An individual may be told she, he, is to die, and will accept it. For the species will go on. Her or his children will die, and even absurdly and arbitrarily — but the species will go on. But that a whole species, or race, will cease, or drastically change — no, that cannot be taken in, accepted, not without a total revolution of the deepest self.
Doris Lessing on the slated role of the Giants on Earth, in her novel Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (1979), p. 38.
At dawn on Friday the 13th, in October of 1307 — a date that lent weight to triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13 — King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the words: “Dieu n’est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume” — “God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom.”
These “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,” most commonly known as the Knights Templar, figure heavily in the literature of Grand Conspiracies, and in the lore of heresy and the occult.
As repeatedly noticed on This Is Common Sense, politicians tend to treat Congress’s failures to come to agreements on federal government spending as a sort of game, where the most intransigent Player at the Game of Chicken wins. If you hold out for massive spending, refusing to fund government at lesser levels, you eventually get what you want: increased spending.
But early on Donald Trump suggested that he might treat this failure to reach a Continuing Resolution differently. Now, in The Daily Caller, the new plan is explained:
Trump depicted him as the Grim Reaper. His neighbors think he wants to cause “maximum trauma.” Senate Leader John Thune told Democrats to brace for impact.
And those who know Russ Vought best say, good. Democrats should be scared. Because if unleashed, Trump’s two-time Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has a swift and thorough plan to downsize the government that he has been preparing for years.
Reagan Reese, “Democrats Are Terrified Of Trump’s Shutdown Slasher — And They Should Be,” The Daily Caller (October 6, 2025).
It was the president himself who first mentioned Mr. Vought, in a Truth Social post on October 2nd:
I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.
Russ Vought is an old Tea Party figure, serious about cutting government, says The Daily Caller.
Ned Ryun, the CEO of American Majority and a long-time friend of Vought’s, told the Caller that Vought has been preparing for this moment for years. He’s an official Americans should be thankful for, Ryun added, explaining that he believes if Vought is allowed to fulfill his plan it will be a pivotal moment in American history.
“Not sure how many other moments we will get like this, and I truly believe if Trump fully empowers Russ, this could potentially be the beginning of the end of the administrative state,” Ryun told the Caller.
Those close to Vought all emphasized one thing above all when talking about the OMB Director: his humility. When this term is up and Vought’s work is over, Bovard told the Caller he won’t be bragging to the press, cashing in or looking for work on K Street.
And for now, he is focused on finishing the job and winning the game.
op cit.
On October 10, the White House notified over 4,100 federal workers of imminent layoffs via Reductions in Force (RIFs), the largest single-day action yet. The reductions affect
Treasury
1,446
Broad operational slowdowns in tax processing and financial oversight.
Homeland Security (incl. CISA)
~800
Reduced cybersecurity monitoring and border operations support.
Commerce
~450
Delays in trade enforcement and economic data collection.
Education
~350
Paused student loan processing and grant reviews.
Energy
~300
Canceled emissions-reduction projects and carbon capture tech funding.
Housing & Urban Development (HUD)
~250
Halted community planning, property inspections, and FHA loan approvals.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
~200
Suspended environmental monitoring and permitting.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
~150 (across 9 departments)
Disruptions in disease tracking; some terminations blamed on “coding errors” in RIF lists.
Is it worth noting that OMB Director Russ Vought is widely recognized as one of the principal architects and a key author of Project 2025, much demonized by Democrats at their 2024 presidential “nominating” convention.
Democrats can thus hardly complain that they did not see big cuts coming. So why did they risk it all by not going along with the latest CR?
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached “the Indies.”
The main islands of the Caribbean (south of the Bahamas) were, for many centuries, known as “the West Indies,” perhaps to both contextualize and commemorate Columbus’s mistake.
Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.-R) explains the budgeting process on X:
He is recirculating an old video. But that is OK: Congress is recirculating old arguments for the budget impasse.
Every Continuing Resolution and government shutdown is an argument for term limits!
So what has been happening this time around?
September 30–October 1: The shutdown began at midnight after Senate Democrats rejected a House-passed “clean” CR (extending funding at current levels through November 21) in a 55-45 vote. Republicans held slim majorities (House: 221-214; Senate: 53-47), but the Senate requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.
October 2–6: Senate voted on competing bills, failing five times. Democrats’ alternative (funding through October 31, plus ACA extensions) was rejected 47-53. Republicans blamed Democrats for obstruction; Democrats accused Republicans of ignoring healthcare needs.
October 7–8: Two more failures (sixth and seventh votes). Only three Democrats (Sens. Fetterman, Cortez Masto, and King) crossed the aisle for the GOP bill. Senate adjourned without progress, with Republicans considering standalone funding for key agencies.
October 9–10: Shutdown extended into a second week after the Senate adjourned until October 14. The House GOP bill failed again (54-45), with no additional Democratic support. Speaker Mike Johnson noted “some discussion” of shortening the CR timeline due to delays, but no decisions were made. The Congressional Budget Office reported a $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY 2025, highlighting fiscal pressures.
October 11 (Today): No new votes scheduled over the weekend. Discussions continue amid growing public frustration — polls show 60-67% of Americans blame both parties, with Republicans and President Trump slightly more faulted (10-17 percent gap).
Paul Jacob has been writing about Continuing Resolutions and Congress’s habitual, repeated budget impasses for decades now, most recently on October 3rd, with “Pleistocene Politics.”
October 11, 1890, marks the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
On the same date in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford approved a congressional joint resolution, Public Law 94–479, to appoint, posthumously, George Washington to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.
John J. Pershing (1860 – 1948) is the only other American to attain this high title, and the only one to achieve it while alive.
We seem to have Germany — not a typo: Germany — to thank for the fact that one of the most intrusive EU gambits attacking freedom of speech is about to fail.
The proposal would let governments monitor all private chat messages, via mandatory back doors, without bothering with such trivialities as warrants, probable cause, evidence.
The European Union centralizes many assaults on liberty that member countries are supposed to supinely accept once enacted. But it can’t ignore individual members as proposals are still en route to becoming law. And the German government, often not exactly a beacon when it comes to free speech, has now made its opposition to this particular mode of surveillance and censorship loud and clear.
As Germany blocked the plan, first announced in 2022, German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig said that “unprovoked chat control must be taboo in a constitutional state. . . . Germany will not agree to such proposals at EU level.”
Parliamentary leader Jens Spahn of the Christian Democratic Union also uttered some common sense, explaining that warrantless monitoring of chats “would be like opening all letters as a precautionary measure to see if there is anything illegal in them. That is not acceptable, and we will not allow it.”
Although the proposal is not yet quite dead, the German opposition makes it extremely unlikely that EU bosses can go further with it.
Great spirit, German officials. Cheers to now applying this principle consistently — as is required of principles.
Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
Roger Bacon, in Robert Belle Burke The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon Part 2 (2002), p. 583.
