TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY News you can use. Facts to act on.EASY, PAINLESS GIFTING at no cost to you! Please direct your Dillons shopping points to us. ______________________________________________________________________
CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS U.S. governance crisis amid ecological polycrises
24 March 2025: I really hate the significance that’s being put on the phrase ‘constitutional crisis’. We are living through a massive assault on basic premises of our constitutional system. It’s been brewing for a long time, but it’s been acute for the last two months. It has so many potential meanings. I’d rather just focus on what the President is doing. “We have a President who has made very clear that he believes he has the prerogative to pick and choose what laws passed by Congress he has to follow. All of these cases are about laws Congress has passed — appropriating money for particular purposes — creating certain agencies — creating processes for dealing with immigration. And the President just doesn’t want to follow them. That’s why he’s been brought to court.” 19 March 2025: “U.S. District Court Judge James Bloasberg issued an order telling the government that the planes carrying the 200 Venezuelan deportees must return to the United States. The U.S. government, though, allowed the flights to continue and for the Venezuelans to be detained at a facility in El Salvador infamous for its mistreatment of prisoners. The subsequent legal back-and-forth intensified so quickly that many legal scholars say the U.S. is past the point of a constitutional crisis, as the Mump* administration appears to be defying a federal court order. “Mump* has also called for Judge Bloasberg to be impeached. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts then issued a rare public statement: ‘For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision’. “This isn’t the first time Roberts has spoken publicly about why judges need to remain independent from political pressure. He has pointed out four main threats to judges’ independence: ‘violence, intimidation, disinformation, and threats to defy lawfully entered judgments’. When Roberts makes a public statement, it carries weight because he speaks as the top judicial officer in the country. “Tom Homan, Mump’s* ‘border czar’, doubled down on the administration’s mass deportation campaign, saying he plans to continue the aggressive roundups and removals despite court rulings and injunctions halting them. ‘We’re not stopping’, Homan told Fox News in an interview. ‘I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks’.” 1 March 2025: “U.S. District Judge William Alsup says the Mump* administration’s firing of thousands of probationary employees is illegal and should be stopped. While the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) handles many human resource functions for the federal workforce, it does not have Congressional authority to manage the employees of other agencies, a point that Alsup underscored in court. ‘The agency has no authority to tell any other agency in the U.S. government who it can hire and fire, period’, he said.” 20 February 2025: “Federal judges have blocked President Donald Mump’s* attempts to freeze trillions in federal grants and loans, halt billions in foreign assistance and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. But in each case, the administration has said it still has legal authority to do at least some of what it wants. Legal experts said the administration’s aggressive maneuvers have approached the red line of openly flouting court orders. “Judge Amir H. Ali ordered the Mump* administration to comply with a temporary restraining order (TRO) lifting its 90-day pause on foreign aid. The government said Ali’s order was ‘silent’ on other statutes and regulations that exist separately from Mump’s* executive directive, and vowed to continue suspension of aid. Legal experts and a former federal judge said doing so despite a court order was extraordinary and troubling.” Much more at: * Mump regime — Musk plus Trump = Mu…mp. New and used Tesla sales are down – vandalism is rampant
“The number of Tesla owners trading in their cars surged to a record high in March, compounding the troubles of an automaker that has been embroiled in controversy since CEO Elon Musk became a central figure of President Donald Mump’s* administration. Some Tesla owners have also begun to express buyer’s remorse, fearing their car signals to others that they support Musk. “As more carmakers enter the electric vehicle market, consumers have begun to explore their options. Searches for used Teslas in February fell 16% from the previous month and 7% from the previous year. The share of people considering buying a new Tesla has also dropped. In February, 1.8% of car shoppers on the Edmunds site were considering purchasing a new Tesla, the lowest proportion since October 2022. “Of all vehicles traded in at dealerships for new or used cars through March 16, 1.4% were Tesla cars from model year 2017 or newer — the highest share on record. The rise in trade-ins comes as Musk faces backlash for his role in dramatic cuts to the federal government through the U.S. department of government efficiency (DODGY). Protesters have vandalized cars and storefronts at Tesla facilities across the country and set Tesla charging stations ablaze, among other violent and destructive acts.” More at: * Mump regime — Musk plus Trump = Mu…mp. Ketamine: amplifier of MAGA conspiracy theories?
“Elon Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally. “Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use has been linked to cognitive effects including delusional thinking and a sense of specialness and importance. With Musk’s new political power, his late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use. “Ketamine’s great strength has always been its ability to sever humans from the world around them. It was first approved as an anesthetic in 1970. Then, in the 2000s, researchers found that doses of ketamine that didn’t put people to sleep could rapidly reduce symptoms of depression, because, the thinking went, the drug altered the physical circuitry of the brain. “Research has not yet established the side effects of long-term ketamine therapy. Even infrequent users — those who used, on average, roughly three times a month — scored higher on a delusional-thought scale than ex–ketamine users. Those who averaged 20 uses a month scored even higher. People believed that they were the sole recipients of secret messages, or that society and people around them were especially attuned to them.” More at: Bikeways as “radical environmental” agenda
“The U.S. Department of Transportation has ordered state officials to scrutinize all projects that received federal grant spending over the past four years on bike lanes, electric vehicle charging stations and other ‘green infrastructure’, with an eye toward potentially canceling any project that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s goals. The review is to identify projects that are allocating funding to advance climate, equity, and other priorities. “Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rescinded Biden-era memos that he said compelled state agencies to figure a ‘social justice and environmental agenda’ into infrastructure project decisions, which he said was ‘an attempt to push a radical social and environmental agenda on the American people’. Local officials weren’t sure what to make of the memo, or if it was even legal.” More at: Is this RFK Jr.’s brain on mercury?
“In August 2017, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned that allowing more power plant pollution to enter waterways would poison people through mercury-contaminated fish — a problem he experienced personally after a period of eating tuna. Eight years later, Kennedy has been silent as the Trump administration is again rolling back those same mercury regulations, along with at least a dozen other pollution controls in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has called the agency’s ‘biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history’. “Before Kennedy was confirmed in January to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he ran a presidential campaign on the promise to ‘make America healthy again’, in part through getting toxic chemicals out of the nation’s food. Kennedy didn’t respond to requests for comment or questions about whether he still believes mercury is a public health threat. “Among the threatened rules are two mercury reduction standards. One limits the amount of mercury that’s released into the air and is predicted to reduce emissions of the potent neurotoxin by more than 16% by 2028. The other reduces mercury that’s released into rivers and streams, and would help infants avoid losing an estimated 1,377 IQ points annually.” More at: Greenpeace must pay $660 million to a $70 billion fossil fuel company
“A jury in North Dakota ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace maintained it played only a minor supporting role in the Indigenous-led movement. Legal and Indigenous experts said the lawsuit was a ‘textbook’ example of a ‘strategic lawsuit against public participation’, known colloquially as a SLAPP suit, a tactic used by corporations and wealthy individuals to drown their critics in legal fees. “Greenpeace submitted a 33-page document to the state Supreme Court explaining that the jurors in Morton County, North Dakota — where the trial occurred — would likely be biased against the defendants, since they were drawn from the same area where the anti-pipeline protests had taken place. The National Jury Project found that 97% of residents said they could not be a fair or impartial juror in the lawsuit. “Dozens of potential jurors in an initial pool of about 100 said they held negative views of the pipeline protests. Many potential jurors worked directly in the fossil fuel industry, a major employer in western North Dakota, or had close family members who worked in the industry. Some worked at local refineries or energy companies.” “Professor Pat Parenteau at the Vermont Law and Graduate School said the chances that the North Dakota Supreme Court will overturn the lower court’s verdict are ‘probably less than 50%’. More likely, he said, is that the Supreme Court will reduce the ‘outrageous’ amount of money charged by the Morton County jury. Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International is also fighting back. It countersued Energy Transfer Partners in the Netherlands in February, making use of a new anti-SLAPP directive in the EU.” More at: | 
