February 24, 2026

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S BECAUSE YOUR BODY NEEDS MEAT: She wrote vegan cookbooks. Then she started craving burgers.

A doctor’s visit revealed that Jamieson was severely anemic. Despite being a trained chef and doing everything “within the vegan framework” to make sure she was getting enough vitamins and minerals — “I’d written books about it. I knew what you were supposed to do,” she says — including cooking with cast iron pots and even getting intravenous iron infusions, it wasn’t enough. “I was like, this is crazy. This is not sustainable. And this is not how humans are supposed to stay healthy,” she says.

So, after 10 years of being a vegan, Jamieson’s red meat dreams became a reality: She bit into a burger. “It was delicious,” she says. “It was like heaven. My body was like, Oh my God, thank you.”

Helen was a vegetarian before her heart attack, after which she said “screw it, I’m eating meat.” I took her to Morton’s in Nashville for her first steak and her reaction was simillar. I remember her saying “what the hell was I thinking?” after her first bite.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

Trump and Vance would be very wise to separate themselves from Tucker — beyond the midterms, unless there’s a Sister Souljah moment from Vance over Tucker, he will be used to tank Vance’s chances in 2028: The Last Temptation of JD Vance.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE: US military begins withdrawing from main base in northeast Syria, Syrian sources say. “Qasrak has been a main hub for the US-led global coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria, where US troops deployed over a decade ago, partnering with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against the jihadist group. Kurdish forces agreed last month to integrate their institutions with Damascus.”

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

IF THERE’S A STRANGER TIMELINE THAN THIS ONE, I DON’T WANT TO LIVE ON IT:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

OUR MEN’S HOCKEY TEAM’S HISTORIC WIN WAS JUST TOO MUCH FOR SPORTS WRITERS TO BEAR:

The charge against the men’s team seems to be four-fold. First, that, having won the gold, its members declined to address the “tide of fascism in the United States” and instead said gauche hyper-nationalistic things, such as, “This is all about our country right now,” “I love the USA,” “I’m so proud to be American today,” “This is for every American,” “It’s the greatest country in the world,” and “Everyone better be wearing the red, white, and blue for as long as they can.” Second, that during a post-game phone call with a rollicking President Trump, the players didn’t band together on the spot to push back against his supposedly sexist jokes — or apologize later for their complicity. Third, that the team subsequently agreed to go to the White House to celebrate their victory — and, even worse, that it seems excited by that prospect. Fourth, that the FBI director, Kash Patel, went over to Italy to watch the game and then chugged beer with the team in the locker room. Together, the sporting press is keen to inform us, these decisions have “sullied” the USA’s victory and ruined the reputations of its architects for all time.

What nonsense this all is. What narrow, monomaniacal, outlandish, freakish guff. I had a low opinion of sports writers before the last 48 hours, but good grief do I now want to throw the entire corps into a lake. The USA men’s team wins the gold for the first time in 46 years, and the news cycle following that achievement is stocked with fringe, politicized crap. I am reminded in this moment of Margaret Thatcher, berating the press after the recapture of South Georgia during the Falklands War. “Just rejoice at that news,” Thatcher said, “and congratulate our forces and the Marines.” Amen, Maggie. Just rejoice, and congratulate our team. I promise you’ll live through the ordeal. Not everything has to be a campus psychodrama. Not all stories need to “surface the nuances of” this or that. Not every incident that tangentially involves Donald Trump requires his elevation to the star of the tale. It’s okay to be happy that the United States won something, without finding 100 other reasons to be sad, angry, indignant, or confused. There really is no need to stretch to canonize a woman who represents another country when we have our own heroes before our very eyes. Rejoice!

Journalists are not politicians, and there is no need for them to be perfectly representative of the nation. But it might be a good thing for our culture if they weren’t all massive weirdos.

One of the cliches of the newspaper business is to call the sports section the paper’s “candy store” or “toy department.” (Hoping to get a rise out of Bill Parcells in 2004, Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes told him that he — Parcells — worked in the toy department.) Most sports writers see themselves as capable of crafting far meatier stuff than writing up sports games, and they wouldn’t get hired by their editors if they weren’t leftists, so of course they’re rooting for Eileen Gu and the CCP, and loathe American patriotism in general (scoundrel, last refuge of) and Trump specifically.

Think of the past couple of days as a dry run though, for what’s coming this summer:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHICHEVER WAY THE (LUCRATIVE) WINDS BLOW:

Also from Miller: “Trump was a permission structure for them. ‘Someone that bad can’t be the same as me, so I am not like him.’ So now they believe they can grift any way they want, because to them, he is always worse. See Tim Miller, Bulwark etc..”

Earlier (From Ed): The Atlantic’s Got a Fevah, and It Needs More Nazism!

Posted at 1:58 pm by Stephen Green

NEOFEUDALISM: Illinois ranks near bottom in social mobility.

Ugaste told The Center Square. “Those who are in dire economic straits, giving them a handout, more SNAP benefits or putting them on Medicaid isn’t a help. That’s a safety net to help them get over a hump. We have to have good paying jobs with good benefits.”

With Archbridge Institute researchers defining social mobility as “the ability to better oneself and those around them,” based on such factors as institutions and rule of law, entrepreneurship and growth, education and skills development and social capital, Illinois now ranks 38th across the country, including behind at least five other midwestern states that were all ranked in the top quarter.

Data also points to the state’s ongoing struggles with economic growth, high regulations and persistent corruption by elected officials as some of the biggest drivers for its poor overall standing.

Illinois’ lowest rankings came on institutions and predatory state action at 49th, followed by entrepreneurship at 45th and judicial system quality at 40th.

Big Government is how the well-connected use state power to protect their status and freeze out any rabble who might otherwise become competitors.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

HOW THE REVOLUTIONARY LEFT EMBRACED RADICAL ISLAM:

In 2006, in a public discussion of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, the feminist scholar Judith Butler characterized Hamas and Hezbollah as “part of the global left.” Butler’s remarks provoked a scandal at the time, but after the October 7 attacks, it became common to hear Western leftist protesters chanting slogans like “long live Hamas!” How did Middle Eastern terrorist groups rooted in radical Islamic ideology come to occupy such a central place in otherwise secular left-wing politics? In The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, journalist Jason Burke takes up this question, exploring the historical roots of the Palestinian national movement and situating its rise within the transition from 1970s left-wing radicalism to the emergence of radical Islamism, which reshaped global politics in the 1980s.

Burke’s account brings to life the central figures of this transnational revolutionary movement: Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Fusako Shigenobu of the Japanese Red Army, Ulrike Meinhof from the German Red Army Faction, and “Carlos the Jackal,” the nom de guerre of the sociopathic Venezuelan-born gun for hire Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. These leftist militants moved fluidly across borders, traveling from sympathetic regimes in the Middle East to hubs of revolutionary fervor, most notably the PLO’s refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. They hijacked airplanes and marched with Kalashnikovs in the desert. Inspired by the revolutionary tracts of Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong, they forged a transnational network of anti-colonial insurgency and solidarity.

These left-wing radicals took Mao’s dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” to heart and concluded that electoral politics and peaceful protest were insufficient for taking on the global forces of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. But this analysis also created its own problems. The enemy these militants fought was not a single politician, national government, or corporation, but a vast, complex global political and economic system, so it was always unclear how a small number of assassinations and kidnappings could defeat it.

This is part of why Israel became their primary target. The radicals of the era viewed the Jewish state as the most egregious manifestation of capitalist decadence and settler colonialism, but also as small and weak enough to be brought down through violent direct action. By doing so, they believed they could hasten the inevitable collapse of a rotten Euro-American imperial system.

As Mark Steyn wrote 20 years ago, “our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.”

QED:

Meanwhile, in Old Blighty:

Speaking of which: While Serving as UK’s Top Prosecutor, Keir Starmer Routinely Let Off Grooming Gang Rapists With… A Warning Letter.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll