Random News: March 18, 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.

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Good morning. It’s March 18, 2024, and it’s a Monday. As usual, many things are going on in this beautiful world of ours, and if you don’t know things, you’re ill prepared to handle whatever is coming next. Let’s learn what’s up together.

• Today is a huge Supreme Court case involving the ability for social media companies to remove deceptive and dangerous information, versus people’s First Amendment rights to be exposed to misinformation.
• For years, the Biden administration has asked social media platforms such as Facebook and X to take down posts that include misinformation about vaccines, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2020 election, among other things.
• Republican officials in two states – Missouri and Louisiana – and five social media users sued over the practice in 2022, arguing that the White House did far more than “persuade” the tech giants to take down a few deceptive posts.
• No matter how it seems at first glance, this isn’t an easy case to resolve.
• For example, doctors who’ve seen people needlessly die because they followed some bullshit  fake cure for COVID who like there to be a pathway for companies to remove provably false content that might be being posted for nefarious reasons.
• The case could prove pivotal to the 2024 election. Its outcome could determine whether the Department of Homeland Security can legally flag posts to social media companies that may be the work of foreign disinformation agents seeking to disrupt the race.
• The case, Murthy v. Missouri, is being argued right this moment. Whatever the decision ends up being will impact everything you see in the future of the Internet, and being forced to choose between truthful information versus unconstitutional censorship is a shitty place to be.
• Moving on to a joke of an election, which Americans should view as a warning if we ever elect a dictatorial autocrat like Vladimir Putin.
• The  Russian president won a landslide reelection victory yesterday, taking 87% of the vote. The outcome of the contest was never in doubt.
• Putin’s opponents in the race — all members of Russia's rubber-stamp parliament — barely ran campaigns or held any rallies at all. None received more than 5% of the vote.
• Meanwhile, antiwar candidates were banned from the ballot, undoing the will of thousands of Russians who backed their candidacies with cumbersome signature gathering campaigns.
• Putin has been in complete power in that country for 25 years now, and will continue to undermine any semblance of democracy until he dies.
• It’s the identical path that Donald Trump would love to take if he is elected this fall. Do not allow that to happen, folks.
• While we’re talking about the SCOTUS, here’s a very good thing that also happened this morning. 
• They denied January 6 defendant and former New Mexico elected official Couy Griffin's bid to reverse the decision that bars him from holding public office over his role in the attack.
• Ha ha! Griffin was a piece of shit insurrectionist who founded "Cowboys for Trump.” 
• He tried using the same legal argument that worked for Dumpy. Both cases concerned Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says that those who previously took an oath to the Constitution while holding a government position but later “engaged in insurrection” cannot hold office.
• But when the Supreme Court ruled for Dump in that case March 4, it made it clear that the ruling only applied to those running for federal office.
• Speaking of Big Smelly, a large majority of Americans surveyed in a poll this week reject Dump’s legal argument that presidents should be immune from criminal prosecution for alleged crimes committed while in office.
• The Politico Magazine/Ipsos poll showed 70 percent of respondents reject this argument, while only 11 percent say presidents should be immune from criminal prosecution.
• The presidential immunity argument didn’t hold much weight when broken down by partisan affiliation. 48 percent of Republicans say presidents should not be immune, while only 24 percent disagree.
• The presidential immunity argument was overwhelmingly rejected by Democrats (92 percent) and independents (75 percent), while only 3 percent of Democrats and 8 percent of independents say presidents should be immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.
• Good. We haven’t all gone insane.
• Moving on… to the 40-hour workweek that you’re likely just starting once again. It’s been standard in the U.S. for more than eight decades.
• But Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, this week introduced a bill that would shorten to 32 hours the amount of time many Americans can work each week before they’re owed overtime.
• Given advances in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Sanders says U.S. companies can afford to give employees more time off without cutting their pay and benefits. But critics say a mandated shorter week would force many companies to hire additional workers or lose productivity.
• Sanders says the worktime reductions would be phased in over four years. He held a hearing on the proposal Thursday in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, of which Sanders is the chairman.
• It will never pass, but like most of Bernie’s legislation, it’s probably the right thing to do.
• In other news…
• Don’t mess with Texas when it comes to porn.
• Days after Pornhub and other affiliated adult websites pulled out of the Lone Star State over its new law requiring all users to verify their age by providing a government-issued ID, Google data revealed a sudden rise in search traffic in Texas for VPNs by more than 400%.
• A VPN is a virtual private network, and it allows Internet users to encrypt their connections and obscure their locations to access region-restricted content. Since Pornhub blocked access in the state March 14, a VPN is now the only way to visit the site within Texas’s borders.
• Snort.
• Subscription-based adult content services have become increasingly popular in recent years, usually costing only a few dollars per month.
• Like most conservative states, Texas is often guilty of “do as I say, not as I do.”
• Let’s talk about cougars. No, not that kind.
• A group of Seattle-area cyclists who helped one of their own escape the jaws of a cougar in February recounted their harrowing story this weekend.
• The woman who was attacked, Keri Bergere, sustained neck and face injuries. She spent five days at an area hospital and was still recovering.
• It turns out that the only reason she’s alive is that her friends were in life-or-death hand-to-paw combat with the 75-pound cat for 45 fucking minutes until they got it to give up and leave.
• Cougars use the extraordinary force of their jaws, said to exert about 400 pounds per square inch of pressure, to crush the skulls, neck bones and windpipes of prey.
• Relevant side note: the cougar (Puma concolor) is also known as the puma, mountain lion, catamount, or panther in various spots across the USA. They’re all the same thing. Don’t fuck with them if possible.
• And now, The Weather: “Red Light” by Basement Revolver
• Spring is officially just a day away, but there’s a weird weather pattern happening where everywhere east of the Mississippi is experiencing lower than average temps, while everywhere west of it is above average.
• Shrug.
• Let’s do a chart. It’s the top of the Billboard 200 Albums chart from March 1971. I am going on two years old. My parents had quite a few of these albums.
• 1. Pearl (Janis Joplin). 2. Love Story (Soundtrack). 3. Chicago III (Chicago). 4. Jesus Christ Superstar (Various Artists). 5. Tumbleweed Connection (Elton John). 6. Abraxas (Santana). 7. Love Story (Andy Williams) 8. The Cry Of Love (Jimi Hendrix). 9. Pendulum (Creedence Clearwater Revival). 10. Stoney End (Barbra Streisand). 11. All Things Must Pass (George Harrison). 12. If You Could Read My Mind (Gordon Lightfoot). 13. Paranoid (Black Sabbath). 14. Osmonds (The Osmonds). 15. Greatest Hits (Sly & The Family Stone). 16. The Partridge Family Album (The Partridge Family). 17. Close To You (Carpenters). 18. Elton John (Elton John). 19. Rose Garden (Lynn Anderson). 20. Whales & Nightingales (Judy Collins).
• From the Sports Desk… March Madness is here, so here are the #1 seeds in the NCAA men’s tournament.
• UConn Huskies, Houston Cougars, Purdue Boilermakers, and North Carolina Tar Heels.
• Today in history… Mongols overwhelm Polish armies in Kraków in the Battle of Chmielnik and plunder the city (1241). English lord John Berkeley sold his half of New Jersey to the Quakers (1673). The British Parliament repeals the Stamp Act (1766). Six farm laborers from Tolpuddle, Dorset, England are sentenced to be transported to Australia for forming a trade union (1834). The Congress of the Confederate States adjourns for the last time (1865). Mohandas Gandhi is sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience (1922). Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass in the Alps and agree to form an alliance against France and the United Kingdom (1940). Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space (1965). The U.S. Congress repeals the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency (1968). 
• March 18 is the birthday of US vice president John C. Calhoun (1782), US president Grover Cleveland (1837), UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869), mystic Edgar Cayce (1877), businessman Ernest Gallo (1909), activist Fred Shuttlesworth,  (1922), race car driver/businessman Andy Granatelli (1923), journalist/author George Plimpton (1927), businesswoman/philanthropist Lillian Vernon (1927), novelist John Updike (1932), singer Charley Pride (1934), singer-songwriter Wilson Pickett (1941), singer-songwriter Eric Woolfson (1945), actor Brad Dourif (1950), guitarist/composer Bill Frisell (1951), singer-songwriter Irene Cara (1959), singer-songwriter/guitarist Jerry Cantrell (1966), rapper/actress Queen Latifah (1970), NBA player Brian Scalabrine (1978), singer-songwriter Adam Levine (1979), and singer-songwriter Lykke Li (1986).

Alrighty. I’m gonna work out and then have meetings and then produce shit and then… I have no idea. Eat lunch? Do an interpretive dance? No one knows. Enjoy your day.