February 24, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Make it a groovy Tuesday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OLD AND BUSTED: “You Have to Break a Few Eggs to Make an Omelette.”

The New Hotness? Forget the omelette, let’s just break some eggs:

As George Orwell famously asked, “‘Yes, but where is the omelette?’, the answer is likely to be: ‘Oh well, you can’t expect everything to happen all in a moment.’”

Or ever.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF FUN CITY: Mamdani Responds to Agitators Hurling Snowballs at NYPD, Immediately Makes It Even Worse.

Mamdani was asked whether he agreed with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch that the incident in Washington Square Park on Monday was “criminal.”

[…]

PBA President Patrick Hendry called it “unacceptable and outrageous,” saying, “The individuals involved must be identified, arrested and charged with assault on a police officer. And all of our city leaders must speak up to condemn this despicable attack.”

But Hizzoner disagreed.

“I don’t from the videos that I’ve seen,” Mamdani told reporters when pressed about comments from the PBA. “It looks like a snowball fight.”

When asked how he knew those involved were “kids” — as footage appeared to show adults taking part — Mamdani just said: “I can just tell you from the video I saw, it looked like kids in a snowball fight.”

Watch:

Um, no. It wasn’t “kids” causing injuries to police officers, and it wasn’t a mere snowball fight between the people and the officers because the pelting was only coming from one direction, and the officers were clearly overwhelmed.

Imagine being an NYPD officer, having to be out in this weather and face this kind of abuse, and then having Mamdani add insult to injury by acting like it was harmless fun involving children.

Mamdani was on record during the Summer of Love for wanting to defund the police, and demoralizing them into quitting is one way to accomplish just that: What NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s public safety agenda could mean for NYPD.

Mamdani’s views on law enforcement have shifted since 2020. After the 2020 killing of George Floyd, he was among the Democrats calling to defund the police, writing on social media that the NYPD was “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”

He also referred to the department as a “rogue agency,” comments that drew sharp criticism from police unions and city officials.

In a later interview with The New York Times, Mamdani said he owed officers an apology. He has since said he no longer supports cutting the NYPD’s budget and promised to maintain current staffing levels.

Based on his statement today, I’d take him at his word back in 2020.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

A WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE ARE ANGLING TO BE THE EDITOR OF HARPER’S: New York Times ‘Fact-Checks’ Trump’s State of the Union—Before He Delivers the Address.

Before the State of the Union address, politicians and interest groups from the party opposite the president sometimes offer “prebuttals,” denunciations of the president’s remarks even before they’ve been released or spoken. These anticipatory denunciations of unseen, undelivered remarks are the stuff of speculative, spin-cycle political talking points, not news.

Yet this year, the New York Times broke with precedent and ran a print article headlined “Wobbly Claims on Jobs, Inflation and Crime,” assailing President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech before he even delivered it.

The “fact check” carries the byline of the factually challenged New York Times “fact-check” reporter Linda Qiu. The New York Times uses her pedantically against Trump but not against New York City’s truth-stretching mayor Zohran Mamdani. This latest column is entirely off base when it comes to the substance, attempting to undermine Trump’s claims of progress on inflation, jobs, crime, and immigration. On immigration, the Times rolled out fact-checking terminology—”slightly exaggerated”—that is comical in its demonstration of Times bias. When the Times fact-checkers discover Democrats saying things slightly exaggerated, they call them “mostly true.”

What’s more than slightly exaggerated is any pretension remaining at the Times that the newspaper is nonpartisan rather than totally in the tank for the Democrats.

Time traveling starts at a young age among the left:

Flashback: Media ‘Con Game:’ Predetermined Storylines.

Harper‘s magazine editor Lewis Lapham is being appropriately mocked for a major pre-GOP-convention boner. In the September issue of his magazine, which has been on newsstands for over a week, Lapham writes about the “Republican propaganda mill” and the GOP convention:

“The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal — government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden’s prayer — and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn’t stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?”

That’s right, Lapham wrote about the GOP convention speeches before anyone even stepped to the podium. Lapham has apologized for what he’s calling a “rhetorical invention,” use of “poetic license,” and a “mistake.”

But the only “mistake” Lapham made is in revealing for all to see what has long been known by anyone who pays attention to the news: the major media routinely bring to their coverage of significant political events a predetermined storyline — you might want to call it a “Lapham”. Facts that undermine the storyline are ignored or explained away as aberrations to The Truth. For the editor of Harper‘s and other establishment press figures, it really makes no difference to them what will be said at Madison Square Garden because the Laphams are already set, loaded in the scribblers’ word processors and television anchor tele-prompters and ready to go.

Maybe Lapham employed Joy Reid’s time traveling hackers to pull it off?

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

AT PJ MEDIA THEY’LL BE Liveblogging the State of the Union.

Starting here at 8:45. Our own Vodkapundit, Stephen Green, will be doing it too, and will post a link shortly.

But I wish Trump and JD would do this:

Posted at 8:19 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THAT’S QUITE A LOT OF DECLINE TO HIDE: Was Climate Change the Greatest Financial Scandal in History?

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex.

And for what?

Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources. The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those countries poorer by blocking affordable energy.
Since the global warming crusade started some 30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree — as even the alarmists will admit.

In other words, $16 trillion has been spent — a lot of people got very, very rich off the government largesse — but there is not a penny of measurable payoff.

But it’s much worse than that. In economics there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?

What if the $16 trillion had been spent on clean water for poor countries? Preventing avoidable deaths from diseases like malaria? Building schools in African villages to end illiteracy? Bringing reliable and affordable electric power to the more than 1 billion people who still lack access? Curing cancer?

Many millions of lives could have been saved.

Yes, but with much fewer private jet trips to Davos. Have some priorities here, man!

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SINK ‘EM ALL:

Posted at 6:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds

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