Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) has once again postponed her next UAP (UFO) hearing. The whistleblowers keep balking. “We asked multiple people, and they weren’t willing to testify. They said, ‘we either didn’t want to be the only one,’ ‘we were worried about our safety,’ etc.”
The real issue, Secrets Task Force Chair Luna suggests, appears to be that they are avoiding SCIFs — secure meetings between testifiers and congressfolk — perhaps because their bosses do not want them exposed to the more freewheeling, spontaneous and to-the-point lines of questioning that come up during SCIFs.
Well, that’s what Daniel “Dark Journalist” Liszt hazards, anyway. He names at least one Deep State orchestrator: Chris Mellon.
Meanwhile, Newsmax’s Ross Coulthart blurted out that he “categorically” knows that the “tic tac” UFO is the property of Lockheed-Martin.
By the way, is it funny that the House committee investigating UFOs is led by someone names “Luna”?
Regardless, the ongoing UFO “disclosure” is not mimicking reported outré UFO behavior: turning on a dime, G-force defying speeds. It’s proceeding, instead, at a snail’s pace — if the snail is traveling a salt flat.
The previous site update on UFOs was in mid-June; Paul Jacob has been covering the subject for years, in December in the context of “drones.”
On July 11, 2025, Paul Jacob covered the suspensions of key Secret Service personnel in “Secret Stupidity?”
The next day, the General Accounting Office (GAO) came out with a new report, revealing “that the Secret Service received classified intelligence regarding a threat to Trump’s life ten days before the rally, but failed to share the information with other key agencies,” explains a FoxNews story.
“It also identified a series of procedural and planning mistakes, including ‘misallocation of resources, lack of training and pervasive communication failures’ that led to the near assassination,” the FoxNews coverage declares.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who ordered the report, blames the failures on “years of mismanagement.” But what else could he say?
On Wednesday, in “The Devil and the Deep Blue Dress,” Paul Jacob dealt with the closing of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Since then, reactions have run the gamut, but there is a persistent theme: disbelief. What President Trump and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, have told us about Epstein is not widely believed. But what does this mean for those most closely associated with reforming the FBI, Dan Bongino and his boss, Kash Patel?
The New Republictries to place this tweet in context: “It’s important to keep in mind that Loomer has her own agenda when she ‘reports’ on the Trump administration, and is desperate for anyjob that will keep her in close to the Oval Office.” But the progressive magazine goes on to say that Loomer has exerted no small amount of influence on the Trump Administration in the past.
“Conservatives have taken to social media to back FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino in an apparent falling out between the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) following Attorney General Pam Bondi’s defense of a memo regarding the Epstein files,” explainsNewsweek.
“According to a far-left Axios scoop,” the Independent Sentineltells us, “Dan Bongino took the day off today after a clash with Pam Blondi [sic] over the handling of the Epstein tapes. The dispute erupted Wednesday amid the fallout on the administration walking back its claims about Epstein. They said there was no client list and he committed suicide.”
Kash Patel, Director of the FBI, is also rumored to be thinking of throwing in the towel — but also seeks to put the AG to the curb.
What does this all mean? “Could you imagine you’re Dan Bongino?” asks the host of The Quarteringpodcast. “And you’re worth like . . . 200 million dollars. You know. F**k it. Just quit…. All he has to do is quit and say ‘I did the best I could; the Deep State is still real.’ You know. That kind of stuff. And then . . . 99% of people will forgive him. I guarantee you that fact.” The podcaster’s belief? The one that quits first will have the least mess on them.
Seems about right.
But nothing has happened yet, and Trump Again/Off-Again Bill Mitchell thinks a whole lot of folks are speculating, not reporting:
Uh, we know who.
Oh, wasn’t it odd to see Ms. Loomer’s put-down of AG Bondi as “Blondi” carry over into the news reports without correction?
“The year 2024 was transformative for both President Javier Milei and Argentina,” wrote Alejandro Werner in January. “After just one year in office, Milei has achieved significant milestones: eliminating the fiscal deficit, bringing inflation to moderate levels (see figure 1 [above]), reducing the gap between the official and the parallel exchange rate (a free but illiquid market), and implementing the most ambitious liberalization and deregulation program Argentina has seen this century.”
As we Americans endure information-free debates about our president’s reforms and bills — at least one being “Big” and “Beautiful,” according to presidential ballyhoo — it’s worth remembering that in South America one politician is making significant changes indeed.
“The upcoming mid-term elections in October will be a test of his political strength, so the first challenge is securing a strong performance in these elections,” Werner’s article for the Peterson Institute for International Economics goes on. “With half of the seats in the lower house of Argentina’s Congress and a third of the Senate up for renewal, the stakes are high. Currently, Milei’s political party, La Libertad Avanza, has minimal representation in Congress. A favorable mid-term outcome, buoyed by Milei’s consistent approval ratings, could cement his party as the dominant political force ahead of the 2027 presidential elections.” So note: Milei has accomplished a lot more than Trump with much more opposition than Trump has within his own government, with his own political party boasting of majorities in both the House and the Senate.
The view from Cato Institute is worth considering: “Argentine President Javier Milei has lowered inflation, drastically reduced government spending, and dismantled large parts of the federal bureaucracy,” explains Ian Vasquez for Cato. “But one of the most far-reaching efforts by his administration has been its deregulation push. . . .”
This push may remind Americans of Trump’s first term, and perhaps also of DOGE, but Milei has been much more successful.
Since coming to power, Milei has made wide-ranging cuts to Argentina’s bureaucracy. In his first year, he reduced the number of ministries from 18 to 8 (eliminating some and merging others), fired 37,000 public employees, and abolished about 100 secretariats and subsecretariats in addition to more than 200 lower-level bureaucratic departments.
The president has also aggressively pursued deregulation. Using a conservative methodology, my colleague Guillermina Sutter Schneider and I calculated that during Milei’s first year in office, he implemented about two deregulations per day. Roughly half of the measures eliminated regulations altogether, while the rest modified existing regulations in a generally market-oriented direction.
Milei has implemented these reforms legally and constitutionally, and they have resulted mainly from two broad measures. First, Milei began his administration by issuing an emergency “megadecree” that consisted of 366 articles. Emergency decrees are consistent with Argentine law if they meet certain conditions. They are also reviewable by Congress, which has the right to reject the orders within a specified period of time. Since the legislature did not object, most of the deregulations in the megadecree went into effect.
“Deregulation in Argentina: Milei Takes “Deep Chainsaw” to Bureaucracy and Red Tape,” Spring 2025.
A request for more information from Grok, this morning, elicited an important context from the AI:
Milei’s deregulation is driven by a consistent libertarian ideology aiming to dismantle the state, while Trump’s ismore pragmatic, focusing on economic competitiveness and political appeal, often paired with protectionistpolicies that contradict free-market principles.
If your general impression is that Trump’s much less impressive than Milei in curbing government bloat, Grok concurs: “Trump’s rhetoric suggests continued deregulation, but specific actions in 2025 are less documented, with DOGE’s efforts described as ‘meager’ compared to Milei’s.”
The difference between a “liberal” and a “leftist” is lost on many, especially on the political right. But understanding is coming. A liberal is a person ostensibly for an “open society” and against treating “the other” badly, but is also for the basic structures of society. A leftist, on the other hand, sees the causes of “the marginalized” and “the poor” and anyone not hyper-obviously benefitting from the current order as an excuse to tear down that order. “Fundamentally transform America” might be a slogan to excite a liberal, but a leftist sees it as a demand with immediate consequences.
Leftists do wish for a fundamental transformation of America!
Liberals might still think that free speech, for example, is a good thing. Whereas a leftist sees it as a barrier to that fundamental transformation.
Rumination on this subject is all over YouTube. Consider Styx:
Of Democrats and their institutional liberalism, he says, “I find it very funny that Reagan broke their minds so much that they began trying to absorb far leftists . . . and now Trump is breaking their minds again.”
The problem with the liberal is an inability to deal with substantive challenge.
And leftists are proving to be just as much a challenge as Trump, now, especially with the recent anti-ICE riots (the subject of Styx’s talk), so liberals are trying to distance themselves from the left. But, Styx says, that isn’t working.
Author Andrew Doyle, in a recent book, is trying to understand whither “the woke.” He sees the woke as “unprecedented” for being authoritarian and successful at it while pretending to be powerless:
Doyle is the creator of the infamous “Titania McGrath” persona and Twitter account, and his new book is called The New Puritans. He expects that the new puritans of wokeness will wither quickly as a movement, because of the fundamental contradiction. The “unprecedented” contradiction.
The only big success in opposing leftist policies, on the other hand, is not in the U.S., it is far, far south. Hence the seemingly random placement of a Milei image at top. More updates to come on him and his Argentine movement.
One often heard the opinion, as recently as a year ago — sometimes as a whisper, sometimes as a boast of savvy opinion or special knowledge, or even daring prophecy — that Michelle Obama was the Democrats’ secret weapon, the most likely next “sure thing” candidate for the presidency.
Is anyone saying it now?
Michelle Obama’s candidacy is off the table. Comb through X — you’ll see almost no one thumping for Mrs. Obama.
But what made the savvy sages of our time drop the issue?
There are probably two issues:
I. The general collapse of Democratic Party cultural cachet after the debacle that was the Kamala Harris campaign. The Democrats have great trouble reaching a majority of Americans right now. It is the party’s issues. Michelle Obama would not solve this problem. (Or would she?)
II. The fizzle that was (or at least yawns induced by) “IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson.” It is not doing well on YouTube, and not creating much buzz outside of a narrow fan base. Or so it appears to those outside the fan base. Apple and Spotify say the podcast is a success.
But if success it be, Michelle Obama’s enduring popularity does not seem to be remotely political. This may reflect her own non-political outlook on life.
Almost certainly the lack of Michelle O. buzz has nothing to do with this:
Today’s “Thought” (see below) features Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett dismissing fellow Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. This passage from Justice Barrett’s write-up of the Trump v. CASA decision has been shared a great on social media since it came down yesterday.
The whole passage is worth reading (see links here), and may demonstrate some tension on the court. In social media, much has been made about the . . . sportive . . . or political . . . or even “catfight” . . . element of it all, or as a sign that Jackson is a “DEI hire” etc. But the actual decision is of no small moment, and worth reading.
The Epoch Timesoffers “five takeaways,” with the summary in the blurb: “By limiting the ability of judges to issue universal blocks, the court’s ruling is expected to affect other cases contesting Trump administration policies.”
ONE: Nationwide Injunctions Not Consistent With Nation’s History
“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” Barrett said. “Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.”
TWO: Broad Relief Still Possible
A key aspect of Barrett’s opinion indicated that broad relief was not necessarily bad but depended on who the plaintiffs in particular cases were. Courts, she said, could issue orders designed to provide “complete” relief for the parties before the court rather than other individuals in similar situations.
THREE: Unclear How Birthright Citizenship Issue Will Play Out
“No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law,” Barrett said. “But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.”
Note that this quoted passage follows immediately after the oft-shared swipe at Justice Jackson.
FOUR: Dissenters Say Constitutional Rights in Danger
Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who penned her own dissent, expressed their disagreement with Barrett and her majority opinion colleagues.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor said. She added that while birthright citizenship might be under threat today, “tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
Because the majority decision limited relief to parties before the court, it rendered “constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit,” Sotomayor said.
Jackson, meanwhile, described the majority’s decision as “an existential threat to the rule of law.” Her separate dissent suggested that Barrett had focused too much on history and not enough on broader and more basic principles, like whether the judiciary can stop unlawful behavior.
FIVE: Majority Has Strong Words for Jackson
In multiple portions of Barrett’s majority opinion, she and her fellow justices leveled criticisms of Jackson’s dissent.
At one point, Barrett said that Jackson’s position was “difficult to pin down.” After briefly discussing Jackson’s dissent, Barrett adds that the majority “will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
The Epoch Times article ends with Barrett’s most generalized critique of Jackson’s dissent, where she says that Ketanji Brown Jackson’s position “would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.”
And this might be the biggest ideological takeaway. Progressives (which are what Jackson and fellow justices Sotomayor and Kagan most obviously are) have relied heavily on court rulings to advance their political agenda. They tend not to win on their issues through majority vote of the people. For good or ill, many of the major “progressive” achievements, such as regarding de-segregation and abortion, were achieved largely on the basis of key Supreme Court cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade.
More recently, Democrats have relied heavily on injunctions of the lesser federal courts to “stop Trump.”
The ruling in Trump v. CASA limits this tactic somewhat.
From early on, blood clotting has been rumored to be associated with COVID and its treatments [“vaccines”]:
The ”auto-generated” text given from a DuckDuckGo search: “The term ‘clot shot’ is often used informally to refer to COVID-19 vaccines, particularly in discussions about rare side effects like blood clots associated with some vaccines, such as Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. While these side effects are serious, they are extremely rare compared to the risks posed by COVID-19 itself.”
But is it really the case that rumors of clotting are merely that, mere rumors? An efflorescence of dark humor in a trying time? Dr. John Campbell has been following the story, and interviewing doctors, scientists, and embalmers:
In this repeat interview with Major Tom Haviland, who has spoken to and polled embalmers at morticians’ conventions, we learn that while the stories told and evidence collected by embalmers working on dead bodies (preparing them for internment) are alarming, scientists and government funders have shown remarkable restraint in following up on clues.
The clots being found after the rollout of the various “vaccines” are not just small, easy to tear. They are large, “tough and rubbery.”
However, the mainstream of the medical profession takes pains to debunk these stories every now and then, dismissing them as tall tales, or as almost anodyne, quite common before and after the pandemic, contrary to the testimony of Haviland.
Note that Haviland and Campbell are not talking about microclotting. Nor is Haviland referring to “chicken fat clots,” which are small, yellow, and have been observed for a very long time. Haviland is on track of an even more alarming trend, which features clots of sometimes gruesome length.
Be careful in choosing an emoji to accompany your “clot shot” epithet.
“A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll reveals a significant wave of discontent among Democratic voters,” explains Billy Adams at MSN, “with a strong majority expressing a desire for new leadership and a shift in party priorities.”
The spectacular failure of party leadership in the debacle that was the transition from the Biden re-election campaign, last year, to the Harris presidential election campaign, is just the tip of the proverbial calved glacier.
“The survey indicates that many Democrats feel their party is over-emphasizing issues such as transgender rights and electric vehicles, while not paying enough attention to pressing economic concerns,” the article points out. “Voters are eager for their leaders to address ‘kitchen-table issues’ like the cost of living and affordability, and to work towards reducing corporate influence.”
Are we seeing an end to identity politics as the focus of the left? Or perhaps the end of the left’s influence on the party? “Some prominent Democrats have openly criticized the party for being too ‘weak and woke,’” and the general trend of complaints about the pathetic response of Democrats, in 2024, to a resurgence of Trump support showed, apparently, a need to reconnect “with its base on core economic issues.…”
But can the party retreat from cringe woke nonsense to return to its core strengths of cringe statist/socialist nonsense? Rep. Marc Pocan (D-Mich.) has expressed how difficult this is proving to be: “I would love to have a day go by that @DNC doesn’t do something embarrassing & off message.”
“Is it funnier,” asked Paul Jacob regarding a Rand Paul critic who had mocked the senator and called the whole picnic episode funny, “than the Deep State admitting that it had been faking and fanning the flames of the UFO craze all along?”
It is worth taking a few moments and digesting that UFO story, apart from the picnic invitation kerfuffle. The new spin on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) issue was provided by the first of a two-parter by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha in the Wall Street Journal [link above]. The title and blurb provide an adequate précis:
The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology: U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs
Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025.
Now, Paul Jacob, on this site, has been covering the drip-by-drip UAP disclosure for a number of years now [feel free to use the search bar, above]. It has been obvious that the government has been lying to us. For a long time.
But about what? And how much?
The Wall Street Journal story is that the government made the whole thing up, or nearly so. “The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames [of the UFO craze], in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.”
Unfortunately, we knew this was true from before the New York Times debut of the disclosure story in 2017. The sad, strange case of Richard Doty, who fed a hapless citizen who had stumbled upon a secret military operation a wild story of aliens and extra-terrestrial civilizations, was covered in the 2013 documentaryMirage Men.
But the wrinkle on the story is that Doty has gone on to push UFO stories publicly. Look for him on YouTube. Very odd, to say the least — and Doty is just one liar among many.
Speaking of liars, the CIA was created during the same summer that the modern UFO story started, 1947. That year featured multiple UAP reports (over Mount Rainier, most famously) and an alleged UFO crash (near Roswell, New Mexico). But the story had at least one strange precursor: the foo-fighters in World War II.
To what extent did the Deep State (and that freshly-debuted CIA, specifically) create a craze? Or, on the other hand, direct it and capitalize on it? Control it?
And what part was played by the pulp literary movement of science fiction? That is a question rarely asked, much less answered.
No answers here. But it is worth digesting how ufologists have handled the Wall Street Journal article. Here are two:
The thing is, if the UFO/UAP subject is almost completely a government psy-op, what does that tell us about our government?
To say that the government lies to us would be to understate the enormity of this.
