Category: Update

Yesterday, Paul Jacob implied that Senator Rand Paul and Representative Tom Massie, both of Kentucky, could have observed the turning of the federal debt to from thirty-six point-something trillion to $37 trillion at the White House picnic. Considering that the picnic is already over, and the debt, as calculated by USDebtClock.org, still lingers under $36.98 trillion, that was obviously not possible. Of course, with such ritual observances, exact markers of the exact moment are hardly required.

But it does call attention to a mildly interesting question: when?

A quick consultation with the artificial intelligence called Grok3, supplied by X, suggests that the $37 trillion mark will be reached around June 19th, with June 15th or 16th well within the realm of possibility. But Grok also adds some caveats as well as this piece of useful information:

The Congressional Budget Office and other sources estimate the federal debt will reach $37.1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2025 (September 30, 2025). However, real-time data from USDebtClock.org and posts on X indicate the debt is growing faster than some projections, with some analysts predicting $37 trillion well before the fiscal year-end. A Joint Economic Committee report specifically projects $37 trillion by approximately October 31, 2025, based on a three-year average daily growth rate, but current trends suggest it could happen sooner.

Grok3, consulted June 13, 2025.

A fact to bring up at this summer’s family picnic, no? Be the life of the party. We dare you.

While there was nothing unexpected about Elon Musk leaving DOGE and going back into the ersatz private sector of corporations receiving government contracts, and X (that is, ex-Twitter), the manner of the disemployment is a bit startling.

Paul Jacob covered the first hints of the schism in late May. It was something Elon Musk said in an interview, here reproduced as one of this site’s Thoughts of the day:

But then things got weird. As summarized by The New York Times, the schism played out first at the White House, as “Mr. Trump said that Mr. Musk, the billionaire leader of Tesla and SpaceX, was ‘upset’ that the pending legislation would roll back subsidies for electric vehicles. Then he got in a particularly sharp jab, asserting he would have won the 2024 election without the millions of dollars Mr. Musk spent to support him.” Then it went mostly to social media (X and Truth Social):

But Trump “also maintained that Mr. Musk knew ‘every aspect of the bill,’ saying that the tech executive did not have a problem with the measure until he left his government post.”

Then Elon pulled out all the stops:

Responses to the schism have been all over the map. Here are two dissimilar takes, from comedians Steven Crowder and Dave Smith:

Why conclude with comedians? It could be that comedians tend to be much clearer than other commentators.

Or it could be that this is all really funny.

“FBI Director Kash Patel claimed Friday that there was a recent ‘breakthrough’ in the COVID-19 origins probe,” explains a Daily Mail article, repeating information divulged on a Joe Rogan Experience episode.

Fauci, one of the primary medical leaders during the deadly pandemic, is being investigated as part of the larger inquiry into how COVID started and America’s response.

Patel told podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI originally couldn’t locate any of the [cellular telephony] devices Fauci used during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 — but they apparently turned up just days ago.

Though this is good news for advancing some transparency on wayward/malign behavior by the country’s former top-paid bureaucrat, the FBI Director cautions not to “jump to the conclusion [that] everything’s in there. Maybe it’s deleted, maybe it’s not, but at least we found it, and at least now we can tell people that we have been looking because it is of public importance.”

Further, Patel admitted that President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon places additional difficulties upon prosecution.

The Daily Mail article concludes with a background discussion of SARS-CoV-2 origins:

The FBI and the CIA both asserted that COVID likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, which had been conducting different experiments on coronaviruses in the years preceding the disastrous pandemic.

The lab leak theory was previously denounced as a conspiracy theory during the height of the pandemic. Fauci has been accused of suppressing information indicating the veracity of the lab leak, which he denied before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last year.

Paul Jacob has written extensively about this subject, from fairly early on in the pandemic story.

“The total number of excess deaths in 47 countries of the Western World was 3,098,456 from 1 January 2020 until 31 December 2022,” write the four authors of “Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022.”

It’s an interesting journal article, well worth our attention.

“Excess mortality was documented in 41 countries (87%) in 2020, 42 countries (89%) in 2021 and 43 countries (91%) in 2022. In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic onset and implementation of containment measures, records present 1,033,122 excess deaths (P-score 11.4%). In 2021, the year in which both containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines were used to address virus spread and infection, the highest number of excess deaths was reported:
1,256,942 excess deaths (P-score 13.8%). In 2022, when most containment measures were lifted and COVID-19 vaccines were continued, preliminary data present 808,392 excess deaths (P-score 8.8%).”

Or, to put it in graphic terms:

Here we can compare excess death stats among the various countries:

Though we are already forgetting the enormity of mob-action, abuse of expert testimony, and unconstitutional government, our forgetfulness is not a result of the problem going away. “Excess mortality has remained high in the Western World for three consecutive years,” the authors summarize, “despite the implementation of containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines.”

Interestingly, in Eastern Europe and Russia, where vaccination with mRNA gene therapeutics was scant to none, the excess level has gone negative. That is a good thing.

Paul Jacob has written extensively about the pandemic in these pages. Feel free to use the search engine above.

 

“There is nothing in the file at this point,” Dan Bongino, Deputy Director of the FBI, told the Fox News audience, “on the Epstein case — and there’s gonna be a disclosure on this coming shortly; we’re workng through . . . there is video. . . .”

Of Epstein killing himself?

No, says Bongino. Of the “entire MCC bay.” No one coming in or going out; no one. . . .

Wait, wait — weren’t we informed years ago that the surveillance system had been down, conveniently, for the period in question? But he asn’t asked that.

When Bongino and his boss Kash Patel appeared together, insisting the Epstein committed suicide, many have noted how uncomfortable they look. 

But that proves nothing.

And nothing proves nothing.

In a recent conversation with Fox’s Bret Baier, Patel insisted that the FBI must not “rush” disclosure. It’s been weeks; months!

The official story’s not impossible, though. “It was only on the last day I watched Jeffrey that I got a hint he was depressed,” Epstein’s fellow inmate William Mersey wrote in 2021. “I arrived on my shift to find him sitting on the dirty suicide cell floor eating his dinner.

“When I asked why he’d chosen to use the floor of his cell as a dinner table, he half-heartedly waved me off and responded ‘It’s easier this way.’ It was at that moment it occurred to me he’d given up hope…. Jeffrey realized he had nothing to look forward to save spending his golden years locked up with societal misfits. His life was over  —  and he knew it. And he responded in a manner which he felt was rational. He killed himself.”

Plausible. It might even be true. 

But much of the story doesn’t add up — in no small part because of links to “intelligence.” And Bongino’s insistence that the FBI’s files show nothing suspicious in the case? Well, yeah. That would be true in case of a conspiracy, too.

And about video of empty corridors: you don’t need AI to fake that. 

The “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” meme is not going away; Patel and Bongino did little to rout the rumors.

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Note: The quotation at top was retrieved from a podcast.

Paul Jacob on Epstein:

“Pedo Plane Perv,” July 10, 2019

“Suicide?” August 12, 2019

“Just one day before the [Senate] hearing, likely for preemptive damage control purposes, the FDA quietly updated its myocarditis warning on Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, expanding the risk category to males aged 16 to 25 and citing an incidence of 8 cases per million doses for the 2023–2024 formulations,” Nicolas Hulscher wrote on Thursday for Focal Points. “Unfortunately, no mention of death was added — despite robust, peer-reviewed autopsy evidence confirming fatal vaccine-induced myocarditis.”

Hulscher’s short article focuses on the testimony of Dr. Peter McCullough at the hearing, which was held on Wednesday.

In direct response to claims made by Senator Richard Blumenthal during the hearing that COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives, Dr. McCullough was unequivocal: “I don’t want America to be fooled by this hearing today thinking that the vaccines saved lives — because they didn’t.”

Dr. McCullough’s testimony was clear, data-driven, and difficult to ignore.

He made the case that public health agencies minimized known harms, failed to act on early warning signs, and still have not provided the public with full transparency.

The hearing was the first Senator Ron Johnson conducted as the new chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The senator began by asserting that the Biden administration had known about the mRNA “vaccines’” myocarditis problem early, but kept mum.

“Johnson released newly subpoenaed records exposing a detailed timeline of what officials knew and when,” The Vigilant Fox summarizes on Substack. “While Pfizer and Moderna received insider updates, doctors and citizens who raised concerns were silenced.”

In February 2021, Israeli health officials warned the CDC of “large reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people” following Pfizer injections, just two and a half months after the vaccine received emergency use authorization.

By April, the CDC was already reviewing myocarditis data from Israel and the Department of Defense. But instead of alerting the public, they stayed quiet.

It now seems possible that the full truth about the coronavirus pandemic will come out, though few if any insiders are likely to be brought to justice.

“New Hampshire joins a growing list of states that mandate some level of local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement,” The Epoch Times tells us.

New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed a pair of bills into law that ban so-called “sanctuary” policies designed to keep local police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

“There will be no sanctuary cities in New Hampshire,” Ayotte declared at the bill-signing ceremony, flanked by lawmakers and sheriffs from across the state. “Period. End of story.”

At issue are two bill, HB511 and SB62. These curb local governments under the corporate control of the sovereign state from defying federal law on the matter of immigration — that is, “unless expressly prohibited by state or federal law, local governmental entities may not prohibit or impede any state or federal law enforcement agency from complying with federal immigration laws,” etc.

“New Hampshire now joins a growing list of states that have enacted anti-sanctuary laws,” The Epoch Times goes on to explain. “According to legal advocacy group Immigrant Legal Resource Center, more than 20 states, including Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Georgia, have laws mandating at least some level of local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.”

The idea of the state nullification of federal law — James Madison called it “interposition,” and it was a key idea of the early Jeffersonians — has been on the rise in recent years. (Cannabis legalization is a good example.) This movement of the states to rein in the “sanctuary city” movement goes in the other direction, forcing compliance with the federal government.

Yesterday, the federal debt was seen on USDebtClock.org as quickly and inexorably inching towards $36.9 trillion. The official budget deficit is over $2 trillion. And Moody’s made, on Friday, an adjustment in its ratings, stripping “the US of its top-notch triple-A credit rating as it warned about rising levels of government debt and a widening budget deficit in the world’s biggest economy.”

Now, none of the major ratings agencies bestows upon the federal government the top rating. “For the first time in history, the US does not hold a triple-A credit rating from at least one of the three big agencies. S&P in 2011 was the first to strip the country of its pristine rating, while Fitch took the move in 2023.”

Meanwhile, the president boasts of a record one trillion dollar military budget.

And Congress’s DOGE caucus, formed to back up DOGE cuts, is apparently dead.

Insolvency brinksmanship seems to be going gung ho ahead.

Last year to the day, James Bovard wrote this: “The Biden White House is proclaiming a new prerogative for presidents: they may suppress any evidence of their unfitness for office.”

Yesterday, on social media, Mr. Bovard updated the story he covered last year: “The damning audio of President Biden’s disastrous interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur is finally out. Here’s my New York Post oped last year on the BS pretenses the White House used to suppress the tape. Biden was not even sure if Trump was elected president in 2017 or in 2016.”

While Biden’s bumbling, brain-addled senescence was on display before the 2020 election, Democrats wouldn’t admit it until after his disastrous “debate” with Donald Trump last summer.

And, as Bovard indicated, now (finally!) we have the actual audio of the interview that was of some consequence last year. CBS gives some details:

Snippets from a 2023 interview that led Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur to describe former President Joe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” were obtained and published by Axios Friday, showing Biden’s halting tone of voice and difficulty remembering dates.

CBS News has confirmed the audio matches the transcript of the interview released by the Biden White House in 2024.

In one four-minute clip, Biden was asked by Hur’s team — which was investigating Biden’s handling of classified records — about where he kept his documents shortly after leaving office as vice president. Biden’s response is marked by long pauses, and his voice appears hoarse at times. His speech is especially halting as he describes the period around his son Beau’s death.

In the audio obtained by news outlet Axios, Biden can also be heard struggling to remember the year when Beau died or the year when President Trump was first elected. Members of his staff can be heard correcting him or reminding him of the date.

Joe Walsh, “Recordings of Biden Justice Department interview emerge, highlighting his memory lapses,” CBS News (May 17, 2025).

It is noteworthy that CNN’s Jake Tapper had co-authored a book on the Biden decline cover-up in the Democratic Party. It is also noteworthy — and many commenters online have emphasized it — that Tapper was in on the cover-up. But that won’t be admitted, will it? At least, not by Tapper and other professional cover-up artists.

“The Treasury Department said Friday it would likely run out of cash to pay the nation’s bills by August,” Politico tells us, “setting a new, firmer deadline for Congress to act to avoid a catastrophic default on the United States’ more-than $36 trillion debt.”

“Because there is significant uncertainty in projecting cash flows months into the future,” Secretary of Treasury Scott K.H. Bessent wrote Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, on Friday, “it is impossible to identify precisely how long cash and extraordinary measures will last.” Bessent went on to surmise that funds “will be exhausted in August while Congress is scheuled to be in recess.”

The Secretary urged “Congress to increase or suspend the debt limit by mid-July,” to prevent another scurrying chaos about government operations, like we’re used to, and “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Not doing so, the Secretary informed the Speaker, “would wreak havoc on our financial system and diminish America’s security and global leadership position.”

Michael Stratford and Jennifer Scholtes at Politico draw the obvious extrapolation: “If congressional Republicans don’t get their party-line bill to President Donald Trump’s desk before Treasury exhausts its borrowing power, GOP leaders will likely be forced to seek votes from Democrats to head off the fiscal cliff — an exercise that would likely require making major policy concessions to the minority party and risk alienating fiscal hawks.”

“GOP Lawmakers are hashing out the details of what will be in the sweeping package,” explains USA Today, “which is expected to boost funding for border security and defense while cutting taxes and possibly cutting social programs such as Medicaid.”

What are the odds that Republicans will work together to reduce government in their promised megabill before this new “deadline”?

Odds are that they will only increase spending. No?

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Paul Jacob writes about the budgeting process, debt crises, and allied subjects with some regularity. “The Continuing Crisis,” from March, gives a good idea of his general tenor.