Random News: April 11, 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 April 11, 2024, and it’s a Thursday for some reason. My name is Zak (not really), and I’m here to tell you information that may or may not be valuable to you. Hopefully we all learn some things together.

• Let’s talk about sex, baby.
• What you may mistake as a Republican war on women’s reproductive rights actually has a much more sinister background.
• The bigger picture is not to protect the lives of little babies. If they cared that much about babies, they would be supportive of maternal/paternal leave, child care and development programs, and the like… and they’re adamantly against them.
• No, the real opposition to women’s rights to abortion is about people’s right to have sex with the people they choose to have sex with. That’s it. That’s the driving force. The big enchilada.
• The Republican war against sex education, against access to birth control, against the healthcare provider Planned Parenthood, and of course against abortion have long been out in the open along with a war against the rights of women’s sexual choices and on the rights and very existence of queer and trans people.
• When the Supreme Court was hearing arguments last month about access to the abortion pill mifepristone, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas cited the Comstock Act.
• Who was Anthony Comstock? He was a 19th-century anti-vice campaigner who was driven by religious shame over masturbation to become an extreme anti-sex crusader.
• In the early 1870s, Comstock convinced Congress to make it a crime to advertise, sell, or mail contraceptives or give out contraceptive information, even orally, or to mail anything “immoral”.
• Comstock led efforts to ban and burn books (sound familiar?), and often boasted that he had driven 15 people to suicide. Nice guy, huh?
• We already are seeing the results of removing access to health care for women in states that ban abortion. Women who miscarry go critical from infection or loss of blood before being offered care.
• And that is on purpose. The anti-abortion movement’s end goal is to let doctors refuse treatment — including life-saving emergency care — for patients whom the movement deem to be sinful and morally impure.
• That’s why the far right is campaigning so hard to take away both birth control and abortion, making sex punitively risky for anyone who might get pregnant.
• They want women to die for their alleged sin of recreational sex. That is what they want. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
• Moving back to today’s reverent news on this topic…
• Yesterday, Arizona was filled with chaos and confusion across the state as abortion providers were flooded with phone calls from frantic patients after the state’s 160-year-old total abortion ban was declared valid.
• Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers at the State Capitol blocked efforts to undo the ban, prompting angry jeers from Democrats.
• Those AZ Dems tried to push bills through the Republican-controlled Legislature to repeal the ban, a move they said would protect women’s health and freedom, and also force Republicans to take a formal vote on the law.
• But Republican leaders quickly scuttled that effort by calling for a recess, and later adjourned until next Wednesday.
• As of today, it’s uncertain whether Arizona’s Republican leaders, who narrowly control both chambers of the Legislature, would allow any immediate action on proposals to repeal the ban.
• Simple solution, Arizonans: vote them all out. Every single one of them.
• Let’s move on.
• Every single day, Don the Con gets more and more desperate with the looming start of his first of four criminal trials coming this Monday, April 15.
• Yesterday, he once again attempted a longshot effort, asking a New York appeals court for emergency relief to stop the criminal hush money trial so he can appeal a lower court’s ruling on presidential immunity and have the judge recused from the case.
• Earlier this week, Dump begged the appeals court to delay the trial so he can challenge a gag order stopping him from making statements about witnesses, family members of the judge and prosecutors, and jurors.
• It was immediately denied.
• Dump then whined that the trial can’t take place in Manhattan because of pretrial publicity. That, also, was denied.
• Here comes justice, Donnie. And weather reports predict it’s gonna be a Stormy Monday in Manhattan.
• In other news…
• As per our recent reporting, the six former Mississippi law enforcement officers who’d pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with torturing and abusing two Black men in a racist attack and were sentenced to federal prison terms of 10 to 40 years, were sentenced yesterday on state charges for the same heinous crimes.
• The members of the Mississippi “Goon Squad” — former Rankin County Sheriff’s deputies Brett Morris McAlpin, 53; Christian Dedmon, 29; Jeffrey Middleton, 46; Hunter Elward, 31; and Daniel Opdyke, 28 — and a former police officer from the city of Richland, Joshua Hartfield, 32 — had pleaded guilty to state charges in August.
• McAlpin, Middleton, and Opdyke were sentenced to serve 20 years; Dedmon to 25 years; Elward to 45 years; and Hartfield to 15 years in federal penitentiaries.
• The sentences will be served concurrently with their federal sentences, and all were ordered to pay $6,431 within two years of release, and permanently surrender their law enforcement certificates.
• In the attack, the former cops attacked two Black men for being at the house of a white woman. Their victims were beaten, assaulted with stun guns, raped with a sex toy, and one of them was shot in the mouth in a mock execution.
• Moving on to something important.
• For the first time ever, the Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday it is issuing a national regulation limiting the amount of certain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, found in drinking water.
• Known as "forever chemicals," PFAS are synthetic chemicals found nearly everywhere – in air, water, and soil – and can take thousands of years to break down in the environment.
• There is no safe level of exposure to PFAS without risk of health impacts. The EPS will now require that public water utilities test for six different types of PFAS chemicals to reduce exposure in drinking water.
• To comply with the new drinking water standards, the EPA is making $1 billion available to states and territories to implement PFAS testing and treatment at public water systems.
• You can thank Joe Biden for this; it’s part of a $9 billion investment made possible by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to assist communities impacted by PFAS contamination.
• Moving on.
• Here are a couple of names we thankfully haven’t had any need to mention in a good while: Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman. 
• The two right-wing morons with a history of peddling conspiracy theories are now facing the consequences of orchestrating a more real conspiracy of their own.
• Wohl and Burkman agreed to pay up to $1.25 million to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James after being charged with overseeing a 2020 election robocall campaign aimed at suppressing the Black voter turnout.
• The fake calls told around 5,500 Black voters in New York that casting ballots by mail would alert creditors and put the them on a public database used by police departments to track down people with outstanding warrants.
• The two idiots were already facing criminal charges in Michigan and Ohio for the robocall scheme when the New York attorney general filed charges in 2021. The Federal Communications Commission slapped them with a $5.1 million fine in June 2023.
• I don’t know if you remember this, but in November 2018, these were the guys who did a press conference to expose “explosive” evidence about special counsel Robert Mueller (hint… none of the evidence was remotely true), but Burkman’s pants zipper was wide open the whole time.
• Imbeciles. What an embarrassment they are to the Republican party. To humanity, actually.
• Speaking of Republicans…
• One of Donnie Dump’s county campaign chairs in New Hampshire lost his job as a police officer after threatening to kill his colleagues in a shooting spree, murder the department chief, and rape the chief’s wife in retaliation for his suspension over his relationship with a high school girl.
• Wait, this gets even better.
• Jonathan Stone, who is currently a second-term state representative, was announced as Dump’s Sullivan County chair by his campaign on June 27, 2023. But you already know this guy.
• He was the dude who, in 2016, gifted El Dumpo an inscribed AR-15 rifle at a campaign stop. yes, Stone opened a gun shop after losing his job as a police officer.
• Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican party! Proud to be associated with them, huh?
• In better news, happy National Pet Day.
• I like this made-up holiday because it’s all-inclusive. Dogs, cats, lizards, iguanas, whatever non-human creature that lives in your house and you think of as a friend is part of the happiness.
• I don’t have pets. I do have four extra rather small roommates who occasionally jump into my lap (usually while it’s super inconvenient), trip me while walking down stairs, and generally act like tigers who are embarrassed to be 18” tall.
• And now, The Weather: “Test Tube Baby” by Michael B Thomas
• From the Sports Desk… as we did yesterday with the NBA, the NHL is nearing playoff time, so let’s see who’s in contention. The following teams have secured a spot as of now.
• Atlantic Division: Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers, Toronto Maple Leafs, Tampa Bay Lightning. 
• Metropolitan Division: New York Rangers, Carolina Hurricanes.
• Central Division: Dallas Stars, Colorado Avalanche, Winnipeg Jets, Nashville Predators.
• Pacific Division: Vancouver Canucks, Edmonton Oilers.
• NHL playoff matchups and seeding will be final in about a week.
• Today in history… Premiere of Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion BWV 244b at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Electorate of Saxony (1727). Former shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrenders Edo Castle to Imperial forces, marking the end of the Tokugawa shogunate (1868). The city of Tel Aviv is founded (1909). President Truman relieves Douglas MacArthur of the command of American forces in Korea and Japan (1951). The Stone of Scone, the stone upon which Scottish monarchs were traditionally crowned, is found on the site of the altar of Arbroath Abbey (1951). United Kingdom agrees to Singaporean self-rule (1957). President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing (1968). Apollo 13 is launched (1970). The Apple I computer is created (1976). Over two hundred thousand people march in Caracas towards the presidential palace to demand the resignation of President Hugo Chávez (2002). Twenty year old Daunte Wright is shot and killed in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota by officer Kimberly Potter, sparking protests in the city, when the officer allegedly mistakes her own gun for her taser (2021).
• April 11 is the birthday of surgeon James Parkinson (1755), UK prime minister George Canning (1770), lawyer/judge Jane Bolin (1908), occultist Anton LaVey (1930), actor/dancer Joel Grey (1932), actress Louise Lasser (1939), director/screenwriter John Milius (1944), singer-songwriter Stuart Adamson (1958), TV host Jeremy Clarkson (1960), MLB player Bret Saberhagen (1964), singer-songwriter Lisa Stansfield (1966), MLB player Mark Teixeira (1980), and singer-songwriter Joss Stone (1987).

Alrighty then. Oh, forgot to mention… I had the hopefully final — at least for a good-ass long time — session with my dentist yesterday afternoon. My last permanent crown was put on, and it was quick and pretty easy, especially compared to all of my other three+ hour procedures. Glad that’s done. Enjoy your day.