that about 500 of the National Guard troops have been trained so far to accompany agents on immigration operations. So… they’re ICE now?
• Is this just in Los Angeles? Not according to Sherman, who says, “We are expecting a ramp up,” regarding protests across the nation happening now.
• Sherman is commander of Task Force 51, which is overseeing the more than 4,000 Guard troops and 700 Marines who have been deployed to Los Angeles to provide security during the protests.
• Also fucking laughable: he stated that all of the troops deployed to the protests are going through several days of training on civil unrest.
• SEVERAL DAYS! That’s all???
• Tell me, what essential job did you gain expertise in after SEVERAL DAYS? Marines are trained for weeks and months on end on how to kill people. Now they’re going to act with gentle finesse when handling US residents?
• But wait… there’s more to this story, as usual.
• Yesterday, a U.S. Northern Command official claimed that the 700 Marines mobilized to the Los Angeles area on Monday have not yet completed pre-mission training as of yesterday morning, with no clear picture yet as to whether they will be deployed on the ground.
• The Marines “are still conducting pre-mission training and they have not been employed by Task Force 51, the DoD command element in Los Angeles,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “I do not have an estimate of when they will be employed.”
• Confusing matters even further, on the same day (yes, still just fucking yesterday), Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said the Marines had received “in excess of two hours” of the training, and that they would have shields and batons as their equipment.
• TWO HOURS. What the actual fuck? Jesus fucking Christ.
• In any case, let me remind you: the Posse Comitatus Act restricts the use of military involvement in domestic law enforcement. Period. Having them involved in “detaining” residents is against the law, and there need to be investigations started immediately. 
• Moving on.
• I hope you don’t think that ICE raids are being confined to California, or to blue states in general.
• A food packaging company in Omaha, Nebraska had their plant raided and more than half of its workforce was arrested.
• And this happened despite the company meticulously following the government’s own system for verifying the workers were in the country legally. Glenn Valley Foods now is operating at about 30% of capacity as the business scrambles to hire more workers.
• The owner says, “We were told to e-verify, and we e-verified all these years, so I was shocked. We did everything we could possibly do.”
• ICE confirmed that more than 70 people were arrested during the Glenn Valley Foods raid on Tuesday.
• So no matter where you are or who you are, you and your workplace will be affected by this cruel attack on working people.
• Let’s move on with more immigration news… this time, a happier story.
• Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled that the federal government cannot deport or detain Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil for the foreign policy reasons cited by the Dump administration. 
• So shove that up your ass, Dumpy.
• The preliminary injunction does not go into effect until Friday morning, giving the government a chance to appeal. But it marks a blow to Dump's push to remove Khalil, a green card holder who was detained by immigration agents in March and is currently being held in Louisiana.
• Even better, the ruling focuses on Secretary of State Marco Rubio's determination that Khalil's "presence or activities would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest."
• Also of note: Farbiarz said, "the Court finds as a matter of fact that [Khalil's] career and reputation are being damaged and his speech is being chilled — and this adds up to irreparable harm."
• I’d love to see some of the victims of Dump’s overzealous, quota-driven removal of brown-skinned people result in compensation for the ones who’ve been illegally detained or deported.
• Maybe that’ll make someone else think twice before trying it again.
• Okay, there are things happening on this planet of our that aren’t about U.S. immigration.
• Including some breaking news from the Supreme Court, who, this morning, revived an Atlanta family’s lawsuit over a botched FBI raid on their home in 2017.
• In a unanimous decision, the justices instead sent the case back to a lower court to take another crack at deciding whether the lawsuit can move forward.  
• We’ve told you about this story a couple of times before. Federal agents smashed through Trina Martin’s front door in 2017 while executing a search warrant at the wrong address, believing it was the home of an alleged violent gang member.
• Martin and her boyfriend were startled out of bed with a flash-bang grenade and guns raised, as her 7-year-old son screamed from another room. The agents basically destroyed her home, and then left without even a apology, much less an offer to pay for the damage.
• She sued the government in 2019, but a federal judge in Atlanta dismissed the suit and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The justices now say the lower courts erred.
• Good. Get their asses.
• Moving on.
• We’ve been so preoccupied with other stuff, we haven’t mentioned any news about Dumpy’s Big Bullshit Bill in a good while.
• Well, here’s an update: a mysterious $1 billion for a law that lets Dump “mobilize” certain industrial sectors during an emergency is tucked into the Senate’s version of the megabill.
• And Republicans admitted they aren’t sure what that alleged Defense Production Act money is for.
• Even Banking Committee Republicans said in interviews this week that they are trying to figure out what the cash is intended to do before they vote on the bill. But as one Republican senator said about the Dump administration: “They won’t tell us.”
• “It’s hard to be supportive of it if we don’t know what it’s for. It’s uncomfortable, for sure. A billion dollars is a billion dollars. And it would be nice if we knew what it was specifically aiming at,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND).
• Or maybe Dump is just taking that extra billion and keeping it for himself. There’s no way to know.
• Hey MAGA people… that’s your money. A billion dollars. You paid it in taxes. Now this guy is going to fuck you, and you’re going to accept it and not say a peep, and even kiss his fat ass and thank him, because you are fucking weak and worthless.
• In other news…
• President TACO is back at it, now saying that he endorses a US-China trade deal that will ramp up supplies of rare earth minerals and magnets needed for the automotive industry, and setting tariffs on Chinese goods at 55%.
• Yesterday, Dumples wrote, “Our deal with China is done, subject to final approval with president Xi and me … We are getting a total of 55% tariffs, China is getting 10%. Relationship is excellent!”
• Let me translate that for you. American citizens are being taxed at 55% for items made in China, while Chinese people are only paying a 10% tax on American-made items. That’s what Dump is bragging about.
• Is that clear? I sure sure fucking hope so.
• Moving on to other stuff you should know about.
• Today, June 12th, is Loving Day.
• The date commemorates the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case which allowed interracial marriage in all parts of the U.S.
• The case involved Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife Mildred Loving, a woman of color. In 1959, the Lovings were convicted of violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored".
• Caroline County circuit court judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced them to prison but suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return.
• After unsuccessfully appealing to the Supreme Court of Virginia, the Lovings appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.
• On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings' favor that overturned their convictions and struck down Virginia's Racial Integrity Act.
• And the case was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions ruling that restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States were unconstitutional, including in the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.
• I truly — and sadly — believe that today’s court would have never allowed this, despite justice Thomas (a Black man) being married to a white women.
• Moving on.
• I usually save RIP notes for below my Weather area, but this one is far too important to be missed.
• Rest in peace to Brian Wilson, the co-sounder, singer, and main songwriter of the Beach Boys, and arguably the greatest American pop music creator of the 20th century. He died yesterday at 82.
• The word “genius” gets thrown around far too liberally in regard to the arts. But I can say without hesitation that Brian Wilson did things from a songwriting perspective that put him in the class of musicians like Mozart and few others.
• One of my favorite quotes about Brian comes courtesy of Bob Dylan, who said, "Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today."
• And that’s 100% true.
• Brian and the Beach Boys were local to where I live, formed here in LA’s South Bay. He name-drops my city — along with other well-known surf spots — in his song, “Surfin’ USA”…
• “Haggerties and Swamis / Pacific Palisades / San Onofre and Sunset/ Redondo Beach, LA”
• But it was Wilson’s maturing work a few years later — culminating in 1966's ‘Pet Sounds’ — that made his songwriting one of the most influential of all time.
• Without ‘Pet Sounds’ you don’t get a ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ or everything that came after in the world of innovative music.
• I met Brian very briefly in the 1990s — just a handshake, and his mental state wasn’t altogether there at the time. But it’s something I’ll never forget.
• Moving on to the exact opposite kind of story from the Entertainment Desk.
• Former movie mogul and current rapist piece of shit Harvey Weinstein was convicted yesterday of one of the top charges in his sex crimes retrial, but acquitted of another.
• The split verdict meted out a measure of vindication to his accusers and prosecutors after the landmark case was thrown into limbo. His initial conviction five years ago was overturned last year, and the case was sent back for retrial in the same Manhattan courthouse.
• Either way, that horrible, evil excuse for a human won’t be getting out of jail any time soon. 
• Let’s move on to some Comedy News…
• Last night, Dumpy the Uncultured Clown went out to a play at the Kennedy Center. He saw “Les Misérables.”
• Did… he know… what “Les Mis” is… about?
• Synopsis: a guy goes through a bunch of shit during the French Revolution, while young rebel idealists fight the army and attempt to overthrow the unpopular government via a street barricade at a protest.
• Um…
• And now, The Weather: “Wheel of Change” by Hand Habits
• From the Sports Desk… many gurus were predicting a sweep in the NBA Finals. 14 out of 15 experts said the Thunder would easily beat the Pacers.
• But in last night’s Game 3 of the NBA championships, underdog Indiana beat OKC 116-107 in a back-and-forth battle, taking a 2-1 lead in the series.
• You have to root for an underdog… especially one that’s come close but never won it all.
• In other Sports Desk news…
• We all love to see when a talented young ball player gets his chance in the major leagues.
• Yesterday, the Washington Nationals announced they were calling up Bruce the Bat Dog for his MLB debut against the Miami Marlins on June 14 at Nationals Park.
• Bruce, a 21-month-old golden retriever, gets his first career assignment in the big leagues after his excellent performance as a member of the the Rochester Red Wings, the Nationals' Triple-A affiliate.
• Plus, that’s another preferable thing to do in D.C. on Saturday, as opposed to giving attention to Dumpy’s birthday parade.
• Today in history… In England, rebels assemble for the Peasants’ Revolt at Blackheath, just outside London (1381). Thomas Willett is appointed the first mayor of New York City (1665). The earliest form of bicycle, the dandy horse, is driven by Karl von Drais (1817). The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, NY (1939). Anne Frank receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday (1942). The film ‘Cleopatra’, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, is released in US theaters (1963). NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith during the civil rights movement (1963). The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional (1967). The first of the Indiana Jones film franchise, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, is released in theaters (1981). U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall (1987). All analog TV stations switch to digital transmission (2009). United States President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea held the first meeting between leaders of their two countries in Singapore (2018).
• June 12 is the birthday of Chinese emperor Gao Zong (1107), Tuscany duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1519), author Johanna Spyri (1827), physicist Oliver Lodge (1851), UK prime minister Anthony Eden (1897), photographer/journalist Weegee (1899), businessman David Rockefeller (1915), US president George H. W. Bush (1924), diarist Anne Frank (1929), actor Jim Nabors (1930), sportscaster Marv Albert (1941), composer/pianist Chick Corea (1941), singer-songwriter/bass player John Wetton (1949), drummer Bun E. Carlos (1950), singer Brad Delp (1951), actor Jason Mewes (1974), MLB player Hideki Matsui (1974), NFL player Dallas Clark (1979), and NBA player Jrue Holiday (1990).

Yup, that was a lot, but it’s a time in the world where documenting what’s going on is crucial. Hopefully someone in the future will read these babbling and get a certain perspective. And once again, I will remind you that some 2,000 “No Kings” events are being held across the USA on Saturday. Join me along with potentially millions of other Americans who give a shit. It will be a good-ass time. Enjoy your day.