Random News: July 25, 2023

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 July 25, 2023, and it’s a Tuesday. I’ve got a jam-packed schedule this morning, so no poetic dilly-dallying; let’s get our news on…

• A fucking ton of documents from formerly respected guy Rudy Giuliani has been turned over to special counsel Jack Smith. These documents are focused on the debunked conspiracies and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
• Those documents had been withheld by former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who claimed they were privileged. But something must have swayed his opinion, because they were handed over to Smith on Sunday.
• None of this is good news for Donald John Trump and his upcoming third round of indictments. Speaking of which, that indictment could happen as early as today.
• Moving on…
• Yesterday, Twitter was renamed as X.
• Yes. Just X.
• Instead of making a Tweet, you make a Xeet. I’m not kidding about this. I’m 100% serious.
• One small problem.
• There’s already a trademark for an “X” logo, and that trademark belongs to… Elmo’s arch nemesis Zuck!
• Cue dramatic music fanfare.
• Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has already registered an "X" logo in connection to "online social networking services" and "social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming, and application development."
• Welp. Way to business, Musky Man.
• But bizarrely, Microsoft also has a trademark on a tech product called “X”. And to make matters even funnier, yesterday workers were seen removing the first letters of the word Twitter before SFPD stopped them from continuing the “unauthorized work.”
• According to police, the social media firm had failed to communicate with security and the building’s owner its plans to remove the sign at the Market Street headquarters. After the initial work by a worker on a cherrypicker, only the blue bird and the letters “er” were left on one side of the sign.
• Er.
• Final note: from the viewpoint of a veteran marketing person (i.e., me), changing the name and logo of an established brand is almost always the sign of a death knell.
• In our continuing coverage of the January 6, 2021 failed coup attempt, meet Peter Francis Stager, a 44-year-old man from Conway, Arkansas.
• Stager beat a Metropolitan Police Department officer with his flagpole at least three times as other rioters pulled the officer, head first, into the crowd. He was captured on video saying, “Every single one of those Capitol law enforcement officers, death is the remedy. That is the only remedy they get.”
• Yesterday, U.S. Judge Rudolph Contreras sentenced Stager to four years and four months in prison. He’d pleaded guilty in February to a felony charge of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon.
• There will be no peace until every one of the Jan 6 insurrectionists receive justice.
• Current Florida Governor and distant loser of a presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was in a car crash this morning in Tennessee on the way to an event. He and his team were uninjured. Further details of the wreck were not immediately available.
• Shrug.
• In other “People Who Will Never Be President” news, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has qualified for the first Republican presidential primary debate next month in Milwaukee
• To do so, Burgum offered donors $20 gift cards for $1 donations. 
• See, the first debate requires candidates to collect 40,000 individual donors, with at least 200 unique donors per state, as well as poll at 1% in three RNC-sanctioned polls, or 1% in two other national polls and two polls from key states.
• The funniest part: supporters of Joe Biden say they have been funneling the gift card money to the president’s re-election campaign. Nice!
• Although the RNC has not announced who has qualified for the debate, Burgum is the seventh Republican to claim they’ll be there. 
• Moving on…
• Yesterday, as promised, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Texas and its Republican governor for placing buoys in the Rio Grande as part of the state's effort to deter migrants from crossing into the United States.
• The civil suit said Gov. Greg Abbott (R) violated federal law by installing the barrier and asked a judge to order the defendants to "promptly remove the unauthorized obstruction" at their own expense.
• The lawsuit cites the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899, which bars the “creation of any obstruction not affirmatively authorized by Congress, to the navigable capacity of any of the waters of the United States.” It also alleges that Abbott had failed to obtain a permit through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before installing the barrier in the Rio Grande as required by federal law.
• Get his ass.
• In the “This Asshole Again?” file, anti-government agitator Ammon Bundy must pay an Idaho hospital more than $50 million for defaming it and targeting it with protests while it cared for an associate’s grandson—who was taken into protective custody after child welfare officials determined he was malnourished.
• He put up web content accusing the hospital of being kidnappers and child traffickers, and had mobs of men threatening patients and families in the ER. Life Flight pilots were refusing to land at the facility, fearing shots from the armed crowd on the ground.
• A jury delivered its verdict yesterday: Bundy, an associate, and their companies would owe $26.5 million in compensatory damages and nearly $26 million in punitive damages.
• Some global news…
• China’s foreign minister Qin Gang was booted today after a prolonged absence from public view and replaced by his predecessor. This is a surprising and highly unusual shake-up of the country’s foreign policy leadership.
• No one knows what happened to Qin, who has not been seen in public for a month. Weird.
• And now, The Weather: “Good Era Doom” by Draag
• What should be — but might not be, horrifyingly — the hottest week of the year is here. More than 260 million Americans will experience a deadly heat wave that continues to encompass more of the U.S.
• By tomorrow, the heat will spread up the coast toward the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
• Stay safe, peoples.
• Of note: the extreme heat waves across three continents this month were made significantly more likely by the human-caused climate crisis, per a new analysis released today.
• There was a time we could have prevented this, and we simply chose not to. A lot of you laughed at the people who tried to warn you about a pending climate disaster that could wipe out humanity.
• Still laughing?
• Speaking of ways to die that were totally avoidable…
• Registered Republicans experienced a "significantly higher" rate of excess deaths than Democrats in Florida and Ohio in the months after COVID-19 vaccines were made widely available, a new study has found.
• The Yale researchers note in their study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine Monday, the findings "suggest that well-documented differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been a factor in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic."
• After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, researchers found the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from a percentage point of −0.9 to 7.7 percentage points. That meant the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than that among Democratic voters.
• Holy shit. Well, I hope wearing that red hat was worth losing your parents and grandparents.
• Let’s do some charts. July 1995: I was 26 and was very much immersed in my career. In fact, I was working in marketing for an audio equipment manufacturer, and our gear was used on the #1 song at the time, and that became a very big fucking deal. Here’s the Modern Rock Charts, which represented a good chunk of the stuff I’d have been listening to. I wasn’t a pop guy then either.
• 1. You Oughta Know (Alanis Morissette). 2. Hold Me, Thrill me, Kiss Me, Kill Me (U2). 3. Molly (Sponge). 4. This Is A Call (Foo Fighters). 5. December (Collective Soul). 6. All Over You (Live). 7. Misery (Soul Asylum). 8. I Got A Girl (Tripping Daisy). 9. Say It Ain’t So (Weezer). 10. Little Things (Bush). 11. Stars (Hum). 12. Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver (Primus). 13. More Human Than Human (White Zombie). 14. Tomorrow (Silverchair). 15. Hey Man, Nice Shot (Filter). 16. Smash It Up (Offspring). 17. Carnival (Natalie Merchant). 18. Better Than Nothing (Jennifer Trynin). 19. In The Blood (Better Than Ezra). 20. Stutter (Elastica).
• From the Sports Desk… Running back Saquon Barkley and the New York Giants have agreed to terms on a one-year deal worth up to $11 million. The deal also includes a $2 million signing bonus.
• Well, good for him I guess. Get that money.
• Today in history… Constantine I is proclaimed Roman emperor (306). Henry IV converts from Protestant to Catholic (1593). James VI and I and Anne of Denmark are crowned in Westminster Abbey (1603). The last action of the American Revolutionary War, the Siege of Cuddalore, is ended by a preliminary peace agreement (1783). Mozart completes his Symphony No. 40 in G minor (1788). An American attack on Canada in the War of 1812 is repulsed (1814). The first commercial use of an electrical telegraph is successfully demonstrated in London by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone (1837). The United States Congress passes legislation authorizing the rank of General of the Army, and Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant becomes the first to be promoted to this rank (1866). The Wyoming Territory is established (1868). The American invasion of Spanish-held Puerto Rico begins, as United States Army troops under General Nelson A. Miles land and secure the port at Guánica (1898). Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University discovers that a key ingredient in kombu soup stock is monosodium glutamate (MSG), and patents a process for manufacturing it (1908). Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) is established (1925). In a speech John F. Kennedy emphasizes that any attack on Berlin is an attack on NATO (1961). Bob Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival, signaling a major change in folk and rock music (1965). Birth of Louise Joy Brown, the first human to have been born after conception by in vitro fertilization, or IVF (1979). WikiLeaks publishes classified documents about the War in Afghanistan, one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history (2010).
• July 25 is the birthday of humanist Jakob Wimpfeling (1450), dramatist George Peele (1556), Japanese warlord Katō Kiyomasa (1562), abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman (1806), English prime minister Arthur Balfour (1848), actress Estelle Getty (1923), actor/director Jerry Paris (1925), trumpet player/composer Don Ellis (1934), actress Barbara Harris (1935), lynching victim Emmett Till (1941), drummer Jim McCarty (1943), singer Rita Marley (1946), bass player Verdine White (1951), NFL player Walter Payton (1954), model Iman (1955), singer-songwriter/guitarist Thurston Moore (1958), NHL player/coach Tony Granato (1964), and actor Matt LeBlanc (1967).

Well, it’s time to go work out and then start a marathon of meetings, and then get some work done, and then shop for groceries, and then whatever the fuck happens after that. Enjoy your day.