Here’s how much A.I. is fucking with Americans’ brains:
The beautiful Army blonde Jessica Foster has posed with an F-22 Raptor fighter jet, donned camouflage in the desert and walked a tarmac with President Donald Trump on the first day of the strikes on Iran.
The slew of photos and videos depicting the patriotic life of the MAGA dream girl have led her Instagram account to explode, gaining more than a million followers since she began posting four months ago.
But Foster is an illusion — a fake woman who experts say was probably created by an artificial intelligence image generator. There’s no public record of Foster’s military service and the account,despite not being labeled AI, is packed with indicators that she is fake. Between many of her pro-Trump posts, Foster also prominently displays her feet.
Why be surprised? Donald John Trump is a fake president. If only he was an A.I. invention.
Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief at the now Trump-friendly CBS News, has announced there will be mass layoffs at the network.
In a Friday memo to staff, seen by the Daily Beast, Weiss and CBS president Tom Cibrowski announced the cuts, saying those affected will be notified by the end of the “difficult day.”
“It’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, and that we need to change along with it,” Weiss and Cibrowski wrote.
“New audiences are burgeoning in new places, and we are pressing forward with ambitious plans to grow and invest so that we can be there for them. That means some parts of our newsroom must get smaller to make room for the things we must build to remain competitive.”
It’s worth remembering that whenever a MAGA figure enters an institution as a “leader,” that institution is soon destroyed, with the MAGA figure thereafter blaming everyone else for what happened and launching a round of mass layoffs
Sometime in the future, the MAGA figure will be paid off to go away, even as they leave the institution they poisoned utterly destroyed forever
Once you start looking for this phenomenon you can’t stop seeing it, and it’s exactly what’s happening at CBS News today
Abramson continues. But you know where this is going:
MAGA is a death cult. That means it doesn’t build anything or innovate or foster any community or develop ethoi that inform or inspire… it has only one setting, and that setting is war. Tear everything down, attack everyone, delegitimize everything, defile everywhere. The idea that Bari Weiss has any vision whatsoever that relates to the news or anything else is simply laughable. She is a self-aggrandizing, clueless chaos agent who will throw all the toys out of the crib until she skulks away.
The only thing any professional operating in good faith can do in the face of something like this is get as far away from it as possible as quickly as possible so that you don’t get any of the moral and spiritual stink of MAGAism on you.
The Hertfordshire Zoo in England announced the births of two elephant shrew pups — the very first of their species to be born in Britain.
The zoo said the elephant shrews, also known as black and rufous sengis, were born to first-time parents Nuru and Mala on Feb. 23, and were discovered via CCTV cameras in the animals’ enclosure.
The long-nosed babies, the first elephant shrews ever born in Britain, have been nicknamed “the Snootlets.”
The zoo said each baby weighed approximately 1 ounce at the time of birth — roughly equivalent to a single AA battery.
“The Snootlets are thriving with mum, dad, and our dedicated veterinary team and over the coming weeks they will grow more active and confident, and we cannot wait for them to start exploring their habitat,” the zoo said.
We have a lot on our plate but I’m sure Trump is still thirsting for conquest. He just needs to take over weak countries by kidnapping their leaders. Bondi, Blanche and Patel are setting it up for him right now.
President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who has had a volatile relationship with President Trump, is under criminal investigation by at least two U.S. federal prosecutors’ offices, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The investigations, which have not been previously reported, were being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and they have involved prosecutors who focus on international narcotics trafficking as well as agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security Investigations, the people said.
The inquiries have been exploring, among other things, Mr. Petro’s possible meetings with drug traffickers and whether his presidential campaign solicited donations from traffickers, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss active investigations.
I’m sure Trump has never solicited donations from criminals.
Cuba comes first but they just plan to have Marco wade ashore like Douglas MacArthur and declare himself Viceroy. Colombia might be more complicated and I’m not sure what they get out of it. Domination of the coffee trade? But Trump’s got conquest on his mind and he’s going to need a lot of soothing after Iran. This could be it.
I’m trying so hard to stay empathetic toward these voters who apparently didn’t listen to what he was saying or were so overcome by their antipathy toward people who aren’t like them that they couldn’t let themselves vote for the Democrats. After what he put us through with COVID, there’s really no excuse.
Anyone who voted for this guy again was just plain irresponsible:
COVID may have killed significantly more people in the U.S. in the first two years of the pandemic than official records indicate, with as many as one overlooked death for every five recorded ones. That brings the total to nearly one million deaths just in 2020 and 2021.
That calculation comes from research published today in Science Advances that seeks to understand how many COVID deaths fell through the cracks of official reporting systems. The untallied cases show the burden of the pandemic in the U.S. fell most heavily on marginalized people.
“These vulnerable groups are just taking a higher risk at every step, and the accumulation of all of that is this disparity in COVID mortality at the end,” says Mathew Kiang, an epidemiologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.
In the new research, Kiang and his colleagues analyzed official records published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for deaths occurring from March 2020 through December 2021 for adults aged 25 and older—some 5.7 million records in all. First, they fed a machine-learning algorithm the records of deaths in hospitals, which at the time were testing most patients for COVID. They trained the algorithm to recognize hospital deaths in which COVID was formally identified as an underlying cause. Then they used the algorithm to flag potential unrecognized COVID deaths by identifying records that looked like hospitalized COVID deaths but occurred in other settings where testing was less likely.
All told, the algorithm identified between about 150,000 and 160,000 potential unrecognized COVID deaths on top of the 840,251 that were officially reported. Those numbers suggest that for every five recognized COVID deaths, one additional death went unmarked. That ratio is on par with other analyses that have simply compared the total observed number of deaths with the number of total deaths expected based on historical data, says Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, but the new method is both more sophisticated and more granular.
He’s the guy who said, “slow the testing down please” because he thought that if you didn’t test then the problem would be solved. Which is would have been — for him. He said from the very beginning that he didn’t like the big numbers because they made him look bad. He was so stupid that the didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.
Now he’s running a major war. When he isn’t working on his ballroom or redesigning the toilets in the White House.
These people voted for that. What he was like wasn’t a secret (and I’m not even talking about January 6th.) It’s very hard to feel any sympathy. But I’m trying.
The national average price of a gallon of gasoline has surged 33%, from just under $3 to nearly $4, since the U.S. war against Iran started three weeks ago. As of this writing, oil prices are up 50% to over $100 a barrel. The cost of the war is mounting.
It’s not just gas prices. Today, a reader emailed me a link to a website that estimates the total military cost of the war in real time and puts the price tag at roughly $25 billion in 20 days. (I did a quick Google and found no fewer than five of these sites; my theory is that people are using AI to spin them up quickly. Each site has different numbers, but this one extrapolates from the Pentagon’s briefing to Congress.)
And that number is likely an underestimate! University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers points out that the cost of the war, when measured as the impact on the U.S. economy instead of just in military spending, is not just” in the tens of billions, but the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The topline numbers are obviously bad for the administration. But the intensity of opposition is striking. 44% of all adults said the war is a “very bad” use of taxpayer dollars — nearly three times the 15% who said “very good.” Among Democrats, 73% said “very bad” while 9% said good. Among independents, 45% said “very bad”— nearly double the 23% total who said good or very good.
Look at the Republican numbers. It’s not unanimous by any means.
We also asked whether respondents would support the military action if the war caused gas prices to rise by $1 per gallon (we wrote this question two weeks ago, when the price had only risen a quarter) or more. On that question, 61% said they would oppose the action, compared with 30% who said they would support it.
GOP support after the gas prices question dropped from 68% to 61% and opposition ticked up from 24% to 31%. (Subgroup margins of error are larger than the full-sample MOE, so treat these shifts as directional.)
Trump is clearly thinking about sending in ground troops. Don’t be surprised if he does it. After all, he says that no matter what’s happened in his life it always comes out ok. But most Americans aren’t sanguine.
Trump’s handpicked Commission of Fine Arts approved a general design for a 24k gold commemorative coin for the U.S. 250th anniversary featuring Trump’s image. “I motion to approve this as presented, and with the strong encouragement that you make it as large as possible, all the way to three inches in diameter,” the commission’s vice chair, James McCrery, said. Separately, the Treasury has said it plans to issue a $1 Trump coin that the Commission of Fine Arts approved in January. Straight-up banana republic stuff.
We have never issued a coin for a living person before, much less the sitting president.
But there’s more:
Trump: I have much more power in my second term. I said I'm going to sign an executive order to ensure that the second Saturday in December, is preserved exclusively, nobody is playing football. Not Ohio state against Notre Dame. Not LSU against Alabama. Nobody is going to play… pic.twitter.com/ZDFefu6kSF
“I have much more power in my second term. I said I’m going to sign an executive order to ensure that the second Saturday in December, is preserved exclusively, nobody is playing football. Not Ohio state against Notre Dame. Not LSU against Alabama. Nobody is going to play football for four hours during that very special time of the year in December. It’s preserved forever for the army-navy game. If you don’t want to watch football, you don’t have to. But if you want to watch football, you are only watching one game. You are not watching 19 different games.”
He started a war three weeks ago but this is what he’s talking about today. (He also said they were going to stop women playing in men’s sports…)
“Because we wanted surprise,” Trump replied. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”
Late night had a field day:
Jimmy Kimmel said that Americans “often cringe when real leaders come to visit ours, but today I think we hit a new level of discomfort.”
“I guess we should be grateful he didn’t do an accent?” — JIMMY KIMMEL
“Do you mean the movie ‘Pearl Harbor?’ Because Japan didn’t do that — we did that to ourselves.” — SETH MEYERS
“Let me tell you: There’s no doubt in my mind that everything he knows about Pearl Harbor begins and ends with a movie starring Ben Affleck.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
“I haven’t seen an American bomb in front of Japan that badly since — you get the idea.” — JORDAN KLEPPER
“During the same press conference, President Trump praised the Japanese prime minister’s understanding of English and added, ‘I haven’t picked up your language.’ Oh, nobody thought you had picked up Japanese. You already have your hands full with English.” — SETH MEYERS
The verdict is in: “The USA loses its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in over 50 years.”
Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, a major democracy monitor, has issued its annual report, this year subtitled “Unraveling The Democratic Era?” “THE WEST IN DECLINE” reads one subsection. “Nearly three quarters of the world population (74%, or 6 billion) live in autocracies.” The United States is on track to join them.
V-Dem’s data on the United States goes back to 1789. The group’s founder, Steffan Lindberg, tells The Guardian, “What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”
Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.
“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.
US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.
The United States under Donald John Trump has been weighed in the balances and found wanting.
“The world has never before seen as many countries autocratising at the same time,” the report concludes. From page 5:
5. In Focus: Autocratization in the USA
Under Trump’s presidency democracy in the USAhas fallen back to the same level as in 1965. Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era.
President Trump’s second term can be summarized as a rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.
The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.
Legislative Constraints – the worst affected aspect of democracy – is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.
Civil Rights & Equality before the Law, and Freedom of Expression & Media are now at their lowest levels in 60 years.
Electoral components of democracy, however, remain stable – for now
The Guardian continues:
The researchers use 48 different metrics to assess democratic health, such as the freedom of expression and the media, the quality of elections and the observance of the rule of law. The resulting “liberal democracy index” shows that the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency”, Lindberg says. Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the “checks and balances” (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.
The United States is still leading Western Europe. Just in the wrong direction (V-Dem):
The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the USA.
The USA loses its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in over 50 years.
It’s five o’clock somewhere. Even so (V-Dem):
What would it take to stop autocratization in the USA, and turn it around? Roughly 70% of all “third wave” episodes of autocratization have been reversed, making U-turns. Elections were often pivotal windows of opportunity, and the first electoral cycle was often decisive.
“What are you prepared to do?”
Are we there yet? Do lovers of liberal democracy have what it takes? Or do we roll over at let this country die?
Denmark reportedly readied itself for potential attack from the US in January – flying bags of blood to Greenland and explosives to blow up runways in case of a battle with its former closest ally.
During the tense days when Donald Trump threatened to take over Greenland – a largely autonomous territory that is part of the Danish commonwealth – “the hard way”, Copenhagen was so shaken that it started preparing for US invasion, according to Danish public broadcaster DR.
When, in January, Danish soldiers were flown to Greenland, they were reportedly carrying explosives to destroy runways in the capital, Nuuk, and in Kangerlussuaq, a small town north of the capital, to prevent US aircraft from landing in the event of an invasion.
They also carried supplies from Danish blood banks to treat wounded people in the event of battle, according to DR, which had spoken to sources from across the Danish government, authorities and intelligence services in Denmark, France and Germany.
Jesus Christ. And they saw the writing on the wall long before Americans did and it only got worse after Venezuela:
Denmark reportedly started seeking political support from European leaders in a series of secret talks that started soon after the 2024 US election.
The 3 January US attack on Venezuela was a crucial turning point, many of the sources told DR. The following day, Trump said the US needed Greenland “very badly” – renewing fears of a US invasion. The following day, Frederiksen said that an attack by the US on a Nato ally would mean the end of both the military alliance and “post-second world war security”.
According to DR, there was already reportedly a plan for Danish and European forces to send soldiers to Greenland later in they year, but this was rapidly brought forward.
An unnamed top French official told DR that the unprecedented situation had brought Europe closer together. “With the Greenland crisis, Europe realised once and for all that we need to be able to take care of our own security,” the source said.
