I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don’t know if it can be both.
Elon Musk, referring to Donald Trump’s ballyhooed “Big Beautiful Bill,” to CBS Sunday Morning, aired June 1, 2025.
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Citizenship
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
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Excess Deaths Long After Pandemic
“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.
Atque etiam recordatus quondam super cenam, quod nihil cuiquam
toto die praestitisset, memorabilem illam meritoque
laudatam vocem edidit: “Amici, diem perdidi.”
One evening at dinner, realizing that he had done nobody any favour throughout the entire day, he spoke these memorable words: “My friends, I have wasted a day.”
Suetonius on Titus Flavius Vespasianus, in The Twelve Caesars, Robert Graves and Michael Grant, translators (Harmondsworth, 1979), Chapter 8.
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First Day of June
- The Roundheads defeated the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War on June 1, 1648.
- The court-martial for malfeasance of Benedict Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, began on this date in 1779.
- Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the United States in 1792 on the same day of the month.
- Tennessee was admitted as the 16th state of the United States exactly four years later.
- Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey declared the Territory of Minnesota officially established — 1849.
- The Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed, allowing the Navajo to return to their lands in Arizona and New Mexico, in 1868.
- The United States Census Bureau began using, on June 1, 1890, Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine to count census returns.
- Adolf Eichmann, a former SS officer in Nazi Germany, was hanged on June 1, 1962, in Israel . . . for having committed crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other offenses.
- The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims was first published in the June 1, 1974, issue of Emergency Medicine.
- George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty to end chemical weapon production in 1990, on the first day of June.
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Nothing to See Here, Folks
“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.
Note: The quotation at top was retrieved from a podcast.
Paul Jacob on Epstein:
“Pedo Plane Perv,” July 10, 2019
“Suicide?” August 12, 2019
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Auberon Herbert
Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885).
To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.
Categories
Stoned Emperor
On May 31, A.D. 455, Emperor Petronius Maximus was stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome from a Vandal invasion that was, in fact, blowback from his own power politics. Thus ended his two-and-a-half month reign, which he had obtained by murder and bribery.
Petronius Maximus made at least one strategic mistake, attempting to strengthen his position by forcing Licinia Eudoxia, the previous emperor’s widow, to marry him — and forcing her daughter Eudocia to marry his son. This latter arrangement canceled Eudocia’s betrothal to the son of the Vandal king Genseric, infuriating both Eudocia and Genseric, who sent a fleet to Rome. Maximus failed to obtain troops from the Visigoths and he fled as the Vandals arrived. In the hubbub, he became detached from his retinue and bodyguard and was killed by fellow Romans.
“Elon Musk says he is ‘disappointed’ by the price tag of the domestic policy bill passed by Republicans in the House last week and heavily backed by President Trump,” explains CBS News.
The “price tag” is indeed a whopper, if by price we mean what Donald Trump’s ballyhooed “Big, Beautiful Bill” (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act orBBB) added to the debt: an expected $3.3 trillion over ten years.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Mr. Musk claims, laughing, in an upcoming CBS News Sunday Morning interview — a portion leaked as a teaser by CBS on Tuesday. “But I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
An opinion shared by many — just not those “in government.”
Which is apt, since Musk is out. He expressed his “personal opinion” as he was exiting the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The exit isn’t the big story. We knew from the beginning that Musk’s time at DOGE was not going to last forever.
Which highlights the up-in-the-air aspect of DOGE’s mission and future.
Note that Musk is capable of artful politics. His official statement appeared on X: “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President [Donald Trump] for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.”
This rosy view of his exit may mask much muck. “Musk made himself a total pariah,” first-ousted Trump strategist Steve Bannon told The Free Press. “He had access, admiration, unlimited resources — and by his own actions toward people, blew it all.”
How did he blow it? By actually doing something?
Musk concluded his official exit statement by hazarding that DOGE’s “mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.” That’s precisely what’s in doubt.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reprehendenti filio Tito, quod etiam urinae vectigal commentus esset, pecuniam ex prima pensione admovit ad nares, sciscitans num odore offenderetur; et illo negante: “Atqui,” inquit, “e lotio est.”
Titus complained of the tax which Vespasian had imposed on the contents of the city urinals. Vespasian handed him a coin which had been part of the first day’s proceeds: “Does it smell bad?” he asked. And when Titus said “No” he went on: “Yet it comes from urine.”
Money doesn’t stink.
“Pecunia non olet” is a popular recasting of a famous conversation between Emperor Vespasian [Titus Flavius Vespasianus] to his son Titus Flavius Vespasianus [the future emperor Titus], upon the latter’s objection to a tax on Rome’s urinals — as quoted by Suetonius [above], in The Twelve Caesars, Robert Graves and Michael Grant, translators (Harmondsworth, 1979).