This article compiles some information, but I know a lot of lawyers are currently going through the work of citing specific provisions and putting out guides to people’s rights.

I believe the death penalty is immoral because I don’t believe there is such a thing as an act so heinous that it would be moral to kill them after the fact.

There is room in my moral framework for killing in self defense or defense of others, but I leave that to require some kind of immediacy. And I think enemy combatants in a hot war are fair game, too, but that requires a hot war as a precondition, and I don’t think we’re there right now.

To clear up some of what you’re saying, it sounds like you’re applying private sector rules to government jobs.

Government probationary jobs have fewer protections than non-probationary, but they still have way more protections than the private sector. Once they make it past probation, government employees can only be fired after 30 days notice and an opportunity to challenge the firing in writing, so it takes a while to lay the groundwork for firing an employee. And then a fired employee has appeal rights.

While on probation, government employees don’t have the right to notice before firing, or an opportunity to challenge the firing before it happens, and their appeal rights are seriously limited. But the law is that they still can’t be fired except for poor performance.

These were his loyalists. He purged the career staff from leadership/management positions in these offices, and replaced them with people like these 6 prosecutors (conservative credentials like clerking for Scalia). The leadership in the Public Integrity Section got forced out (either resigned or got reassigned to an immigration task force), so the leaders who remained were specifically appointed by Trump.

The US Attorneys generally all resign upon a change of administration, unless asked to stay, and this Danielle Sassoon was appointed acting US Attorney by Trump. She’s a conservative Republican.

You’re just not paying attention. Here is the EPA map of where Combined Sewer Outflows happen.

As you can see, it’s hundreds of American communities, including major cities like New York, Chicago, DC, San Francisco, Seattle.

Oil is just in a precarious position with supply and demand.

High prices will accelerate demand destruction, as people and businesses move to cheaper energy sources, like solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear, plus spur the continued development of grid scale storage and demand management technologies. Sustained high prices could cause lifestyle and consumption habits to change, too: fewer gas guzzlers, fewer supercommuters, improved shipping efficiency, etc.

Low prices would put strain on the finances of producers, whether for profit corporations in the West or state owned (or closely affiliated) producers in places like Saudi Arabia or Russia, and would weaken those countries’ influence on geopolitical issues.

There’s a reason they want a strong cartel, which is what OPEC tries to be, but that cartel has been weakened considerably by non-OPEC Plus nations becoming huge producers. OPEC cut supply to try to hurt Biden, but it ended up being a handout to American, Canadian, and Norwegian companies, by propping up prices while losing market share. Meanwhile, sanctions on Russia (and Iran and Venezuela) add a bunch of friction (and some cost) to their exports, so that they need higher prices to break even.

For the first time in modern history, societies have access to non-fossil-fuel energy sources in competitive volume and price, to where an oil oligopoly can’t push around consumers. Trump can’t put that back in the bottle.

We can agree to disagree. I don’t miss the days of paying for long distance phone calls, all the waiting around in trying to link up with friends at a designated place, looking up addresses in a physical book of map grids, manually maintaining a calendar in a planner, driving across town and waiting in line for tickets to a show. The internet made things better.

The other stuff back then wasn’t always better, either. Smoking eveywhere, unreliable cars, air pollution, crime, etc., really cut into quality of life.

Yeah. The instant this bullshit started happening, last week or ideally earlier, go to a federal judge. Ask for an injunction to allow you to physically put a stop to it, using some specifically named authorized law enforcement or military assets. Have something prepared for why it justifies that level of response, lord knows it wouldn’t be hard to come up with.

There were some lawsuits filed:

Doe v. OPM, Case No. 1:25-cv-234 (D.D.C.) was filed on January 27, seeking to disconnect the DOGE server from OPM systems. Today, February 4, there was a motion filed for a temporary restraining order.

Doe v. DOJ, Case No. 1:25-cv-325 (D.D.C.) was filed today, February 4. With the filing came a motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent the disclosure of the identities of the roughly 6000 FBI agents who worked on January 6 cases.

Maybe they’re granted, maybe not. I hope they are. But even if these motions are denied, this will at least force the Trump administration to make public statements and representations about what they’re doing. It’s a semblance of transparency by making the Trump people stand up and justify this bullshit.

Peak was mid to late 2000’s. Late enough for most people to have broadband Internet and lots of websites with user submitted content that bypassed the traditional cultural gatekeepers, before smartphones and social media ruined everything.

The same preppers who hoarded ammo and canned foods and water filters couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask when a real pandemic showed up, too.

Does anyone have the picture of these guys that was shared on X, the one that Elon Musk was proudly replying to?

You kill them?

Yeah, refusing to buy a Tesla is the same as killing Elon Musk. That’s the level of nuance and detail in my post, and you’ve distilled it perfectly.

I’m not a fan of treating trumpers horribly

I agree with you, at least with people who simply voted for Trump. But I do think that people who campaigned for him, who run messaging on his behalf, who implement his orders, and otherwise actively take part in advancing his agenda, are fair game for active resistance. And those who are unrepentant about supporting Trump and continue to support Trump don’t need the benefit of our friendship.

Thanks. I wanted to organize into the four parts that I did, because I assumed that each part would be harder and harder to find a home for. But the Part 1 stuff that is clearly legal and an exercise of one’s own rights should still be communicated on as many platforms as possible.

And no, these aren’t normal times. The entire structure of how we talk about politics goes out the window when all the guardrails in political power itself are gone.

That’s what I mean by “lobbying.” If you have direct contact to a member of Congress, great. That’s better than most. Start that two-way conversation, making sure that the elected officials know what the constituents feel, and how these sweeping, broad actions translate into specific instances of pain in their district, in their own families. And make them come back at you to test and examine whether their own actions miss the mark or are being understood by the voter as a fight on their side. It’s two way persuasion.

But it’s every lever we can pull. If you know elected officials, talk to them. If you know their staffers, talk to them. If you know lobbyists or donors or family members or friends of the people who hold power, tell them. Many are out of touch, but flooding every channel of communication will force them to at least hear what is being said.

Yeah, I’ve changed it up to be more bullet point oriented. It looked OK on the default desktop browser interface, but some mobile apps really smushed things together.

I didn’t know eggs come in metric outside of the US.

Miss Vickies originated as a Canadian brand but was purchased by Frito Lay in the 90’s.

It obviously translates to baculum, the dick bone.

They’ll have a bin of loose spare stems at the motor pool garage

I don’t think these law enforcement agencies are as competent as you seem to assume. Procurement for federal agencies is comically inept, including basic things like pens or staplers.