The plastic spoon in our brains

PRESENTED BY THE TICK

We all now have a plastic spoon’s worth of nanoplastics in our brains, thanks to the unchecked flood of petrochemical plastics into the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe.

In other spoon news, federal workers are adopting the spoon as a symbol of resistance against Elon Musk’s technofascist coup, in response to his blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, and treasonous “Fork in the Road” mass-firing initiative, which used an illegally installed email server to request, in a series of unhinged emails written by Musk lieutenants installed at the Office of Personnel Management, that federal employees announce their decision whether to quit by today.

TOXIC AVENGERS: After climate-denier-for-hire Lee Zeldin was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency with the backing of all Republicans plus Arizona’s Democratic senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman (D-Pa.), over 1,100 EPA employees were told they would soon be fired. More than 300 career staff have already left. Musk lieutenant Gautier Cole Killian is now inside the EPA. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is speaking at an emergency rally today at 2:30 pm in front of EPA headquarters.

E PLURIBUS UNUM: Protests erupted yesterday in all 50 states—the 50501 (Fifty Protests, Fifty States, One Day / Fifty States, 50 Capitols, One Protest) movement rapidly organized the national resistance, primarily on Reddit, drawing tens of thousands of people to state capitols.

ACT UP AGAINST GENOCIDE: The global AIDS movement is fighting back against Donald Trump’s genocidal dismantling of USAID, which provides lifesaving support against AIDS and HIV around the world through its PEPFAR program and other initiatives. Today at 11 am, AIDS survivors and human-rights activists are converging for an emergency protest at the State Department, now run by Marco Rubio, the Trump lickspittle who was unanimously confirmed by a lapdog Senate. As Dr. Atul Gawande said at yesterday’s USAID rally yesterday’s USAID rally outside the U.S. Senate:

On the Hill, Senate Republicans and Fetterman and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) confirmed Eric Wright as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

House Democrats railed against the Trump-Musk dismantling of the U.S. scientific enterprise at a hearing on the future of the U.S. scientific enterprise. Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.) noted that the fascistic suppression of scientific research by crimethink keyword is modeled on a “Stalinistic” report released last year by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Walter Copan, Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer, Colorado School of Mines and Former Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology during the first Trump administration, and Dr. Sudip Parikh, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Publisher, American Association for the Advancement of Science, vigorously agreed that the funding freezes, firings, and bigoted suppression of science is harmful and “dangerous to our global leadership.”

Having discovered a spine, Senate Democrats filibustered the nomination of Project 2025 architect Russell Vought to be head of the White House Office of Management and Budget into the wee hours of last night after Republicans invoked cloture.

Today, at 10 am, the House Natural Resources mining subcommittee began a hearing on domestic mining and U.S. national security. The witnesses are the industry-funded Dr. Morgan Bazilian, Director, Payne Institute for Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines, GOP energy lobbyist Jeremy Harrell, mining lobbyist Mckinsey Lyon, and the Democratic witness Dr. Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San José State University.

Also at 10 am, the House Judiciary regulatory subcommittee has a hearing on the California fires and regulatory policy. This hearing has Republicans making the depraved claim that excessive regulation on insurance and permitting serves as a roadblock to those recovering from disaster. The named witnesses are Steve Hilton of Golden Together, a right-wing California advocacy group consisting mainly of himself, backed by the insurance, timber, and real estate development industries in favor of deregulation; R Street’s Steven Greenhut, and neo-fascist anti-environmentalist Edward Ring. R Street, a libertarian front group for the insurance industry, takes the position that lawsuit abuse is a greater problem than climate change.

Former AOC chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti has launched his challenge to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who entered Congress in 1987.

California and the Northeast are threatened by dangerous winter storms.

Musk now has access to the Medicare and Medicaid systems.

The hottest January in recorded history is “a little puzzling,” climate scientists say.

Megadroughts are growing in size and scope.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: Senate Finance Committee
  Nomination of Jamieson Greer to be United States Trade Representative

• 10 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee
  Domestic Mining and U.S. National Security

• 10 AM: House Judiciary Committee
     the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust Subcommittee
  California Fires and Regulatory Policy

Climate Action Today:

• 11 AM: ACT UP
  Emergency Protest: Stop Trump's deadly global attack on people with HIV

• 2:30 PM: Climate Action Campaign
  Defend EPA From the Trump-Musk Coup

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