Random News: July 20, 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 July 20, 2024, and it’s a Saturday. It being summertime, as much as I enjoy lounging in my robe, I had to swap it for some shorts and a t-shirt pretty soon after getting up. It’s not hot here, but it’s also not “drape one’s self in heavy terrycloth” weather either. Anyway, I do have coffee and I’m about awake enough to look at the news. Let’s do that together.

• First, though…
• There does seem to be a fascinating dynamic playing out regarding who is supporting Joe Biden as the nominee versus those who, at least allegedly, are not.
• The most direct outspoken politicians who seem to be showing Joe unwavering support are in the progressive camp… Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Hakeem Jeffries, and the like.
• Additionally, the people urging Joe to keep running also include all but one of the 60 members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
• But who is reportedly in favor of Joe stepping down to allow a different, non-specific person run? Mostly establishment Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Sherrod Brown, and allegedly even Barack Obama.
• Who else? Well, there’s a mysterious super PAC calling themselves “Pass the Torch” who are urging President Biden to drop out. It is allegedly being financed by a former FEC violator (though they are not responding to questions about where their money is coming from), and the comms work is being led by a cryptocurrency ad agency.
• But the story behind this story is that if you assume that person replacing Joe would automatically be Kamala Harris, that might not be the case.
• Rep Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) warned this week that the Democratic elites who are pushing for President Biden to stand down are also “not interested” in seeing Vice President Harris atop the ticket.
• She said, “If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken. They’re not going to be fully honest, but I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversation. I’m here to tell you that a huge amount of the donor class and a huge amount of these elites and a huge amount of these folks in these rooms that I see that are pushing for President Biden to not be the nominee also are not interested in seeing Vice President being the nominee.”
• That’s a huge problem, and assuming it’s accurate, the biggest enemy of the Democratic Party is — once again — the Democratic Party itself.
• In as much as I detest polling, the most recent of them show that both Biden and a hypothetical Harris/Trump matchup would be a dead heat, with numbers within a single digit. Harris narrowly led Trump 50% to 49%, in another statistical tie in the latest national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
• Of note: that poll also found that none of the Democrats who have been mentioned as possible alternatives — including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — performed any better than Biden when compared to Trump.
• Anyway, that continues to play out, and none of us can really do anything but sit and wait. And I’ll repeat this as long as it takes: I’m fine with Joe and will 100% vote for him. If he steps aside, I promise to vote for a different qualified Democratic candidate.
• Nothing they do would cause me to consider voting for Dump (hahahahaha), but more importantly, I will commit to vote regardless of who the Dem candidate is. I will never sit this out on the sidelines.
• I’m a player. I’m in this game. I’m a voter. End of story.
• And my genuine analysis, as non-expert as it is, tells me that no other person has as good a shot at beating Dump than our current president. Not Kamala Harris, not anyone. Joe can do this, if we let him.
• Let’s move on to some current news.
• Judge Aileen M. Cannon is playing a very risky dice game in her decision to throw out the stolen classified documents case against Don the Con.
• I know that seems like a million years ago. It was last Monday.
• Nearly every legal expert says she is on track to be reversed on appeal and could even be removed from the case — an extraordinary, but not unheard of step.
• She’s counting on Dump being elected in November. If that happens, his mishandling of classified national security records and obstruction of government efforts to retrieve the material won’t matter.
• He will just force his own Justice Department to close the case. If he encounters resistance, he’ll just promote Cannon to the very appeals court that will soon examine her decision to toss the case.
• Does that seem wrong to you? It is.
• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where Jack Smith has filed notice of his plans to appeal, has already rebuked Cannon twice for her handling of other aspects of the classified documents case.
• Of note in this case: in 1974, the Supreme Court unanimously required President Richard M. Nixon to hand over recordings to a special prosecutor as part of the Watergate investigation.
• Lower-court judges are bound to follow the Supreme Court’s lead. But Cannon unilaterally decided her decision was more important than that of the Supreme Court. She claimed that U.S. v. Nixon did not directly address the validity of the office of special counsel.
• But it did, specifically. She knows that (she can’t be that stupid). So she did this to buy time for Dump to get re-elected so he could throw out the case and promote her.
• That’s another side effect of what you get with Dumples the Clown… a huge increase in unjust actions where certain people get to ignore the rule of law that others are forced to follow.
• It’s no way to continue a democracy.
• Moving on.
• In our continuing coverage of the assholes who tried — and failed — to enact a coup against the USA on January 6, 2021, meet Tyler Bradley Dykes, 26, of Bluffton, SC.
• He’s a Marine who gave a Nazi salute during the insurrection. Dykes has been sentenced to almost five years in prison for his role in the Capitol riot.
• Dykes grabbed a riot shield from Capitol police officers during the coup attempt, which he then used to obstruct and intimidate officers at the scene. The FBI arrested Dykes in Virginia on July 17, 2023.
• He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers in April. Yesterday he was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison and was also ordered to pay $22,000 in fines and restitution.
• Good. It’s my opinion that an active duty Marine who attacked his own country should have received more severe punishment than regular civilians. This guy took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Enough said.
• Moving on.
• We should probably give another mention to the irony of yesterday’s global disruption in IT services that grounded flights, knocked banks and media outlets offline, and disrupted hospitals, retailers, and other services.
• CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company whose software is used by thousands and thousands of airlines, banks, hospitals and other risk-averse organizations around the world. They protect computer systems from hackers and data breaches.
• But it was a faulty update in the software meant to protect these entities that caused the Blue Screen of Death on Windows machines and interrupted crucial business services while it got resolved.
• What’s been pointed out is that since the backbone of all of our IT infrastructure relies on very few companies like CrowdStrike, and everybody uses the same services, when there’s a glitch, everyone goes down at the same time.
• Sounds like a “keeping all the eggs in one basket” kind of problem to me, and maybe there’s a reason to not allow one company to take over entire industries. Give that some thought.
• Let’s move on.
• I want to mention the passing of longtime Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who dies of pancreatic cancer yesterday at 74. She had been an outspoken advocate for Black Americans for decades.
• Jackson Lee was among the first women to graduate from Yale University, and served as a Houston municipal judge, and a city councilwoman before she was first elected to represent Texas’ 18th Congressional District in 1994.
• She was one of the sponsors of legislation to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday, and frequently spoke out against police brutality. She was also widely admired among progressives for her opposition to the Iraq War and was a fierce critic of Dumpy.
• She will be missed.
• One aspect of Project 2025 that may be the most misleading is the plan to criminalize pornography. I want to talk about that a bit, because I don’t think this means what you think it means.
• Let’s start on the surface: you may have feelings about pornography, whatever you consider that to be. That’s fine. We’re a nation of many opinions.
• I know that a pretty good portion of you, admittedly or otherwise, do look at, watch, read, and otherwise experience various types of porn. How do I know? Because I can easily see lists of the most popular web sites in the world.
• There is also tons of easily-accessible porn on mainstream sites like X, the app formerly known as Twitter, owned by Elon Musk.
• The proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.
• However, that kind of porn is not what Project 2025’s outlook is about.
• Project 2025’s definition of porn also includes topics like "transgender ideology" and "sexualization of children." A drag queen reading to kids would be considered porn. LGBTQ books in school libraries would be porn.
• And they would be free to imprison anyone would they accused of not strictly following their anti-porn crusade. That could be every gay person (or any person merely accused of being LGBTQ, or someone having scrolled by a poem image on a web site, and so on). Do you see the problem here?
• And now, The Weather: “Mary Jane” by Orion Sun
• From the Sports Desk… the 2024 Olympic Games opens next Friday night in Paris, France. Fun fact: having previously hosted in 1900 and 1924, Paris is one of only two cities who will have held the Olympics three times, the other being London (1908, 1948, and 2012).
• The program will feature 329 events in 32 sports. That’s a lot.
• In addition to the 28 core Olympic sports that were part of the games as of 2016, there’s one brand new one — breaking — and skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing will return from 2020.
• Yes, breaking, as in break dancing. You don’t think it’s a sport? Fucking try doing it.
• Today in history… Rollo — my 33rd great-grandfather — lays siege to Chartres (911). Japanese forces capture Pyongyang (1592). Nicéphore Niépce is awarded a patent by Napoleon for the Pyréolophore, the world's first internal combustion engine, after it successfully powered a boat upstream on the river Saône in France (1807). Citizens of Bogotá, New Granada declare independence from Spain (1810). Seneca and Shawnee people agree to relinquish their land in western Ohio for 60,000 acres west of the Mississippi River (1831). British Columbia joins the confederation of Canada (1871). The Ford Motor Company ships its first automobile (1903). In Finland, a new electoral law is ratified, guaranteeing the country the first and equal right to vote in the world, and Finnish women are the first in Europe to receive the right to vote (1906). Police in Minneapolis fire upon striking truck drivers, during the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, killing two and wounding sixty-seven (1934). The United States Department of Justice files suit in New York City against the motion picture industry charging violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act in regards to the studio system, eventually result in a break-up of the industry (1938). California opens the first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, known today as the 110 between DTLA and Pasadena (1940). King Abdullah I of Jordan is assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem (1951). The first International Special Olympics Summer Games are held at Soldier Field in Chicago, with about 1,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities (1968). Apollo 11's crew successfully makes the first human landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility, and Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon six and a half hours later (1969). The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars (1976). The Civil Marriage Act legalizes same-sex marriage in Canada (2005). The United States and Cuba resume full diplomatic relations after five decades (2015). O. J. Simpson is granted parole to be released from prison after serving nine years of a 33-year sentence after being convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas (2017).
• July 20 is the birthday of poet Petrarch (1304), paleontologist Richard Owen (1804), monk/geneticist Gregor Mendel (1822), painter Giorgio Morandi (1890), explorer Edmund Hillary (1919), NBA coach Chuck Daly (1930), actress Diana Rigg (1938), actress Natalie Wood (1938), singer-songwriter Kim Carnes (1945), guitarist/composer Carlos Santana (1947), singer-songwriter/guitarist Chris Cornell (1964), guitarist/composer Stone Gossard (1966), NHL player Jimmy Carson (1968), actor Omar Epps (1973), NHL player Peter Forsberg (1973), NBA player/actor Ray Allen (1975), NHL player Pavel Datsyuk (1978), model Gisele Bündchen (1980), NBA player Steven Adams (1993), and NBA player Ben Simmons (1996).

Again, I know you hate to wait. You hate uncertainty. You hate the bullshit of being in limbo. I do too. But the Democratic National Convention doesn’t happen for almost exactly a fucking month, from August 19–22, and it’s exceedingly difficult to say what will happen between now and then. I mean, Dumpy got his ear clipped just one week ago today, and like a thousand things have happened since then. My recommendation: keep on keeping on. Time will go by and shit will resolve one way or another, and we’ll all meet at the polls on November 5. Enjoy your day.