The MAGA or Mar-A-Lago face is the new costly signal for anyone who wants to be part of MAGA (or right-wing news), and it’s pretty darned creepy.

It has a signature look.

Defined by copious use of Botox, a Miami-bronze tan, puffy lips and silky smooth skin, plastic surgeons told DailyMail.com it was giving Trumpland an almost ‘plastic’ and ‘Real Housewives’ look.

We can thank Donald Trump for this weird habit.

I wouldn’t normally be snarky about someone’s looks but let’s be clear: nobody is born with Mar-a-Lago face. These are not human faces, they are luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging. People such as Laura Loomer, Kristi Noem, and Matt Gaetz can afford excellent surgeons and subtle cosmetic work but, unless they’ve all had botched procedures, it seems they deliberately chose to look like AI-generated caricatures. One can only surmise that they live in such weird little bubbles, where everyone is addicted to filler, that this sort of conspicuous consumption of cosmetic surgery has become desirable.

Having the right look is certainly desirable to optics-obsessed Donald Trump, whose chief concern for his underlings appears to be how they perform on TV. In 2017, an Axios report claimed that Trump wanted his female staff to “dress like women” and demanded that his male employees have a “certain look.” Over the years it seems the “certain look” has only become more extreme.

An obsession with traditional gender norms also seems to factor into today’s exaggerated aesthetics. Earlier this year a New York-based dermatologist told Politico that fashion often shifts to more traditional gender expression in culturally conservative times. “It’s ironic … that they’re so against trans-ness and gender-affirming care for trans people,” the dermatologist said of Trump’s inner orbit. “Because, you know, they’re all doing their own gender-affirming care.” The Zambian bum-stick chimps seem positively sophisticated in comparison.

You know, I’m not unhappy at all about this. Remember the end of Inglourious Basterds, in which Brad Pitt pulls out a big knife and carves a swastika into Christoph Walz’s face, before he follows orders and takes him to the US to reward him for betraying the Nazis? This is the same thing. If we ever overthrow our fascist regime, the people behind it will have all self-labeled themselves.

Put this post by Donald Trump on Truth Social front and center when he’s tried for treason.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning…”
Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR

He thinks it is amusing to threaten an American city of almost 3 million people with apocalyptic destruction. He’s a criminal despot.

His pretext is that crime is too high in Chicago. Unfortunately for that excuse, invading the city to deport a subset of people whose primary “crime” is being brown and speaking Spanish would not address that problem, the statistics show that crime has been declining already, and Chicago is not the most crime-ridden city in the country. That distinction belongs to cities in red states.

The four cities of populations larger than 100,000 with the highest murder rates in 2024 are in Republican states: Jackson, Mississippi (78.7 per 100,000 residents), Birmingham, Alabama (58.8), St Louis, Missouri (54.1) and Memphis, Tennessee (40.6).

…Chicago is bracing to be the next city targeted by the Trump administration. To date this year, 278 people have been killed in Chicago, 118 fewer people killed when compared with 2024. It is at pace for 412 deaths for the year, which would be a rate of about 15 per 100,000 residents. The rate is likely to be lower still than that, because homicide rates increase during summer months.

The Windy City ranked 37th in homicide rate in 2024 for cities larger than 50,000 residents in the United States. For cities with more than 100,000 residents, it placed 14th. This year, it is likely to slide farther down the list, even as violence falls to 60-year lows.

What are the National Guard going to do in Chicago, anyway? Stand around on street corners, eat deep dish pizza, guard the Bean in Millennium Park, visit the Field Museum? Trump is putting on a show, the same as renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War was an empty gesture.

They’re coming to take away the guns!

“In the wake of the Minneapolis Catholic church shooting, senior Justice Department officials are weighing proposals to limit transgender people’s right to possess firearms,” CNN reports.

“Such a move would represent a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s fight against the rights of transgender Americans.”

Interesting. The majority of trans people are not mass murderers, so this is a plan to punish the innocent for one person’s actions. As long as we’re going down this road, I must point out that 98% of the perpetrators of these shootings are men, and further, that the majority are white men.

Number of mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and August 2025, by shooter’s race or ethnicity

Obviously, the most effective approach would to limit white men’s right to possess firearms. It’s the only statistically sensible plan.

Now you too can take the Oklahoma teacher test without giving your name to PragerU. The list of 34 questions has been revealed! These guys are obsessed with religion and sex, the stuff teachers don’t usually deal with, and there’s very little that is content-appropriate.

For instance, should we really care about the details of an authoritarian loyalty oath?

Question 33 of 34:
Which of the following is a phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance?
A) Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness
B) Of, by and for the people
C) One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all
D) One nation, Under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all

“Under god” was an addition made in the 1950s during the Red Scare. We’re not going to discuss that, though.

Some of the questions are misleading.

Question 9 of 34:
Why is freedom of religion important to America’s identity?
A) It protects religious choice from government control
B) It makes Christianity the national religion
C) It bans all form of public worship
D) It limits religious teaching in the public square

Yeah, “A” is the official rationale, but this is PragerU — what they really want is “B”.

Four of the 34 questions are about propagandizing for their binary view of sex.

Question 2 of 34:
What is the fundamental biological distinction between males and females?
A) Height and weight
B) Blood type
C) Personal preference
D) Chromosomes and reproductive anatomy

Question 3 of 34:
How is a child’s biological sex typically identified?
A) Parental affirmation of child’s preference
B) Personal feelings
C) Visual anatomical observation and chromosomes
D) Online registration

Questions 4 of 34:
Which chromosome pair determines biological sex in humans?
A) AA/BB
B) XX/XY
C) RH/AB
D) EX/XQ

Questions 5 of 34:
Why is the distinction between male and female considered important in areas like sports and privacy?
A) For equity in minority communities
B) To preserve fairness, safety and integrity for both sexes
C) To increase participation in sports
D) To enhance the self-esteem of transgender children

They are very concerned with chromosomes. Haven’t they gotten the word that the excuse of the day is gamete size, rather than chromosomes? Also, chromosomes are not typically evaluated when assigning sex.

Look over all the questions yourself. You be the judge whether these are an appropriate assessment of general teaching ability and qualifications, or just a test of conservative political ideology.

To answer the question in the title, some unqualified billionaire gave him a lot of money.

The Republicans are great at counterfactual naming. They recently gave us the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was anything but — it was the gutting of social services all across the country, and the transfer of money to the already wealthy. The newest lie is the GREAT Trust, short for “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation,” which Trump has been pushing for a while. He knows real estate, you know — he’d like to flatten Gaze and rebuild it in his tacky way, and Israel loves the idea.

The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, otherwise known as the Great Trust, proposes that the 2 million people currently living in Gaza could be paid to be relocated to other countries or secure zones as part of a deal that would also see them receive subsidies to cover four years of rent and a year’s worth of food, The Washington Post reports.

With the current population gone, the U.S.-administered trust then proposes to clear away the rubble and erect six to eight “dynamic, modern and AI-powered smart planned cities,” boasting multi-storey glass apartment complexes, public parks, golf courses, “world-class resorts” along its Mediterranean beachfront plus electric vehicle plants and data centres.

This makes sense, in a perverse right-wing sort of way:

See? Israel is doing the preliminary demolition for the oligarchs, and every Palestinian killed is less money that needs to be spent on relocation, all so they can build this:

That would be the most beautiful cemetery ever made. Here in the US, we have a horror movie trope about haunted houses built on top of Indian graveyards, and Gaza would be prime real estate for stories of hauntings and curses.

I have to ask who profits from this development. Not the Palestinians at all; they get a pittance for their land, and get forcibly marched out of their homes…or shot. Not the neighboring countries, which will suddenly have two million refugees foisted upon them, which they don’t want. It is not a popular idea.

Almost nobody supports this plan.

Almost everyone outside Israel, including Egypt, Jordan, the UN and Palestinian leaders, has rejected the idea.

In addition to those directly involved, a number of other states have also been critical of Trump’s plan to relocate Gaza’s population, including Germany, whose leader, Olaf Scholtz, dismissed the suggestion as “unacceptable”.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot also dismissed the idea, telling France’s parliament on Tuesday that the US president’s suggestion was “absolutely unacceptable”.

Spain, one of the two states within the EU to recognise the state of Palestine, also condemned the notion, with Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares telling the media outlet EuroNews that “Gaza belongs to the Palestinians and the people living in Gaza”.

The Arab League also forcefully opposed the plan, issuing a statement on Monday, stating, “The forced displacement and

Who does like it?

Many right-wing Israelis.

The idea of removing Palestinians from Gaza and replacing them with Israelis has been popular among a significant portion of Israelis ever since the initial illegal Israeli settlements were removed from Gaza in 2005.

It took on new relevance in the eyes of many following the Hamas-led attack from Gaza on southern Israel on October 7 2023, which killed 1,139 people.

A conference, held in Jerusalem in January 2024 and titled Settlement Brings Security, drew 12 cabinet ministers, including the ultra-Zionist minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the far-right former minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Both took part in discussions centred around Palestinians’ “voluntary” migration from Gaza and its subsequent resettlement by Israelis.

Along with other right-wing ministers, both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich welcomed Trump’s suggestion of moving Palestinians to neighbouring states this week. Smotrich told reporters on Monday that he was already drawing up an “operational plan” to turn Trump’s idea into an actionable Israeli policy.

It’s also against international law, but that won’t stop Israel or Trump.

The Onion is becoming the only reliable source for news

I can relate to this story: Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’. I feel the same way!

“Now that I don’t watch the news, I just don’t have that anxiety. I don’t have dread,” said Mardette Burr, an Arizona retiree who says she stopped watching the news about eight years ago. “There were times that I’d be up at two or three o’clock in the morning upset about something that was going on in the world that I just didn’t have a lot of control over.”

She’s not alone. Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.

The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%. Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information.

I gave up on the NY Times years ago — it was clearly a tool of the oligarchy, and I was constantly irritated with the bothsiderism. I stopped watching CNN during the Iraq war, when it was wallowing in the ‘glory’ of gunning down thousands of people. I thought maybe the Washington Post was a little better, but unsubscribed when Bezos exerted his control over its editorial position. Now I will go for days without looking at the news. I get most of my information from a few trusted online sources, and I worry that that will reinforce my biases, but no worry — I expect the government will squash them all soon, as they would like to do with PBS. ProPublica is still hanging in there!

Where do you get your news? Or do you even bother any more?

Donald Trump is clearly not healthy — the rapid cognitive decline, his terrible appearance, I can believe he’s going to be dead in the next few years, or so incapable of doing his job that he’ll have to be declared incompetent and replaced. I wouldn’t be as certain as Rick Wilson (who I don’t trust anyway), but we may see an abrupt change of leadership before his term in office is over.

“Trump is dying” and “Vance knows,” according to conservative strategist Rick Wilson.

Conservative anti-Trump activist Rick Wilson, who co-founded the Lincoln Project and hosts the group’s podcast, has written extensively about Donald Trump. On Friday, the strategist declared that the president is indeed dying.

“Slow or fast, he’s headed down,” Wilson wrote, adding that there are “rumors” about what comes next. “Rumors from the Trumpverse are that the circle who knows what’s up is very, very small and very, very paranoid.”

It’s a possibility and a scary one.

Who has seen The Death of Stalin? If you haven’t, check it out: it portrays the mad scramble for power among a gang of selfish, incompetent boobs when the Great Leader suddenly died. That may be the United States in the near future.

JD Vance has made an announcement.

Vice President JD Vance has now made an unexpected statement regarding President Donald Trump’s health, stating he is ready to take over at any time.

On August 27, 2025, Vice President JD Vance declared himself prepared to step into the role of president should President Donald Trump’s health falter, a statement that has reignited speculation about Trump’s physical condition and the future of his administration.

Vance, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, confidently stated, “I’m ready to step up if, God forbid, anything happens to the president,” addressing concerns raised by Trump’s recent diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI) and ongoing controversies surrounding his leadership.

I wonder how Trump is reacting to his lackeys’ publicly salivating at the prospect of his demise.