On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-­wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”

The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

That's a hed that'll make me sleep better tonight.

The agency that maintains the US nuclear arsenal will be sending home 80% of its workforce as the government shutdown drags through its 17th day and into the weekend, now the longest full funding lapse in US history.

House armed services committee chair Mike Rogers said in a Friday press conference that the National Nuclear Security Administration has now exhausted its carryover reserves.

“We were just informed last night that the National Nuclear Security Administration, the group that manages our nuclear stockpile, that the carryover funding they’ve been using is about to run out,” said Rogers, a Republican from Alabama. “These are not employees that you want to go home. They’re managing and handling a very important strategic asset for us.”

The NNSA, which operates as part of the department of energy, does not directly control operational nuclear weapons – a Pentagon responsibility – but plays a strategic role in keeping warheads secure and functional without conducting explosive tests. The agency also runs non-proliferation programs aimed at preventing nuclear materials from reaching hostile nations or terrorist organizations.

Of fucking course it's UT Austin. Well, education was nice while it lasted. Go into STEM, be ill-prepared for the state of the art four years later; stick with the humanities, and the last course you need for your degree is no longer offered.

Why would anyone go to college at this point? Just paying tuition to be around people your age after high school?

While UT Austin leaders have said little about their plans for the university’s future, the new provost, William Inboden, recently outlined his vision in a 7,000-word manifesto published in National Affairs, a rightwing magazine. In the essay, he laments the crisis of “legitimacy and trust” in US higher education and universities’ “ideological imbalance”, in part blaming the “identity-studies framework” for them.

“Too many American history courses present the American past as a litany of oppressions and hypocrisies, leaving students with an imbalanced view of the United States,” he wrote, repeating a position often invoked by conservatives, including Donald Trump, who have railed against universities as bastions of woke liberalism.

Yep, White folk got here, lived in peace alongside the natives, and then a whole bunch of people who wanted unpaid jobs emigrated here from Africa. It's all been aboveboard.

When it comes to truth, I believe that since the universe exists, there must be certain rules operating behind it, though they have not yet been revealed. Therefore, in this original state, truth itself is without meaning. Truth can be divided into the a priori and the a posteriori. The a priori refers to all the rules governing the operation of the universe, which have existed since the birth of the cosmos, such as the laws of physics. The a posteriori refers to the rules derived from the a priori truths. Truth can also be divided into descriptive and definitional truths: a priori truths are mostly definitional, while a posteriori truths are mostly descriptive. In my view, truth refers to laws that are repeatable, verifiable, and unchanging. It is not necessarily the answer to some ultimate question, but can also be something small and everyday, such as the sun rising in the east.

I believe that meaning is man-made, something that is assigned. The definition of artificial meaning is utility, or a tool for rationalizing ideas. Its primary function is to respond to needs. Therefore, truth does not necessarily have meaning. Does proclaiming truth automatically give it meaning? Not necessarily. I believe the key to assigning meaning lies in motivation. Unless speech contains the motivation to endow truth with meaning, and unless meaning is connected with value, it is merely a declaration. For example, the statement “I believe truth exists prior to wisdom” has meaning—the meaning comes from the words “I believe.” Since meaning can be assigned by the individual, removing “I believe” reduces it to a mere declaration, without explicit assignment of meaning. Some may argue that the act of speaking itself carries motivation, but I think the real question is whether one can state truth without assigning meaning. I believe this is possible. Thus, recognized truth does not necessarily have meaning. Others may say that truth must be revealed, something to be approached. Yet humans can explore truth without need, even through accidental discovery.

In my view, the condition for linking meaning with value lies in utility or subjective recognition. Knowledge, then, is the name given to truth once it has been endowed with meaning. Of course, knowledge can be proven wrong, and therefore knowledge is not equivalent to truth. Humanity—or intelligence—cannot fully comprehend all the parameters and rules of the universe. In other words, Laplace’s demon does not exist. Thus, knowledge may be erroneous due to the limits of subjective cognition. Such errors include, but are not limited to, logical errors, definitional errors, and errors of scope.

Beyond truth and knowledge, there exists a vast amount of information unrelated to verifiable truth or to utility and recognition. Before truth is verified, and before knowledge is recognized or endowed with value, it is merely information.

This essay discusses only artificial meaning. What I consider “true meaning” was addressed in the first essay.

Just as authorities declared this week they had finally solved the mystery of who set the fire that devastated Pacific Palisades, Californians got the news that the FAIR Plan—the state’s insurer of last resort—is proposing to raise its home insurance rates by an average of almost 36 percent. The news that Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, has been arrested and charged with setting a fire that led directly to the cataclysmic conflagration provides some closure. Kenny Cooper, Special Agent in Charge of the ATF Los Angeles Field Division, stated “We know this is [an] incendiary fire and that the subject that we arrested started it.”

But the news about the FAIR Plan brings no such resolution. There is no arsonist to blame—just deepening, widening uncertainty. The private home insurance market in California is not functioning. As insurers exit the state, there is enormous pressure on the FAIR Plan to take up a hugely expanded range of policies. “The math doesn’t work,” FAIR Plan president Victoria Roach said in May.

What’s ahead? Increasingly expensive and unreliable insurance, the routine shifting to homeowners of assessments needed to shore the whole scheme up, and a weakening property market that will reprice in surprising ways.

Indiana University has ordered its student-run newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student (IDS), to cease printing new editions and fired the school’s director of student media, who also served as the paper’s adviser, according to multiple reports. Students at the school are criticizing these moves as censorship.

The university’s directive to halt print editions came just hours after Jim Rodenbush, the school’s director of student media, was terminated, according to a letter from IDS editors.

The editors said Indiana University and the media school “previously directed the IDS to stop printing news coverage in our newspaper. Only the special editions, traditionally included as inserts in our paper. Telling us what we can and cannot print is unlawful censorship. The Student Press Law Center agrees and had told the university to reverse course.”

They wrote: “After former director of student media Jim Rodenbush resisted, IU fired him. When we asked them to rescind the order, it cut print entirely.”

Rodenbush confirmed to NBC News on Thursday that he was fired on Tuesday.

Cutting the print edition makes a certain amount of sense. Banning news and firing the advisor is less of an aboveboard move.