OUR PICKSAmerica Is Remaking Its Disaster-Relief System | Worries About Space Pearl Harbor | Experts Predict AI Will Lead to the Extinction of Humanity, and more

Donald Trump Shoots the Messenger  (Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic)
Classic authoritarian move: When reality doesn’t go your way, deny reality.
Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves come in two flavors. The first is devious plans that help him amass power (say, turning the Departments of Justice and Defense over to lackeys, or using regulatory threats to bully media owners into favorable coverage). The second is foolish impulses that he follows because they make him feel momentarily better.
Firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as Trump did via a Truth Social post this afternoon, falls into the second category.
McEntarfer’s unpardonable sin was to oversee the routine release of BLS jobs data. This morning’s report showed that job growth last month fell somewhat short of expectations. The more interesting—and, to Trump, unwelcome—information came in its revisions, which found that previous months had much lower job growth than previous estimates. Economists had been puzzling over the economy’s resilience despite Trump’s imposition of staggering tariffs. Now that we have the revised data, that resilience appears to have largely been a mirage.
Trump’s deeper confusion is his apparent belief that reported job numbers are what matter to him politically. He is obsessed with propaganda and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies. But, as Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public with fake numbers into thinking the economy is better than it is. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy.
The president’s mad rush to subject the macroeconomic policy makers to the same partisan discipline he has imposed on the power ministries is less a coup than a temper tantrum. He thinks he wants loyalists and hacks running those functions. He might not like what happens when he gets his way.

America Is Slashing Its Climate Research (Economist)
Hear no science, see no science, speak no science.

Experts Predict AI Will Lead to the Extinction of Humanity  (Leighton Woodhouse, The Times)
Truly super-intelligent bots could wipe us off the face of the Earth, says a Nobel prizewinner and others —who predict machines will match humans in as little as a year.