“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.” All of the meat was from healthy, grass-fed animals reared on the farms where she worked.
Other former vegetarians reported that they, too, felt better after introducing grass-fed meat into their diets: Ms. Kavanaugh said eating meat again helped with her depression. Mr. Applestone said he felt far more energetic.
“It can be hard to balance your diet as a vegetarian, especially when you’re younger, and I wasn’t doing it right,” he said.
I continue to hold out hope that we’ll be able to grow grass-fed beef in a lab.
Is he a nice person? Well, he’s left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he’s used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy – a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.
What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation – a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street. He was going on the BBC’s “Question Time” that night and was worried that he didn’t have anything sufficiently arresting to say, so asked if I had any tips. I gave him a few thoughts on the passing scene, and he considered them not in terms of his own public-policy positions (if any) but in terms of attitudinal cachet. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you really stir them up and put in a word for social conservatism?”
“You mean abortion and all that? Oh, G od..,” he sighed, and ordered dessert.
If that seems to be (for self-interested reasons) his most firmly drawn red line, don’t nevertheless overstate his ideological flexibility. Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot …and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.
Between him and Trump, we are in for interesting times.
I’m reading a review copy of an interesting new book from Bob Zimmerman on the history of slavery in America. One of the points he makes is that one of the things that created the cultural environment for it was the nature of how the Cavaliers founded Virginia, with the class bias and denigration of physical labor they brought from England.
One of the many reasons I can’t take Democrats seriously on race is the fact that they feel the need to kiss that corrupt grifter’s ring to get their party’s nomination.
Bryan Preston isn’t impressed with the latest SF series, despite Katie Sackoff:
…in Another Life, only Sackhoff’s Niko and her AI sidekick (Samuel Anderson) are fit for this mission. The rest fill every negative millennial stereotype in the galaxy. They are whiny. They are grouchy. They scream obscenities at each other — all the time. They never fail to crack under the least amount of pressure. One is immediately mutinous. Another cannot ever think before opening their pie hole and saying things any rational adult knows they will immediately regret. Collectively, they perpetually can’t even.