You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (2005).
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Cormac McCarthy
Author: Redactor
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The Cato Street Conspiracy
On February 23, 1820, a plot to murder all the British cabinet ministers was exposed and the conspirators arrested. The name for the secret organization, “The Cato Street Conspiracy,” came from the meeting place near Edgware Road in London where the conspirators conspired. An informer had tipped the police off, and the plotters fell into a trap. Thirteen were arrested, while one policeman, Richard Smithers, was killed. Five conspirators were executed; five others were transported to Australia.
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Clots of the Clot Shot?
“This can’t be hidden for too much longer.”
Dr. John Campbell, “White clot science” (February 21, 2026).
It has been some time since the last report, in these pages, about the appearance of long, white, rubbery, fibrous clots in the veins of the recently dead . . . as found by morticians around the world. Now, finally, studies have been done, and published — if not in major journals.
In “Press Release: Breaking Research Decodes the Mystery of “The Rubbery White Clots,” we learn that new studies have “for the first time comprehensively characterised the anomalous intravascular casts (AICs) commonly reported by embalmers worldwide as strange, rubbery white clots.
The research, significantly funded by New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) and conducted by New Zealand-based researchers Drs Bruce Rapley and Matt Shelton, provides definitive analysis that these structures are a previously unrecognised and abnormal form of intravascular clotting.
Since 2021, global reports from embalmers and some clinicians have described the retrieval of long, elastic, white fibrous structures from blood vessels, distinct from ordinary post-mortem clots.
“NZDSOS has been at the forefront of raising concerns about these anomalous findings. This new three-part study using international labs on three continents describes their structure, elemental composition and protein makeup, concluding they represent a novel and persistent pathological entity”, said Dr Shelton.
The three papers tackle distinct issues with the tissues:
Obviously well worth further study, as the press release goes on to say.
But remember: this clot situation is not anodyne: “This is not just a big blood clot,” insists Senior Researcher Dr Bruce Rapley. “This is a fundamentally different architecture. The profound deficiency in plasminogen is like building a structure impervious to future demolition — it’s designed to persist. The elemental data confirms it’s not just protein; it’s a hybrid material our bodies are forced to make but not equipped to clear.”
Of course, the heroic Dr. John Campbell explains it well:
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Calvin Coolidge
Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law.
Calvin Coolidge, speech to the Massachusetts State Senate (January 7, 1914).
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Galileo’s Gift
On February 22, 1632, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, received the first printed copy of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo). The Grand Duke was the dedicatee.
Galileo’s Dialogo is a witty and entertaining defense of the Copernican system, where the Sun is at the center of “the universe.” This was opposed to the traditional view — held by Aristotle and Ptolemy — of an Earth-centered system, as represented by an armillary sphere.
Only two systems appear in the Dialogo; Galileo pitting what we now call the Ptolemaic system with the Copernican, nowhere mentioning the Tychonic system then favored by most astronomers, one in which the Sun and Moon and stars revolve around Earth, but the planets revolve around the Sun.
Once published, Pope Urban VIII gave orders for the Dialogo to be recalled and summoned Galileo to Rome for trial.
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What Odd Things to Say?
On Brian Tyler Cohen’s “No Lie” podcast, released around February 14, 2026, in a Q&A segment towards the end, Barack Obama fielded a question about “aliens.” Are they real?
They’re real, but I haven’t seen them. And they’re not being kept in . . . what is it? Area 51.
While Area 51 has become the default punchline in media (thanks to movies, memes, and the 2019 “Storm Area 51” viral event), serious UFO researchers and whistleblower claims (from Bob Lazar’s talks with Nevada newsman George Knapp to David Grusch’s 2023 congressional testimony) almost always point elsewhere for alleged crash retrievals and “biologics.”
Main target?
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — specifically the “Hangar 18” myth, popularized in the 1970s by figures like Robert Spencer Carr. The site is also tied to Roswell debris allegedly being shipped there post-1947, with reverse-engineering and body storage rumors persisting in books and eyewitness accounts. Other locations pop up variably (Dugway, Los Alamos, etc.), but Wright-Pat edges out Area 51 in many traditional narratives for the “bodies” angle.
And, according to lore, comedian Jackie Gleason (a known UFO enthusiast) reportedly told his then-wife Beverly McKittrick that President Richard Nixon, a golfing buddy, drove him late one night in February 1973 to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. There, Gleason allegedly viewed embalmed alien bodies (small, about two feet long, with big heads/ears) in a secure building — possibly recovered from a crash or retrieval. The tale surfaced publicly via Beverly after their divorce. It’s often retold. And it adds a Florida candidate for an inventory of “dead aliens,” not the infamous Nevada site.
This all sounds far-fetched, and Obama tried immediately to throw water on the flame:
There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.
Of course, the military has scads of underground facilities, so the “enormous conspiracy” caveat seems almost designed to fan the flames, not quench them. How many more votes just switched to Enormous Conspiracy?
Later, Obama tried to walk it further back:
He followed up with statistical reasoning about the vast universe making life probable, emphasizing no evidence of contact or hidden bodies during his presidency (and later clarified on social media that he saw “no evidence” of extraterrestrials making contact).
But the story did not stop with the former president.
Fox White House Correspondent Peter Doocy: Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of non-human visitors to Earth?
President Donald J. Trump: Well, he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that, you know.
Doocy: So, aliens are real.
Trump: Well, I don’t know if they’re real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made — He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don’t — I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it. Do you believe it, Peter?
Doocy: Well, the president can declassify anything that he wants to. So . . .
Trump: . . . I may get him out of trouble by declassify[ing].
Q&A at the steps of Air Force One, February 19, 2026.
What an odd way to respond.
But the oddities aren’t decreasing:
What will Trump do, though — and what is he up against?
The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. . . . If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
Malcolm X, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (December 13, 1964), later published in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965), edited by George Breitman, p. 93.
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Three Horrors
On Feb. 21, 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.
On Feb. 21, 1916, the Battle of Verdun began with German bombardment of the city of Verdun, France. For ten months, the longest single engagement of the First World War, German forces attacked the French along a 20-kilometer front crossing the Meuse River. When the battle ended, with no change in the strategic position of either army, the combined death toll was over 300,000 (out of over 700,000 casualties).
On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by rival Black Muslims while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York City.
Matt Walsh says that “one of the worst ecological disasters in American history is currently unfolding. A river of sewage is flowing into the Potomac. When you dig into this story, and who is responsible for it, you start to see why the media doesn’t want to talk about it.”
He’s not wrong, the disaster began January 19th but we’ve heard little about it. On his podcast, No. 1736; Mr. Walsh goes all into a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” explanation.
According to The Daily Wire’s most socially conservative host, the responsible agencies are filled with hires based not on qualifications or competence or conscientiousness, but based on their color.
He highlights, specifically, two individuals in the current muck: one, DC Water CEO David L. Gadis, partly responsible for the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and the other, the current head of DC Water Board of Directors, Dr. Unique N. Morris-Hughes, a doctor in philosophy. Walsh regales us with her inanities and her over-spending on departmental entertainment junkets.
While there may be a detectable odor to Walsh’s relentless critique of hiring blacks, specifically, under DEI, the odor from the Potomac, right now, is much less metaphorical.
In between retches, ask the question: Why would there be a general incompetence rising in public utilities now?
Is it race as such? Of course not.
Is it DEI putting race over competence? Maybe in part.
But the general trend for a long time has been to put more and more domains of everyday life under direct government control. There’s a principle lost on the Mamdanis of this world: the more tasks set for government to govern, the less capable it becomes to manage even its core tasks. And, as that capacity declines, so goes even the will to bother trying.
Besides, if there is any apter metaphor for Washington, DC, than hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage sloshing into the Potomac . . . I can’t think of it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Charles W. Morris
Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results in systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs — if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning.
Charles W. Morris, “Foundations of the Theory of Signs,” in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 1, No. 2; Reprinted 1971.