Women miss the ancient experience of being mainly with women, says Camille Paglia:
How Christendom replaced Jesus-as-God with Hitler-as-the-Devil — historian Alec Ryrie elaborates his thesis (discussed in these pages before) as developed in his newest book:
As the House of Representatives hold hearings on “UAPs,” ufologist Richard Dolan speculates what it all means. Caution — he believes that ETs are here now:
Meanwhile, the transit of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is on the other side of the Sun; it’s gone past perihelion; and NASA is not releasing any better images of the object, under cover (not implausible) of the federal government shutdown. Lots of discussion on YouTube. From all over the map. Happy searching. And for a search engine, try Freespoke.com.
On October 16, 2025, the Anglican Communion split, officially, into two, with the breakaway group calling themselves the actual Anglican Union, and the churches aligned with the Church of England and the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury condemned as something close to heretics.
But that’s not the kind of thing we follow here at ThisIsCommonSense.org.
Speaking of big splits, Mt. Etna may be in the process of splitting into two, with a huge hunk of the mountain predicted to slide off in the Mediterranean Sea. That would be a disaster of possibly horrific proportions. In early June a massive eruption caught world attention. It may be worthwhile to follow current reporting.
But that is also not a topic for these pages.
More relevant are secessionists movements in these United States, with the recent votes, these last few years, in eastern Oregon, in which more than a dozen counties are in effect petitioning the Oregon legislature to be let go, so they can be united with Idaho. It’s called the “Greater Idaho Project,” and Paul Jacob has written about this in these pages.
The occasion for this update is the nifty map and article at Brilliant Maps.
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?
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.”
“If you’re in our hemisphere, if you’re in the Caribbean, if you’re north of Venezuela and you want to traffic drugs to the United States, you are a legitimate target of the United States military,” in an interview with Fox News’s The Sunday Briefing.
“We have every authorization needed. These are designated as foreign terrorist organizations,” Hegseth insisted. Two days ago another boat of “narco-terrorists” was bombed in the Caribbean under Hegseth’s direction.
This is all comes under the rubric of “fighting terrorism” as authorized after 9/11.
This is how the Trump Administration is ramping up the War on Drugs, a preoccupation of both major political parties and the federal government in the 20th century.
The previous Tuesday, Hegseth had made waves denying to women any easier physical qualification standard to get in the military, demanding a return to pre-2015 qualification standards. And advised his audience of big brass that just as rank-and-file military personnel should be fit, so too should U.S. generals and admirals not be fat.
At least that, we can hazard, is a constitutionally fit and proper — fully authorized — judgment of the Secretary of, er, Defense.
The Democrats pushed the government into shutdown because they insisted that Obamacare be re-upped, and that the medical expenses of immigrants, legal and illegal, be paid from federal government coffers. This was the upshot of Paul Jacob’s Thursday and Friday commentaries.
But Democrats do not want to admit the latter part of top agenda item (in Maxine Waters’ words). Here is NBC trying to make the Democrats’ case:
The argument can be broken down into multiple pieces, but take just the first minute, describing why Democrats insist that the Obamacare re-up be dealt with now, not after the CR. They say it must happen now, because people are making their plans on it. Republicans are not negotiating in good faith, Democrats complain. (Sound familiar?) But by scuttling the CR, now the Obamacare re-up issue is postponed further.
And Democrats knew that going in.
They aren’t dummies. Are they?
So it is really about something else. Not the American people and their medical insurance. Something else. . . .
FromOctober 1 to November 9, 2025, Comet 3I/ATLAS (also known as C/2025 N1) will become unobservable from Earth due to solar conjunction — making it too close to the Sun’s glare for ground-based telescopes. Thus it will be unobservable when it reaches its perihelion (point on its trajectory closes to the Sun) on October 29, 2025. It should reappear for observations in early November 2025, though visibility will be limited to equatorial regions initially.
As previously mentioned in these updates, the comet may not even be a comet since it is so weird. And it is so weird that Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has had a field day on newscasts and podcasts speculating on the possibility that the object may be artificial in origin. YouTube is filled with both rational discussion and outrageous hype about this extremely odd interstellar mass, with talk of alien machinery, etc. And is it worth noting that the object will be invisible to us on Halloween day? (See illustration, above, for a chuckle.)
While 3I/ATLAS is in a sense a UFO — we do not yet understand why it is so odd, why it is so different from the previous two interstellar interlopers to our solar system as well as from all other comets, a category it has sort of been shotgunned into by most respectable observers — it is one whose outré status may be falsified in the next few months. If it does not slow down or speed up after its “dark” (eclipsed) period behind the Sun, we can probably determine it’s not “too” outré.
But something interesting is happening right before disappearing: it’s been hit with a coronal mass ejection (CME):
What are the odds? Already the odds of an interstellar object of this size should “do” a flyby of three planets (Mars, Venus & Jupiter) in the plane of the ecliptic boggles the mind. Add all the rest, and now this CME, and what do we get? A riddle orbiting a mystery recolving around an enigma!
This is all not just entertaining science stuff. Understanding objects flying within the orbits of the terrestrial planets has to be regarded as a safety issue for all people on our planet.
President Trump complained, aloud — that is, on Truth Social, to his Attorney General, Pam Bondi — that there can be no more delays on major cases against Deep State and Democratic corruption. Soon after, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, was indicted on two of three charges, with just days to spare before the statute of limitations kicked in to preclude prosecution. “Comey was charged with one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice,” explains CBS, “related to Senate testimony he gave almost five years ago.”
Meanwhile, the Epstein case appears to be slouching towards disclosure. The O’Keefe Media Group released, on Wednesday, a conversation overheard at an airport that featured an official investigator in the case letting a few cats out of the bag. “Senior Justice Department investigator Glenn Prager revealed Jeffrey Epstein,” Mike Flores summarizes, is “‘CIA’ and confirmed that rapes occurred while Bill Clinton was on the private plane.” That is, the infamous private plane popularly known as the “Lolita Express.”
“I’ve interviewed all the victims, There’s never been an instance where Trump was on a plane with these kids and the rapes occurred. But that can’t be said for Clinton. And it can’t be said for others,” Glenn Prager was overheard saying at a Phoenix airport. “While the Clintons were on the plane, while Bill Clinton was on the plane, there were rapes that occurred.
“They [DOJ] didn’t want to go after him [Epstein] because he’s an asset for the United States and Israel,” he added.
Trump has not been “protecting himself because there’s nothing there,” this Mr. Prager clarified, “but he’s protecting a lot of people.”
The O’Keefe Media Group is the investigative company that James O’Keefe created after his unfriendly ouster from his previous effort, Project Veritas. The conclusion of OMG’s article contains caveats:
When reached for comment by phone Prager simply replied “I can’t talk to you,” before hanging up.
According to a DOJ spokesperson, “This individual [Glenn Prager] worked at the Department of Justice as a program analyst over fifteen years ago. He has no understanding of, or access to, the underlying facts in this investigation. His statements should not be considered accurate. It is disgusting that someone would further exploit victims of sexual abuse by fabricating stories for their personal benefit.”
In April of this year Glenn Prager was announced as Executive Director of Government Risk Solutions for LexisNexis Solutions, a global data and analytics company that provides technology services to the private and public sector.
In a separate article, “DOJ INSIDER: ‘Prince Andrew was on Epstein Island When Rapes Happened’— Claims FBI Kash Patel and DOJ AG Pam Bondi at War over Epstein files,” OMG reveals more of the source’s disclosures.
What do people think of the firing of Jimmy Kimmel?
Well, not a firing exactly, as Paul Jacob mentioned yesterday, but, let’s agree, Kimmel’s exact employment status is not quite the issue. What’s at issue is what he said, and to what extent was the government influential in removing Kimmel from his on-air position even if only temporarily.
Dave Smith took, generally, Paul’s position: what Kimmel said was odd, dumb; and the FCC should not pressure a media corporation to remove on-air talent:
Joe Lancaster, at Reason, addressed the Kimmel FCC problem:
This week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized TV host Jimmy Kimmel for comments made about Kirk during his show. Carr openly intimated that ABC should take action or potentially face reprisal; within hours, the network suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely. (Trump later praised Carr as “outstanding. He’s a patriot. He loves our country, and he’s a tough guy.”) Of course, when the opposing party was in power, Carr recognized the error of such a threat. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that during the 2020 election, Facebook artificially decreased the spread of a story about Hunter Biden in response to a request from the FBI. “The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it—rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear,” Carr posted on X in response. Now that government power is in his hands, Carr apparently has fewer qualms about wielding it like that.
As for the influence of the FCC, one major player in the cancellation out-right denies any such influence: “‘The decision to preempt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision,’ a Nexstar spokesperson told CBS News in an email Thursday.”
But, of all the reactions, The Babylon Beeaimed for a wider perspective:
For several years now, Paul Jacob had applied his demand for government transparency to the UFO topic. While for decades there has been a big cultural divide on the subject, between the Sophisticated Scoffers (who think there is absolutely nothing to the UFO issue) and the UFO Nuts (who express a range of opinion, from the suspicion that “there’s something to this” to the belief that “the aliens are here and running the Bilderberg Group”), in the last few years a number of government officials, military leaders, whistleblowers and pencil pushers have affirmed that some Unidentified Flying (and Submersible) Objects are puzzling and disturbing and somehow real, no matter how odd. To protect themselves they’ve re-dubbed the issue as one of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, previously “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”) and have set up official inquiries and congressional investigations.
And the House Committee run by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Fla.) has made some progress, even in this past week of tumultuous socio-political turmoil. Consider a recent installment of Clayton Morris’s Redacted show:
The new UFO telemetry video is interesting, if not exactly knock-down. Historian Richard Dolan covered the mid-week hearing live:
