Category: Update

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 Times offers “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 entry for “clot shot” in the Urban Dictionary is amusing:

Slangsphere.com has advice:

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 documentary Mirage 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.

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.