Read it.

Unidentified attackers have killed nearly 50 people in Nigeria’s Plateau state in further conflict in a religiously mixed region. The night-time attack hit the villages of Zike and Kimakpa in the Bassa local government area—known for intercommunal conflict and deadly land disputes—on Sunday, April 13th.

Two weeks earlier, armed men struck multiple villages in the Bokkos area, also in the state, killing 48. The attack occurred some 25 km away from the Plateau state capital, Jos. Last week, army troops recovered the headless corpse of a 16-year Fulani herder in the Bassa area, whose cattle were also stolen.

…

Christian persecution in Nigeria is widespread, often initiated by predominantly Muslim Fulani herders—with the Western media seemingly reluctant to talk about the perpetrators.

Read it.

One week after an event was held in support of Marine Le Pen, who is the target of legal attacks aimed at preventing her from standing in the 2027 French presidential elections, a rally organised in Paris against the ideas of the Rassemblement National (RN)—a failure, even by the organisers’ own admission.

The American Mind.

Professor James Hankins has written a sincere but largely misguided piece advocating for what amounts to a national guest worker program with a delayed pathway to citizenship. He proposes, with appropriate modesty, that “The advantages of this [immigration] proposal may not seem obvious at first sight to Republicans.” Let me, with all due humility, suggest that the alleged advantages are not obvious because they are not there. While Hankins’s program has a slightly different taste, it is basically the same old amnesty wine in a new bottle.

His core problem is viewing immigration policy as one issue among many in which any proposed solution should ultimately be subject to a popularity contest. In reality, immigration is an existential issue, and the way we approach it defines what kind of community we will be.

The first question to add in re immigration is: What sort of people add value to the country and the people already here?

Rich people add value by spending and investing.

Successful businesspeople add value by starting and running successful business, providing jobs and tax revenue.

Intelligent people add value by solving problems and making lives better for everybody.

Criminals don’t add value (and every illegal immigrant is ipso facto a criminal)–they subtract value by increasing the natural proglodyte propensity for ignoring laws they don’t like and diluting the common shared culture that makes a society work.

Read it.

Democrats–best politicians money can buy.

Read it.

Millionaire cosplay socialist Bernie Sanders took his ‘Fight Oligarchy’ tour to Coachella festival over the weekend, perfectly epitomising how fake and contrived the entire thing is.

The tickets for this thing cost several hundreds of dollars a piece. It’s a glamping weekend for trendy comfortable wannabe influencer 20 somethings who have no idea what everyday Americans are going through.

The perfect venue for Democrats like Sanders and his side kick AOC to reel off lists of alarmist ’causes’ they’re making dollars from.

Lifehacker.

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our cars. We love our vehicles because they represent freedom (and economic necessity, if you rely on one to get to work or do your grocery shopping), but we hate how much they cost—and the fact that you never actually stop paying for them. It costs an average of $1,452 every year just to keep your vehicle running, and the overall cost of owning a car is a whopping $6,684 annually.

As crucial as vehicle maintenance is in terms of making sure your car is reliable, people tend to skip an awful lot of it. If all you do every year is the basics—changing the oil and engine filters in a standard tune-up—you’re skipping a bunch of maintenance that only seems less important. Here are the vehicle maintenance steps you should definitely not skip.

This advice is aimed at women, since men typically do this stuff automatically.

Fun fact: Jeff Somers is a highly-regarded (by me, at least) speculative fiction author and noted connoisseur of whiskies.

ZMan looks ahead.

One of the questions rarely asked regarding the ongoing American crisis is whether we have passed the point where reform is possible. Few want to consider that possibility for obvious reasons. If reform through the regular political process is no longer possible, then only unpleasant alternatives remain. One of those alternatives is some form of collapse. Like Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, America may be headed over the cliff with nothing to prevent it.

Last week, we caught a possible glimpse of the answer. Trump rolled out his tariff regime, and the stock markets went wild. It was not just a global selloff; volatility was off the charts, which is worse than the decline itself. A steady selloff occurs during a correction when markets are overbought. A chaotic, erratic decline signals panic setting in among the algorithms. It means their code cannot interpret the conditions they are programmed to use for trading.

Just as things began to stabilize, the bond market started to “get the yips”, as Trump noted on Thursday. No one in the mass media understands this, so they kept claiming the bond market crashed, which is far from accurate. The issue was that market players were dumping treasuries. It is unclear why, for instance, the Japanese central bank was selling treasuries. This uncertainty is just as worrisome as the actual dumping, so everyone was spooked.

Read it.

Unfortunately, we have a problem with the military. They don’t seem to think they answer to civilian leadership anymore.

The most recent example of that problem is Space Force Colonel Susan Meyers, who was just relieved of her command of the 821st Space Base Group at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. Why was she relieved? Because she, in her official capacity as commander of this unit, disavowed the words of the Vice President of the United States.

Vice President JD Vance made remarks regarding Greenland getting the shaft from Denmark and leaving it vulnerable, and Meyers decided that she just had to counter those comments.

Now, she’s been relieved of command.

Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield was also removed from her position as the US representative to NATO’s military committee, which followed a series of actions, including her refusal to put up photos of President Donald Trump or Vance in the chain of command. It might not be the worst act of insubordination ever, but it’s still insubordination.

Let’s also not forget good old General Milley, who famously and publicly said, following Trump’s first term, that if he’d been ordered to attack China, he’d have given the Chinese a phone call to let them know what was coming, first.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

It takes an academic to do it, but it can be done. I filled my Buzzword Bingo card twice in the abstract alone.

Before people start looking to see if the blog has been hacked, allow me to back up a little bit. Many years ago, I found a book on my parents’ shelves entitled “The Bog People” by someone named Glob. He was one of the first archaeologists/anthropologists to write about the bodies found in bogs in Northern Europe. He also led the first professional excavation of the tanned remains of humans that turned up when people were digging peat and other things in swampy areas. The book had flaws, and leaned a little too much on Tacitus and other written sources, but someone had to start somewhere. It remains the foundational text on the topic. The idea stuck, and I’ve actually gotten to see four of the sets of remains. They are fascinating, if rather disconcerting, somewhat like Ötzi (the body from the ice).

I‘m revisiting the topic for various reasons, and working my way through a set of academic papers about wetland sacrifices and bog bodies and so on. Some are quite useful, some rather thought provoking (why do so many of the water sacrifices in Denmark also have lots of small, pale stones on or near the offerings?). And then there’s the one about posthuman theories of othering bodies, and bringing different theoretical frameworks about non-human nature, animal-human transferrences, and so on to the archaeology and anthropology of wetland sacrifices. Once I waded into the paper (pun fully intended), there were no surprises, just long words for concepts I already knew, written in a very dull, jargon-laced way. Gee, people back then decided that some humans weren’t fully people, and so could be abused and sacrificed. Or they could be included in burials against their will, as servants/slaves for the dead (and probably as ways to propitiate the dead and hurry them to the ancestors, in some cases). And sometimes animals stood in for humans as ritual offerings, but a few times it might have been the reverse. Cultures viewed outsiders and people with obvious differences as being inferior, perhaps. Gee.

Read it.

A high-end medical practice is offering clients the purported service of scrubbing their blood of microplastics.

In an interview with Wired, Clarify Clinics CEO Yael Cohen said that her London facility’s bespoke blood-filtering service — which is otherwise known as apheresis and generally used for plasma donation or other so-called therapeutic plasma exchange procedures — is so comfortable that some patients doze off during it.

…

Though Cohen and her clinic claim the ability to help ease those ailments, the jury is still out as to how bad microplastics actually are for the human body. While studies in recent years have established links between microplastics and damage to human cells and hearts, that research was all, as Wired notes, observational. Thus far, the only thing we know definitively is that these mysterious particles have been found nearly everywhere researchers have looked, from our blood and guts and brains to archaeological digs and Mount Everest.

While there don’t appear to be any studies about the effectiveness of the Clari procedure, there’s a pretty strong body of evidence suggesting that therapeutic plasma exchange in general is a safe and effective treatment for some autoimmune and neurological disorders.

We have the technology.

Read it.

When a pregnant woman had her blood sampled back in 1972, doctors discovered it was mysteriously missing a surface molecule found on all other known red blood cells at the time.

After 50 years, this strange molecular absence finally led to researchers from the UK and Israel describing a new blood group system in humans. In 2024, the team published their paper on the discovery.

“It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort, to finally establish this new blood group system and be able to offer the best care to rare, but important, patients,” UK National Health Service hematologist Louise Tilley said last September, after nearly 20 years of personally researching this bloody quirk.

Read it.

Fifty years after Turkey’s invasion and occupation of 36% of Cyprus, the systematic Islamization of the island’s northern part has become increasingly evident. This transformation is not incidental but a calculated initiative by Ankara, aligning with its broader neo-Ottoman ambitions. The steady shift toward political Islam in northern Cyprus carries profound implications for regional stability, European security, and the preservation of cultural heritage.

The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, widely condemned as unlawful by the international community, forcibly displaced nearly 200,000 Greek Cypriots and led to the systematic erasure of Greek cultural heritage in the north. Greek street names, monuments, and place names were replaced with Turkish equivalents. Over 520 Greek Orthodox churches and cemeteries were desecrated or looted, and more than 23,000 Byzantine icons were either destroyed or stolen—an act UNESCO has described as an “institutionalized erasure” of Christian heritage.

Simultaneously, Turkey has facilitated illegal settlements from mainland Anatolia, significantly altering the region’s demographics. This population transfer, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, has transformed northern Cyprus from a predominantly secular society into one increasingly influenced by Islamist ideology.

Read it.

President Trump, Treasury secretary Bessent, and Commerce secretary Lutnick are effectively teaching a course right now on the fundamentals of international trade.

…

Or asked another way: How “free” can international trade be if its proponents depend upon a labyrinthine system of rules that requires thousand-page treaties and guidance from the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, central banks galore, the Bank for International Settlements, international standards organizations, law firms specializing in commercial and maritime law, more law firms specializing in the administrative law of specific nations, even more law firms specializing in the labor and environmental laws of each nation, and an ever-increasing number of national and international regulatory bodies to tell producers what they can and cannot produce, how and when to produce what they are permitted to produce, and whom to pay for the “privilege” of producing it — all while restricting which domestic consumers around the world are permitted to purchase what the aforementioned producers end up producing?

That long question only scratches the surface of the sheer complexity of international trade, yet even in its oversimplification, it smacks of coercion, extortion, overbearing micromanagement, government corruption, and blatant racketeering.  It oozes the “command and control” odor we associate with a Soviet-type, socialist, or similarly centrally planned economy.  Nothing about “free trade” in practice sounds remotely free.

Read it.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the Covid crisis wasn’t just a health catastrophe, but a financial one too, according to a damning new audit report released Friday. The state government poured $453 million into building an enormous stockpile of medical equipment — and only used 0.000012% of it.

According to state comptroller Tom DiNapoli, New York bought a staggering 247,343 medical devices, but only wound up using a laughable three pieces of equipment out of the vast horde. Worse, the waste was only compounded by the state’s utter neglect of its fiduciary duties to taxpayers. Rather than finding buyers for the once-valuable assets, bureaucrats have been content to let the equipment age and decay in warehouses. As if the erosion of the stockpiles weren’t bad enough, New York is also wasting money on storage costs.

“New York state bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of medical equipment at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including ventilators and x-ray machines, that now sits unused in storage facilities across the state, missing recommended maintenance and costing taxpayers storage expenses,” said Napoli’s office. Of the equipment that requires ongoing maintenance, auditors found that 90% of it is past due, with no process or contract in place to handle that need. Failure to keep up with maintenance risks voiding manufacturer warranties, and also rendering the equipment unusable in an emergency.

Read it.

Why Trump is not, in fact, really Hitler.

TDS: The rise of end times fascism (The Guardian)

ZMan:

It is entirely possible that we passed the point of no return and therefore no amount of reform, not even authoritarian reform, will save us. The population will need a great reset before civilized government can return to North America. Maybe it is the organized deportation of the crazies to someplace not here or maybe Mother Nature steps in with a real plague. Perhaps it will require organized violence in the context of societal collapse to fix the gene pool.

Maybe that is why the fertility rate is collapsing. The mutational load has reached the point in our species where nature looks at us as a genetic dead end. We are like panda bears. It has evolved down a dead end in terms of its habitat, so it is dying out. Similarly, humans have evolved to the point where we can no longer maintain cooperative societies, which is our natural habitat. The presence of so many crazies signals, at best, a great culling of the human herd.

Makes me look like an optimist.

Read it.

President Donald Trump entered to a standing ovation and cheers from a crowd of thousands attending a UFC event on Saturday night, shaking hands with supporters against a backdrop of fans waving his trademark MAGA hats.

Just as Trump entered, he greeted podcast host Joe Rogan, who sat to the right of the president. On the other side of Trump sat Elon Musk, billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump, who accented his dark suit with a bright yellow tie, pumped his fist in the air, prompting cheers to strains of “Taking Care of Business.”

He brought along several members of his administration and White House team, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and White House communications aides Steven Cheung and Taylor Budowich. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also joined Trump for UFC 314.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Two groups representing Harvard professors sued the Trump administration on Friday, saying that its threat to cut billions in federal funding for the university violates free speech and other First Amendment rights.

Apparently there is a First Amendment right to receiving a handout from the taxpayers. Who knew?

Read it.

Quasicrystals, once considered impossible, were found in a 3D-printed aluminum alloy – and they make it stronger. This could change how we design aircraft and car components.

• Researchers at NIST discovered quasicrystals, rare, non-repeating atomic structures, in 3D-printed aluminum alloys.
• These quasicrystals were found to strengthen the metal, making it more suitable for lightweight, high-performance parts like those used in airplanes.
• Quasicrystals were first discovered at NIST in the 1980s, a breakthrough that challenged long-held scientific beliefs, and earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.

Read it.

Have you ever had trouble taking in information in a noisy environment? A new study suggests that tapping your fingers in a steady rhythm could help you ‘tune in’ through the noise.

The researchers designed a series of experiments to uncover the role of movement in understanding speech, “building on the theory that the motor system is not merely an executor of movements,” they write, “but actively contributes to the integration and reuse of temporal information.”

The Sunday Times.

Scotland was once a great recruiting ground for the UK’s armed forces. Not any more.

In 2014, the year of the independence referendum, the British Army reported an official intake of 630 untrained soldiers from Scotland.

By 2023 that number had dropped to 330, less than one a day. In the past financial year, it was 370. That is a decline of 41 per cent in a decade. It is the same story for the Royal Navy and the RAF, where Scottish recruitment has plunged 37 per cent and 53 per recent respectively since Scotland voted on its constitutional future.

The British Army has been shrinking since the Cold War, winding up entire historic Scottish regiments, severing multigenerational links with communities as it does so. Recruitment has fallen in England too, but by nothing like the scale seen in Scotland. For the army, it is down 13 per cent across the UK.

Read it.

An Iraqi culture-enricher caused significant damage and bodily harm earlier today at a police station in the Portuguese city of Braga. The mixed-up youth stabbed and almost killed a police officer, who was the same officer who had received the migrant’s asylum application. The youngster was evidently enraged because his application had not yet been approved, and reacted by attempting to kill the policeman. Which was understandable, given the racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia of the native Portuguese who had so callously discriminated against him.

Read it.

AMC Networks Inc., owner of the popular cable AMC Channel, is planning to move its corporate domicile from Delaware and reincorporate in Nevada, joining a growing list of companies abandoning the state.

The AMC news hit just days after Madison Square Garden Entertainment announced it was planning to leave Delaware, a move made by at least 20 major companies in the past year, according to Robert Anderson, a Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas.

In a recent shareholder notice, AMC Networks Inc. said it sought approval of plans to ‘redomesticate’ from Delaware to Nevada, marking the latest high-profile exit from a state under fire for its left-leaning judicial system.

You don’t need a picture ID to vote with your feet….

UK Daily Register.

Hashem Abedi is currently behind bars at HMP Frankland in Durham. The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) said officers received life-threatening injuries after Abedi allegedly assaulted them in an “unprovoked” attack.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

Neil Young once stormed the country to sing the First Amendment’s praises.

That 2006 Freedom of Speech tour came after some said it was unpatriotic to critique the War on Terror. Young and his Crosby, Stills and Nash bandmates disagreed. They used the tour to skewer President George W. Bush, highlighted by the song, “Let’s Impeach the President.”

Subtle. And they had every right to sing it, even if they alienated longtime fans along the way.

It turns out Young’s First Amendment defense had plenty of strings attached.

Years later, Young declared war on a podcaster for sharing the “wrong” thoughts on a global pandemic. In 2021, the rocker said Joe Rogan’s contrarian COVID-19 views shouldn’t be shared on Spotify.

He even pulled his music from the platform to protest Rogan. It’s either him or me, Young argued. Spotify stuck with Rogan.

Who is much better looking, to tell the truth.

Young eventually returned his music to Spotify. Time has been kind to some of Rogan’s “problematic” pandemic views.

Meanwhile, Young said nothing about the media’s misinformation campaign tied to COVID-19. Remember how the jab would prevent the recipient from getting the virus and spreading it?

What about the six-foot rule? St. Anthony Fauci? The serial attacks on the lab leak theory?

Young stayed mum through it all, even though he was outraged by Rogan’s so-called lies.

It gets worse.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture continues to discriminate in many of its programs, according to a new letter from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty wrote the letter telling the USDA that it will file a lawsuit if the issue is not corrected within 60 days.

Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty represents Chilton farmer Adam Faust, stating that Faust is not eligible to benefit from a dozen USDA race-based programs because he is a white farmer.

“USDA offers important resources for dairy farmers, including margin coverage, loan guarantees and grants,” Faust said. “But it is outrageous that some farmers get a better deal based on race. I am hopeful the Trump Administration will change course and fix these discriminatory programs.”

Faust previously successfully challenged USDA rules for programs under President Joe Biden’s administration through Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

Read it.

In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.

They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since. In fiscal 2025, its 51st year, LSC’s 135 employees will spend 95 percent of its now $560 million annual budget paying legal groups to represent Americans in cases such as eviction, domestic violence, and disputes over government benefits, according to Ron Flagg, the agency’s president since 2020.

“LSC would welcome reauthorization,” Flagg said. “We haven’t hidden from it. Every budget cycle, we go through an exhaustive process before Congress appropriates funds — dozens of meetings with leaders of both parties. We demonstrate our return on investment, how we help 2 million Americans get life-saving legal help.”

The Legal Services Corp. now stands as America’s oldest “Zombie” program, but it’s far from unique. At a time when the Trump administration is moving aggressively to scale back government, including eliminating the entire Education Department, it’s sobering to note that 1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30. The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. In a deep dive last year, CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don’t know how much funding the other programs received.

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As Vice President JD Vance warns about the suppression of Christians’ free speech rights, a new law in a Western nation makes “praying with or over a person” in some circumstances “unlawful even if that person has asked you to pray for them.” Making the wrong kind of intercession for someone in this U.S. ally could land a believer up to five years in prison.

The government of the Australian state of New South Wales explains the newly enacted Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 allows “prayer” or expression of any “religious belief” only if it is not “directed to changing or suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The bill—which took effect last Friday, April 4—bans any speech the government classifies as attempting to change someone’s LGBTQIA2S+ status, with a maximum penalty of “imprisonment for 5 years.”

“The Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 does not prohibit prayer. However, praying with or over a person with the intent to change or suppress their sexuality or gender identity is unlawful. It is unlawful even if that person has asked you to pray for them to be able to change or suppress their sexuality or gender identity,” explains Anti-Discrimination NSW, the state government body that fields discrimination complaints under the law. (It also has “investigation, education, and research functions.”)

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued an updated guidance late Friday night on product exclusions from President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, imposed under Executive Order 14257 and its amendments (EO 14259). The exclusions cover a wide range of electronic devices, including smartphones, laptops, and related components.

First, President Trump paused reciprocal tariffs for non-retaliating countries (e.g., China) for 90 days last week. Now, updated guidance from CBP reveals that some of the highest-value trade—particularly a wide range of electronics—is excluded from the reciprocal tariffs.

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A Moroccan culture-enricher who was already in a Spanish prison is going to have his sentence extended because he decided to take up jihad while he was in the slammer. Like so many confused migrant youngsters, he did not understand that his host country did not approve of one of his cherished traditional cultural practices, namely the slaughter of infidels in the name of Allah.

The article below asserts that he was self-radicalized while he was in prison. It doesn’t identify any specific ideology, so I guess he was just, well, radicalized — you know, in a general sense. Like catching the flu or something similar.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

John C. Wright passes the word.

This text is shamelessly copied from Karl Mehta, since the pace at which we are flooded with winning has finally broken me. I simply cannot keep up. But some of these gems were too good not to share, and the Marxist media will not cover the story.

Read the whole thing.

Read it.

Sweden has seen massive demographic changes over the last 25 years, and this is not only reflected in the demographic composition, but also the religious composition of the country. While churches continue to close their doors, the country went from approximately seven mosques in 2000 to now 300 in 2025.

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And has been since the fall of Soviet Communism, the threat that it was intended to counter. It stands as a poster child for Reagan’s adage that the closest thing to immortality is a government program.

NATO is a corpse. All that remains is the grotesque performance art of a diplomatic zombie stumbling from summit to summit, mouthing tired clichés about “shared values” and “burden sharing,” even as its core strategic logic lies rotting beneath the surface. The Atlantic Alliance, once the steel scaffolding of Western security, has become a hollow ritual. Its military readiness is an illusion. Its political cohesion is fraying. Its future, if it has one, lies not in revival—but in reinvention or replacement.

…

NATO’s death was not caused by Donald Trump, though he may soon become its undertaker. Nor was it caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, though that war has exposed the Alliance’s hollowness in ways no war game or communique ever could. The real cause lies in decades of European free-riding, American strategic drift, and a foundational lie at the heart of the Alliance: the idea that an empire can masquerade as a collective defense pact without consequences.

Read it.

A 16-year-old runner at a California high school is suing Attorney General Rob Bonta over failure to enforce Title IX standards to protect female athletes.

In November, Taylor Starling, a track athlete at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California, along with her teammate, Kaitlyn Slavin, filed suit against the district, alleging she lost a spot on the team to a biological male student. Now Stirling has added Bonta to the lawsuit in light of President Donald Trump’s executive order that banned males from competing in female sports.

“I felt angry when I was removed from my varsity team because I knew the requirements were changed for him because he is transgender. I felt like my sacrifice, hard work, and dedication didn’t matter to my school administrators because I am a girl. It was easy for them to push me aside and that hurt,” Starling said.

Apparently it’s not enough to be a girl to be on a girls’ team, you have to be the right kind of ‘girl’.

Read it.

The center of world terrorist activity and violent death is no longer the Middle East. The “Sahel region of Africa is now the ‘epicentre of global terrorism,'” responsible for “over half of all terrorism-related deaths” worldwide, according to the respected Global Terrorism Index.

The sub-Saharan Sahel is largely unknown to much of the world. It can be described as the large, mostly flat, strip, nearly 600 miles wide, located between the savannahs of Sudan to the south and the Sahara desert to the north.

During the last ten years or so, according to the Royal United Services Institute, the world’s oldest defense and security think tank, headquartered in London, the Sahel has undergone a “significant surge in jihadist violence. Armed actors take advantage of porous borders, fragile states, and local grievances to extend their operational reach,”

Pretty ironic, considering the fact that Islam has no problem with slavery and the major role that Muslims (especially Arabs) played in the African slavery business. People like Hakeem Jeffries always make me want to laugh.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

In a ruling on Thursday, Judge Trevor Neil McFadden said that a rule by the Department of Homeland Security to require illegal immigrants to comply with statutory registration and fingerprinting may move forward as plaintiffs arguing against it failed to “demonstrate that they have standing to bring this suit.”

The case was filed on March 31 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington, with the main plaintiff being the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, along with other immigrant advocacy groups.

On Jan. 20, when President Donald Trump took office for the second time, he issued an executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” in which he stated that illegal immigrants must be identified and registered with the federal government.

Apparently the fact that it makes your butt hurt to think of immigrants being inconvenienced in any way is not enough to justify a suit.

USA Today, a Voice of the Crust.

They say that like it was a bad thing.

Every piece of evidence regarding Head Start indicates that it spends money and doesn’t do any good. If sixty years of failure doesn’t justify ending a program, what would? The Brookings Institution (a Voice of the Crust) reports:

In 2005, the first report about the Head Start Impact Study found that one year of Head Start improved cognitive skills, but the size of the effects was small. While this first report affirmed Head Start’s impact on school readiness, the final HHS report published in 2010 showed that by the end of first grade, the effects mostly faded out. According to the 2012 HHS report on third grade follow-up, by the end of primary school there was no longer a discernible impact of Head Start. Due in part to these reports, some have concluded that while Head Start has some initial impact on kindergarten readiness, the fadeout in impact over early elementary school qualifies attempts to invest more in early childhood education.

Let us get away from this Deep State notion that every problem can be solved with a Federal handout administered by a Federal bureaucracy.

Read it.

With chronic illnesses soaring across the United States, a group of doctors and nutrition researchers say it’s time to reconsider the foundation of American dietary advice—starting from the bottom up.

How about educating people and letting them make their own choices? ‘Doctors and nutrition researchers’ seem to think they have a God-imposed duty to lecture other people about how to go about their daily lives, rather than just presenting the information and allowing people to take whatever action they deem appropriate. I’ve got a mother, I don’t need a bunch of volunteers.

In a peer-reviewed paper published in Nutrients, the authors contend that the traditional carb-heavy diet has not only failed to safeguard public health but may be contributing to rising rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. They propose a new low-carbohydrate food pyramid designed for the vast majority of American adults showing signs of metabolic dysfunction.

Their model—built on protein, full-fat dairy, and healthy fats—challenges decades of federal guidance and reignites a long-simmering debate about dietary fat’s role in chronic disease.

How about the Federal government stop spending my tax dollars on ‘guidance’? The Nanny State is an ugly thing.

Read it.

Enacting what gun-grabbers see as the next-best thing to an outright “assault weapon” ban, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday signed off on a law that will make it a much bigger hassle purchase many semiautomatic firearms. The law, which will face immediate legal challenges from gun rights groups, also takes aim at bump stocks and binary triggers, while increasing the penalty for violating the state’s magazine restrictions. It’s set to take effect on August 1 of next year, with violators facing up to 120 days in jail, a fine, or both. Repeat offenders could be locked up for 18 months.

“The bill enacts some of the most sweeping gun regulations ever considered in the Centennial State, even compared to the few dozen restrictions Colorado lawmakers have been stacking up over the last decade,” notes The Reload’s Jake Fogleman. The law affects the purchase of so-called “assault rifles” — like AR-15s and AK-47s — as well as gas-operated pistols that use a detachable magazine. Recoil-operated handguns aren’t subject to the restrictions; the bill’s advocates say 90% of the pistol market won’t be affected. Examples of affected gas-operated handguns include the Desert Eagle, Walther PPK, Sig Sauer MPX Copperhead and Smith & Wesson MP 5.7.

A key element of the progressive mindset is to treat The Common People like children, restricting their access to tools in the expectation that if they are allowed access to tools they will inevitably misuse them. Not Appearing In This Film is the notion that perhaps, just perhaps, a better solution is to educate and persuade people not to use tools in an inappropriate manner.

The Foundry.

In the ongoing debate about the role of government in addressing societal issues, a crucial misconception often surfaces on one side: The desire to help others equates to a mandate for state intervention.

Advocates for increased government action frequently ignore the vital distinction between voluntary assistance and coercive mandates. The belief that government can—or should—serve as the ultimate arbiter of compassion neglects the fundamental principle that true generosity arises from individual choice rather than compulsion.

Those advocating for increased government intervention often exhibit a profound misunderstanding about the nature of help. They seem to believe that the mere desire to assist equates to a moral imperative for the state to act—often through coercive means. This reliance on government as the ultimate solution tends to obscure an essential principle: the freedom of individuals to choose how, or whether, to help.

Government is, at best, a necessary evil, and that evil ought to be mitigated as far as possible by restricting its activities to the essentials: Keep people save and keep people honest. Anything beyond that is illegitimate.

ZMan’s weekly podcast.

I thought I would take a break from the money game this week to address an issue that comes up in the email from time to time. That issue is my ideology. Whenever I comment upon ideology, almost always in a negative way, I get comments suggesting I should explain my ideology, rather than just criticize others. Certain nationalists take issue with being called ideologues for some reason.

The trouble with this is I am not an ideologue, but I thought that might make for a good show, so that was the plan this week. Then as I was recording it, I started having issues with my voice, like I am getting a cold. That threw me off my game and the show wandered around a bit. I would have scrapped it and started over, but I was not sure if the pipes would make it, so I stuck with the first pass.

This is the best show I’ve heard ZMan do to date, and it matches my own views on what is going on about 95%.

Very highly recommended. I certainly wish he’d do more stuff like this.

Read it.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) referred its Title IX investigation into the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for further enforcement action. Simultaneously, ED will initiate an administrative proceeding to adjudicate termination of MDOE’s federal K-12 education funding, including formula and discretionary grants.

These actions are a direct result of MDOE’s continued refusal to comply with Title IX. ED issued a noncompliance finding on March 19, and sent a final warning letter to the state on March 31.

“The Department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor. “The Maine Department of Education will now have to defend its discriminatory practices before a Department administrative law judge and in a federal court against the Justice Department. Governor Mills would have done well to adhere to the wisdom embedded in the old idiom—be careful what you wish for. Now she will see the Trump Administration in court.”

Read it.

You can’t make this shit up.

Read it.

The first Earth Day was organized in 1970 in response to growing public concern for the environment. Many of these concerns were entirely justified. In 1969, for example, an oil slick along an industrialized stretch of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, generating national awareness of the need to reduce water pollution. Similarly, in coastal cities in California, most notably in Los Angeles, the exhaust from unleaded gasoline created air pollution so dense you couldn’t see the hills a few miles away.

We’ve come a long way in 51 years. This month, as Americans celebrate Earth Day on April 22, we are challenged to differentiate between legitimate environmental priorities and those priorities chosen for us by special interests with ulterior motives for whom environmentalism is a sentiment to be manipulated.

Here are ten issues where environmentalism has been misused, with consequences that have either been of no benefit whatsoever to the environment or have even caused harm.

Mediaite, a Voice of the Crust.

A U.S. Space Force colonel was removed from her position as the commander of Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on Thursday after she disavowed Vice President JD Vance’s remarks about acquiring the Danish territory.

This is public insurbordination, and fully justifies her removal. (Notice that all these officers causing trouble are women.)

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.