Random News: March 7, 2025

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 7, 2025, and if you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again! This is the last weekday for awhile that I get to wake up about the same time as the sun rises; Monday will be that horrible first weekday after Daylight Savings kicks in. I am not looking forward to that at all.

• And now to make a whole lot of you super angry at me.
• You probably assume that everything in my worldview is aligned with what liberals/Democrats say, and utterly opposed to the talking points of conservatives/Republicans.
• And on a 98% basis or higher, you’d be right. But not 100%.
• I can tell you one area where the shitty MAGA Dumpsters and I agree. I mention this because another person in agreement on this issue is my state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. And he’s catching a ton of shit for it from my fellow progressives.
• I do not think it’s fair for transgender women to participate in women’s sports. It has nothing to do with those athletes’ gender identity. Instead it has to do with the fairness we expect in sports.
• There are extremely few objective examples in any sport — from track to swimming to tennis to nearly every team sport — where men’s performance records aren’t higher than those of women.
• Why? Because in the grand majority of cases, biological males are physically different than women in ways that have nothing to do with gender indicators.
• Based on global averages, men are taller and have more muscle mass than women, especially in regard to upper-body strength. Those physical qualities offer an advantage in most sports, inside and outside of gender considerations.
• And no, not every man is taller and/or stronger than women, obviously. And yes, there are tremendously strong, fast, and capable female athletes in all sports.
• I’m a fan of many of them, from Serena Williams to Sha'Carri Richardson to Caitlin Clark to Simone Biles to Katie Ledecky to… you get the point. I greatly admire their respective skills and dedication to athletic greatness.
• Newsom made his opinion known on a podcast with conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who, like Dumpy, has been a vocal opponent of allowing transgender women and girls to participate.
• “I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair,” Newsom told Kirk on the “This is Gavin Newsom” podcast.
• What’s the downside of the opinion that Newsom and Dump and I share in this regard? It’s huge. Just consider the MAGA parents who demand to get proof of a girl’s biological gender just because she’s larger or faster or stronger, or who has a slightly less traditionally feminine hairstyle or facial features.
• And then there are athletes who are biologically female (or even intersex) who get falsely accused of being transgender each time they have a stellar performance.
• Think about last summer when boxer Imane Khelif of Algeria faced a wave of vile attacks following allegations about her gender identity and eligibility to compete with women in the Olympics.
• Far more than doing any good, the argument against trans women in women’s sports has been primarily a tool of the transphobic, creating a much bigger issue of it than it deserves
• It’s fucked up. And there’s a legit argument that these downsides far outweigh the benefits.
• And — once again, arguing against my own point — people of the same biological gender competing in sports vary massively in size and strength. Look at the NBA, where you have a Victor Wembanyama at 7’3” and a Yuki Kawamura at 5’ 8”.
• Look at the NFL where 152-pound KaVontae Turpin plays in a game with 379-pound Daniel Faalele. People of all genders are not sized in some homogenous manner, in sports or any other area of life.
• And what about people like swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, and holder of 20 Guinness World Records?
• Phelps’s body, by some genetic quirk, produces half the lactic acid of the average person, which helps him swim longer distances and recover faster. Lactic acid is what causes muscle fatigue.
• Is that an unfair advantage, like being tall or heavy or whatever? Some would say yes.
• But back to my point.
• The actual number of transgender girls and women participating in sports is extraordinarily small. Republicans make it seem as if half the kids on their daughters’ soccer teams were born as boys. It’s simply not the case.
• I pointed out not long ago that out of the more than 500,000 student-athletes who compete in NCAA sports, there are fewer than 10 known transgender athletes total, and that includes both male and female athletes.
• That’s 0.00002 percent, or even less.
• Overall, polling suggests that allowing transgender female athletes to play on women’s teams isn’t close to popular, and that opinion crosses political ideologies. Even most Democrats — around 7 in 10 — oppose allowing transgender female athletes to participate in women’s sports.
• My outlook on this — I’ll repeat it for everyone who’s about to bite my head off — has nothing to do with the rights of transgender people to live their true lives and be the gender that they naturally regard as their own.
• Transgender people should serve in the military. Should use the bathroom of their choice. Should never face discrimination in hiring, housing, or services of any sort.
• I’ll support those rights to the death. I have transgender friends. I have friends with transgender kids. Any kind of discrimination against those people is abhorrent.
• No, it has everything to do with competitive fairness, I oppose it only in the way I oppose steroid use, or corked baseball bats, or athletes who bet against their own team, or anything else that gives an unfair advantage/disadvantage in a sport.
• Do athletes of all genders deserve opportunities to play and compete? 100% yes. But should efforts be made to make sports be competitively fair amongst players? Also yes.
• And to wrap up this topic, which has already gone on much longer than I thought when I started writing it… a silly rhetorical question…
• If you truly want to remove these obstacles and issues, why not just eliminate separation of genders in sports entirely, and just have the best athletes of all genders compete for the top spots?
• Surely some of the top women athletes might have a shot at making a team otherwise filled with men, if everything in sports should be judged as gender-neutral. Soccer, hockey, basketball, track, swimming, bicycle racing, distance running, competing with all genders combined, and may the best person win, right?
• \Wait, would that actually be fair? Would that establish an equity-based playing field? Why or why not?
• Feel free to discuss in the comments.
• That was way too long. Let’s do the news.
• U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled yesterday that Dumpy's firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board was unlawful and said she must be allowed to continue in her role.
• Howell said that the Constitution and past cases make clear that Congress can limit the president's removal power. She ruled that the president's firing of Gwynne Wilcox from the NLRB violated federal law that allows for a board member to be removed only for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office," and declared her termination void.
• Fuck yes.
• She wrote, "An American president is not a king — not even an 'elected' one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here."
• Fuck him up, Judge Howell.
• Speaking of King Wishy Washy…
• Yesterday, Dump delayed tariffs on all products from Mexico and Canada for about a month. Why the significant walkback of Dumpy’s signature economic plan?
• Because his little scheme is fucking the stock market and the economy, and the real power people — the ones with all the money — told him to shut the fuck up.
• After a phone call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, the Dumpster said the tariffs would be delayed until April 2.
• If you want to know the funniest thing about this, the products exempt from tariffs are those under the USMCA — aka, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — which was negotiated by Dump during his first term.
• And it covers nearly all products in trade between the countries.
• Moving on.
• The purge of any references to people who aren’t white and male has begun at the Defense Department under the orders of Dumpy the Supremacist Clown.
• Tens of thousands of photos and online posts are now marked for deletion as Dumpy’s gang works to purge all diversity, equity and inclusion content.
• These include references to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, and the first women to pass Marine infantry training.
• One official said the purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content.
• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given the military until Wednesday to remove content that highlights diversity efforts in its ranks following Dump’s executive order ending those programs across the federal government.
• Any mentions of service to America that highlights women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military, is being erased from history. Dump’s order also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months — such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.
• Why is the B-29 airplane that dropped the atomic bomb in WWII being deleted? Are you ready?
• Because it has the word “gay” in the plane’s name “Enola Gay.”
• I’m fucking serious.
• Many of the images listed in the take-down database already have been removed. Others were still visible this morning, and it’s not clear if they will be taken down at some point or be allowed to stay, including images with historical significance such as those of the Tuskegee Airmen.
• Fucking hell. I’m hopeful that most of this content is archived elsewhere and will be returned to their rightful place the moment this piece of shit leaves office — via impeachment, election, or, preferably, death.
• Let’s just keep on keeping on.
• How’s Elon Musk’s space company doing?
• Not so great.
• Yesterday, SpaceX’s Starship megarocket took off from the launch pad at their Starbase site near Brownsville, TX for its eighth test flight.
• But a little over eight minutes into the flight — roughly the same timing as a similar SpaceX mishap in January — several engines appeared to cut off as the upper-stage Starship vehicle was still accelerating into space.
• Live video showed the craft spinning out of control before all communication was lost. It’s the second failure in a row for SpaceX.
• You may note that the January explosion was investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration, who then cleared yesterday’s failed attempt. The FAA is one of many federal agencies that Musk and Dump have targeted for budget and personnel cuts.
• Hmm.
• Let’s move on.
• A former government official who was falsely accused of illegally sending funds to New York City to book luxury hotels for undocumented migrants — and then publicly ridiculed and fired — said yesterday that just days earlier, she had been directed by a member of the Elon Musk-led DOGE to make the payments. 
• That’s fucking fascinating. It’s almost like she was being set up for a false narrative. Huh.
• Mary Comans, who was the CFO at FEMA, sued the agency and the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday. 
• ”I was fired illegally by the Trump administration for doing my job, for doing exactly what I was directed to do by the Trump political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security and at the DOGE. They told me to do these actions, to make these payments, and then they fired me,” she said.
• I 100% believe her. Comans’s lawsuit argues she was unlawfully terminated from her position "without cause or the due process required by law and the Constitution." 
• Moving on.
• We mentioned up top that this coming Sunday (March 9) is the start of Daylight Savings Time.
• I know a lot of you look forward to this. I’m not one of you.
• I hate it being pitch-back dark for the first full hour of my day after I get up at 6am.
• And frankly, I don’t get much benefit from it remaining light until late into the evening.
• Moreover, it’s the time change itself that imposes the feeling of a government-required jet lag without going anywhere.
• We’ll talk more — or, more accurately, complain more — about the pending time change tomorrow.
• And now, The Weather: “Leftovers” by King Hannah
• Rest in peace to Pamela Bach, an actor and the ex-wife of “Baywatch” star David Hasselhoff, who died via suicide at 62.
• Bach appeared on “The Young and the Restless” and met her future husband on the set of his series, “Knight Rider.” She also appeared on “Baywatch.”
• A reminder to all: help is always available in the USA via the national suicide and crisis lifeline by dialing 988.
• From the Sports Desk… star pass rusher Myles Garrett is demanding a trade, but Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam declined a request to even meet with him and discuss it.
• Haslam directed Garrett to instead speak with general manager Andrew Berry, who oversees football operations.
• I laughed when someone said that Cleveland should trade Garrett to the worst team in the league, and someone responded that the Browns can’t trade him to the Browns.
• Today in history… Napoleon Bonaparte captures Jaffa in Palestine and his troops proceed to kill more than 2,000 Albanian captives (1799). Senator Daniel Webster gives his "Seventh of March" speech endorsing the Compromise of 1850 in order to prevent a possible civil war (1850). Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for an invention he calls the “telephone" (1876). A group of 600 civil rights marchers is brutally attacked by state and local police in Selma, AL (1965). Iran and the United Kingdom break diplomatic relations after a fight over Salman Rushdie and his controversial novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ (1989). Sweden officially joins NATO, becoming its 32nd member (2024).
• March 7 is the birthday of physicist Antoine César Becquerel (1788), mathematician/astronomer John Herschel (1792), artist Piet Mondrian (1872), actress Madame Sul-Te-Wan (1873), composer Maurice Ravel (1875), philanthropist/activist Dorothy de Rothschild (1895), race car driver Janet Guthrie (1938), actor Daniel J. Travanti (1940), businessman Michael Eisner (1942), singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt (1944), singer-songwriter Arthur Lee (1945), actor John Heard (1946), singer-songwriter Peter Wolf (1946), NFL player Franco Harris (1950), actor Bryan Cranston (1956), tennis player Ivan Lendl (1960), singer-songwriter Taylor Dayne (1962), comedian Wanda Sykes (1964), NFL player Steve Beuerlein (1965), MLB player Jeff Kent (1968), actress Rachel Weisz (1970), actress Jenna Fischer (1974), actress Laura Prepon (1980), and poet Amanda Gorman (1998).

Well, that was a lot, and now I’m out of time. There’s always more. Stay aware and stay focused, and don’t let the fuckers confuse you. It’s up to you to know what’s really going on. Hopefully this little news report helps in that regard. Enjoy your day.