Happy birthday, America! 🇺🇸

When I see someone waving a flag today, I regret that my first wary instinct is to suspect they may actually hate our country. They might claim to appreciate specific parts, so long as those parts precisely match their own corner of it, but otherwise not so much.

I love my country. That means I love the people in it, even if they don’t look like me, sound like me, think like me, worship like me, love like me, or simply exist like me. If your family was around before Europe found it, I’m glad you’re still here. Part of later waves of immigration? Hi, neighbor! Just got here last week, whether through official channels or not? Welcome aboard, friend! To me, that’s patriotism: honoring the actual ideals this wonderful country was founded on, not the twisted little corrupt version politicians push at us.

Opinion | Birthright citizenship overreach by the Supreme Court ends term - The Washington Post:

A more modest ruling, relying on those statutes, would have left the constitutional issue for a future court to consider if and when Congress deliberates on the issue and decides to change the rules.

I use to pay for a WaPo subscription, but their takeover by rightwing extremists ruined it. Imagine wringing hands because SCOTUS made a ruling based on a plain reading of the Constitution.

Uber’s tired of getting sued for breaking laws so they’re trying to change them. Vote no.

Honestly, getting me to take the side of ambulance chasers is quite the accomplishment. I’m impressed by their dedication to evil.

From the text of the agreement to end Trump’s War:

9. Pending the final Deal, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America agree to maintain the status quo; the Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions, and will not deploy any additional forces in the region.

This return to the status quo cost 7-10K killed and 50K injured and $113B to the US alone.

Please, can we stop winning now? We can’t afford any more of these stupid victories.

Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

[T]he controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address.

This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard recently. My home router has a built in VPN server. When I’m out running around, my iPhone can route traffic through my house. Pray tell, o sage Utah legislature, by what misguided notion did you expect a website to tell that I’m accessing a it from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California? (Which is why we used it last time: I configured my travel router to use that home VPN so we could watch American Netflix at night before bedtime when we just wanted something familiar to relax with.)

Honestly, this is the new “pi equals 3” legislation. “Let’s make laws codifying technical ideas we clearly have no freaking clue about”.

This is who you elected, Utah. Well done.

Utah’s stupid new law “prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.”

It’s probably illegal for minors to access this site from Utah because I say some things that Utah’s leaders probably find offensive. Let me know if I don’t; I’ll work on fixing it. To access it over a VPN, follow these instructions to turn on iCloud Private Relay. Then I can’t see where you’re connecting from.

There. Now I’ve broken the law in Utah.

US Senate Candidate Caught Insider Trading on Kalshi Says He Did It on Purpose | WIRED:

Moran claims that he stopped speaking to Kalshi because he objected to the company’s settlement terms. “They wanted me to make a public statement,” he says. That was the thing that I pushed back on, that’s a violation of my First Amendment rights, to compel my speech.”

What a freaking tool.

One of our credit card companies, acting as “Californians for Medical Privacy”, is opposing CA’s AB 2746. They say:

Lenders could need to know what medical services you received, if they were “medically necessary”, and potentially, even your private treatment details, if AB 2746 (Schiavo) were to become law.

Liars.

California’s existing law basically says that you can’t use a person’s medical debt against them when making credit decisions. Someone getting sick and racking up an enormous medical bill because their insurer denied, defended, and deposed, is not something they could have reasonably foreseen and avoided. It’s a different category of debt than, say, maxing out your credit cards in Las Vegas.

The new changes would clarify and expand the definition of “medical debt” in reasonable ways. The members of Californians for Medical Privacy claim they’d need to know why you borrowed money on a credit card to pay a hospital bill. While it’s not completely wrong, it’s a flashback to COVID times when people said dumb things like “I’m not allowed to tell you whether I have a fever because of HIPPA¹” to avoid getting kicked out of a bar for having the plague.

See, if you’re allowed to tell them that you charged $10,000 to pay an emergency room to fix a broken arm, then they can’t hold that against you when you apply for a mortgage. They’d much rather hold your future in their greedy little hands while you sell your car to pay for a root canal. Their explanation of the law is probably more or less correct. Their claims about the implications of it to us, the residents of California, the patients, and the borrowers, are complete lies.

I didn’t know about AB 2746 until our credit card — which we’re closing today — told us about it. And now that I know what it is, and the lies lenders will tell to oppose it, they’ve convinced me to be in favor of it.

The icing on the cake was their email footer:

ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account.

This was an political astroturfing campaign, not an “account servicing email”.

Again: Liars.

As seen on BART. I love my neighbors.

The National Park Service claims putting a sticker over inappropriate parts of the 2026 pass invalidates it. However, you have an absolute right to carry the pass inside a clear plastic case, and that case may have a sticker on it that tastefully hides the affected area.