Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 19

Strategies, Tactics, & Tips For How Everyday Americans Can Fight Back Together Wherever We Live
https://indivisible.org/resource/guide

A week after the election, we published
"Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink",
an open-source handbook for building nationwide opposition to the coming authoritarian takeover.

The first step: total opposition to Trump’s Project 2025.

🔸Slow the Senate
🔸Make congressional Republicans work for Democratic votes
🔸Break the norms around congressional collegiality
🔸Work with the new surge in anti-Musk, anti-Trump grassroots energy

Together, we are the opposition, and this is our republic
—if we can keep it.

This is the part where we keep it.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/how-to-organize-our-way-out-of-the-trump-musk-putsch/

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has requested the U.S. Postal Service board begin its process to find a successor
-- just months after telling Congress he would remain in the post “until somebody hauls me out of here.”
https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/02/louis-dejoy-step-down-usps-postmaster-general/403059/

A team from Elon Musk’s SpaceX
is reworking the systems at the Air Traffic Control Command Center in Virginia Monday
in the wake of last month’s deadly air disaster in Washington, DC.

The news comes after CNN reportedthat the Federal Aviation Administration fired hundreds of probationary employees who maintain critical air traffic control infrastructure.
The exact number of workers losing their jobs is unknown,
but the union representing them said it was in the “hundreds.”

The Trump administration is trying to eliminate thousands of federal employees as it works with Congressional Republicans on a massive tax cutting bill that is said to favor mostly corporations and the wealthy

Musk’s status as a major government contractor
— mostly through his company SpaceX
— represents a massive conflict of interest that both he and Donald Trump have repeatedly attempted to downplay.
https://www.theverge.com/news/614078/faa-air-traffic-control-spacex-elon-musk-layoff-staff-shortage

REYES: Can we agree that the greatest fighting force ... is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1 percent of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them?

DOJ ATTORNEY: I can't agree with that here.

REYES: Would you agree with me that if our military is negatively impacted in any kind of way that matters ... We all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use. We have a military that is incompetent.
Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn't.
It is pretext.
It is frankly ridiculous.
If you want to get me an officer of the U.S. military who is willing to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage the U.S. military is less prepared because of pronoun usage I will be the first to give you a box of cigars.

https://bsky.app/profile/kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3lihtrd6jmv2t

For a long time it was considered impertinent to refer to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their henchman as Nazis.

But we’ve reached a point where these distinctions has no meaning.

Whatever comes to mind when you think of a Nazi, that is for whom this country is currently being run, and the powers that be aren’t shy about it.

Musk quote tweeted
"He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." at 1:14pm
(14:14 in the 24-hour clock)
with 14 American flags,
a reference to the white supremacist ‘14 Words,’:
"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

It was about as subtle as his Hitler salute on Inauguration Day.

Musk’s Nazi bonafides have been long established,
from his war on the Anti-Defamation League,
to his loud support for Germany’s far-right AfD party.

At a recent party event he told attendees via a virtual appearance,
“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” (He doesn't mean Bratwurst)

Referring to Germany’s Nazi past, he said, “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents…There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

Musk is also obsessed with white birth rates and personally repopulating the Earth, and his hatred of migrants is well-documented.

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/nazis-musk-kliger

With Trump and Musk driving U.S. policy,
Kansas farmers have been played for suckers

https://kansasreflector.com/2025/02/12/with-trump-and-musk-driving-u-s-policy-kansas-farmers-have-been-played-for-suckers/

One of the greatest tricks that Donald Trump and Elon Musk ever pulled is to convince millions of people that DOGE, the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, is about government efficiency.

DOGE isn’t really a department;
it’s not an agency;
it has no statutory authority;
and it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste.

It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government.

The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.

Trump allies make noises about expert failures
—and yes, experts sometimes do fail.

In particular, MAGA world continues to demonize what its constituents believe was the medical establishment’s attempt to curtail civil rights during the coronavirus pandemic.
(Those are arguable charges;
Trump himself presided over a wave of shutdowns in 2020.)

None of these complaints explains why DOGE teams have been unleashed in places such as the Department of Veterans Affairs,
the Federal Aviation Administration,
and the National Reconnaissance Office,
which is responsible for American spy satellites.

Worse, Musk’s team accidentally posted sensitive information from NRO in what one intelligence official called a “significant breach” of security.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/career-civil-servant-end/681712/

Here’s an ACTUAL ad paid for by ELON MUSK that Bezos’s Washington Post DID Run a few months ago.

https://bsky.app/profile/gtconway.bsky.social/post/3liezirp5oc2z

The Washington Post
💥pulled out of running a $115,000 front and back page advert
that called for PresidentDonald Trump to “fire” Elon Musk.

Members of Congress, political pundits and the public have watched the world’s richest man and his non-official advisory body, DOGE,
tear through various government departments, as he attempts to slash bureaucracy and cut $2 trillion in federal spending.

Advocacy group Common Cause,
in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund,
signed an agreement for a scathing anti-Musk wrap advert
for Tuesday’s edition of the newspaper, as well as a full page inside the paper

https://www.yahoo.com/news/washington-post-refuses-run-115-104643707.html

In 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon signed an executive order creating the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

It was a time when pollution made many of our nation’s rivers and streams unsafe for fishing or swimming.

Back then, New York City’s air pollution was so thick that you often couldn’t see the city’s iconic bridges.

🆘Forty-seven years later, there is serious talk of dismantling the agency, or at least slashing its size by two-thirds.

But what does America look like without the EPA❓

From 1971 to 1977 the nascent agency, in an act of prescience, enlisted the services of freelance photographers to help us remember.

These photographers captured images of America’s environmental problems before we’d cleaned them up.

In 2011, the US National Archivesdigitized more than 15,000 pictures from the series “Documerica”.

Here are some of the most compelling.
https://www.popsci.com/america-before-epa-photos/

‘It is going to be terrible’:
a senior in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ prepares for Trump’s dismantling of hard-won environmental progress

The second Trump administration has moved to gut or shutter key offices tasked with environmental issues and civil rights
at both the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/feb/16/louisiana-cancer-alley-trump-pollution?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Environmentalists in Florida are calling on the governor, Ron DeSantis, to declare an emergency as a worsening
“red tide” algae bloom off the state’s south-west coast
threatens popular tourist beaches and blamed for the deaths of wildlife including fish and dolphins.

Several counties have issued health alerts in response to the outbreak,
which scientists say began in the
Gulf of Mexico last year when Hurricanes Helene and Milton stirred up nutrient-rich waters that feed the algae.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/16/florida-red-tide-ron-desantis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

"Angst and anxiety and, to a certain extent, grief,” is how Sudip Parikh, who leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the organization hosting the conference, summed up the mood on Saturday.

News about layoffs at government agencies rippled across conference-goers’ phones

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/climate/trump-science-funding-cuts.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Delays in CDC analyses of infectious disease threats
and agency silence
will harm Americans,
doctors and public health experts warn

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/urgent-cdc-data-on-influenza-and-bird-flu-go-missing-as-outbreaks-escalate/

The IRS will lay off thousands of probationary workers in the middle of tax season, according to two sources familiar with the agency’s plans, and cuts could happen as soon as next week.
This comes as the Trump administrationintensified sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce,
by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection.
It’s unclear how many IRS workers will be affected.
Previously, the administration announced a plan to offer buyouts to almost all federal employees through
a “deferred resignation program” to quickly reduce the government workforce.
The program deadline was Feb. 6, and administration officials said employees who accept will be able to stop working while still collecting a paycheck until Sept. 30.
However, IRS employees involved in the 2025 tax season were told they will not be allowed to accept a buyout offer from the Trump administration until after the taxpayer filing deadline, according to a letter sent recently to IRS employees.
https://apnews.com/article/irs-treasury-layoffs-doge-tax-season-2be8db11fdd510b7ce6ac0db56f9a503

This is about rightwing people but it’s also about libs/leftists who post “oh you’re just figuring this out NOW” or “oh you’re SURPRISED by this?”

It’s cynicism and nihilism wrapped up in the idea you’re smart for feeling that way
-- when really you’re either scared or empty inside

https://bsky.app/profile/brendelbored.bsky.social/post/3liacjf2hhs2u

With egg prices in the United States soaring because of the spread of H5N1 influenza virus among poultry,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) yesterday conditionally approved a vaccine to protect the birds.
President Donald Trump’s administration may therefore soon face a fraught decision on whether to join the ranks of other nations
—including China, France, Egypt, and Mexico
—that vaccinate poultry against H5N1.
Although many influenza researchers contend that vaccination can help control spread of the deadly virus,
the U.S. government has long resisted allowing its use because of politics and trade concerns that many contend are unscientific
Note that USDA is not under the control of Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-conditionally-approves-vaccine-protect-poultry-avian-flu

"Free Speech Advocate" shares U.S. classified information with the entire world

Musk’s team posted information about the staff and size of a U.S. intelligence agency on their new website, HuffPost reports.

DOGE has been criticized for the level of access into sensitive government departments, including the Treasury Department,
-- but how they got the classified information isn’t clear. 

https://newrepublic.com/post/191580/elon-musk-doge-classified-us-intel-data-website

During the storm, an extreme wind event that meteorologists confirmed Friday was a a weak tornado hit a mobile home park in Oxnard, ripping roofs off homes and tearing power lines to the ground, according to the National Weather Service.

There were no immediate reports of people harmed, but around a dozen properties were damage
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-02-13/strong-atmospheric-river-strikes-california-when-will-l-a-get-hit-what-you-need-to-know