Random News: December 10, 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 December 10, 2023, and it’s a Sunday. I’m a dude in a robe, here to deliver some information that may be useful to you or the people you care about.

• Let’s start with some weather. Crews are searching for survivors and surveying the damage after tornadoes and strong thunderstorms tore through Tennessee, overturning cars, ripping apart buildings and leaving at least six people dead.
• Last night Montgomery County was in a search and rescue phase after nearly two dozen people were treated for injuries at a hospital.
• Here’s wishing the best to my many friends in that fine state.
• Let’s head down to Houston, TX where Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire defeated Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee last night in Houston's closely-watched mayoral race. 
• Whitmire was leading by a resounding margin of 65.27% to 34.73% as of last night.  
• Not to say this was the cause, but Jackson Lee, had been running an ad that urged city residents to "vote on or before December 7th.” One problem with that: the runoff election was on Saturday December 9, and the early voting period ended on December 5.
• Whoops.
• In case you were unaware, Houston is the fourth largest city in the USA by population, behind only New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
• Today is Sunday Gunday, where we take a quick look at just some of the gun violence in the USA over the past couple of days.
• Three dead, one injured after a shooting in the Buckhead area of Atlanta, GA. Two dead, two others injured in a shooting in North Philadelphia, PA. Two men dead after a shooting in Detroit, MI. One shot dead and two others wounded (one critically) in a shooting in San Pedro, CA. One juvenile dead and two other victims injured in a shooting in Waggaman, LA. A woman shot dead and a man injured in a road rage incident in downtown Houston, TX. One man dead, another injured after a shooting in Mason County, KY. A 16-year-old shot and killed at an apartment complex in central Phoenix, AZ. A 16-year-old shot and killed at a high school in Albuquerque, NM. A 7-Eleven security guard shot and killed while trying to stop a theft in Oakland, CA. One dead after a shooting inside a lounge in Birmingham, AL. One shot and killed in his car in the South Loop of Chicago, IL. Two shot outside a nightclub in Silver Springs Shores, FL. Two people shot during a bar fight on the Northwest Side of San Antonio, TX. Two men shot in Winston-Salem, NC. One shot and in critical condition after a shooting at a gas station in Miami, FL. One shot and in critical condition after a shooting in Nashville, TN. One shot and in critical condition after a shooting in Rocky Mount, NC. One shot and in critical condition after a shooting at an apartment complex in south Kansas City, MO. One shot and in critical condition after a domestic violence-related shooting in East Memphis, TN. A 13-year-old girl shot in Minneapolis. An accidental shooting of a juvenile by another in Titusville, FL. 
• Do you think this is normal?
• Then you have been brainwashed. It’s not normal for people to go around shooting and killing each other all the goddamn time, and it doesn’t happen this way anywhere except the USA.
• Vote for candidates who support common sense gun control measures… or don’t complain when you or your loved ones are the next victims.
• Moving on.
• Here’s some advice for you, no matter who you are.
• When you get asked a question like, “Is antisemitism bad? Is Islamophobia bad? Is genocide bad?”, the answer is always a simple “yes,” because these things are simply true and don’t need to couched in excuses or intellectual language.
• That would have been good advice for Liz Magill, who had been the president of University of Pennsylvania until yesterday. She voluntarily stepped down from the helm of the Ivy League school following a torrent of criticism for her testimony about antisemitism on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
• Magill struggled to answer questions about whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate UPenn’s code of conduct. She and other university presidents failed to explicitly say calls for genocide of Jewish people constituted bullying and harassment on campus.
• Magill will remain on Penn’s faculty as a tenured professor at Penn Carey Law School.
• Moving on to a delicious story about our pal Elmo Muck. He purchased an AI chatbot for his little social media platform X, which was only to be available for his paying subscribers.
• The chatbot is called Grok. Mucky had promised that the chatbot Grok would be "anti-woke."
• The only problem? As Elmo’s fanboys are now realizing with horror, Grok often sounds like a strident progressive, championing everything from gender fluidity to Musk's long-time foe, President Joe Biden.
• Ha ha ha haaaaa…
• ”Are transwomen real women?" one account asked the bot. "Give a concise yes/no answer."
• "Yes," the bot answered, to the fury of Musk's culture war-obsessed fans.
• You love to see it.
• In other news of Elmo’s follies, he has welcomed back conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to X. Jones is most notorious for falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was staged.
• He was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages to family members of the victims after courts found he had caused them to be subjected to harassment and death threats with his false claims.
• Jones had been banned from spreading his false and poisonous views on other major platforms including YouTube and Facebook. He’d been banned from Twitter since 2018 for breaching the site's rules on abusive behavior.
• Thank Jeebus I got off that toxic waste pit awhile back.
• And now, The Weather: “HFCS” by PACKS
• A brief aside. Without being too specific, I’d like to remind everyone to try and appreciate the time they have with the people who make their lives better.
• I think sometimes, people only tend to consider those who are the absolute closest to themselves… their immediate family, spouses, children and so on. That’s totally understandable.
• But there are many other people in your lives whose presence has an impact. I’ve lost far too many of those people over the years, and it never gets easier. Hats off to your extended group of pseudo-family… friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and everyone else who helps you get through this thing called life.
• From the Sports Desk… the most unique player in baseball history is now a Los Angeles Dodger.
• Shohei Ohtani, the transcendent two-way talent, agreed to a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers yesterday. Ohtani's contract is the largest in baseball history by more than $250 million, topping the 12-year, $426.5 million extension given in 2019 to Mike Trout, his now-former teammate with the Los Angeles Angels.
• I’m already making plans to visit Chavez Ravine this coming season. Seeing this guy is like having been able to see Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron.
• In other news from the Sports Desk, the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA's inaugural in-season tournament yesterday, beating the Indiana Pacers 123-109.
• LeBron James was awarded the tournament’s MVP.
• Today in history… Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham are executed for having affairs with Catherine Howard, Queen of England and wife of Henry VIII (1541). Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmond Halley (1684). The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is published (1768). Mississippi becomes the 20th U.S. state (1817). Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's Union Army troops reach the outer Confederate defenses of Savannah, Georgia (1864). Theodore Roosevelt is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize in any field (1906). Japan's biggest heist, the still-unsolved "300 million yen robbery", is carried out in Tokyo (1968). 
• December 10 is the birthday of mathematician/computer scientist Ada Lovelace (1815), poet Emily Dickinson (1830), economist/academic Elizabeth Baker (1885), dancer/choreographer Hermes Pan (1909), composer Alexander Courage (1919), NBA referee Dick Bavetta (1939), actress Susan Dey (1952), music producer Paul Hardcastle (1957), actor/film producer Kenneth Branagh (1960), NHL player/executive Rob Blake (1969), drummer Meg White (1974), and NFL player Joe Burrow (1996).

Alrighty. Got things to do. Enjoy your day.