“Iran’s Revolutionary Guards seized two vessels in the strait of Hormuz for what it called maritime violations and escorted them to Iranian shores, according to the shipping companies and Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency. Wednesday’s move was the first time Iran has seized ships since the war began in late February. … Iranian officials said they had not agreed to any extension of the truce, and criticised Trump’s decision to maintain the US naval blockade. Lead Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said a full ceasefire only made sense if the blockade was lifted. … The Pentagon said the US secretary of the navy, John Phelan, would depart the office ‘effective immediately,’ without providing an explanation for his sudden exit amid the naval blockade.” (04/23/26)
“In policy debates, some see state action as the obvious solution; others say the same about civil society and/or markets. But listen closely, and you’ll often find that everyone’s gone negative: They have lots of bad things to say about the other side, and not much in favor of their own. That’s the ‘pretty pig’ problem: We can all see the downsides — many of them quite real — with one system, and so we conclude, a bit too quickly, that the other one must be better. As I’ve noted before, that approach leads to disagreement without engagement, as the advocates on both sides ignore the problems of their own preferred system: The state I can imagine is clearly a good solution to the real world commercial system I’m immersed in, but that state doesn’t exist, and its powers are not stable or reliable.” [editor’s note: Nietzsche offered a neat, concise, and true “theory of the state” … “Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.” – TLK] (04/22/26)
“The price of bitcoin continued its April surge, rebounding to prices not seen since early February. … Bitcoin Wednesday afternoon traded around $78,600, surging 3.9% over the past 24 hours. Bitcoin peaked at $79,468 intraday Wednesday, marking its highest price since Feb. 2. Although bitcoin has trended higher in April, it still remains well below its October peak of $126,200. … Meanwhile, Strategy on Monday announced it acquired 34,164 bitcoin for roughly $2.54 billion, representing a price of about $74,395 per bitcoin. … With the acquisition, Strategy became the largest publicly-traded holder of bitcoin, surpassing BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), which holds 806,699 bitcoin.” (04/22/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“The Trump administration has spent months demonizing immigrants — detaining them, deporting them, tearing apart families, and casting them as threats to national security. And yet, when it comes time to fill the ranks of its endless wars, those same individuals—green card holders, refugees, asylum seekers, even undocumented men—suddenly become expendable assets. Too dangerous to belong. Not too dangerous to die. Increasingly, the same could be said of all of us. We are all being viewed as potential threats by the government. … While the government is making it easier for Americans to be conscripted and killed in war, it is simultaneously working to make it harder for us to have any say in the decisions that send our young men and women to war in the first place.” (04/22/26)
“European Union officials on Wednesday took a key step toward approving a loan of roughly $105 billion for Ukraine, after Hungary dropped its long-standing opposition. The loan is moving forward after its main opponent, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, lost his campaign for reelection this month. The money will provide a crucial lifeline to Kyiv, helping to finance its government and fight Russia’s ongoing invasion. The package is expected to get formal approval Thursday, according to officials from Cyprus, which holds the E.U.’s rotating presidency.” (04/22/26)
“Taxation is theft. People are free to disagree because everyone is free to be wrong. You might debate what kind of theft it is; whether extortion, a ransom, or an armed robbery, but it’s theft. We used to know it. The story of Robin Hood has morphed into a socialist fairy tale of someone who ‘robbed from the rich and gave to the poor,’ but originally, he was a hero who recovered stolen property from tax collectors and returned it to their victims. Government and other socialists don’t want this story told, for obvious reasons. If you are taking someone’s property — their money — under threat, when they’d rather keep it to use as they see fit, you are a thief.” (04/22/26)
“A high-ranking counterterrorism official is insisting she ‘did nothing wrong’ after her ex-boyfriend reportedly triggered a watchdog probe over accusations she used him as a ‘sugar daddy’ and demanded he spend thousands to fund her lavish lifestyle. The Daily Mail reported that in December, a divorced business executive identified only as Robert B. matched with 29-year-old Deputy Assistant Homeland Security Secretary for Counterterrorism Julia Varvaro on Hinge, beginning a months-long dalliance that ended with him filing an official complaint with DHS. ‘This is just a mad ex-boyfriend putting crap together. And it’s just really weird,’ Varvaro insisted to the outlet. … Robert B., who appears to be decades older than Varvaro, told the outlet that he shelled out up to $40,000 on her — funding trips to destinations like Italy, San Diego, South Carolina, and Aruba during their three-month romantic entanglement.” (04/22/26)
“Much about our current political era feels unprecedented, especially the sense that the government is targeting people for their political beliefs. In December, President Trump’s Department of Justice ordered the FBI to drastically escalate surveillance of leftist groups. News has also broken that the Biden administration collected data, without a warrant, on Republican senators’ phone calls as part of Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of Jan. 6, taking advantage of inadequate legal protections for data privacy. Republicans and Democrats alike routinely express concern about ‘lawfare,’ the use of unjustified investigations and prosecutions to harass whichever party is out of power. Americans hoping for a deescalation of lawfare should seek to recover the forgotten legacy of the Constitution’s Framers: the safeguards those patriots who knew what it was to be hunted designed for times like these.” (04/22/26)
“U.S. health officials stopped the publication of a study on whether the COVID-19 vaccine was keeping adults from becoming sick enough to have to go to the hospital. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman on Wednesday confirmed the decision to halt publication, citing a dispute about the study’s methodology. The research paper was to appear in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s flagship publication. … the new study concluded that the vaccine cut ER visits and hospitalizations among otherwise healthy adults by about half this past winter, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the cancellation. HHS officials did not say exactly why that methodology was a problem in this instance but argued that prior infection, behavior and differences in who seeks care can affect results.” (04/22/26)
