“President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was ordering a ‘new and highly accurate CENSUS,’ saying it will be based on the ‘information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.’ ‘People who are in our country illegally will NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,’ he wrote in the Truth Social post announcing the move. The census is a constitutionally mandated count of every person in the United States every 10 years, which was last conducted in 2020. A full census has never been conducted mid-decade in this manner, nor has one ever excluded noncitizens from the count.” [editor’s note: The reason those things have never happened is that the the US Constitution provides for one census each decade, requires it to count all inhabitants of the US, and apportions US House districts by inhabitants, not citizens; his pretend “census” wouldn’t legally change any of that – TLK] (08/07/25)
“America treats its politicians like the kid in that old Seinfeld episode, ‘The Bubble Boy’ — isolated and coddled lest contact with regular human beings harm them. The rest of us apparently exist only to provide these power-mongers with votes, and occasionally with audiences carefully curated for high levels of adoration and applause. Outside those contexts, we’re to be neither seen nor heard. Okay, that’s not completely true. We also fork over $3 billion per year for the Secret Service, $800 million for the Capitol Police Department, and heaven only knows how much for military air cover, etc., to ensure that Very Special Important People never experience discomfort due to unintentional contact with us mere mortals.” (08/07/25)
“Vance meets with Bondi and Patel to chart a course on Epstein; ex-NBA star Gilbert Arenas is charged with running illegal poker games in the Valley; California grand juries keep returning no bill.” (08/07/25)
“Israel’s political-security cabinet approved a plan to take control of Gaza City early on Friday, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel intended to take military control of the entire strip despite intensifying criticism at home and abroad over the devastating almost two-year-old war. … Two government sources said any resolution by the security cabinet would need to be approved by the full cabinet, which may not meet until Sunday. … Outside the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on Thursday evening, hundreds of demonstrators protested against an expanded war, demanding an immediate end to the military campaign in return for the release of all the hostages.” (08/07/25)
“We’re familiar at this point with the ‘America First’ justification for tariffs: The United States has a large trade deficit in goods, and this is bad because it means American jobs to make those goods went abroad. … But it’s also worth pointing out that it’s just as easy to make a nationalist case against trade surpluses. As it stands, nationalists already don’t like the trade surplus the U.S. does have. They demean jobs in finance and tech as unmanly and hold intangible products to be less vital than tangible ones, even though the U.S. services trade surplus is nearly $300 billion. … what if nationalists achieved their model economy, one led by exports of durable goods by durable men? I’m skeptical they’d enjoy it as much as they believe they would.” (08/07/25)
“Millions of Americans saving for retirement through 401(k) accounts could have the option of putting their money in higher-risk private equity and cryptocurrency investments, according to an executive order signed Thursday by President Donald Trump that could give those financial players long-sought access to a pool of funds worth trillions. There is no immediate change in how people invest part of their work earnings. Federal agencies would need to rewrite rules and regulations to allow the expanded choices, and that would take months or more to complete. But once done, employers could offer a broader array of mutual funds and investments to workers, according to the White House.” (08/08/25)
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum & Rebecca Crosby
“An overwhelming majority of Americans, 64 percent, believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, according to a Gallup survey conducted late last year. An overwhelming majority of Americans are wrong. On Tuesday, August 5, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its comprehensive report on crime in the United States for 2024. … the new FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s. In 2024, there were about 349 reported violent crimes in the United States for every 100,000 Americans. That is the lowest rate of violent crime since 1969.” (08/07/25)
“The government of the Solomon Islands will not invite the U.S. and China to attend a key regional meeting in September, a move experts see as an effort to avoid diplomatic fallout over the alternative of singling out and excluding Taiwan from the event. The annual leaders meeting organized by the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), a key regional body comprising 16 Pacific island nations, Australia and New Zealand …. At last year’s PIF meeting in Tonga, Qian Bo, Beijing’s ambassador to the Pacific, successfully pushed to remove a paragraph from the forum’s joint communique that would have recognized Taiwan’s standing and involvement with the regional organization. Peter Kenilorea, a Solomon Islands MP who has criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the Pacific, told Nikkei Asia in May that Honiara was under pressure from Beijing to exclude Taiwan from the forum.” (08/07/25)
“President Donald Trump sure picked a curious venue to start calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a ‘dictator.’ It was February 19, halfway through a remarkable two-week run in which America reversed its approach to both the Russia-Ukraine war and possibly the entire 76-year-old Washington-led trans-Atlantic military alliance. Trump was speaking in Miami Beach’s Faena Hotel and Forum at a bland-sounding ‘Priority Summit’ hosted by the innocuously named Future Investment Initiative Institute, which in turn is owned by the nondescript Public Investment Fund (PIF). But to the global financial elite, that latter entity is far from obscure. At an estimated $941 billion, the PIF is the sixth-largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet, owned by one of the world’s most authoritarian dictatorships, Saudi Arabia.” (08/07/25)
“A federal judge on Thursday ordered a two-week halt to construction at an immigrant [concentration camp] in the Florida Everglades dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ as she considers whether it violates environmental laws. The facility was quickly built two months ago at a lightly used, single-runway training airport and can hold up to 3,000 detainees in temporary tent structures. The site was continuing to be built out, but the order by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams temporarily bars the installation of any new industrial-style lighting, as well as any paving, filling, excavating or fencing. The order also prohibits any other site expansion, including placing or erecting any additional buildings, tents, dormitories or other residential or administrative facilities.” (08/07/25)
