Random News: April 23, 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 April 23, 2025, and it’s a Wednesday. Despite being showered and dressed and sipping coffee, I’m not quite 100% awake yet. I’m sure it will happen eventually.

• I want to start by once again mentioning some ways to get personally involved in the fight against the fascist takeover of our country.
• If you’re interested in joining the battle to preserve our quickly-diminishing rights, tonight at 5pm PT/8pm ET, there’s a national call to help prep for the upcoming May Day action events.
• I’m putting a link in the comments. Sign up and join us!
• For May Day 2025, workers, parents, community members, students, and working families are coming together to raise their voices for better, safer, and stronger communities across the country.
• We deserve places that center the needs of working families, neighborhood public schools, affordable housing, and access to high-quality healthcare. Join us to build a vision that works for the many instead of the billionaires and their corporations.
• I’ll be there on the call tonight, and on Saturday May 3 in the streets.
• Let’s do some news.
• While Dumpy and his gang of thieves still seem to be gung-ho on the plan to tax Americans to death via tariffs, some of his top lieutenants are telling a different story behind closed doors.
• Yesterday at a private event hosted by JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the tariff standoff with China is unsustainable and that he expects the situation to de-escalate.
• Bessent noted that negotiations haven’t started but that a deal is possible. Guess we’ll see. Hopefully that happens before more Americans lose jobs and companies go under due to Dump’s ineptitude.
• Moving on.
• As I expected, it’s looking like the Supreme Court appears likely to require a Maryland school board provide parents with the ability to opt their elementary school-age children out of instruction featuring storybooks that address gender identity and sexual orientation.
• A group of families went up against the Montgomery County Board of Education, saying that public schools unconstitutionally burden parents' First Amendment right to exercise their religion freely when they require children to participate in instruction on gender and sexuality that violate the families' religious beliefs.
• Shrug. Again, this is what I expect of the current Court.
• I mean, just say what it actually is: these people don’t want kids getting any kind of information or validation about homosexuality or transgender people.
• After more than two hours of arguments yesterday, the court's conservative majority seemed ready to side with the families.
• "What is the big deal about allowing them to opt-out of this?" asked human-sized anal opening Samuel Alito.
• He noted that the county allows parents to request their children be excused from other areas of instruction, such as sexual education or Halloween or Valentine's Day celebrations. That is indeed true.
• Why was this case at the Supreme Court? Because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit found that there was no burden on the families' free exercise of religion because there was no evidence they were compelled to change their religious beliefs or conduct.
• Duh.
• So of course, this will become a standard that all public schools in the U.S. will have to obey, and the far-right conservatives will call it a victory against LGBTQIA+ people.
• I’d say that telling a kid how they’re not allowed to read a book probably makes them all the more interested in reading that very book, so perhaps it will eventually have the opposite effect as intended.
• Let’s move on.
• Are you (or perhaps your child) autistic? Well, you or they may be tracked soon as part of a national registry, whether you like it or not.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is set to amass the private medical records of Americans for a new autism study. The NIH will provide Kennedy with data pulled from a number of federal and commercial databases.
• This gets worse. Between 10 and 20 outside groups of researchers will have access to these records, and they will be provided with grant funding to carry out Kennedy’s autism studies.
• RFK Jr., of course, is trying to promote the scientifically debunked, complete bullshit claim that autism is caused by vaccines 
• Anyway, they’re pulling your data via medical records from pharmacy chains, lab tests, genomics data from patients treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, claims from private insurers, data from smartwatches and fitness trackers, and more.
• This is dystopian, eugenic fucking hell on Earth. Welcome to 2025. We’re all going to die.
• It was nice while it lasted, I guess.
• I want to point out something about autism, using the old “correlation does not imply causation” rule of logic.
• Breast cancer diagnoses rose by over 300% between 1973 and 1992. There must have been some factor for the massive increase in breast cancer, right?
• Um, no. Mammograms were implemented for screening in 1976. So our ability to properly diagnose breast cancer was the reason the rate of diagnosis skyrocketed. It was always there; we just didn’t know.
• Some others pointed out that there was no autism before 1930. Gee, you’re right… because autism wasn’t singled out as a disorder before that time.
• You know what else was unknown until 1930? Pluto. But just because that’s when an astronomer saw it with his telescope doesn’t mean it wasn’t there the whole fucking time.
• Anyway, fuck RFK Jr. and his ill-informed idiocy.
• Moving on.
• Yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a plan to significantly reorganize the State Department.
• The proposed shake-up targets human rights programs and others focused on war crimes and democracy. Basically, they want to make it easier for crimes against humanity to occur unchecked.
• And they are trying to reduce U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, potentially affecting hundreds of jobs, though there would be no immediate layoffs.
• However, they also left open the possibility that far greater downsizing could occur — effecting, potentially, tens of thousands of the department’s 80,000 employees, and numerous U.S. consulates and facilities abroad.
• Lawmakers in both parties have already raised concerns about major changes to congressionally mandated programs and agencies that the Dump administration has signaled it wants to revamp or outright delete.
• This plan includes the elimination of 132 offices and 700 positions.
• In news from the Business Desk…
• Yesterday, the actual president — Elon Musk — had to deal with his little side business of being the CEO of Tesla.
• It didn’t go well.
• The electric car maker's first-quarter results showed sales and profit that fell far short of analyst expectations while Elon’s focus was on destroying the USA for his pal Dumpy. 
• Ahead of the quarterly report, investors submitted questions to Tesla that they hope to get answered on the company's earnings conference call. As you’d anticipate, most of the questions were asking Elon when he might return to his car company instead of his playtime with DOGE.
• How bad is it? Tesla's stock price has plunged 53% from its most recent high in December, when the stock was pushed higher when people moronically assumed that Musk's role advising Dump would actually help Tesla in some way. 
• Uh, that’s a big “no.”
• How about measuring the first quarter of 2025 to the same one in 2024? Elon had to tell his shareholders that Tesla had a stunning 71 percent plunge in profits in comparison.
• Musk's activities with DOGE — like cutting tens of thousands of federal workers and accessing taxpayers' personal data — have alienated consumers and sparked protests across the globe, causing the stock price to deflate.
• And ironically, at the same time, Tesla’s manufacturing costs — and car pricing — are going up, up, up due directly to Dump’s ridiculous tariff (aka tax on Americans) plan.
• With Tesla suffering amid widespread backlash against Musk, he told investors that his “time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly” starting next month — though he said he probably will maintain involvement with DOGE through the remainder of Dump’s term.
• I don’t think it’s going to work out that way, but we’ll all wait and see.
• Let’s move on.
• How have things been going for Ron DeSantis since he was humiliated by Dump in the 2024 primary?
• Not so good.
• The $10 million that DeSantis’ administration diverted to a state-created charity last year consisted of Medicaid dollars owed to state and federal taxpayers, contrary to what the governor and other officials have publicly asserted.
• Three years ago, lawyers working with the state drew up a settlement agreement that said Florida’s largest Medicaid contractor, Centene, overbilled taxpayers $67,048,611 for medications.
• That’s the exact amount DeSantis officials settled on with Centene last year. But instead of returning all $67 million to state and federal coffers, they sent $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity overseen by his wife, Casey DeSantis.
• What happened next? 
• That $10 million was sent to two nonprofit organizations that aren’t required to report how they spend their funds. Those “dark money” groups later gave $8.5 million to a political committee overseen by DeSantis’ chief of staff in a series of transactions that some Republican lawmakers believe was illegal.
• LOCK HIM UP.
• Moving on with another name I haven’t thought about in a good long while: Sarah Palin.
• Yesterday, a jury concluded that The New York Times did not libel the former Alaska governor and VP candidate for an error in a 2017 editorial that she says damaged her reputation.
• Womp womp.
• I really don’t care about this at all. I’m just spreading the schadenfreude toward Palin to be mean and vindictive.
• The Times had erroneously ran an editorial that claimed Palin’s political action committee had contributed to political rhetoric that enabled an atmosphere of violence. They then corrected the article less than 14 hours after it was published.
• It took the jury just two hours to decide she was full of shit.
• Ha ha.
• And now, The Weather: “Won't Give Up” by Mamalarky
• A very sad RIP going out to Roy Thomas Baker, arguably my favorite music producer of all time. He died this month at age 78.
• When you read Baker's obituaries, they’ll all focus on one song: Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and understandably so.
• But his huge influence on me in music and recording was his work with The Cars on their first four albums, which have some of the most brilliant and subsequently influential production in the entire history of the rock/pop world.
• And of course, RTB did more than that. As a producer/engineer, the list is insane… Journey, Yes, Foreigner, Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, Devo, Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, Smashing Pumpkins, and much more.
• Oh, and during the tenure of his side-gig as Senior VP of A&R for Elektra, they signed Metallica, Simply Red, Yello, Peter Schilling, 10,000 Maniacs, and many more.
• His musical acumen and influence will echo for eternity.
• Let’s do a chart.
• It’s April 1979, 46 years ago today. I am in fifth grade. I like riding my BMX bike, roller skating, playing guitar, and being a low-level juvenile delinquent with my little similarly-minded friends.
• Here’s the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart at the time. Disco is still huge but is starting to head out, new wave is coming in, and smooth-ass yacht rock was in its prime.
• 1. Heart Of Glass (Blondie). 2. Reunited (Peaches & Herb). 3. Knock On Wood (Amii Stewart). 4. Music Box Dancer (Frank Mills). 5. I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor). 6. Stumblin' In (Suzi Quatro & Chris Norman). 7. What A Fool Believes (The Doobie Brothers). 8. I Want Your Love (Chic). 9. Goodnight Tonight (Wings). 10. In The Navy (Village People). 11. He's The Greatest Dancer (Sister Sledge). 12. Take Me Home (Cher). 13. Tragedy (Bee Gees). 14. Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground) (The Jacksons). 15. Sultans Of Swing (Dire Straits). 16. Love Is The Answer (England Dan & John Ford Coley). 17. Blow Away (George Harrison). 18. Love Ballad (George Benson). 19. Precious Love (Bob Welch). 20. Love Takes Time (Orleans).
• From the Sports Desk… NBA and NHL playoffs continue.
• In the NBA, the Pacers took a 2-0 series lead over the Bucks, winning 123-115. Likewise, the top-seed Thunder are up 2-0 on the Grizzlies via a 118-99 win. Lakers tied up the Timberwolves 1-1 in their series after a 94-85 victory.
• In the NHL, the Hurricanes went up 2-0 against the Devils with a 3-1 win. The Maple Leafs are up on the Senators 2-0 in their series after an OT 3-2 win. The Panthers annihilated the Lightning 6-2, and the Wild beat the Golden Knights 5-2, tying up their series at 1-1.
• Today in history… Edmund Ironside succeeds his father Æthelred the Unready as King of England (1015). The first public school in the United States, Boston Latin School, is founded in Boston (1635). King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland is crowned in Westminster Abbey (1661). First baseball game at Wrigley Field, then known as Weeghman Park, in Chicago (1914). Adolf Hitler's designated successor, Hermann Göring, sends him a telegram asking permission to take leadership of Nazi Germany (1945). Student protesters of the Vietnam War at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university (1968). Coca-Cola disastrously changes its formula and releases New Coke (1985). The first YouTube video, titled "Me at the zoo", was published by co-founder Jawed Karim (2005). 
• April 23 is the birthday of playwright/poet William Shakespeare (1564), US president James Buchanan (1791), politician Stephen A. Douglas (1813), physicist Max Planck (1858), actress/singer/dancer/diplomat Shirley Temple (1928), runner/author Jim Fixx (1932), singer-songwriter Roy Orbison (1936), actor Lee Majors (1939), NBA player/coach Gail Goodrich (1943), director/activist Michael Moore (1954), actress Jan Hooks (1957), actress Valerie Bertinelli (1960), comedian George Lopez (1961), terrorist Timothy McVeigh (1968), wrestler/actor John Cena (1977), comedian/TV host John Oliver (1977), model Gigi Hadid (1995), and royal Prince Louis of Wales (2018).

That’s plenty of stuff. I’m going to go do various things. Remember to see the link in the comments for tonight’s May Day organizing call. Enjoy your day.