Random News: March 14, 2024

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.

---

Good morning. It’s March 14, 2024, and it’s a Thursday for some reason. I’m feeling relatively good on this brand new day, as the sun turns the sky from black to gray, and I’m here and writing anyway. Let’s do this.

• Yesterday, the House passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to either sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in the United States.
• Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate, and it passed on a lopsided vote of 352 to 65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year.
• Why do this now? Simple. US intelligence forces determined that Chinese ownership of the platform poses grave national security risks to the United States, including the ability to meddle in elections.
• The interesting thing about this is that the coalition behind the ban included Republicans, who defied former president Donnie Dumpster in supporting it.
• However, the bill is not at all a sure thing in the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has been noncommittal about bringing it to the floor for a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it. And even if it passes the Senate and becomes law, it is likely to face legal challenges.
• But here’s the weird thing: this fast-tracked bill seem very bipartisan but has its splits within each respective party.
• President Biden has said he would sign the bill into law, but top House leaders like Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, voted against the bill.
• Donnie Dump said he opposed the bill, but many of his strongest allies in the House, like Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 4 Republican in the House, voted for it.
• And here’s the reality: TikTok is a huge harvester of its users personal data… but so is Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and all the Google properties like its search engine as well as YouTube.
• Every one of them are mining data about you. How do I know? Because I work in the advertising world, and the amount of information I can access on you via Facebook alone is astonishing.
• I can pinpoint target my clients’ Facebook ads based on everything you’ve ever liked, videos you’ve watched, comments you’ve made on posts, your age, your location, your race/ethnicity, your political interests… and more.
• The only difference is that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, at least for now.
• Moving on.
• The presiding judge in the Georgia criminal case against El Dumpo and his crime team has thrown out some of the charges against the former president and several of his co-defendants.
• Do I like this? No, But is it the end fo the world? Also no.
• The partial dismissal by Georgia Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee leaves most of the sprawling racketeering indictment intact.
• McAfee ruled that six charges in the 41-count indictment related to Trump and some co-defendants allegedly soliciting the violation of oath by a public officer lacked the required detail about what underlying crime the defendants were soliciting.
• So now Dumpy is now facing just 88 charges over the four criminal indictments in Georgia, New York, Washington, DC, and Florida.
• In another of those cases, today Dump’s lawyers are trying to convince a federal judge in Florida to dismiss special counsel Jack Smith's classified documents case against him.
• Judge Aileen Cannon is set to hear arguments on two motions filed by Dump, one that says the former president is shielded from prosecution by a federal recordkeeping law, and another that claims one of the charges presents numerous open legal questions. 
• Smith charged Dump with 32 counts of unlawfully retaining classified government records after he stole documents from the White House during the presidential transition. Big Smelly and two aides are also accused of engaging in a scheme to obstruct investigations.
• Obviously keeping an eye on that. As we know in the USA, no one is above the law. Not you, not me, not former or current presidents.
• Let’s talk about voting.
• Now that the presidential candidates have sealed their respective party nominations, do the remaining primaries even matter?
• Yes, absolutely. Each one of them predicts trends and is particularly valuable for showing the direction of voting patterns in swing states.
• To that end, next Tuesday (March 19) is another big batch of them, with Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, and Ohio all having their primaries for both Democratic and Republic voters.
• Please vote! Thank you.
• And that brings up another important thing to consider.
• As you know, Dumpty Dump won Georgia on Tuesday with 84.5 percent of the vote, as well as winning Mississippi and Washington.
• But Nikki Haley, despite dropping out of the GOP primary race a week earlier, still received 13 percent of the Republican vote in Georgia, amounting to more than 77,000 ballots.
• Now I”ll remind you that in 2020, Trump lost Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes. And I can guarantee you that while some of the Haley supporters will hold their nose and vote for Dump in the general election, not all of them will.
• Let’s move on.
• I want to talk about Nex Benedict, the 16-year-old nonbinary student in Oklahoma who died a day after getting beaten in their high school bathroom.
• Her death was used a a result of suicide, per the autopsy report released yesterday. She overdosed on diphenhydramine and fluoxetine, more commonly known as Benadryl and Xanax.
• Like many people, I suspected this was the case. But I want to tell you: death by suicide as a result of continual bullying is just another form of murder as far as I’m concerned.
• One has to look at the state of Oklahoma, which in recent years has passed numerous bills that are openly hostile to LGBTQ communities.
• The state failed Nex and people like them. The culture allowed bullies to feel empowered to harass and intimidate and harm this person to the point that they felt suicide was the only way out.
• And there’s no accountability for the people who caused this. It’s depressing, but there is a way to pay it forward, and that’s to be sure that wherever you live, you fight like hell for the rights of people who aren’t like everyone else.
• Moving on.
• Wait. No. Let’s stay on this for a moment.
• The number of American adults who identify as LGBTQ+ has more than doubled in the last 12 years, according to new polling from Gallup.
• The latest results show that 7.6% of U.S. adults now align themselves with the LGBTQ+ community — up from 3.5% in 2012, when Gallup started collecting this data. Compare that to four years ago, when the figure was 5.6%.
• Little opinion here: nope. The number is probably similar to what it’s always been, but younger people in a more accepting environment are far more likely to be open and truthful about it.
• The study itself says, ”Adults in these younger generations are far more likely than those in older generations to identify as LGBTQ+."
• And I say, “Adults in younger generations are far less likely to lie about their sexual orientation than those in older generations.”
• More than one in five Gen Z adults — age 18 to 23 during the data collection period — identify as LGBTQ+.
• And about one in three Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, most as bisexual.
• If your whole worldview is entangled in attacking the LGBTQ+ community, you’re going to be in a larger and larger minority as time goes by.
• In other news…
• Right now in the Senate, the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is holding a hearing regarding standardizing 32-hour work week.
• I like tis idea. Who brought it up?
• Our buddy Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Yesterday, Bernie introduced a bill to establish a standard four-day workweek in the United States without any reduction in pay.
• The bill, over a four-year period, would lower the threshold required for overtime pay, from 40 hours to 32 hours. It would require overtime pay at a rate of 1.5 times a worker’s regular salary for work days longer than 8 hours, and it would require overtime pay at double a worker’s regular salary for work days longer than 12 hours.
• The committee will hear from United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, among other witnesses.
• Go Bernie! Man, we could have had that guy as a President. Ah well.
• Moving on.
• Yesterday, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said she would issue pardons for tens of thousands of people convicted of misdemeanor marijuana charges going back decades.
• If approved, the pardons will apply to all adult Massachusetts state court misdemeanor convictions before March 13, 2024, for possession of marijuana or “Class D substance.” Most people will not need to take any action to have their criminal records updated.
• I support this 100%. Healey said the pardons would apply to those arrested as far back as the 1970’s war on drugs and earlier.
• And now, The Weather: “Bat House” by hockey season
• If you’re in Colorado, you don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows. A major storm dumped heavy snow on the state overnight, their biggest in years.
• Major sections of Interstate 70 were closed in the Colorado mountains, with numerous reports of vehicles stranded on the highway for hours.
• Stay safe, my mountainous friends.
• From the Sports Desk… nah. Sports Desk has the day off.
• Today in history… Eli Whitney is granted a patent for the cotton gin (1794). ‘The Mikado’, a light opera by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, receives its first public performance at the Savoy Theatre in London (1885). Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge, the first national wildlife refuge in the US, is established by President Theodore Roosevelt (1903). Anne Miller becomes the first American patient to be treated with penicillin, under the care of Orvan Hess and John Bumstead (1942). A USAF B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashes near Yuba City, CA (1961).
• March 14 is the birthday of composer Johann Strauss I (1804), SCOTUS justice Joseph P. Bradley (1813), dentist Lucy Hobbs Taylor (1833), US vice president Thomas R. Marshall (1854), railroad engineer Casey Jones (1863), physicist Albert Einstein (1879), race car driver Lee Petty (1914), photographer Diane Arbus (1923), actor Michael Caine (1933), songwriter/music producer Quincy Jones (1933), NBA player Wes Unseld (1946), actor Billy Crystal (1948), MLB player Kirby Puckett (1960), and gymnast Simone Biles (1998).

That’s enough. Oh, one more thing. Remember how happy I was yesterday that I only had one more simple dental procedure and would then be done for years? Yeah, no. It ended up taking three hours and after my latest root canal, my dentist wasn’t happy with the fit of a permanent crown, which then required a new set of impressions and I still have to go back yet again to have that installed once it’s ready. Fucking hell. Enjoy your day.