Lutefisk is nothing but a way to make fish that has been dried rock hard edible. You’ve got your dried fish that you’ve stockpiled for the winter, and it’s now got the solidity of a hunk of plywood, and in order to eat it, you soak it in a caustic mixture of lye and then wash all the lye out (important step). Then, instead of inedible slabs, you’ve got a fish-flavored gelatinous blob of protein. The flavor hasn’t really changed, but the texture is radically different and unexpected for fish, which is where most of the objections to it come from.

But that’s not the interesting bit in this story of the major producer of lutefisk in the US (located in Minnesota, of course). They mention that consumption of lutefisk is in steady decline, but the company isn’t panicking, because they’ve found a new market: Nigerian immigrants. They don’t want the lutefisk, but they do want the hard-dried stockfish it’s made from — they have their own methods of extracting tasty protein from it, which involves simply boiling the stuff to make a fish stock for soups in Nigerian cuisine. There’s a Norwegian-Nigerian connection!

Famine or no famine, stockfish fit into the preexisting culinary tradition. “This kind of intense, slightly fermented flavor was already part of traditional Nigerian cuisine,” Ochonu says. While fermented beans and nuts are used in dishes across the country to supply the desired taste, stockfish’s unique, pungent flavor can’t be provided by locally caught fish. Even better, it’s a protein source that keeps without refrigeration. (That said, Ochonu specifies, stockfish is still more common in eastern Nigerian food than in western and northern Nigeria.)

Today, stockfish is an essential ingredient in Nigerian cuisine, although for some it conjures painful wartime memories. Still imported from northern Norway, it’s cut into chunks, softened in boiling water, and used as a base for Nigerian soups and sauces such as efo riro, spinach soup, edikang ikong, a vegetable soup, and egusi, a soup made with melon seeds.

Now I have a craving to visit a Nigerian restaurant — we have some, but they’re all concentrated in the Twin Cities, and we’re kind of snowbound out here right now. When the thaw comes!

A man, John Galton, was murdered in Acapulco. The proximate reason: he was growing marijuana in Mexico, and the drug cartels wanted to shut him down. The ultimate cause: he was deeply involved in the anarcho-capitalism cult.

Anarcho-capitalists (“ancaps”) believe in dismantling the state and allowing unchecked capitalism to govern the world in its place. Even within the small anarchist world, ancaps are fringe. Anarchists typically describe their movement as inherently anti-capitalist. Their philosophy describes anarchy as the rejection of hierarchical structures, which they say capitalism enforces. Anarcho-capitalists, meanwhile, see money as a liberating force. They promote a variety of libertarian causes like using cryptocurrency, legalizing all drugs, and privatizing all public institutions like courts and roads. The movement reveres the novelist Ayn Rand, whose work outlines a philosophy of radical selfishness and individualism. Her best-known character, an idealized capitalist named John Galt, appears to have inspired Galton’s name.

Peter Kropotkin wept. It’s all a fraud, with everyone involved desperately trying to con people out of money. They’re into cryptocurrency, drugs, and various paper-shuffling schemes, all of which rely on parasitizing other people’s wealth instead of generating their own, and they carry a lot of weird baggage.

They made their money off Forester’s hand-blown smoking paraphernalia and fundraised on their frequent blog posts. They adopted a dog named Rebel and a cat named Satoshi (named after the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin). The pair hosted “meat-ups” for people interested in carnivorism, an all-flesh diet popular in some right-wing and libertarian circles, particularly among libertarians with an interest in cryptocurrency.

The unofficial leader of their community of selfish expatriates, Jeff Berwick, is also a notorious con artist.

Berwick’s passport company, TDV Passports, also appears to have stumbled. The site used to sell “professional facilitation services for those seeking to establish citizenship in countries abroad.” In practical terms, that meant putting clients in touch with people who could fast-track immigration and citizenship applications. Various versions of the site charged from $12,000 for the Dominican Republic citizenship process to $40,000 in “legal fees” for U.S. citizenship. The company appears frequently on scam-reporting websites, where alleged TDV Passports customers complained of spending tens of thousands of dollars without ever obtaining immigration documents.

He’s also running a conference which will feature Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano, and charges extravagant fees for everything — it’s another scam. But what I thought most revealing was his comment on the horrifying murder of his friend:

Anarchapulco will go on as scheduled next week and might be even bigger due to the murder, Berwick says.

“We’ve received nothing but love from attendees and expect this will not affect attendance in a negative way at all,” he said. “In fact, it could increase attendance as more people are exposed to our message this week due to media coverage of this tragic event.”

I suppose you don’t have to be a sociopath to be an ancap, but it sure helps.

You sometimes hear gloating accusations that the “Left is eating its own” or that liberals are addicted to drama or that right-wingers know how to coordinate their messaging. Next time you hear that, think of the behavior of alt-right wackaloons Ian Miles Cheong, Andy “Warski” Pires, Jean-François Gariépy, and a swarm of other racist goons. It’s got pro wrestling, Nazis, accusations of pedophilia, SWATting, and guys setting their own nipples on fire. They aren’t going after leftists, but each other. It’s all very amusing.