The magic here is that the Library of Congress has the Capitol Police backing them, and they answer to Congress, not the President.

Context for those who dont know it:

The absence of sparrows, which traditionally kept locust populations in check, allowed swarms to ravage fields of grain and rice. The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962. The death toll from starvation during this period reached 20 to 30 million people

A large part of what they do is research. Taking away a couple billion a year that the government spends on that at Harvard is a big deal, even if the institution can ultimately survive it

Only when they can performatively blow smoke in people’s faces. You can’t do that with a hot water heater.

All you have to do is click through to the lawsuit they link

STATE OF NEW YORK; COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS; STATE OF ARIZONA; STATE OF CALIFORNIA; STATE OF COLORADO; STATE OF CONNECTICUT; STATE OF DELAWARE; DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA; STATE OF ILLINOIS; STATE OF MAINE; STATE OF MARYLAND; THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN; STATE OF MINNESOTA; STATE OF NEW JERSEY; STATE OF NEW MEXICO; STATE OF OREGON; STATE OF RHODE ISLAND; and STATE OF WASHINGTON

In short, most of the ones with a Democrat as Attorney General

The concerns are big enough that Waltz is being shunted off to the UN instead of being allowed to stay where he is.

Signal makes it believable by providing source code and reproducible builds. It doesn’t rule out the possibility that they’ve done something clever with the random number generator, or have the app store you use give you a compromised app, or provide any protection against endpoint compromise, but it’s about as good as you can get.

Third party apps derived from theirs, which explicitly promise to log all your messages to a server somewhere, like TeleMessage, are, for obvious reasons, far less trustworthy.

Yes, but the stations in wealthier areas have enough donations that they’ll likely stay alive. Just poor rural areas will lose public broadcasting

No, it’s being done under the Congressional Review Act, which isn’t subject to supermajority rules.

Even more to the point: every time we shutter a coal-fired power plant, the miscarriage rate downwind from it falls.

Most “pro-life” sentiment is about having an excuse to vote for racists, not actually trying to do anything to protect fetuses.

The harm is the point — they see people who are harmed by this as unfit, and deserving of the harm.

Weekends are peak car shopping time. It’s not impossible to buy a Tesla, but a lot fewer people are, and the company has been forced to sharply lower prices

There have been protests outside Tesla showrooms every weekend.

It’s been very effective at deterring Tesla sales

Yep. Call your rep and senators and tell them how mad you are about it.

They’re choosing people who are in the Nazi group chat and also did an internship at one of Musk’s companies.

No senior folks because more senior people won’t break the law because their boss says so.

What we do in the present and future is a human decision. How bad it gets is up to us still, not something locked in by physics

We are past two important points:

• we passed the point where you would not be able to tell the difference something like 30 years ago
• we passed the point where we likely locked in 1.5°C of warming quite recently. That’s roughly where you walk into a minefield of risking major ecosystems with each additional bit of warming, and the stretch goal that small island nations wanted because it might have left them habitable.

Importantly neither point is one where we expect civilization to suddenly end.

Probably not. We’re still in a place where it’s probably possible to end up with a civilization-supporting planet. But it requires phasing out fossil fuels. And starting now. And the oil executives who bribed Trump don’t like that.

It looks like a planned gradual turnup