FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Naked Truth About the Naked Arsonist. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have the arsonist who really couldn’t help herself, our first stolen ambulance story for 2024, and the zombie apocalypse comes to California because of course that’s where it starts.”

I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: Is our love affair with Huy Fong cooling? Sriracha lovers say the sauce has lost its heat. “The hot take from die-hard Huy Fong fans is actually a not-so-hot take: They say the Sriracha they once relished no longer brings the same heat. And that bellyaching is quickly spreading across the internet as people conduct their own informal taste tests to measure Sriracha zing.”

For what it’s worth, I’m on my second bottle of Huy Fong since it became easily available again, and I haven’t noticed that it’s any less hot. But I never thought it was all that spicy to begin with.

But when Huy Fong was hard to find, I got into Momofuku’s Chili Crunch that really brings the heat.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Case for Marrying an Older Man. Long, and self-obsessed, but revealing — and not wrong — in its neotraditionalism.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Elon Musk reveals plan for next Starship mission.

The SpaceX boss said the next Starship launch, which is expected to take place in early May, will focus on bringing the craft back to Earth safely from orbit for the first time.

On Wednesday, SpaceX completed a second static fire test of its latest Starship rocket at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

“Getting ready for Flight 4 of Starship,” Mr Musk posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.

“Goal of this mission is for Starship to get through max reentry heating with all systems functioning.”

Godspeed…

HMM: Russian network that ‘paid European politicians’ busted, authorities claim.

Investigators claimed it used the popular Voice of Europe website as a vehicle to pay politicians.

The Czech Republic and Poland said the network aimed to influence European elections.

Voice of Europe did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Czech media, citing the countries [sic] intelligence agency BIS, reported that politicians from Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary were paid by Voice of Europe in order to influence upcoming elections for the European Parliament.

The German newspaper, Der Spiegel, said the money was either handed over in cash in covert meetings in Prague or through cryptocurrency exchanges.

Pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk is alleged by the Czech Republic to be behind the network.

And there’s this from 2020:

Over the past year, Telizhenko has repeatedly aired his claims about corruption in the Biden family while appearing on Giuliani’s YouTube channel and podcast. The claims are drawn from Telizhenko’s past work as a diplomat in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, his employment with a DC lobbying firm and his stint in the office of the prosecutor general of Ukraine. While serving in these positions, Telizhenko claims to have witnessed signs of corruption and conflicts of interests involving the Biden family and other Obama Administration officials.

With help from Giuliani, these claims also found their way to the U.S. Senate, where Johnson and his staff have had repeated contacts with Telizhenko for over a year. The Wisconsin Senator first met with Telizhenko in July 2019, a month before Johnson teamed up with Senator Grassley to investigate allegations of corruption against the Biden family.

As that probe got underway in the U.S. Senate, Russian allies in Ukraine made repeated efforts to lend credibility to these claims of corruption against Biden. Some of these efforts involved Medvedchuk, a personal friend of the Russian President.

Hopefully, Kissinger’s formula doesn’t apply here and they can all lose.

REPLACEMENT THEORY IN CENSUS DATA: You know the theory: Democrats, led by President Joe Biden, opened U.S. borders to enable the importation of millions of new voters who will be loyal to the party symbolized by the braying donkey. But is that really what is going on?

The always curious lads at Issues & Insights (I&I) did some digging into U.S. Census Bureau data on net migration flows since 2020 and here’s what they found:

“We broke out net international migration numbers into counties that voted for Biden and those that voted for Trump. What did we find? Of the more than 2.5 million international migrants, more than 2 million went to counties that voted for Biden. Which means fewer than 500,000 of them ended up in counties that voted for Trump.

“Here’s another way to look at it: Of the 100 counties with the largest gains from net international migration since 2020, all but eight of them voted for Biden in 2020. At the other end of the spectrum, of the 100 counties with the lowest levels of net international migration, only five voted for Biden.”

You have to assume the newcomers will vote the same way continuous residents do in order for the Replacement Theory to hold water. But, as I&I notes, be prepared to be labeled racist and xenophobic if you do. And don’t expect an apology when the returns come in election night and we all see the result.