To say that Donald Trump has been waging an ideological war against the American free press would be an understatement in the extreme. Even attempting to list out the many, many ways in which he has attempted to threaten, sue, undermine, stifle, chill, attack, and hamstring media outlets would be a waste of time. No thinking person fails to understand that he hates any media outlets that don’t behave like full sycophants and no reasonable person thinks that his actions are a positive for the country.

But sometimes his administration really does endeavor to show just how corrupt and against the First Amendment it is, in the starkest possible terms. Stars & Stripes is a news outlet partially funded by the Pentagon. It is under congressional mandate to operate on 1st Amendment principles and describes its work like this:

Stars and Stripes provides independent news and information to the U.S. military community, including active-duty servicemembers, DoD civilians, veterans, contractors, and their families. Stars and Stripes retains its editorial independence and is congressionally mandated to be governed by First Amendment principles, but it is part of the Pentagon’s Defense Media Activity. The Pentagon funding that makes up roughly half of Stars and Stripes’ annual budget is primarily used to print and distribute the newspaper to troops scattered across the globe, including in warzones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The remainder of the news organization’s funding comes from advertising and subscriptions.

Earlier this year, however, a Pentagon spokesman said the administration planned to overhaul Stars & Stripes, with a specific aim to remove content it considered to be “woke distractions that siphon morale” and instead, presumably, force in content that does the opposite. If any of that sounds like an encroachment on editorial independence, congratulations, you have a working prefrontal cortex.

Erik Slavin has worked at Stars & Stripes for over two decades and was named Editor in Chief in 2025. He recently sat for an interview with CBS and was asked about the Pentagon’s stated aim to interfere in the editorial content of the paper. While noting that he had no idea what “woke content” the Pentagon was objecting to and what the standard for that would be, because nobody at the Pentagon bothered to tell him, he indicated that any attempt to censor the paper by the Pentagon would be his red line and counter to both the law and Pentagon policy that the paper be independent.

So of course Pete Hegseth fired him.

The Pentagon on Friday fired the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes and a top reporter for insubordination after they spoke publicly against any interference by the Defense Department in the military news outlet that has a long history of editorial independence. It was the latest move by an administration that has grown increasingly aggressive toward the news media.

Slavin said he was being fired “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” Korte participated in the same interview.

“I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies,” Slavin said.

This is a newspaper with a long, long history. It has been publishing since the American Civil War. It has endured despite the ire of military men far greater than its current whiskey-soaked Secretary of Defense/War/Whatever. General George Patton once tried to ban the paper over cartoons depicting American soldiers in a way he didn’t like, only to have General Eisenhower tell him to calm the hell down and not interfere.

The skin of people like Trump and Hegseth is apparently as thin as the paper upon which Stars & Stripes is printed. To so perfectly encapsulate their own anti-speech desires by firing someone simply for saying he wouldn’t bow to government censorship is significant, though unsurprising.

Meanwhile, American military members appear to be losing a news outlet that focuses on them.

If Sony thought that the outrage over its decision to make the next PlayStation entirely disc-less was going to dissipate quickly, it was wrong. There are actually multiple organic campaigns to protest Sony’s decision to ditch physical media now. We already talked about the plans for a purchase and usage blackout of all things PlayStation in late August. Now we can add to that a social media campaign of sorts going around, called “No disc, no buy.” While the name is self-explanatory as to its purpose, what’s interesting is how this mantra and pushback using it are appearing everywhere.

An example of that can be found in the most recent State of Play showcase Sony held for Phantom Blade Zero, during which Sony decided to keep the chat associated with the stream live. You already know what happened from there.

Choosing to leave chat open for this particular State of Play was a curious move from Sony, given how the forthcoming action-RPG from Chinese team S-Game has already courted controversy when it was revealed its pre-orders are entirely digital, with no disc-based version being touted. That led to much speculation that the October 29, 2026 game may be releasing without a physical version at all, leaping to the front of the pack ahead of Sony’s plan to eliminate discs entirely by 2028. And given there’s nothing PlayStation-related of late that isn’t inundated with furious remarks from those fighting for physical media, you can be sure they were out in force throughout the presentation.

The comments relating to bringing back physical media, or simply repeating the “NO DISC NO BUY” mantra, went on and on and on. Sony since attempted to play hide and seek with all of this by disallowing chat replay on the video, but the damage had already been done.

And this isn’t a one-off. In other game showcases Sony has likewise been inundated with fury over its decision to end physical media for its next console. And, as Kotaku rightfully points out, while digital purchases dominate the American market, that isn’t the case internationally. In other words, the anger overseas is far greater than here in the States.

It’s tempting to write off these respondents, given the reality that now only 15 percent of PlayStation games are ever bought on disc. However, what often goes forgotten is that the 15-percent stat represents the United States, and doesn’t reflect the game-buying habits of players in many other countries. According to a recently published report from Germany, Germans still buy 58 percent of their games on physical discs. In France, disc buyers are also still in the majority at 55 percent. Even Sony’s homeland of Japan sat at 51-percent physical when it came to Resident Evil Requiem. Meanwhile in the UK, reports suggest 40 to 45 percent of games are still sold on real, plastic discs. The end of discs is going to disproportionately affect many countries, and there’s a good chance these people are letting their voices be heard!

Will Sony listen to this sizable percentage of its customers? I doubt it. Surely the company knew this would be a controversial decision and has likely already steeled itself in preparation for all of this anger. Digital games mean more margin for Sony and they’ve done whatever math which has led them to believe that this is the more profitable decision.

This means that game preservation will become much harder. It also means the stories we currently hear about people having their digitally “bought” games ripped away from them are likely to increase exponentially.

As you’ll recall, RFK Jr., who is totally not checked out of his job at HHS, has managed to sneak in hosting a government sponsored cooking show in between not doing anything about the country’s problems with measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough, and so on.

Well, two episodes are now out, and the reviews are not great. Some have referred the episodes as mere “long, boring political ads,” while others have simply pointed out that the meals so far taste like shit. But while those particular reviews may rely heavily on subjective matters of opinion, the main thrust of Kennedy’s show does not. And that thrust is the promise that American families can feed themselves fresh, wholesome meals for less than $5 a plate. CNN’s Tom Foreman appeared on Erin Burnett’s show and walked viewers through what buying ingredients at the grocery store to make one of Kennedy’s meals would actually cost.

When we started buying ingredients used in the show, even going for the lowest prices at a big competitive chain, the cost heated up fast. This was the cheapest frozen wild-caught sockeye salmon we could find. The closest to what they are using. They priced theirs at $8.99. The cheapest we could find, even with the deal from the store, was more than $24. Now the greens mix, that was about the same cost. So were the eggs on a per egg basis. But that’s the trick here, because they’re only pricing that one egg out of the carton. And that gets worse with other things.

For example, this red onion, they say they only spent eight cents on this because that’s how much they used. Getting the whole onion cost us more than a dollar. And look at this. This is the avocado mayonnaise. They priced this at 40 cents, because they were only using a couple of tablespoons to buy. The whole thing cost us more than $11. They’re only pricing parts of it. And grocery stores don’t sell things that way.

In other words, you can’t associate the cost of buying a meal by portioning out what ingredients you use and how much of it. The total cost of the ingredients has still left your bank account. We’re not talking about restaurants, where marginal costs per plate make all the sense in the world. Those are businesses that buy in bulk and have to calculate a profit into their pricing. These are families. Hungry families and the only profit they’re looking for is healthy caloric intake.

Well, Kennedy lost his shit on the internet over the segment, all because Burnett and Foreman refused to play his particular version of make believe. And, after accusing Burnett of having Trump Derangement Syndrome (does that come from vaccines and chemtrails too?), he did so in a way that perfectly illuminated the fact that he doesn’t understand that homes are not restaurants.

After the report aired, Kennedy hit back on X, trashing the host and accusing her of having “abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic.”

“CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe. If you put a squirt of ketchup on your burger, would you be surprised if the restaurant charged you for the whole bottle?” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy argued his show uses “standard recipe costing,” saying “we count what the recipe actually uses,” while “the rest” of each purchased ingredient “stays in the kitchen.”

First off, this is a mostly misleading bit of pushback. While Foreman’s segment did tally up the grocery bill needed in order to make Kennedy’s meal, because that’s how shopping works, that wasn’t the only cost discrepancy he uncovered. For some items, the cost difference was in the marginal quantity of the ingredient used in each meal, that wasn’t the case with every ingredient, such as the fish itself.

So Kennedy’s claims in his show, like most everything he claims, are built on funny math and lies. It’s simply not how grocery shopping for a family works. It’s not how meal planning works. What could be interesting would be for the show to demonstrate from start to finish how to plan out a family’s meals for a week, shop for the ingredients for those meals in a way that you can double up on them to make full use of their cost, and build a recipe list around that and then see what the per-meal cost is.

But that would be way too much work for Kennedy and would place him way outside the cushy, entitled, wealthy experience he has had his entire life as a Kennedy.

Of all the things I thought the Trump administration would cause to enter the public lexicon, I certainly did not have screwworms on my list. If you somehow haven’t heard of this, screwworms are actually a fly that lays its eggs by burrowing into the flesh of other animals. Those animals are mostly cattle, sometimes household pets, and even occasionally humans. It’s a horrific experience and can lead to death in a few weeks. We used to have an international monitoring program in Mexico through USAID designed to stop the problem at the source before it ever gets to America, but Elon Musk’s DOGE did away with that program, citing it as unnecessary. Well, now screwworms are back in Texas and surrounding states, and they put at risk $2 billion in potential damage to the Texas economy alone. It’s bad enough that this particular administration has decided to pull drones from patrolling the southern border for scary illegal brown people to instead hunt for evidence of screwworm infection in domestic cattle.

But if you don’t think all of that is bad enough of a look for what DOGE and the administration did to cause this, what if we had thousands of dead puppies and kittens in the news instead?

Adoptions are on hold for thousands of dogs and cats in Texas, potentially putting the animals at risk of being euthanized, because of efforts to stop the spread of the New World screwworm, an insect that has crossed the border from Mexico into the United States for the first time in 60 years.

“It’s thrown a wrench into things, for small rescues as well as the bigger shelters,” said Mia Bendixsen, executive director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network, which promotes animal welfare laws.

The screwworm can lay eggs that hatch into flesh-eating larvae in wounds or mucous on any mammal, and of the dozens of infections in southern Texas and southeastern New Mexico, several have been in dogs. Forty-four states have restricted the movements of pets from infested areas, creating a hardship for shelters from Texas that typically send thousands of animals to other states each year.

There are several factors at work here, combining to risk the live of thousands of good boys and girls at these shelters. The screwworm issue is one of them. Another is that Texas is notorious for having low spay and neuter rates for pets and, specifically, working animals. Dogs in particular tend to be left in their natural state because ranchers somehow think that spaying or neutering them will decrease their drive to work.

Whether that’s actually true or not I can’t really say, but the fact is that sentiment was around long before this year and it’s the screwworms that are causing a major uptick in unadopted animals in Texas. And the euthanizing of thousands of animals would be just one of many consequences of us choosing actively to let screwworms become an American problem again.

Restrictions on animal transports followed efforts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to keep the New World screwworm fly from crossing the border with Mexico.

Those efforts include construction of a $750 million fly factory in southern Texas for breeding billions of sterile males set to open in April 2027. The U.S. had largely eradicated the fly by the early 1970s by breeding sterile males and releasing them from planes to mate with females, who laid eggs that wouldn’t hatch.

Smaller facilities in Texas and southern Mexico have been dispersing sterile flies bred in Panama, and another is planned for Arizona.

When it comes to this particular issue, it’s obvious that there were no taxpayer cost savings due to DOGE’s fuckery. If anything, it seems like we’ll be spending more money to remediate the problem than we did keeping it from becoming one.

And when you layer on the dead bodies of thousands of cats and dogs on top of it all, well, it’s quite a legacy for Musk and his DOGE bros to leave behind.

The past 18 months have seen a significant number of health issues, perhaps crises, arise in America. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough, and more have all been in the news. RFK Jr. is either stroking his pet conspiracy theories alongside Trump, or else he’s completely out to lunch. In the meantime, Kennedy is also continuing to sow doubts about vaccines generally, while also trying to claim he’s not, which helped result in a Trump executive order to reduce vaccination schedule recommendations for children. It’s as though this administration saw before it a four alarm fire and asked out loud, “How can we make this worse?”

And worse is likely to happen, because, despite all of this, the vaccination rates in American school children continues to fall.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday released data on the vaccination rates of US kindergarteners in the 2025–2026 school year, revealing that rates have once again decreased from the previous school year.

Vaccination rates have been slipping since the 2019–2020 school year, when the US had obtained rates of around 95 percent, the threshold needed to keep outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases from spreading in communities. The latest data shows the US is moving further away from that target.

Nationally, only 92.4 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the 2025–2026 school year, down from 92.5 percent last year. Coverage with the DTaP vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (whooping cough), similarly fell from 92.1 percent to 92.0 percent.

This is bad quite generally, but it’s not equally bad in every state. And it’s very easy to demonstrate that state and local policies when it comes to vaccine requirements for school and the availability for non-religious exemptions are having quite the effect. This data is partially from the last school year, for instance, but it does a nice job highlighting the differences between states. In California, where exemptions face relatively tight requirements, 95.7% of kindergartners had the MMR vaccinations. In Florida, where the DeSantis administration has attempted to end all vaccination requirements for public schools, 88.9% of kindergartners had their MMR vaccinations.

The messaging from state and local leaders matters. The same is true for federal leaders. Public and health policy matter. And when we fall below herd immunity vaccination levels, the consequences are, well, precisely what we’re seeing out in the American wild at the moment.

If the overall number of exemptions exceeds 5 percent in any given location, it means that the location will not be able to achieve the 95 percent coverage target. Currently, 24 states have exemption rates at or above 5 percent. That’s up from 14 states in the 2023–2024 school year.

The data lands as vaccine-preventable diseases continue to rise and spread in the US. The country is on the verge of losing its measles elimination status as cases have reached a 34-year high and are still ticking upward. Last week, President Trump and Kennedy continued their efforts to undermine childhood vaccines, announcing an executive order to reduce the number of recommended vaccinations. The order has no scientific basis, and at a White House signing event, Trump and Kennedy spread vaccine falsehoods, misinformation, and disinformation.

This will get worse before it gets better, in other words. And the only real question is how many people have to get sick and/or die before we correct course.

This Buc-ee’s vs. the Beaver’s Mini-Mart is just not going to go away. While Buc-ee’s has made quite the name for itself as a trademark bully over the past several years, it may have finally run into a combination that is more than the corporation can handle. Between John Oliver’s continued coverage of this lawsuit, in which he is clearly on the side of the mini-mart and in which he is attempting to goad Buc-ee’s into a lawsuit, combined with the community of Beavercreek which isn’t having this shit, the PR is starting to look really bad here.

As a result, the locals in Beavercreek are getting ornery. You can see blurry proof of that in a picture of what vandals apparently did to a Buc-ee’s billboard nearby.

A Buc-ee’s highway advertisement along state Route 4 in Riverside, Ohio, was vandalized amid a controversial lawsuit between the popular chain and a small mini-mart in Beavercreek, Ohio.

My friends in the media can do their half-assed blurring all they want, but someone turned “Buc-ee’s” into “Fuc-ee’s” and then added some otherwise indecipherable graffiti. Now, I’m not here to encourage anyone to participate in vandalism, or break any other law for that matter. But actions like this certainly do give you a sense of just how pissed off the locals are at Buc-ee’s bullying one of its local businesses. This has become a national story and a local one, meaning that the breadth of anger at the company is both intimate and wide-spread.

And I have very little time for the obvious gaslighting that Buc-ee’s is attempting to pull off as a result. Huber Heights is the Ohio town in which Buc-ee’s opened up its first Ohio location and CEO Arch Aplin apparently attempted to enlist the town’s mayor to try to placate the locals.

In a public Facebook post published Aug. 7, Huber Heights Mayor Jeff Gore wrote that there were “two sides to every story” and that he had been in contact with Buc-ee’s CEO Arch Aplin.

Gore wrote that Vik Boparai had filed for the trade name “Beavers Mini Mart” and that the name was in conflict with a federal trademark owned by Buc-ee’s. He said Aplin informed him that Boparai had filed for a federal trademark for “Beavermart,” which “would have given him access to set up Beavermarts all across the country.” Gore noted that the filing was made a “few months after” Buc-ee’s officials announced a location in the Dayton area.

“Mr. Aplin told me directly that Buc-ee’s had no issues with Beavermart using the Beaver logo in Beavercreek. He understood and said that makes sense. What Buc-ee’s did not want was a series of Beavermarts popping up across the state or regionally or eventually nationally that violated their trademark,” the post reads in part.

Two things on this. First, whether two trademarks are in conflict is not for any mayor, nor even one of the trademark holders to determine on their own. That is for the USPTO and the court system to decide, should it get that far. Gore’s commentary here on that is pointless and meaningless.

As for Aplin’s comments about having no issues with the current location’s name or signage, his own fucking lawsuit says otherwise. I’ve embedded the suit below so you can read it for yourself. The complaint specifically calls out the current signage, the cartoon beaver mascot, the current color scheme of its branding, and even the expression of said beaver mascot and states that this is all trademark infringement in its current form. In fact, it asks for relief specifically in the form of an injunction against the mini-mart for continued use of that branding as it currently exists and then asks for a written report from the mini-mart confirming under oath that it has complied.

This is gaslighting. Aplin is lying about what his own lawsuit is demanding. And if there is any one rule in crisis PR above all else, it’s simply: don’t lie. Because that makes the PR even worse as a result, which is exactly what has now happened.

A couple of months back, we discussed how screwworm infections had reappeared in Texas for the first time in decades. The foreign surveillance program designed to keep this from occurring in partnership with countries south of the border dissipated after losing funding as a result of the DOGE bros deciding it just wasn’t worth it. So, just as with measles, the country had to deal with a problem that we had once essentially eradicated with a good government program.

Screwworms are a very real and serious problem if left unchecked. Flies lay their eggs in livestock, mainly cattle, and it can kill the host in a matter of weeks. There are currently reports that hundreds of Mexican citizens have also been infected. And on the American side of the border, the problem is getting worse, not better. As a result, the government is diverting drones from patrolling the border to instead look for screwworm infections in livestock.

Since the first screwworm cases were detected in South Texas in June, the US Department of Agriculture and US Customs and Border Protection have been conducting “one of the most extensive animal-health surveillance operations in the country,” the USDA said on August 10 in social media posts on platforms like X and Facebook.

The effort involves at least 200 drones owned by the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. But the actual number in use “varies depending on availability and need,” a USDA spokesperson told Ars.

The USDA also described performing 1,226 drone flights that surveyed more than 23,000 animals as of August 11.

This all costs money. As does the reinvestment in facilities to release sterile flies to reduce their overall numbers in both Mexico and domestically. $21 million was spent in Mexico for this. Untold millions are being spent for a facility at Moore Air Base in Texas. $25 million is being spent right now to build another facility in Arizona. The grant that DOGE canceled funded animal disease surveillance programs generally, including that of screwworms, cost $170 million. We’ve likely already eclipsed the cost of keeping screwworms out of the country in the government’s response this outbreak.

And what it’s reappearance risks is nearly $2 billion in damage to the Texas economy.

$1.8 billion. That’s how much economic damage could be caused by another outbreak on the scale of the Texas incident in 1976, according to USDA estimates.

This is the very definition of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. It’s governmental malpractice and a failure of stewardship of taxpayer dollars and the economic health of America, which was the very fucking thing DOGE was pitched to have as its north star.

Our government is currently very broken, and brutally stupid. And we have yet another health issue, not to mention a food supply issue, as a result.

We’ve talked a great deal about the Stop Killing Games movement and those discussions have typically traveled along two paths of importance.

On the one hand, the movement is very important to those of us that care about the preservation of video games. A huge problem with allowing developers and publishers to simply shutdown backend servers needed to run games that were designed to require those same server is that those games simply disappear in their original form. If we accept that video games are both art and culture, and I don’t think either is particularly arguable at this point, allowing shared culture to disappear before it enters the public domain is an unacceptable violation of the bargain that is copyright to begin with. In those instances, developers and publishers got their monopoly, but negated the part where said monopoly is supposed to be limited in nature, with the art ending up in the public domain.

The second path of importance is that of the rights of the individual consumer. The public in large part believes it’s buying a game when it makes these purchases. And, yes, the truth buried in terms of service and other legal documents is that in many cases the public is only buying a limited license to play the game, one which the publisher can revoke in part or whole at any time by shutting down support for the product. But if you think that this fact somehow makes none of this a problem, you’re a corporate boot-licker and you should be ashamed of yourself. Sometimes these shutdowns happen very shortly after the game is released and promises of refunds to those that paid for them can be fleeting.

But, man, if you think it’s bad for a developer or publisher to not make good on refunds of a purchased game it shut down, wait until you get a load of Cold Iron Studios, which recently shutdown the cloud-only version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch.

Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content).

Cold Iron Studios hasn’t offered customers refunds.

TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which is a 2021 co-op, third-person shooter based on the Alien film franchise. However, that would mean paying money for a game that you have already paid money for once.

There’s chutzpah, and then there’s fucking chutzpah. The developer ripped away the ability to play a game that people spent money on. Then, rather than offering refunds, they instead offered to sell the game again to those same customers on the new console for a slightly lesser price. That isn’t giving your customers the middle finger. It’s gather up an entire city’s worth of middle fingers and jamming them up your customers’ noses and then asking them to pay for it.

Now, nobody thinks that this version of the game was bought in massive numbers on the original Switch. But I don’t really see how that matters. If you sell something to someone, then take it away, you should return the money you got for it. If you’re hiding behind the “it’s just a license” mantra, then you’re telling the public not to trust you. And maybe simply to not trust digital purchases entirely. And, given some other recent news, that becomes a pretty big problem.

When companies erase digital copies from people’s libraries and make games harder to access, the recent uproar over the announcement that there won’t be physical discs made for PlayStation games as of January 2028 makes sense.

The folks at Stop Killing Games have this exactly right, because situations like this are not only untenable, but the lack of action is making these companies all the more brazen. The audacity of taking something away from a customer and trying to get them to pay for it again is breathtaking.

As is the unwillingness to act on the part of our government and consumer rights groups.

As expected, this didn’t take very long. Earlier this week we pointed out that Donald Trump supplanted RFK Jr. as the world’s most infamous anti-vaxxer when he vomited out a bonkers executive order that reduced the recommended childhood vaccination schedule for American children, pared down which diseases were recommended for vaccination, and demanded that the MMR vaccine be split into three separate shots on a spaced out timeline. Combined with Trump outright lying in the ceremony about how the MMR shot was the size of a soda bottle and was “lethal”, the waters around inoculating children against truly horrifying diseases became much more muddy.

The consequences for this will be the result of the actions of two different groups of people. The first are American parents. Because an EO is nothing like a federal mandate, parents will have the greatest influence on what shots their children receive, which is exactly how it should be. What shouldn’t be, however, is having an American population in which 30% proudly wear shirts and hats that say “Trump is right about everything!” and act upon that statement. Which means some not-insignificant percentage of American parents will take Trump’s EO and justifications as gospel and will refuse to get some of these shots for their children. That will endanger their own children, of course, but it will also endanger all the rest of us, too. Less vaccinations mean those that have health conditions so they can’t get vaccinated are put at risk as herd immunity disappears, while the rest of us get to sit around and wonder if the increased presence of these diseases will allow for them to evolve beyond our current immunity protections.

The other group are medical professionals themselves. Fortunately, that group at least is already giving a giant middle finger to Trump and his toilet-paper EO. Here’s a local example from Florida.

Pediatricians in Florida are pushing back on President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for changes to the childhood vaccination schedule.

And the state’s leading pediatric medical association, the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said they’re not on board.

“We don’t answer to this nonsense, we don’t recommend changing it,” said Dr. Rana Alissa, president of the FCAAP and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida. “We go by evidence-based science, we don’t go by politics and politicians.”

This is helpful, but it won’t be enough. Still, it is a good thing that the actual medical professionals out there are informing their patients that Trump and Kennedy are medical morons and that they shouldn’t listen to them. Those doctors are going to have some heavy lifting on their hands, specifically because Trump decided to make it harder for those doctors to keep their patients healthy.

In a statement, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics Dr. Andrew Racine called the executive order “dangerous.”

The order “will do nothing to support families of children with autism or advance understanding of the condition,” Racine said in a released statement. “The only purpose of this announcement is to sow confusion so that more people doubt the importance of vaccines. Delaying or skipping shots is risky, especially as measles continues to spread and children go back to school.”

This is where I think it’s worth reminding you all that the case count of measles for 2026 is already at least 2,465, compared with last year’s total of 2,289. And I’ll add on to that the fact that 68% of those cases occurred in children 19 years or younger and 93% of all cases occur in those that are unvaccinated or in which a vaccination status cannot be confirmed.

In other words, the very group of people that are currently being the most harmed by measles are in the crosshairs of this executive order for things to get much, much worse for them. And, and I cannot stress this all, for the rest of us as well.

The Buc-ee’s trademark bullying saga continues! The company, once best known for building ridiculously enormous gas station and convenience store combinations has more recently become nearly as infamous for its bullying and litigious behavior. Buc-ee’s has a habit of suing all kinds of other businesses for trademark infringement, so long as those other businesses use cartoon animals in their logos, or have any kind of reference to beavers in their name and branding. John Oliver and his crew on Last Week Tonight recently caught wind of all of this and decided to poke the beaver in the eye, spinning up their own store featuring clothing with its anthropomorphic squirrel mascot on it and text that reads “Buc Off!”, and closed that segment begging Buc-ee’s to file suit over it all.

The company didn’t do so. Instead, they continued their trademark bullying ways and sued a small convenience store in Beavercreek, Ohio, called Beaver’s Mini Mart. Notably, that store has been doing business for many years and Buc-ee’s only recently opened a location 16 miles or so away.

If you thought this would somehow escape Oliver and his team, you were wrong. Oliver once again closed his latest show with the same topic.

But in Last Week Tonight’s Aug. 9 episode, Oliver doubled down, extending the timeline of Buc-Off merch sales in response to Buc-ee’s suing Beaver’s Mini Mart in Ohio.

“The good news is we’ve raised almost half a million dollars for Hunger Free America so far,” Oliver said. “The bad news is it doesn’t seem Buc-ee’s got the message, because apparently they’re at it again. Yep, turns out, they’re still filing lawsuits,” Oliver continued. “You might be trying to name the Buc-ee’s beaver Mitch McConnell, because it seems this b—h will not quit.”

You can see the clip below if you have an HBO subscription (the link is for the whole episode, but it should start at the 31 minute mark).

Oliver recounts several details why this latest lawsuit is so stupid. The name of the town. The way the company is pissing off the local residents and causing them to rally around the local convenience store. The bad press. And, lastly, drawing the continued ire of Last Week Tonight, which seems dedicated to continuing to point out just how shitty Buc-ee’s is being in all of this.

Oliver noted that while the Buc-Off online store was supposed to close Sept. 8, it is “staying f–king open” for as long as Buc-ee’s is suing Beaver’s Mini Mart. Chron has reached out to Buc-ee’s legal counsel for comment. 

Before the episode ended, Last Week Tonight mascot Mr. Nutterbutter made an appearance in a Beaver’s Mini Mart T-shirt. When the mascot made a sad gesture, Oliver asked if he was disappointed that the travel stop still hadn’t sued them. When Mr. Nutterbutter said yes, Oliver had words of reassurance for the giant squirrel. 

“It could still happen,” Oliver said. “Especially because our store is still open.”

I can only hope that Buc-ee’s’ plan to wait for Oliver to get bored of all of this doesn’t work.