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The Telegraph

Republicans tell Trump to ‘grow up’ after he sacks data chief
Benedict Smith
Sat, August 2, 2025 at 11:11 AM CDT

President Trump’s sacking of Erika McEntarfer was described as ‘kind of impetuous’ by Cynthia Lummis, a Republican senator.

Republicans have told Donald Trump to “grow up” after he sacked the US government’s top statistician over underwhelming jobs numbers.

The president said on Friday he would remove Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) shortly after government figures indicated the economy was performing worse than expected.

The move has prompted a rare backlash against Mr Trump from members of his own party.

Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2020 5:08 am Say, like Trump, you've been in the real estate business, and you recognize it's a bubble and has been for a long time. It's logical to say, well, it's been a bubble for a long time and the way to address it has been to buy the dip and then wait for some excesses, trim holdings, wait for the next dip, etc. The practical way to be successful in navigating the bubble has been to take on debt and assume the general trajectory is onward and upward to bigger and bigger bubbles with speed bumps along the road.

“I have been asked a lot about how I feel about passing along Bridgewater after having started and built it over the last 50 years,” Dalio said in the LinkedIn post. “I am thrilled about it because I love seeing Bridgewater alive and well without me — even better than alive and well with me.”

I think the masses don't really give overpopulation much thought, and for most people alive today this is just how things have always been. None of them have had to seriously consider food scarcity.

There are also those who are more aware and just assume that we'll engineer our way out of our problems again when we start hitting the next production ceiling. Feels like wishful thinking to me, to just assume everything will work out without anything to base it on.

I'm in a field that is heavily involved with crop production, I've been to conferences and seen the latest advances and what's in the pipeline. All of the improvements that are being worked on are incredibly incremental, scraping very small efficiencies at great cost. Most of the industry is focused on leveraging AI and automation to get something on the order of 5-10% yield improvements, and the costs to implement these technologies in the real world are really prohibitive at this point for most crops.

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue May 27, 2025 12:45 am One is that I believe AI, instead of dousing a field with a uniform coverage of pesticides, can "look" for insects and only use pesticides where it determines they are needed, avoiding waste. Same type of thing for other inputs.

FullMoon wrote: Thu Jul 17, 2025 1:42 pm What's your thoughts on the religious and spiritual aspect of this transition time forthcoming? Will we see a renewal of faith in God and how will that affect the social structure and politics?

“New York City is finished,” he said. “They can’t keep order there, and you can’t have business without order. It’ll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again.”

“What do you hear of the U.S. government?” I said. “We don’t have electricity an hour a month anymore and there’s nothing on the air but the preachers anyway.”

“Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn’t met since twelve twenty-one,” Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. “We’re still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?”

“We believe in the future, sir. Only it’s not like the world we’ve left behind,” Joseph said.

“How’s that?”

“We’re building our own New Jerusalem up the river. It’s a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. Tell me something: do you know Jesus Christ.”

aeden wrote: Thu Jul 03, 2025 12:24 pm 1 day ago
I’m a younger millennial born in the 90’s and my best friend in my industry, tech, is 10 years my senior born in the 80’s. We’ve both been on the struggle bus for the last couple years. Work is getting much much harder to find, prices aren’t keeping up, and we’ve both make huge changes to our lifestyles to keep our heads above water. He’s selling his gaming PC now, I got stacks of stuff to sell myself. Both our AC units are running absolutely minimally. We’re not going out to eat. My friend admittedly has a far larger lifestyle, I just got married and that came with 130k of student loans. My wife only takes home 19k, so she got absolutely shafted and sold a lie. I’ve told her it’s going to be a very long time till we move or get her a new car. We’re canning food, hang drying clothes, using fans instead of AC, stopped buying stuff to drink, it’s tap water now, buying mark down food, and I’m doing my own haircuts. I’m in the top income bracket in my area, living on nothing, and I feel the pain.


The wasting files

Is the Epstein Affair a Watershed Moment?
July 25, 2025

Perhaps when we look back on the Epstein Affair, we'll understand that it broke the back of Americans' faith in their political and law enforcement institutions.

We're being told the Epstein Affair is old news, nothing to see here, move along--but I'm not so sure. It could be the opposite of old news, a watershed moment in American history.

Watershed moments can be sudden, dramatic events that we all experience as "nothing is the same after this," or long-brewing crises that we only discern were watersheds when looking back.

The Epstein Affair may be the second type of watershed, only recognized in the rear view mirror. In his post Jeff Epstein, MAGA, and Monopolies, Matt Stoller made two noteworthy observations:

1. The MAGA movement--which includes many factions--attached great importance to the Epstein case as the most egregious manifestation of elite abuse of power. To have the files buried yet again only proves the powerful who would be exposed have yet again evaded being held accountable.

2. The scandal isn't what's been hidden, it's that Epstein operated in plain sight.

Naomi Wolf's essay, "The Network" in the Worlds of the Elites, reveals the enormous reach of Epstein's recruitment of elites across the entirety of America's power structure, what I've called since 2007 (see diagram below) Elites Maintaining and Extending Global Dominance.

This structure isn't The Deep State, it's far larger and just as entrenched, for it's "the sum is greater than the parts" assembly of all of America's elites and elite institutions of soft and hard power projection. (Soft power: cultural, institutionalized influence, non-military systems; hard power: military, diplomatic, financial.)

Epstein's operation was an informal hub-and-spoke network of power elites ranging from politics to academia to science to media to Big Tech and beyond.

The French word engrenages comes to mind here: commonly translated as gearing, but more appropriately perhaps it also denotes being caught up in gearing that is irreversible due to the design and mechanics of the system, and then being caught up in an inescapable series of events.

In other words, Epstein's hub-and-spoke network wasn't an aberration, it was the optimization of the status quo system. This is the taboo that cannot be said out loud. Now everyone who is caught up in the gearing is also a participant in an inescapable series of events.

My summary of the Epstein Affair is: the elites aren't above the law; there is no law. This is what's being displayed in plain sight, but we recoil at recognizing it, for it means democracy and rule of law are both convenient fabrications deployed to maintain public compliance.

Recall Smith's Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

Donald Trump was elected to "drain the swamp," but the Epstein Affair makes it clear that both of America's political parties are The Swamp. Neither party did anything but cover up, misdirect or pointedly refuse to expose the Epstein Affair to open air.

The Social Security trust fund could face insolvency by late 2032, per CRFB estimates.

That would trigger a 24% automatic benefit cut—about $18,000 annually for a dual-earning couple.

LOS ANGELES - Millions of seniors could face devastating cuts to their Social Security benefits in just over seven years, according to a new analysis released Thursday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

The report projects that the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are on track to run out of reserves by late 2032. When that happens, federal law requires that payments be limited to incoming payroll taxes, triggering an automatic 24% benefit cut for retirees unless Congress acts.

The cause, in part, is linked to new tax provisions under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—a sweeping piece of legislation that reduced revenue into the trust funds, speeding up depletion.