Category: Update

Today is the 33rd of the federal government shutdown, caused by a failure of Congress to pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) to carry on funding the Leviathan.

On Halloween, returning from Florida, President Trump again urged Senate Republicans to “end the filibuster,” calling Democratic blocks a “ransom” for “illegal alien healthcare.” In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” 

Vice President J.D. Vance echoed this after a Capitol GOP lunch, confirming that military pay continues despite shutdown. 

But SNAP benefits do not. And the failure of Obamacare looms.

Now, what Trump is advising, here, has been in the past called “the nuclear option,” defying Senate tradition by allowing a simple majority to rush through the CR to re-open the government despite Democratic demands that the party gets nearly everything it wants, all in this CR and not in separate bills. This includes re-upping Obama-era subsidies (tax credits) under the Affordable Care Act as well as re-legislating (as opposed to re-litigating) their defeat in the Big Beautiful Bill this summer, which did indeed cut some of their key projects overseas. 

If the Senate went “nuclear,” it wouldn’t be the first time. The 60-vote threshold has been established through repeated bipartisan understandings and incremental changes:

• In 1975, Democrats lowered the cloture threshold from 67 to 60 votes, a compromise to curb abuse while preserving minority rights.
• The Senate has already partially nixed the supermajority multiple times via majority vote, often in partisan fights:
  • 2013: Democrats eliminated it for most nominations (under Majority Leader Harry Reid) to confirm judges.
  • 2017: Republicans extended this to Supreme Court justices (under Mitch McConnell) for Trump’s picks like Neil Gorsuch.
  • 2025: Republicans themselves invoked it twice earlier this year for Trump cabinet confirmations and budget reconciliation tweaks.
  • These changes didn’t fully end the filibuster but carved out exceptions, demonstrating that it is indeed alterable by simple majority.

Trump’s advice would go further: a full elimination for legislation (beyond nominations), potentially via a Senate parliamentarian ruling or direct vote change. Critics like Sen. John Thune (R-SD) call it a “bulwark against bad things,” fearing Democrats could later ram through statehood for D.C./Puerto Rico or court-packing. Moderates like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) warn it would “inflict lasting harm” on the Senate’s deliberative role.

Note that this Sixty Percent requirement is a supermajority requirement, a republican tradition that alters the democratic element of our politics away from simple majoritarianism to a more reserved procedural practice. In effect, this means sometimes there will be stalemates, at least when the two contending parties each play the role of intransigent.

In other words, the game is Chicken!

Though some might notice a resemblance to MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction.

On Monday — Day 34 — the Senate reconvenes at 10 a.m. (ET), and could feature a 14th vote on H.R. 5371 (the CR), but Democrats signal continued blocks without ACA concessions, and without restoration of cuts made in July 2025 (OBBBA) and legal clarity that contingency funds can be used during a shutdown. 

If you are thinking that both of these could best be handled outside a stop-gap CR, you are probably right — and that is what most Senate Republicans are thinking — but Democrats are negotiating from a position of weakness. So they threaten to halt the whole process. It’s all they can do to grasp some victory from 2024’s electoral defeats.

Physicist Brian Cox is more than a little annoyed. He keeps seeing online videos of “himself” saying things that he has never said. And he complained on X:

Michio Kaku has even more cause for complaint: false video of him yammering on about 3I/ATLAS appears to have been more numerous. And he, too, protests. See for yourself on his website:

But how much misleading of the public is going on? Isn’t the standard reaction to do a double take the first time you see one of these fakeries, and then spot it out for what it is within half a minute?

AI is not quite that convincing. Yet. There are tells.

And the fact that the videos show these scientists saying outrageous things about our solar system’s third official interstellar visitor is a pretty big clue. (Though it is worth noting that Michio Kaku has scientifically studied UFOs, and may not be quite as negative to “believers” as is Brian Cox.)

Meanwhile, 3I/ATLAS continues to surprise scientists. Just be a bit cautious with media reports. You do not have to use AI or thrill over every UFO rumor to pass for a “nobber.”

Take the New York Post’s recent story by Ben Cost: “Possible alien spacecraft 3I/ATLAS makes unusual shift while hurtling towards the Sun.” Terrible title, for it suggests that, before perihelion, the putative comet was heading towards the Sun. It wasn’t. And isn’t.

“Manhattan-sized comet 3I/ATLAS allegedly executed an unusual maneuver while approaching the Sun earlier this week, fueling theories that it could be an extraterrestrial spacecraft.” Astounding! But is it true?

Oh. That word “allegedly” — who alleges?

Not Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. He writes about the “First Evidence for a Non-Gravitational Acceleration of 3I/ATLAS at Perihelion.”

The non-gravitational acceleration was measured at the perihelion distance of 1.36 times the Earth-Sun separation (defined as an astronomical unit or `au’), equivalent to 203 million kilometers. It had two components in the orbital plane of 3I/ATLAS:

· A radial acceleration away from the Sun of 135 kilometers (=9×10^{-7}au) per day squared.

· A transverse acceleration relative to the Sun’s direction of 60 kilometers (=4×10^{-7}au) per day squared.

If 3I/ATLAS is propelled by the rocket effect of ejected gas, then momentum conservation implies that the object would lose half its mass over a characteristic timescale equal to the ejection speed divided by the measured non-gravitational acceleration.

Ben Cost’s word “maneuver” suggests (to this reader) a purposive act rather than a mere alteration of physical behavior. But that is not what Loeb . . . “alleges.”

We have to have a wait-and-see attitude — which is what Loeb insists upon and what he has been saying all along, even as he also insisted that we must consider the possibility that this ninth-degree anomalous object is artificial in origin.

For the record, these appear to be the list of Avi Loeb’s observed 3I/ATLAS anomalies:

1. Ecliptic Alignment: Trajectory aligned within 5° of the solar system’s ecliptic plane (0.2% likelihood by chance). 
2. Sunward Jet (Anti-Tail): A persistent forward-pointing jet toward the Sun, not an optical illusion as in typical comets. 
3. Extreme Mass: ~1 million times heavier than ‘Oumuamua and 1,000 times heavier than Borisov (>5 km diameter, ~33 billion tons), while moving faster (<0.1% likelihood). 
4. Fine-Tuned Flybys: Arrival timing optimized for close passes by Mars, Venus, and Jupiter (~tens of millions km), unobservable from Earth at perihelion (0.005% likelihood). 
5. Nickel-Rich Composition: Gas plume shows excess nickel over iron (resembling industrial alloys) and high nickel-to-cyanide ratio, unlike any known comet (<1% likelihood). 
6. Low Water Content: Gas plume only 4% water by mass, far below typical comets (which are water-dominated). 
7. Extreme Negative Polarization: Light shows unprecedented -2.7% negative polarization at small phase angles, unseen in comets or asteroids (<1% likelihood). 
8. Wow! Signal Coincidence: Arrival direction within 9° of the 1977 “Wow!” radio signal origin (0.6% likelihood). 
9. Blue Spectral Surge at Perihelion: Unexpected blue glow (bluer than the Sun), defying dust-reddening in comets; possibly from ionized CO or a “hot engine” source. 

Which would make the current observation of trajectory alteration the tenth, wouldn’t it?

Loeb has emphasized that these low-probability coincidences (cumulative odds <1 in 10¹⁶) warrant further scrutiny, though he rates natural origins as most likely. These contribute to its “4/10” ranking on his Loeb Scale (0 = natural; 10 = technological).

But in yesterday’s post, Loeb added the information about course alteration. According to observations, 3I/ATLAS experienced

· A radial acceleration away from the Sun of 135 kilometers (=9×10^{-7}au) per day squared.
· A transverse acceleration relative to the Sun’s direction of 60 kilometers (=4×10^{-7}au) per day squared.

This means, in layman’s language:

3I/ATLAS has demonstrated an extra “push” directly outward, away from the Sun, beyond what gravity alone would cause. (Which means that the pre-perihelion trajectory, which was scheduled to reach its perihelion — closest-to-Sol — point in late October, would now move further outward and definitely not be “hurtling towards towards the Sun.”)

3I/ATLAS has also demonstrated an extra “push” forward as it swings around the Sun, again due to non-gravitational effects (e.g., asymmetric outgassing).

Meanwhile, UFO enthusiasts/nobbers are upset that NASA hasn’t released any recent images of the object. They aren’t buying the “government shutdown” excuse. The complaint seems to be that the summaries of data so far distributed require more editorial work than merely relaying some data. How hard is it to put the most recent photos up on NASA.gov?

Apparently harder than getting an AI to fake videos of Brian Cox and Michio Kaku.

Here is an illustration — that is, a fake photo:

“The mystery surrounding the generous billionaire who contributed $130 million to cover US military salaries during the government shutdown has been resolved,” explains InterNewsCast.com. “The benefactor is none other than Timothy Mellon, heir to an oil fortune.”

Former President Donald Trump revealed on Thursday that this significant donation was made by a ‘friend’ as a patriotic gesture towards the military and the country.

“He called us recently and said, ‘I’d like to make up for any shortfall due to the Democrat shutdown. I want to contribute personally because I have a deep love for the military and for our nation,’” Trump shared.

Describing the donor as ‘a great American citizen’ and ‘a substantial man,’ Trump noted that the individual wished to remain anonymous, which he found remarkable given that most people in politics seek recognition.

The Pentagon later confirmed that the Department of Defense had indeed received the contribution on Thursday, ensuring that service members’ salaries would be paid. The donor had been kept anonymous, but the New York Times revealed the billionaire’s identity on Saturday. 

Mellon, 83, is a member of one of America’s wealthiest families. Paul Jacob has mentioned, on this site, Timothy Mellon’s cousin Christopher Mellon (the former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence) in articles related to UFO disclosure. Both are members of the extended Mellon family — a prominent Pittsburgh-based dynasty founded by 19th-century banker Thomas Mellon and including figures like Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (grandfather to Timothy). Timothy (born 1942) is the son of Paul Mellon (1907–1999), while Chris (born 1958) is the son of Karl Negley Mellon (1938–1983).

The family’s collective net worth is estimated at around $14 billion.

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.

President Donald Trump, Truth Social (October 2, 2025).

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. . . .

From October 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.