Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Our solar system’s third identified interstellar intruder, 3I/ATLAS, continues its course past the planets more-or-less within the plane of the ecliptic, and continues to surprise.

The least surprising thing is that it has finally developed a tail pointing away from the Sun:

On August 27, 2025, deep imaging of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS by the Gemini South 8.2-meter telescope — aided by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), revealed a weak tail with a teardrop shape in the anti-Sun direction (reported here). At that time, 3I/ATLAS was at a distance from Earth of 2.59 times the Earth-Sun separation. The Gemini South Observatory is located on a mountain called Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.

Avi Loeb, “Detection of an Anti-Solar Tail for 3I/ATLAS,” Medium (August 30, 2025).

Earlier observations had not seen the usual tail forming away from the point of origination of the solar winds, like a normal comet. Instead, the “coma” of dust or ice or gas or whatnot surrounding the object extended in advance of its trajectory — as if it were throwing out flak to take out dangerous objects ahead of it!

Yes, from the beginning the oddities of this intruder were being considered as possible indications of an artificial object.

While this is heartening for those who itch to relegate 3I/ATLAS to “mere” comet status (it’s already proved to be one weird comet, it comet it truly be), Abraham Loeb notes the accumulating oddities, too, which don’t fit the standard “nothing [challenging] to see here, folks” debunkers’ designations: “Recent spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile (accessible here), reported the surprising detection of cyanide and nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS with steeply increasing rates as the object approaches the Sun. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced simultaneously in supernova explosions.”

And as Loeb just noted, measuring the nucleus of the object remains extremely difficult and uncertain.

Further, though detection of CO2 in the object’s coma (surrounding matter) is indeed what one would expect of a comet, the absence of water and carbon monoxide is . . . peculiar.

Everyone should fear a lawless president. But complaining about President Trump’s allegedly illegal actions while not having complained about Biden’s and Obama’s smacks of partisanship.

But the one magazine in America that should not be open to this criticism has to be Reason, right? This magazine of “free minds and free markets” has been critical of every president. Hasn’t it?

So when it reports on Trumpian oversteps, missteps, and outright tyrannical acts of “the imperial presidency,” we should certainly not dismiss the cases out of hand.

“President Donald Trump overstepped the limits of executive authority when he used emergency powers to levy tariffs,” wrote Eric Boehm, “a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

Trump administration used IEEPA in February to slap tariffs on imports from Canada, China, and Mexico. The Trump administration again invoked IEEPA to impose its so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April, which included a universal 10 percent tariff on all imports and higher, country-specific tariffs, some of which went into effect in August after being delayed several times.

As seemed evident during oral arguments, the court’s majority was deeply skeptical of the government’s claim to broad powers that are not spelled out in the IEEPA law, which notably does not contain the word “tariff.”

If the government’s interpretation of the IEEPA statute is correct, the court ruled, that would create “a functionally limitless delegation of Congressional taxation authority.” Elsewhere in the ruling, the court said that such a delegation of taxation power would be unconstitutional, even if that were what Congress intended to do.

In short, the Trump administration’s argument for using emergency powers to impose tariffs fails on multiple fronts.

Eric Boehm, “Why Is Trump’s Border Patrol Arresting Firefighters During a Wildfire?” Reason (August 29, 2025).

But the court lifted all injunctions on the tariffs, throwing the whole issue into chaos. Boehm not unreasonably calls upon Congress to settle the matter. Setting tax rates is the constitutional duty of Congress, after all.

On the same day, however, Joe Lancaster tells us of another ICE arrest, in “Why Is Trump’s Border Patrol Arresting Firefighters During a Wildfire?” Fighting summer fires in the Olympic National Forest were two illegal aliens, it seems. So they were nabbed. We are supposed to be incensed by this. “The arrest was a reversal of federal policy under two presidents. ‘Absent exigent circumstances, immigration enforcement will not be conducted at locations where disaster and emergency response and relief is being provided,’ the Department of Homeland Security announced in 2021, during Joe Biden’s presidency.”

This is mildly interesting. But resting a case against Truman border enforcement on Biden era border control policy seems too tendentious by half, for the Biden let open the borders. And going against past protocols is hardly a case of an Imperial President Threatening All. While we know that Reason folks lean heavily to the radical open borders position, anyone who is at all alarmed at the millions of illegal aliens wandering out in America will hardly be impressed with this particular coverage.

“Arresting firefighters during a wildfire simply over their immigration status undercuts the president’s rhetoric on both immigration and public safety,” Mr. Lancaster argues — not very convincingly. It would be very easy to argue, on the contrary, that the one place that one should not expect to find illegal alien workers is in government employment. And that finding them there uncovers something of an emergency in and of itself.