The 2024 Legislative Sessions of other states.

January 20, 2024.

Utah

Utah's house has passed a bill to ban public transgender bathrooms.

January 25, 2024

Ohio

Ohio's legislature over road a veto and banned gender mutilation of minors and restricted those who have undergone gender mutilation from participating in athletic teams of the opposite gender.

January 31, 2024

New York

New York expanded the definition of rape, which apparently was narrowly defined by the previous law. The new law states:

 Section  1.  Sections  130.40,  130.45 and 130.50 of the penal law are

 REPEALED.

   § 2. Subdivisions 1 and 2 of section 130.00 of the penal law, subdivision 2 as amended by chapter 264 of the laws of  2003,  are  amended read as follows:

   1.  "[Sexual  intercourse]  VAGINAL  SEXUAL CONTACT" [has its ordinary meaning and occurs upon any penetration, however slight]  MEANS  CONDUCT BETWEEN  PERSONS  CONSISTING OF CONTACT BETWEEN THE PENIS AND THE VAGINA OR VULVA.

   2. (a) "Oral sexual [conduct] CONTACT" means conduct  between  persons consisting of contact between the mouth and the penis, the mouth and the anus, or the mouth and the vulva or vagina.

   (b)  "Anal  sexual  [conduct]  CONTACT"  means conduct between persons consisting of contact between the penis and anus.

   § 3. Section 130.25 of the penal law, as amended by chapter 1  of  the laws of 2000, is amended to read as follows:

 § 130.25 Rape in the third degree.

   A person is guilty of rape in the third degree when:

   1.  He  or  she engages in [sexual intercourse] VAGINAL SEXUAL CONTACT with another person who is incapable of consent by reason of some factor  other than being less than seventeen years old;

March 5, 2024

2024 UTAH LEGISLATIVE SESSION RECAP & IMPACTS

March 6, 2024

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have made it a crime for noncitizens to enter the state through Mexico at any location other than a port of entry

New Hampshire

The state has banned men mutilated to appear as women from appearing in women's sports.

March 22, 2024

Arizona

Arizona had declared Pluto as the official state planet.

March 31, 2024.

Oregon

Oregon recriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs after botching a decriminalization effort.

April 2, 2024.

Colorado

A bill in Colorado that aims to protect the data found in a person's brainwaves was signed into law.

Colorado's Democratic House passed a bill that bans a wide variety of "assault" firearms. 

Inaccurately reported on as banning semi-automatic firearms, which it does not, it does take on a lot of popular longarms with military type features.

It's doubtful that it will pass Colorado's Senate, and if it does, it's likely unconstitutional.

April 18, 2024.

Montana

Two genitals mutilated men have filed suit in Montana over a new Montana law that keeps them from having their actual gender changed on government issued identification.

April 19, 2024.

Arizona

Arizona has repealed an 1864 territorial law that banned most abortions. Press reporting on this has been unclear, so it's not clear if it repealed and replaced the statute or what, but a review of the text of the very short law shows it simply repealed the law.  Some digging shows a a 2002 statute banning abortion after 15 weeks will become the law.

Florida

Florida has banned artificial meat.

May 3, 2024

Florida

Gov. DeSantis signed into law a bill that de-emphasizes climate considerations in Florida's energy considerations.

May 17, 2024

Louisiana

Louisiana has passed and signed in to a law a requirement that the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms.

June 20, 2024

New Hampshire

New Hampshire has banned gender mutilated boys in grades 5 through 12 from participating in girls' sports.

July 21, 2024.

Mount Blue Sky, was Mount Evans.

That's the story, Mt. Evans in Colorado has been renamed Mt. Blue Sky.

The mountain was named after Colorado Territorial Governor John Evans.  The Civil War era Governor was obviously popular enough at the time, but his association with the Sand Creek Massacre has caused his memory to tarnish over the years.  That association may be noted here:

June 24

1864   Colorado Governor John Evans warns that all peaceful Indians in the region must report to the Sand Creek reservation or risk being attacked.  This set in motion that lead to the chain of events that caused the infamous Sand Creek Massacre, The Battle of Red Buttes, and the Battle of Platte Bridge Station.

The even itself is discussed here:

November 29

1864         Sand Creek Massacre in which Colorado militia attack Black Kettle's Cheyenne band in Colorado.  Black Kettle was at peace, and the attack was unwarranted.  The unit would muster out shortly thereafter.  The attack would drive many Cheyenne north into Wyoming and western Nebraska, where they would link up with Sioux who were already trending towards hostility with the United States.  This would result in ongoing unbroken armed conflict between these tribes and the United States up through the conclusion of Red Cloud's War.

In 2020, current Colorado Governor Polish established The Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board which suggested the new name, which was approved by the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.  Clear Creek County approved the renaming in 2022.

Evans' reassessment is an example of how such reappraisals have occured post World War Two. Evans was forced to resign as a result of the Sand Creek Massacre and was accused of a cover-up in regard to it, but nonetheless, as late as 1963 he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.  Charitable in many things, other than his views on the fate of Native Peoples, various things were named for him, including Mount Evans, a World War Two destroyer and the Evans Chapel at the University of Denver, the latter of which he had built in memory of a daughter.

Wednesday, March 4, 1942. Counterstrikes

Today in World War II History—March 4, 1942: Two Japanese H8K flying boats bomb Pearl Harbor—no damage. Aircraft from USS Enterprise strike Marcus Island in South Pacific.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

If you were fighting the war, of course, it was a horrible day. . . if fighting was going on, which it was all over the world. But in terms of huge events, well, it was just another day in the war in some ways.

Operation K, the flying boat raid, had significant aspirations but was a flop.  It didn't do much, other than to remind everyone that Hawaii was still within Japanese air range.

H8K.  This one was in its last moments later in the war, just before the U.S. Navy, which took this photo, shot it down.

The round trip flight engaged in by the two Japanese aircraft from the Marshall Islands was nearly 5,000 miles in extent.

Marcus Island is the easternmost island of the Japanese archipelago and is extremely isolated.   The US bombed it repeatedly during 1942 and 1943, but never occupied it.

The remote island was first discovered by the Portuguese in 1694.  They didn't make a specific recordation of the location of the island, however, and it was not sighted again until British/Australian mariner Bourn Russell spotted it in 1830, noting that it was not on his charts, which of course it was not.  It was next sighted by an American evangelical mission to the Hawaiian islands in 1864. The first effort to occupy it commenced by a private Japanese expedition in 1886.

The United States and Japan both claimed the island early on, and in 1902 the US dispatched a warship to enforce its claims, but withdrew when it found the island occupied by the Japanese and a Japanese warship patrolling nearby.  The Japanese withdrew the civilian population in 1933 and made the island a military installation with a weather station and an airstrip.

The island was transferred to the United States in 1952, but in 1968 the US gave it back but continued to occupy it, having a substantial radio station there, whose antenna can be seen in the photo posted above from 1987.  The Coast Guard occupied the island until 1993, and then it was transferred to the Japanese Self Defense Force.