Fox News has an obvious and pronounced conservative slant, but it is still mostly based in reality, except for programmes like the Sean Hannity show (if that is still going) and whatever crap their commentators say. Fox News is still going to call a duck a duck, or at least a waterfowl, and this sometimes garners criticism from the truth-challenged.

Newsmax and OANN are the actual loonies.

They should really lean into this by making a Wizard of Oz-themed television advertisement.

You can renew it early. The passport doesn’t need to be expired in order to renew it.

You might as well get a passport card too while you’re at it when you renew. It’s $30 more and it’s useful if you lose your passport book, and you can carry it in your wallet as a form of ID that doesn’t have your address on it.

I oppose the death penalty, but if we’re going to have it, it should be by guillotine. I argue this for five reasons.

1. Proponents of capital punishment claim that the existence of the death penalty is to terrify people into not committing capital crimes. A guillotine is a far more terrifying implement of death than a gurney, and for maximum effect it can even be displayed in a museum when it isn’t being used and made available to traumatise schoolchildren with by taking them on highly inappropriate school trips.
2. Procurement of lethal injection drugs is difficult and expensive. Any skilled woodworker can make a working guillotine in a weekend for a thousand dollars.
3. It is easy to operate and even idiot prison officials in Tennessee can operate it without causing unnecessary suffering for the condemned. It’s harder to screw up. Relatively little training is required to operate it correctly and it is fast and easy to set up.
4. It doesn’t hide the fact that killing someone is taking blood and an inherently an act of extreme violence, regardless of whether you have the authority of the state behind you.
5. Nobody can deny that death comes extremely quickly to the condemned after using it.

Oh yeah, well I will pay everyone 91 dollars if Trump’s party loses. Pinkie promise.

Oh, you’re talking about Palestine.

In that case, would you rather have a candidate that does nothing but pay lip service to your cause, or a candidate that actively donates your resources to destroy it?

Tough choice, I’m sure.

I do not feel bad about facetiously trivialising an argument about death and bloodshed into one about dinner in order to highlight the ridiculousness of the logic used.

“Do you want to go to the pizza place or the burger restaurant, Timmy?”

“I don’t want either! I want macaroni and cheese!”

“Macaroni and cheese is not an option, Timmy, now pick from what’s available or I’m deciding for you.”

“No! I’m not picking!”

“Okay, we’re going to the pizza place then.”

(1 hour later) “This pizza sucks! It’s all the burger place’s fault for not appealing to me hard enough by serving macaroni and cheese.”

You have a pay cheque, don’t you? That’s something that they would try to go for.

To be clear, I don’t defend the broken system, but I am trying to see what you can do to make the best of the crummy situation that it is.

If you go to a hospital and the hospital bills $100,000, let’s consider two scenarios:

Scenario 1: You have a high deductible health insurance place with a $10,000 deductible. The health insurance company pays $90,000 and the hospital asks you to pay the rest. Hospital bills have a lot of wiggle room and all of it is negotiable. You tell them you’re broke. In this case, the overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they’ll do something like “Okay, pay us $50 a month for a year and we’ll call it good”, because they already got the vast majority of what they were asking for from the insurance company. They have already made most of their profit. It is totally not worth it for them to even send this to collections, let alone hire a lawyer to sue you.

Scenario 2: You have no coverage. Hospital asks you for $100,000. You tell them you’re broke and will declare bankruptcy. They might offer you a plan like $200 a month for the next three years, because nobody else has paid them anything. And here’s the thing: they have leverage over you, because they know that a bankruptcy lawyer is going to ask for a $10,000 retainer paid upfront. You can’t just go up into your local courthouse and shout "I DECLARE BANKRUPCY!” in the style of The Office. Nope. You’ll just get 25% of your pay cheque garnished for the next eight to ten years because you couldn’t afford a bankruptcy lawyer to stop it. The hospital knows that they can juice $9,000 out of you or more, because you being broke also means you can’t afford a lawyer.

Anyway, you do the maths. I don’t know your financial situation and how much the insurance companies want to insure you. You make the right decision based on your situation. I’m just providing information. Maybe the maths nonetheless points you to Scenario 2 being a better bet. But it’s not as clear cut as one might initially think, so at least give it some thought and punch in some numbers into a calculator. And if you already have, more power to you.

If you are young and fairly healthy, look into high deductible plans. Those should be significantly cheaper but won’t cover any routine health services at all. You’ll pay out of pocket for those (possibly at a much lower cash rate depending on provider). Then plan will, however, cover you if something catastrophic happens which requires expensive care.

I have no idea what this meme is supposed to signify.

The claims are already out of time. And Trump is only entitled to a few thousand dollars per occurrence anyway. If the IRS actually had reasonable lawyers representing them, they’d have settled this case for maybe $50,000. Ten billion dollars is a Dr. Evil-level demand.

Okay, so there’s a principle in law, which is that one calls a document by the thing it purports to be. If it is not valid, you prepend “purported” in the contexts where it would be ambiguous otherwise, and explain your reasons as to why and the readers will know what you’re trying to say. You do not play word games with finding creative and insulting things to call it.

This is what the judge ordered:

The Parties are prohibited from referring to the purported “settlement agreement,” or using, offering, admitting, or citing any of its provisions in any judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitration, or any other official proceeding as evidence of a “settlement” reached in this matter, Case No. 26-cv-20609-KMW (S.D. Fla. 2026).63 “Plaintiffs” means the named Plaintiffs in this lawsuit: President Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, the Trump Organization, LLC and includes any of their agents, representatives, officers, directors, employees, partners, corporate agents, subsidiaries, affiliates, or any other person acting in concert with the party or under the party’s control, whether directly or indirectly. “Defendants” means the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Department of the Treasury.

This order doesn’t seem to explicit prohibit the parties from following the terms of the settlement. Merely that the settlement is not to be spoken of again in court.

There are two other orders. One of them is to issue a disciplinary referral against Trump lawyer Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar. This is the court telling the bar association that they strongly believe the lawyer in question has committed a violation of ethical rules. However, I frankly do not find it particularly likely that the Florida Bar will act strongly on this referral, though I’m open to being surprised. The second order is to ban Trump lawyer Daniel Epstein from filing any more applications for pro hac vice in the Southern District of Florida. A pro hac vice application is a tool used to request permission from a court to represent someone for one case only when the lawyer in question doesn’t have a valid licence to practise in the state where the case is being conducted.

Link to full text of ruling (PDF)

The old owners could’ve been fined into bankruptcy and then the franchise was sold to someone else.

There was a filling station in my town which was also significantly cheaper. About 40-50 cents less than nearby stations. I used it for years but also wondered how it was so cheap. Then one day, I went there and the price had gone up from the bargain of a decade to merely reasonable. I was wondering why but then I noticed that someone had put a sticker next to the dispenser keypad that wasn’t there before: a fuel tax sticker. It’s required by law on all fuel pumps here but I guess I just never noticed that they just never had one there previously.

No points for guessing what happened lol

Another W for the DSA

I’ve never heard of a Libertarian propose more government agencies or more expansive welfare programmes.

Back in 2020, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination named Andrew Yang proposed creating a new Department of Technology to regulate technology companies, because, as he put it, technology is now a huge part of our lives and economy and the current regulatory framework is completely unequipped to handle the torrential downpour of bullshit coming from Silicon Valley.

He wasn’t right about everything, and I didn’t vote for him, but that was certainly a good idea in hindsight.