Random News and Notes 23 October

On this date:

• 42 BC – Marcus Junius Brutus, a leading conspirator in the assassination of Julius Caesar, dies by suicide after his defeat at the second battle of Philippi.
• 1641 – Rebellion in Ireland. Catholics, under Phelim O’Neil, rise against the Protestants. The English claimed the Irish massacred as many as 40,000 men, women and children. The actual number killed was closer 4,000.
• 1694 – American colonial forces led by Sir William Phips, fail in their attempt to seize Quebec.
• 1783 – Virginia emancipates slaves who fought for independence during the Revolutionary War.
• 1850 – Suffragist organizers hold the first-ever National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts

• 1861 – President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus in Washington, D.C. for all military-related cases.
• 1918 – President Wilson feels satisfied that the Germans are accepting his armistice terms and agrees to transmit their request for an armistice to the Allies. The Germans have agreed to suspend submarine warfare, cease inhumane practices such as the use of poison gas, and withdraw troops back into Germany.
• 1929 – The first transcontinental air service begins from New York to Los Angeles.
• 1952 – The Nobel Prize for Medicine is awarded to Ukranian-born microbiologist Selmart A. Waksman for his discovery of an effective treatment of tuberculosis.
• 1954 – In Paris, an agreement is signed providing for West German sovereignty and permitting West Germany to rearm and enter NATO and the Western European Union.
• 1958 – Boris Pasternak is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago, his romantic novel set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. The book was banned in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet government forced the author to renounce the honor.
• 1973 – A U.N. sanctioned cease-fire officially ends the Yom Kippur war between Israel and Syria.
• 1983 – A truck filled with explosives, driven by a Moslem terrorist, crashes into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The bomb kills 237 Marines and injures 80. Almost simultaneously, a similar incident occurs at French military headquarters, where 58 die and 15 are injured.

• 1989 – 23 people die in a series of explosions sparked by an ethylene leak at a factory in Pasadena, Texas.
• 1993 – Toronto Blue Jay Joe Carter wins the World Series for his team by whacking a ninth-inning home run over the SkyDome’s left-field wall. It was the first time the World Series had ended with a home run since Pittsburgh’s Bill Mazeroski homered to break a 9-9 tie with the Yankees in the seventh game of the 1960 series, and it was the first time in baseball history that a team won the championship with a come-from-behind home run.
• 1998 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat reach a “land for peace” agreement.
• 2002 – Chechen terrorists take 700 theater-goers hostage at the Palace of Culture theater in Moscow. After a 57-hour-standoff during which two hostages were killed, Russian special forces surrounded and raided the theater on the morning of October 26. Later it was revealed that they had pumped a powerful narcotic gas into the building, knocking nearly all of the terrorists and hostages unconscious before breaking into the walls and roof and entering through underground sewage tunnels. Most of the guerrillas and 120 hostages were killed during the raid.

We start today’s news in Mississippi where the 5th Circuit just delivered the most brutal judicial smackdown this editor has ever seen. In Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch, the Fifth Circuit vacated U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate’s preliminary injunction blocking Mississippi’s House Bill 1193, a 2025 law restricting state-funded DEI activities in public education. The panel called the lower court’s work a ‘botch job’ for errors like misquoting the statute, inventing parties, and citing a fake Fourth Circuit case, with Wingate acknowledging a clerk’s use of the AI tool Perplexity without proper review.

The 5th removed Judge Wingate from the case and returns it to a new judge. The ruling also allows the law to proceed while constitutional issues are reexamined under Supreme Court guidance.

This should be a 435–0 vote in the House to impeach this guy, followed by his removal from the bench. Judges wield enormous power. They have the power to ruin lives, deprive people of their liberty, and make decisions that can literally mean life or death. It should be a total no brainer for every sane person that someone who abuses that power in this way has absolutely no business being on the bench.
Yet we all know what will happen. He won’t be impeached and by tomorrow nobody will even be talking about it. The fact that this kinds of abuse can simply be shrugged off and forgotten tells you just how deep the rot in the judiciary runs.

Hans gets it right here. Any judge who is found to have committed this level of judicial misconduct needs to be removed from the bench, and probably the Bar while we’re at it.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow Scotland has pulled several ancient Egyptian items, including mummies and body parts like a head, hand, and foot, due to a lack of informed consent from the deceased. Glasgow Life, following the International Council of Museums’ 2026 ethics code, says this aligns with modern practices emphasizing dignity for human remains on display since 1901.

Your editor has multiple history related degrees, and he can tell you that even 30 years ago as he worked on the first of them the woke was creeping in. However, he never expected it to get this bad and really does not understand how they expect to get informed consent from someone a thousand years dead. Hell, why are they applying modern sociological constructs to what in essence are objects. They have not been people for millennia and wouldn’t have understood the concept when they were alive.

Yet another Dem official just got banged up for fraud. This time it is Fort Bend County Texas Tax Assessor-Collector Carmen Patrice Turner. Turner, along with Shemerrylyn Regina Fields and Victor Calvin Ewing, face federal charges of conspiracy, theft of government funds, and wire fraud. Prosecutors say Turner had deputies tend to her elderly mother during paid county time and hired Ewing—who worked full-time at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport—to send her portions of his county paychecks via Cash App. The alleged scheme ran from September 2023 to September 2025.

If convicted, they could face up to 20 years per wire fraud count.

I wanna say something, but I think I’ll keep it to myself. Let’s see if any of you can figure it out in the comments.

The tech hits just keep on coming. Over the last 48 hours there have been zero day exploits of PHP, Python and GitLab, a security breach from an Indian cert issuance company, a Linux kernel exploit and now there is news of a gigantic data breach. Quest Diagnostics, the company serving roughly half of all U.S. hospitals and physicians, notified federal law enforcement that they had experienced a massive breach. The company paused the affected Quanum Lab Services Manager system and hired cybersecurity experts. Some patient health and identifiable information was accessed, but the full scope is still under investigation.

Lock down all your accounts. Enable two factor authentication wherever you can. Change your passwords, and do not reuse them across platforms. I have a bad feeling this is just starting.