Random News: August 25, 2022

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 August 25, 2022, and for some reason it’s a Thursday. Here just a bunch of random whatever stuff…

• President Biden did something nice and managed to anger the far-right and far-left, which seems typical in the modern world.
• People making under $125,000/year are eligible for up to $10,000 in student loan debt relief. Per Biden, almost ninety percent of this loan relief will go to folks making less than $75,000 a year. They’d work all their lives and never get out of that hole.
• They left wanted more relief; the right wanted no relief.
• Here’s a funny thing about that… many of the conservatives complaining about this student loan debt relief received hundreds of thousands — or MILLIONS — of dollars in PPP loans that were all forgiven by the government.
• But the difference is that was for them, and the other is for someone else.
• People who lack empathy and are filled with narcissism are probably the worst kind of people overall.
• They don’t have to be mean or evil per se. They can’t even tell what meanness is. Of course, it’s easy for them to keep a list of the people they care about, because there’s only one name on that list.
• Moving on…
• Yesterday, President Biden also appointed Kimberly Cheatle to be the next director of the United States Secret Service. She’s worked there for over 25 years and will be the second woman to head the agency.
• The job is open after James Murray announced his retirement in July… while facing questions about deleted text messages from January 6. Probably best to get a fresh start.
• My state, California, will be banning the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 with an expected vote today.
• I couldn’t be happier.
• The rest of the nation will follow thereafter. Note: the ban will apply only to new vehicle sales, but this will mean a near certainty that gas vehicles will be phased out entirely in the next 30-40 years. I might even live to see it. That’s cool.
• Note: the car companies didn’t push back on this at all. They know the future lies in zero-emission vehicles.
• In more good news, the Uvalde, TX school board finally fired district police chief Pete Arredondo by unanimous vote. Arredondo was in charge of the botched response during the Robb Elementary shooting massacre.
• Today, the DOJ is submitting the redacted version of the affidavit that was the basis of the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. My bet is that it won’t tell you much, but you never know.


• From the Sports Desk… not truly a sports story per se, but Kobe Bryant’s widow Vanessa and a co-plaintiff were awarded $31 million in damages from the LA County Sheriff and Fire Departments. They’d taken and shared photos of the mangled dead bodies from the helicopter crash in January 2020.
• It’s obviously reprehensible. And it’s now illegal; Gavin Newsom signed the "Kobe Bryant Act” later that year to stop first responders from sharing photos of a dead person at a crime scene "for any purpose other than an official law enforcement purpose."

• The memory I want to share is that the day the crash happened, the smaller news item was a strange respiratory virus in Asia that was starting to have cases in the USA.
• It’s been a fucked up time. For literally everyone. For years.
• It’s gonna get better. Unless you’re Donald Trump or maybe Gary Busey.
• Gary Busey is obviously mentally ill. He wrecked a motorcycle with no helmet on in 1988 and has had permanent brain damage since.
• That being said, in the course of a week, he sexually groped multiple women at a convention in New Jersey, and then was caught masturbating on a bench in a public park yesterday here in LA. He’s 78. Someone needs to help that guy.
• The Sports Desk also says that the Sports Desk has a breaking story. The Jazz are trading Patrick Beverley to the Lakers. He’s one of those guys you hate unless he’s on your team.
• And now, The Weather: “Autograph” by Syd Arthur.
• Today in history… Byzantine emperor Constantine V discovers a plot against him and executes the leaders (766). António Mota and a few of his friends become the first Europeans to visit Japan (1543). Gallileo demonstrates his first telescope (1609). A hoax is published in ‘The New York Sun’ about the discovery of life and civilization on the Moon (1835). Matthew Webb becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel (1875). Germany purposefully destroys the library of the Catholic University, losing hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts in WWI (1914). The British Royal Air Force bombs Berlin in WWII for the first time (1940). Paris is liberated by the Allies during WWII (1944). American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell is shot and killed by a former member of his group (1967). ‘Voyager 2’ makes its closest approach to Saturn (1981). ’Voyager 2’ makes its closest approach to Neptune (1989). Belarus gains its independence from the Soviet Union (1991). Linus Torvalds announces the first version of Linux (1991). Aaliyah is killed in a plane crash in the Bahamas (2001). ‘Voyager 1’ becomes the first man-made object to enter interstellar space (2012). Hurricane Harvey kicks Texas’s ass (2017).
• August 25 is the birthday of Russian ruler Ivan the Terrible (1530), painter George Stubbs (1724), Bavarian king Ludwig I (1786), writer/activist John Neal (1793), detective/spy Allan Pinkerton (1819), fluoride champion dentist Henry Trendly Dean (1893), actor Van Johnson (1916), actor Mel Ferrer (1917), athlete Althea Gibson (1927), actor Sean Connery (1930), TV host Regis Philbin (1931), jazz legend Wayne Shorter (1933), baseball player and mustache king Rollie Fingers (1946), bass player Gene Simmons (1949), metal god Rob Halford (1951), keyboardist Geoff Downes (1952), singer-songwriter Elvis Costello (1954), director Tim Burton (1958), singer Billy Ray Cyrus (1961), guitarist Vivian Campbell (1962), rapper Shock G (1963), singer and murder victim Mia Zapata (1965), singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy (1967), 7-time NBA champion Robert Horry (1970), model Claudia Schiffer (1970), actor Alexander Skarsgård (1976), and actress Blake Lively (1987).

Was that a lot of stuff? It felt like a lot of stuff. I never know how much stuff will end up included in this stuff. I’m now going to go do Thursday things. Enjoy your day.