ABOUT OUR ‘JUNK’ DNA: The more is learned about the junk, the less it looks like junk, according to another installment of “Long Story Short” on HillFaith.

STUDENT SUSPENDED FOR USING LEGAL TERM: Ever wonder where the term “illegal alien” originates? I don’t know if federal law was the originator, but, as Liberty Unyielding’s Hans Bader points out this morning, the term appears in both federal and state law codes.

So why is North Carolinian Leah McGhee’s high-school student son being penalized for using the term? Bader explains:

“Leah McGhee’s son has a teacher who assigned vocabulary words during class last Tuesday, including the word ‘alien.’ McGhee says her son made an effort to understand the assignment and responded to his teacher, asking, ‘Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?’

“According to an email describing the incident, sent to local officials and shared with Carolina Journal, a young man in class took offense to his question and reportedly threatened to fight him, prompting the teacher to call in the assistant principal. Ultimately, his words were deemed by administrative staff to be offensive and disrespectful to classmates who are Hispanic.

“’I didn’t make a statement directed towards anyone; I asked a question,’ said the student in response to his suspension. ‘I wasn’t speaking of Hispanics because everyone from other countries needs green cards, and the term illegal alien is an actual term that I hear on the news and can find in the dictionary.'”

Prediction: Leah McGhee is raising one sharp young man who just might end up in law school someday and advance to a position where he can help restore common sense and justice to American public education.

PANIC? On the Left.

ABOUT THOSE PRO-HAMAS DEMOS MONDAY: They shut down the Golden Gate Bridge for hours and disrupted commerce, people and traffic in Chicago, New York and elsewhere across the country.

Ever wonder how the Democrats and the Left can organize these “protests” so quickly? The Washington Free Beacon’s Jessica Costescu exposes the Soros-backed far-left Dark Money groups behind those disruptions and those very likely to come soon.

IGNORE THE BUZZ, HERE’S WHY SENATE SHOULD HOLD MAYORKAS TRIAL: “Nuking the Constitution” is reason one cited by Senate conservatives. Check out my report for number two on Epoch Times.

WHAT ABOUT AI? Regardless if you are fascinated or terrified by what Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be able to do in the future or already is capable of today, Dr. Robert Marks of Baylor University likely has all the answers — Facts and Fictions — you need, today on HillFaith.

WHY SCHUMER WON’T ALLOW MAYORKAS TRIAL: Seven leading Senate conservatives told journalists that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is petrified that allowing the Mayorkas Impeachment trial to go forward will seriously injure President Joe Biden’s re-election and the Democrats’ ability to keep Senate control.

RCP’S CANNON OBLITERATES NYTIMES: For reasons known only to him, RealClearPolitics Washington Bureau Chief Carl Cannon waited three and a half years to respond to a classic piece of cheap-shot “reporting” by the New York Times’ Jeremy Peters.

Trust me, it was worth the wait because Cannon systematically, factually and precisely exposes a hatchet job that demonstrated in the days immediately after the 2020 election just how deep is the agit-prop mire into which the Mainstream Media has fallen.

Bottom-line: RCP carries on the finest traditions of journalism that in the words of the NYT’s former owner, reports the news “impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, interest or sect involved.”

Adolph Ochs, who penned those words in 1896 after taking over the newspaper, would most likely be hooted out of today’s NYT newsroom. After all, when the Ochs bust originally accompanying those famous words moved with the newspaper to a new location in 2007, the quotation didn’t make the trip.

PLANNING ON WATCHING THE SOLAR ECLIPSE? Total eclipses of the Sun don’t happen every day. In fact, the next one doesn’t happens until 2044, and, since millions of Americans live in or near the path of totality for this coming Monday’s event, it’s worth making the effort to see it. And so is this 5:29 video on HillFaith on what such events tell us about the universe.

HOW WILL SCHUMER SAVE MAYORKAS? Senate rules are quite specific and detailed about what the Senate must do when the House of Representatives sends impeachment counts to the upper chamber. That will happen a week from today when 11 House Managers present to the Senate two impeachment counts against Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will convene the Senate at 1:00 pm the following day and a trial leading to a vote on whether to convict Mayorkas will ensure. But that’s probably the last thing the New York Democrat wants to happen, and the rules don’t provide much in the way of alternatives that would not be damaging to his party’s efforts to keep control of the Senate in November.

But, as I report exclusively today on The Epoch Times, there may yet be options available to Schumer, including simply thumbing his nose at the rules, sending the impeachment counts to die in a committee, or a tabling move that the Democratic majority almost certainly will back.

THIS IS TERRIFYING: It is for pollster Scott Rasmussen, that is. He asked a representative sample of the nation’s electorate if they would prefer their candidate to win by cheating or lose by being honest. “Only” seven percent chose the former.

But wait! There’s more, as Issues & Insights (I&I) explains today:

“Among all Americans, just 7 percent said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. As Rasmussen put it, he’d rather see that number lower, but that’s not bad.

“But more than a third of the elite 1 percent he surveyed would condone cheating. And among those who are ‘politically obsessed’ – meaning that they talk about politics every day – that number shot up to 69 percent.”

A government led by cheaters is a government with zero credibility. And if they condone cheating to win elections, they will condone lying by the media, too.

EASTER AND THE MOST VIP FACT OF HISTORY: Like Paul said, if the resurrection isn’t literally true, then Christians are the biggest fools of all. But if it is true …. my latest PJMedia column.

WHAT LINCOLN SAID ABOUT GRANT: When backbiting Washington critics attacked his top general, President Lincoln defended him with two words: “He fights!” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) has more than his share of critics, but the man fights in the Senate for conservative principles and values. Check out my special profile of Johnson this morning on The Epoch Times.

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.

FEDS DEMAND MORE TELEWORK: Let’s see now, federal workers who are mostly working at home anyway showed up recently at their Boston office to demand even more days to work at home. So why do they think they are most effective protesting at their office, but most effective for the taxpayers working at home?

STILL POETS AMONG US: An Easter special reprint in HillFaith. Besides being a skilled poet, Susan Gates, Ph.D, is the author of “Days of Slaughter: Inside Freddie Mac and Why It Could Happen Again.” She knows, she was there on the inside as it happened.

ANOTHER HORRENDOUS RESULT OF THE INVASION: Increased crime, spiraling social and economic maintenance costs and housing shortages are the most obvious negative effects of Biden’s open border, but there are others that are far less obvious such as devastating U.S. food supplies, according to experts interviewed by The Epoch Times.

“With unfettered illegal immigration — some 9 million encounters since 2021 — the normal guardrails for inspection are ignored, raising the likelihood of unwanted diseases being brought across the border,” reports Epoch’s Darlene McCormick Sanchez.

“Dr. Michael Vickers has been a veterinarian for about 50 years and served on the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC), The threat to the food supply is already apparent from the past cases of tuberculosis (TB) transmitted from illegal immigrants to dairy cows in Texas, he said.

“Concerns are growing that it’s only a matter of time before U.S. agriculture experiences a fresh disaster on a grand scale, Dr. Vickers said.”

BIDEN’S LIE ABOUT WHY HE GOT INTO POLITICS; The Chief Executive has long claimed he first got into politics in his home state of Delaware as a result of his guilt about defending a company against an injured employee. But like so much else claimed by this guy, the truth tells a different story, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Joseph Simonson and Andrew Kerr.

VOTERS FLEEING BLUE COUNTIES: Do a deep-dive analysis of the top 10 counties for out-migration, as Issues & Insights (I&I) did recently and one of the common characteristics that most stands out could be a portent of the November election results:

“I&I conducted a detailed analysis of the latest Census data, comparing migration trends and the 2020 election outcomes for all 3,144 counties. What we found is that Biden-voting counties lost a net of 3.7 million people (3,670,516 to be exact) to Trump-voting counties from 2020 through 2023. (That’s up by more than a million since we did this same analysis last year.)

“In other words, in just the three years after Biden won his election, more than 1 percent of the population had packed up and moved out of counties that voted for him.”

So, will those numbers lead to bigger margins for Trump where he won in 2020 and reverse Biden’s outcomes in counties where he won last time around? Or will this wave of Blue county voters dilute or even cancel out Trump’s margins in his winning areas?

BIDEN REACHES ANOTHER RECORD LOW: When the U.S. Embassy in Haiti was closed, it marked the 11th such American overseas facility to be shut down since Joe Biden took the oath of office as Commander-in-Chief.

“This record of failure is particularly noteworthy given that Biden bumbled his way into office promising to ‘restore America’s standing in the world,’ which is still listed on a White House website as an ‘immediate priority’ of his administration,” according to Issues & Insights (I&I).

IRREDUCIBLE MIND (Part 5): Believe me, friends, this concluding installment in the series on HillFaith will blow your mind (no pun intended). By the way, the traffic data shows an increasing readership for each of the first four installments of the video series.

This series  has also generated dozens of unusually thoughtful and provocative comments that I very much appreciate from folks on both sides of brain/consciousness debate. Instapundit has a bunch of really sharp people in its readership.

IRREDUCIBLE MIND (Part 4): You’ve heard of Quantum Mechanics. How about Quantum Biology and the Hard Problem of Consciousness? It’s up on HillFaith today.

IRREDUCIBLE MIND (Part 3): “Why Materialists Can’t Fully Explain Consciousness” is live on HillFaith. Warning: At 38:46, this one is a bit longer than the previous two installments. But in some important respects, it’s also the most fascinating, especially regarding Savants like the Rain Man portrayed by Dustin Hoffman.

Note to Mycroft, Dave, Joseph, Michael, et. al: If you guys could drop the snark and simply make your arguments and counter-arguments, you would have a great illustration of useful civil discourse. Accord the other guy the same respect you expect for yourself and we will all benefit.

IRREDUCIBLE MIND (Part 2): “What Consciousness and Colors Like Yellow Have in Common” is live on HillFaith for those who may be interested.

THE MEASURE OF A MIND: The challenge here is that the mind can’t be measured, at least physically, which leads to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Starting today on HillFaith, Inspiring Philosophy’s Michael Jones does the deep dive into this problem in part one of a five-part video series (each part is 15 to 25 minutes long and well worth the time invested).

I’ve never done this here on Instapundit before but the origin and nature of the human mind and consciousness is at the root of the most fundamental issues that separate Left and Right. Additionally, Jones gives due credit to materialists and non-materialists alike in his presentation, and I am confident there are legions of both with valuable insights to share here in the comments. Keep it spirited and civil, please.