Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner…and the Democrats/NeverTrump people are sure this is the very end of Our Democracy.
In the specific, they are claiming that Trump is merely mad that the latest job numbers had massive downward revisions. And, hey, maybe Trump is mad about that…but the bottom line is that if you’re getting it that wrong, then why the heck are you even putting out numbers? This is the same BLS which month after month after month massively overstated the job gains under Biden. Is the data worth anything? Major financial decisions are taken based on what BLS is saying…and they can’t even nail down accurately the number of jobs gained or lost?
Some say that there is a declining response rate from those surveyed. Ok. Is anyone looking into an alternate method? Seems to me that they’re really just kinda guessing and then revising based on more solid data…so, why not make the monthly report out of the most recent, solid data we’ve got? Sure, it means the July jobs report might be about April or May, but if its accurate then its at least useful and we’d still have long term trend data. If BLS is just throwing numbers at the wall, though, then it is useless…and the Commissioner is either stupid (and so should be fired) or corruptly massaging the data to favor Democrats and harm Republicans (and so should be fired). And do keep in mind: all this statistics stuff was first put together during the New Deal when a bunch of Leftwing pinheads thought they could decide economic policy based on statistics. This is why, today, we buy our consumer goods from China, guys: the stats say it is the way to go.
You know: it doesn’t matter in the long term if in any particular month jobs are gained or lost overall…what matters is how much we, as a people, are making, mining and growing. Bottom line on that is that the more we make, mine and grow here at home the more job openings there will be…and the more national wealth which, stored, can provide aid for those who lose their jobs because of fluctuating economic conditions. Production is the measure…not the household jobs survey.
Some reforms being pushed by Team Trump do look like a back door method to eventually privatize Social Security. They are going slow and careful here because this is a dangerous issue…but everyone with sense knows that eventually the Social Security system is going to need deep reforms to survive. For us older people, it won’t matter: nobody is going to change it for us and we will get what we were promised (nobody is going to vote to cut benefits and then have everyone on or about to be on benefits vote against them next election). Probably for people fifty and older no significant changes are forthcoming. But for the youngsters, I think there will be – and likely with their eventual enthusiastic support. There is much wrong with youth but they do have knowledge about markets…a lot of these kids have been playing around with various investment items since they were little. It will be easier to sell to them the notion that their Social Security is theirs – a government guaranteed investment account that they own, that follows them around wherever they work and which they can start to access by some fixed date in their lives and which will have some guaranteed minimum payout no matter what happens…but which they could also grow to be quite significant, perhaps combining it with their personal savings and their employer 401k’s.
Ultimately, America is Made Great Again by the total dissolution of the New Deal.
Blogs For Victory 
Part of the problem is that this person used/abused her official office to try to affect the election by posting false figures to try to make Biden look successful and affective as a president. This is the same kind of thing we are now thinking of prosecuting on a much bigger and more significant level, the whole Russia Hoax promulgated by people doing the same thing—using their official government offices to abuse that authority to lie to the people to rig an election. Big scale, small scale, it’s still a betrayal of trust and abuse of the office and corrosive to the confidence Americans need to have/ should be able to have/ in a government that does not use its powers to control them.
It goes way beyond incompetence or the inability to have accurate real-time figures. It’s about corruption and efforts to subvert our electoral system.
I believe that is the more likely explanation. Of course, it was some years ago that I first started hearing complaints about BLS data – essentially, when Obama came in it seemed that they were painting the rosiest picture possible. That is probably when we started getting deliberately manipulated data. It is now just on steroids and absolutely nobody hired or promoted by non-Trump Administrations can be trusted at all. In fact, the default position is to assume they are lying in service of political goals.
It’s about corruption and efforts to subvert our electoral system.
And we may be looking at a once in a lifetime opportunity to rectify it.
I get the impression that is a key goal of this administration—to legislate and carve into stone as many safeguards as possible to prevent this from happening again, as much as it can be prevented, and in the short term to replace the miscreants who have seen the public trust as merely a way to impose their ideology. Most seem quite sincere in their beliefs that they have a patriotic duty to manipulate the system to get the results they want—an outcome of the shortcut to the Higher Moral Ground belief peddled by the Left. Being Democrats makes them virtuous and being virtuous means they have a duty to force their self-defined “virtue” onto the country.
I just read an account of the bonfires of the vanities, the hysterical mobs signaling their collective righteousness by destroying all that was beautiful in big bonfires, and don’t see much difference between these people trying to impose their visions of perfection on the rest of us and those fanatics following Savonarola demanding that people give up things of beauty to be sacrificed in the name of virtue.
There is that sincerity – though it is sincerely wrong. Those who are defending Our Democracy don’t even know what Democracy is…and wouldn’t like it if we had one. They also don’t know what a law is – and this most especially includes the lawyers and judges over on that side. Some of the cases filed and judicial decisions rendered are just plain and simple stupid. They completely ignore the written law and substitute a DNC talking point for it.
It is all getting rather loathsome to me. I was checking out the latest batch of anti-Semitic lies being used to try and save Hamas and was positively nauseated. But then I realize that the people peddling Hamas propaganda just to make an anti-Israel point are the same people telling us we can’t deport foreigners without a hearing, nor defund Planned Parenthood even by law. They might be stupid. They might be ignorant. They might be sincere in their stupid ignorance…but they’re finally starting to really piss me off.
I want them disenfranchised and dispossessed. They are not part of me. Not part of America. They are some sort of alien bacteria plaguing our body politic.
I’m not sure that the “anti-Semitic lies being used to try and save Hamas” originate in anti-Semitism. I don’t think most college students sat around thinking of how much they hate Jews.
But people, especially young people, yearn to be “good” and this is the lure of the Left—that it represents goodness, humanity, that shortcut to the Higher Moral Ground. And propaganda about Gaza fits into that so perfectly. So this is all just virtue signaling writ large.
If we could isolate and remove the agitators, the coordinators, the professionals who get things going like yeast in bread dough, and then pluck out the rent-a-mob element, I don’t think we would have very many “protesters” left.
It’s incremental and interconnected, so concern for suffering in Gaza is then linked to support for Hamas on one hand and hatred for the alleged cause of the much-played-up conditions in Gaza means hating the Jews they are told are responsible. Once the malignancy of the anti-Semitism is redefined as virtuous standing up for victimized people, the Left’s job is done.
And remember, the Left is very canny in separating “Jews” from “Zionists”. I clearly remember this effort from my days at the University of Colorado in Boulder (which were, by the way, the days when Bernadine Dohrn spoke for the Weathermen on campus) and coming away with the conviction that “Jews” are a religion and OK but “Zionists” are a vicious and evil and tyrannical political movement.
I can forgive the mindless followers to a certain extent…but certainly the leaders egging on the anti-Semitism need sever punishment. Those lunatics smashing watermelons are merely practicing smashing our heads in.
If people want to engage in displays of irrational emotionalism that don’t hurt others, that’s fine with me. But we absolutely HAVE to start cracking down on those who incite violence.
As for some dingbat whose internal rages need to be expressed by smashing a watermelon, well, bless her heart, poor dear. But don’t take her seriously. If she experienced such a release after veg-assault, it sounds like she needs a…..relationship.
Every SS reform I have heard about has included the ability for people coming into the system to choose which approach they want—the current one or one that ties SS revenue and therefore returns to the economy through selected stock market investments.
I started to watch Silo last night and couldn’t get into it. Partly because I just have lost the desire to watch anything on TV the last few months. I sit down to do it and within minutes find myself reaching for a book. And part of it is that I am not in the mood for drama right now. Scanning through the offerings on a couple of options I found myself only attracted to lighthearted stuff. I’m in a British mood right now, revisiting the Chronicles of Saint Mary’s series in both reading and audio formats, so I took a look at BritBox and might come back to look at The IT Guys—saw a couple of episodes a couple of years ago it it struck me as the kind of goofball British humor (or humour) I have always loved.
There is the curse of having read the book, though I didn’t get into it enough to develop deep images of what people should look like, etc. I understand that the pacing of a movie format has to be different from that of a book, so people and events are introduced in a different sequence.
Two things did occur to me, though. One was the really big rooms and apartments of the people living in the silo. The artificial living space of the silo would seem to dictate very restricted sizes for living quarters, and these rooms were spacious, larger than the average NYC apartment. The book has a more claustrophobic feel to it.
The other was the sense that after decades of forced shared environment there would be much less differentiation of race—that after generations of being forced to breed within the limited gene pool that the result would be people of indeterminate race, yet here the races are very distinct.
But the days are starting to get shorter, and by the time I am back in Florida it will be dark early enough to make viewing more appealing.
There is that – but my biggest gripe is that the story starts with a problem about human reproduction…clearly a very involved process where only the socially favored are allowed to do it. But, if the goal is to retain a stable, 10,000 person population, each female must have at least 2 children…and some will have to have more in order to account for females who can’t reproduce or who die before reproductive age (that 2.1 Total Fertility Rate necessary for stable population). So, actually, in our Silo world any restrictions on child bearing would only come after two healthy children are produced. But, that is also just a small detail. Overall, I found the Sci-Fi to be good.
Maybe you should start a whole new blog called
“JUST HOW BATSHIT CRAZY ARE DEMOCRATS, ANYWAY?”
I have a contribution:
If you go to the link and read to the bottom you will see this:
And this is followed by a rather long but very informative video on the organized subversive tactics of the Left.