February 25, 2026

JD VANCE REVEALS WHAT HE SAW FROM DEMOCRATS DURING THE STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH THAT MOST VIEWERS DIDN’T:

“First of all, obviously, most Democrats didn’t stand up or clap, and what a shame that is,” Vance said. “What a sad commentary that is on the Democratic Party, that the idea that the American government should stand for American citizens, not illegal aliens. That shouldn’t be controversial, but apparently it was to the Democrats.”

But that wasn’t all.

But I will say, Bill, something that I saw that probably most TV viewers didn’t see was really the cowardice, because there were a few Democrats who sort of politely clapped. They didn’t want to stand up. I guess maybe they were worried about being primaried by the far-left fringe of their party. But they were all looking around. They weren’t actually saying, you know what, I’m going to stand and support this because this is a common-sense, obvious statement. They were all looking around for cues from their colleagues, because they didn’t have the courage to stand on their own.

The pattern continued even as the president introduced his guests, many of whom were hailed as American heroes. They deserved immediate applause, yet several received only muted or delayed reactions from the Democratic side of the chamber. Whether that hesitation stemmed from, as Vice President Vance suggested, fear of a far-left primary challenge or from an entrenched refusal to celebrate anything associated with the president remains an open question.

Perhaps the port side of the aisle were simply too dazzled by the appearance of the man behind Trump:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALMOST HUMAN: Boozy chimps fail urine test, confirm hotly debated theory.

As previously reported, in 2014, University of California, Berkeley (UCB) biologist Robert Dudley wrote a book called The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. His controversial “drunken monkey hypothesis” proposed that the human attraction to alcohol goes back about 18 million years, to the origin of the great apes, and that social communication and sharing food evolved to better identify the presence of fruit from a distance. At the time, skeptical scientists insisted that this was unlikely because chimpanzees and other primates just don’t eat fermented fruit or nectar.

But reports of primates doing just that have grown over the ensuing two decades. Earlier this year, we reported that researchers had caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. That observational data was the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild. The authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).

And last September, Dudley co-authored a paper reporting the first measurements of the ethanol content of fruits favored by chimps in the Ivory Coast and Uganda, finding that chimps consume 14 grams of alcohol per day, the equivalent of a standard alcoholic drink in the US. After adjusting for the chimps’ lower body mass, the authors concluded the chimps are consuming nearly two drinks per day.

Drink up! It’s an evolutionary necessity or something.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

NO, ISRAEL IS NOT PERSECUTING CHRISTIANS: There seems to be no end to the lies that pop-up concerning the Jewish state and every aspect of its existence, including how it treats the many Christians who live in the Holy Land. Richard Pollock addresses the transparently ridiculous claim that Israel mistreats Christians within its borders.

Posted at 3:07 pm by Mark Tapscott

DEVELOPING: Cuba Shoots Four Dead in Clash With Florida Speedboat.

Cuban forces killed four people and wounded six others who were traveling in a speed boat with Florida tags and opened fire on the island’s border patrol, the government said.

The vessel approached within one nautical mile off the coast of Villa Clara on Wednesday morning, the Ministry of Interior said in a statement. When security forces approached to identify the passengers, the occupants opened fire, injuring the commander of the military vessel.

US and Cuban tensions are running high as Donald Trump’s administration has effectively imposed a naval blockade on the communist-run island, and dramatically reduced its access to fuel. The president has also mused about the collapse of the six-decade-old regime.

Soon:

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: The Graveyard of Destructive Ideas.

There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity.

The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory). They begin insisting that a new existential threat requires immediate government intervention, novel legislation, ample funding, and public awareness of the impending danger.

So out of nowhere, the public is warned that the scorching planet will be inundated by rising seas in a mere decade. Or that millions of transgender youth are our next civil rights frontier, given that they suffer in silence without political advocacy, new laws, programs, and the chance for “life-saving,” powerful hormonal treatments and radical sex-reassignment surgeries. Indeed, the travel time from an outlandish idea by the faculty lounge to liberal status quo is a mere few years.

Next, the media, hand-in-glove with academia, springs into action to persuade the skeptical public to “follow the science” and “trust the experts.” It castigates any doubters as cranks or “conspiracy theorists” who spread “disinformation” and “misinformation”; or as racists, nativists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes who must be silenced.

Hollywood and sports celebrities often piggyback on the frenzy, hijacking awards ceremonies and pre-game national anthems to out-virtue-signal each other, warning the public that they must adapt and change—or else!

Read the whole thing — and it sure is nice to see VDH having recovered so well.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: “Land Acknowledgements.”

The New Hotness? Taxpayer Acknowledgements!

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

HISTORY BEFORE IT VANISHES: The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks: It’s a race against time (and magnetic decay) to preserve decades of cultural history stored on obsolete hardware.

I remember interviewing Neal Stephenson about 20 years ago. For the Baroque Cycle he had read papers written by Isaac Newton — the actual papers, in Newton’s own handwriting, on paper — and remarked that meanwhile he had floppy disks at home that no machine you could buy could read anymore.

Even in the 1980s, my old law firm had a room full of obsolete word processors (I remember a huge device from the short-lived Exxon Office Systems, among many others) for use in discovery or FOIA requests.

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SKYNET SMILES: Lockheed test-flies F-35 with artificial intelligence to quickly ID unknown contacts.

“The successful demonstration … marks the first time a tactical AI model has been used in flight to generate an independent Combat ID on the pilot’s display,” the company said in its release.

The Lockheed release was sparse on details of how the AI works, but it said that during a test at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, “a Lockheed Martin-built and trained AI/machine learning model resolved ID ambiguities among emitters, improving situational awareness and reducing pilot decision making latency.” In a military context, “emitters” typically refers to radio-frequency emissions from communications systems and radars, as opposed to infrared or optical sensing.

The AI identification algorithm was compact enough to run on the F-35’s onboard computers. Then, back on the ground, Lockheed said engineers “used an automated tool to label new emitters, retrain the AI model to learn the new emitter class within minutes, and reload the updated model for the next flight, all in the same mission planning cycle.”

Just keep the human pilot in the loop, OK?

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

ABIGAIL SPANBERGER’S SOTU REBUTTAL WAS JUST PLAIN WEIRD:

Having just watched Democrats beclown themselves at the State of the Union address, a clearly-nervous and fidgety Abigail Spanberger – the new governor of Virginia – had the unenviable task of trying to put a positive spin on her party’s dire and decidedly unpatriotic behavior. Like all Democrats, when faced with espousing how her party’s policies help everyday Americans, she merely resorted to attacking President Trump. The whole thing was pretty weird.

Spanberger had a few reasons to be nervous. She was the follow-up act to Trump’s barnburner of a speech that saw the president celebrate the best of America while also calling out Democrats for their skewed priorities, particularly when it comes to prioritizing illegal immigration over the safety of American citizens.

Secondly, she was under fire from the left for choosing to deliver the official Democrat response from Colonial Williamsburg … because slavery? She knows who put her in the Governor’s Mansion, so she may have been feeling the beady eyes of the radical left on her as she spoke from the House of Burgesses.

Lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHOOSING SIDES: Trump Got Democrats to Admit That Illegal Aliens Come First, Not You and Your Family.

In other words: Trump Directs and Films the Main Political Advertisement for the Midterms.

UPDATE:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Anti-Gunners’ Latest PLCAA Workaround: Blue States Enacting Onerous ‘Firearm Industry Responsibility’ Laws.

Anti-gun activists think they have figured out a way around the Second Amendment, democratic accountability, and the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to impose a limitless raft of gun control on the American people.

The strategy is to enact what civilian disarmament advocates term “firearm industry responsibility” laws in anti-gun states. These laws impose a duty on members of the firearms industry to institute “reasonable controls” over the sale and distribution of their products, on top of the mountains of explicit state and federal statutes and regulations they are tasked to comply with, lest they face ruinous civil liability.

The term “reasonable controls” is vague and ill-defined, resulting in the decidedly unreasonable circumstance where gun industry members can’t know how to comply with the law. These statutes empower anti-gun government officials to abuse the vague language in a manner that imposes ever-expanding restrictions on the industry and its customers, limited only by the officials’ imagination.

Moreover, this legislation impacts not just firearms dealers, manufacturers, and distributors as they would be understood under federal law, but includes any business involved in the stream of commerce for ammunition or any other firearm-related products.

The goal is to use the threat of devastating civil liability to force the firearms industry to restrict their rights and those of their customers by instituting gun controls that were not enacted (and often rejected) through the democratic process and may be found unconstitutional if imposed directly by government. The entire enterprise is a grotesque and cynical evasion of democratic accountability and constitutional review.

So far, 10 states have enacted versions of this legislation, with extremist gun control advocates in Virginia also seeking to enact a variant (HB21) at present.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green