WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to reinstate tens of thousands of fired federal employees across six agencies, calling their terminations “unlawful.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the Trump administration must immediately reinstate all of the probationary employees it fired from the departments of Defense, Treasury, Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Veterans Affairs.

The mass firings of federal workers were a “sham” effort by the Office of Personnel Management ― the human resources agency of the federal government ― to skirt laws in order to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce, Alsup said. ....

The White House has already signaled it will appeal the ruling.

“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch. The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch — singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. — Judge Orders Trump To Reinstate Thousands of Fired Employees At 6 Agencies

More than 5,000 probationary employees who were fired from the Department of Agriculture got their jobs back last week, after a government employee oversight board found they were illegally terminated. The decision by that panel, the Merit Systems Protection Board, came after it had restored the jobs of six federal employees at other agencies who had been similarly and haphazardly fired by the Trump administration.

Both of those decisions came down after Alsup ruled earlier this month that OPM had no authority to direct federal agencies to fire their employees — something it had been doing for weeks — and that its actions likely were illegal. That ruling led to OPM abruptly walking back its directive to agencies to fire people, and instead contorting its previous guidance to suggest it had been up to agencies all along to fire people.

In several instances, the President has scrambled to rehire federal employees he had just fired ― not because of a court order, but because it turns out we need experts on things like nuclear weapons, bird flu and park management.

Last week, more than 180 probationary employees who were fired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were reinstated.

In an email with the subject line, “Read this e-mail immediately,” these dozens of previously fired CDC workers were told they could return to work “after further review and consideration.”

“We apologize for any disruption that this may have caused,” read the email.

Pincock distinguishes Franklin’s epistemic stance from another one that Franklin might have taken. He might have said, “I’m disposed to claim to know L when I have this kind of evidence. It’s just what I do, or what seems best to me; others may do differently.” For Pincock, this wouldn’t give Franklin reasons for his claim that L. Pincock asks us to imagine how this “non-theoretical” Franklin would respond to a challenge to his claim about L: He has nothing at his disposal that would count as a reason for others to adopt, so he would have to be silent in the face of his challengers. The actual Franklin, though, scientific realist that he was, can reply with an account that involves how evidence is connected to knowledge claims. — J

Once the interpretation of terms like "fact" or "evidence" become dependent on an epistemic stance, we have to look for an interpretative truth that is outside the stance itself. How do we find it? — J

Therefore, although I benefit from social security, I am appalled at Trumpsk heavy-handed axing. Yet, I must admit that something must be done to keep the nation solvent. — Gnomon

A federal judge on Tuesday found that Elon Musk and the White House's Department of Government Efficiency likely violated the Constitution when they unilaterally acted to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled in favor of a group of more than two dozen unnamed current and former USAID employees and contractors who had challenged the efforts to shutter USAID, which were mounted by DOGE and Musk, a senior White House adviser who President Trump has said is the leader of the task force.

Chuang granted in part their request for a preliminary injunction and said in a 68-page decision that DOGE and Musk likely violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause and separation of powers.

He ordered Musk and task force employees to reinstate access to email, payment and other electronic systems to all current USAID employees and personal services contractors. The judge also prevented DOGE and Musk from taking any action relating to the shutdown of USAID, including placing employees on administrative leave, firing USAID workers, closing its buildings, bureaus or offices, and deleting the contents of its websites or collections. — Judge finds Elon Musk and DOGE's shutdown of USAID likely unconstitutional

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the mass firing of federal employees was an “unlawful” directive by the Office of Personnel Management.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered several agencies to “immediately” reinstate all fired probationary employees. Those agencies included the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Departments of Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Agriculture. That would also restore numbers at the Internal Revenue Service, which falls under the helm of the Treasury Department and has been hit hard by job cuts in recent weeks.

In a hearing leading up to the decision, Alsup torched the Trump administration’s decision not to submit OPM director Chad Ezell for questioning as a “sham,” and accused the White House’s effort to cast the firings as performance failures as “a gimmick.”

“It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The Trump administration has fired at least 30,000 employees with the help of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has made a point to target probationary employees still within the first year of their roles. Some of those employees have been called to return, but most are still not working, reported Axios. — Trump Suffers Huge Loss as Judge Overturns “Unlawful” Mass Firings

Alan Watts says that our apparent individuality is a kind of illusion created by the limitations of perception and conceptual thought. The true nature of reality is an undivided whole in which subject and object, self and world, are not utterly separate but poles in an underlying reality which transcends both. This realization, often associated with enlightenment or awakening, dissolves the artificial boundaries between self and world, leading to liberation from the ego’s illusion of separateness.

according to the dialogue (Phaedo) knowledge of the good can only be attained in death if at all. — Fooloso4

But my senses only feel in my visiom of sense. It takes abstract thought coupled withe imagination to think of something or someone not before you in their presence. We know each oher as humans, so then should we treat the body as phenomena or the thing in itself — Gregory

If I think of the Big Bang for example, since there was no consciousness in the space-time reality at that time, to even think about it is to declare that a subjectless object existed once. — Gregory

What about this rock question however: are there rocks in existence when they are never seen? — Gregory

What of truth for it's own sake? Why is desire for a knowledge wrong? — Gregory

Kant never lost sight of the fact that while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions. In addition, we have a peculiar capacity to be affected by beauty, and a strange inextinguishable sense of wonder about the world we find ourselves in. Feelings of awe, an appreciation of beauty, and an ability to make moral choices on the basis of rational deliberation do not constitute knowledge, but this doesn't mean they lack value. On the contrary. But a danger carried by the scientific understanding of the world is that its power... may lead us to undervalue those things that don't count as science. — Emrys Westacott

Can reason never know full truth? — Gregory

I know this rock here has existence — Gregory

So my question is: was contradiction a necessary part of logic and/or reality in the worldview of Kant? — Gregory

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. It falls into this perplexity without any fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no choice but to employ in the course of experience, and is thus encouraged to extend them beyond all limits of experience. But it soon becomes aware that, by this means, its enterprise is drawing it into darkness and contradictions from which it can never escape. The battlefield of these endless controversies is called "metaphysics."

We have now not only traversed the region of the pure understanding and carefully surveyed every part of it, but we have also measured it, and assigned to everything therein its proper place. But this land is an island, and enclosed by nature herself within unchangeable limits. It is the land of truth (an attractive word), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the region of illusion, where many a fog-bank, many an iceberg, seems to the mariner, on his voyage of discovery, a new country, and, while constantly deluding him with vain hopes, engages him in dangerous adventures, from which he never can desist, and which yet he never can bring to a termination.

the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared —this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. — How Schopenhauer's Idealism Began with the First Eye Opening

Her (i.e. America’s) greatest enemy at the moment is the U.S. — Punshhh

Or am I just severely overthinking — Darkneos

That's not what this AP article indicates — frank

WASHINGTON — Most of the 80,000 federal workers responsible for researching diseases, inspecting food and administering Medicare and Medicaid under the auspices of the Health and Human Services Department were emailed an offer to leave their job for as much as a $25,000 payment as part of President Donald Trump’s government cuts.

The workers have until 5 p.m. on Friday to submit a response for the so-called voluntary separation offer. The email was sent to staff across the department, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and the National Institutes of Health as well as the Food and Drug Administration, both in Maryland.

The mass email went out to a “broad population of HHS employees,” landing in their inboxes days before agency heads are due to offer plans for shrinking their workforces. HHS is one of the government’s costliest federal agencies, with an annual budget of about $1.7 trillion that is mostly spent on health care coverage for millions of people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.

There was no immediate comment Sunday from HHS. — AP

We’ve all been influenced by propaganda — from the news to education— but the advisement industry is a particularly effective and often overlooked source of indoctrination. In my view it’s as potent as Fox News or going to church. — Mikie

So far, the Commerce Department has signed contracts to grant more than $36 billion in federal subsidies under the CHIPS Act. Samsung, Intel, Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, known as TSMC, and others in response have pledged to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. chip-making facilities …

In late February, Michael Grimes, a senior official at the Department of Commerce and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, conducted brief interviews with employees of the CHIPS Program Office, which oversees the grants.

In interactions some described as “demeaning,” Mr. Grimes asked employees to justify their intellect by providing test results from the SAT or an IQ test, said four people familiar with the evaluations. Some were asked to do math problems, like calculate the value of four to the fourth power or long division.

Last week, the Commerce Department laid off 40 of the CHIPS office employees, nearly a third of the entire team, these people said. ~ NYT

the youtube isn't accessible from here — jorndoe

...with tornado season looming, our access to valuable weather information is under threat. The U.S. government‘s stellar weather information service is being torn apart and likely sold for parts as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency implement another destructive chapter of the Project 2025 playbook: experienced scientists fired, senior meteorologists forced into retirement, broken radars left unrepaired, weather forecasting balloons not launched, and leases for vital forecasting units canceled. The loss of expertise is profound, and the impact will be widespread. We’ll all be less safe, the economy will suffer and, yes, those popular weather apps could miss the next big storm. — The Contrarian

So Indian religion is an elaborate confabulation from the yearning for justice? Fine - as Lennon sang, whatever gets you through the night, it's alright. — Banno

That "aggregate of material elements" is the very source of value. — Banno

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.

What about those centuries when you could change your prospects in the afterlife by getting with the winning team? — Paine