TOM CRUISE VS. BRAD PITT WAS FAKE. HOLLYWOOD’S PANIC ISN’T:

Did you catch the video clip for the upcoming movie featuring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as the protagonists? There’s a full slobberknocker on a rooftop.

This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV

— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026

There’s only one problem: What you watched was fake.

Using AI tools to generate the fight, a Chinese tech company created the faces, voices, and movements that looked real enough to fool casual viewers.

The clip sparked immediate anxiety across Hollywood. If a machine stages a blockbuster fight between two A-listers without cameras or contracts, what else can it do?

Rhett Reese, one of the screenwriters behind the Deadpool franchise, warns that advances like these could “decimate” Hollywood.

It’s not an abstract idea; studios already use digital de-aging and CGI doubles. AI now eliminates more human labor from the process.

Jim Treacher responded to the imaginary Cruise and Pitt rumble by asking, “A.I. = Actors Inessential?”

It just feels like… It’s like you’re on the side of a mountain, and you’re looking up at an avalanche, and all you’ve got is a toy shovel.

I just don’t know how we stop this as a society. The incentives are too strong. If you can do something that amazing, that cheaply and quickly, people are going to do it.

There’s a good quote from a guy named Rhett Reese. He’s a screenwriter, Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote the Deadpool movies, he wrote Zombieland, a bunch of other stuff. He’s been very successful in Hollywood, so he’s looking at it from that perspective.

And he writes:

In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous.

I think that’s true. That’s kind of the bright side I’ve been trying to look at. The sort of democratization of this.

Some kid in… I dunno, Indiana? Is going to become a star by making movies that people want to see, using this technology.

In Hearts of Darkness, the brilliant documentary about the making of 1979’s Apocalypse Now, while he was in the Philippines directing one of the massive, sprawling and (at the time) expensive films ever made, Francis Ford Coppola mused:

To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some… just people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That’s my opinion.

It took almost 50 years for technology to match Coppola’s vision, but for better or worse, that’s where we are today. As James Lileks asked in 2024: Art That’s Just for Me: What will the rise of artificial intelligence do to visual media?

In 10 years, there will be movies about every single person who boarded the Titanic. In the style of Robert Altman. In the style of Martin Scorsese. In the style of Steven Spielberg. There will be 100,000 fan-fic Star Wars movies as bad as the TV shows, all starring the person who dictated the scenario. There will be a subculture of people who exhaust the creative world of “Twin Peaks” with endless vignettes, and one or two will get it exactly right. In the end, we will watch our own movies more than others, and the theatrical experience will have gone from the great shared silver screen in the communal dark, to niche streaming, to watching our own particular curiosities and desires played on our own glowing rectangles. Millions of hours of movies, made for an audience of one.

I don’t know about that — I think the best AI video makers will garner their own followings, just as the most interesting YouTube channels acquire large numbers of viewers.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: “Her and I have wrote papers about this company!”

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES:

Not gonna lie I didn’t think we’d be at the Rivers of Feces stage of rapid third-world-ization for a few more years but here we are https://t.co/o3wNSTJoZb

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) February 13, 2026

(Classical reference in headline.)

AT AMAZON, Save up to 40% for President’s Day Sale. #CommissionEarned

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Cuba’s a Mess, but What Happens When it is Libre at last?

As always, if you enjoy these essays please take out a paid subscription. I will thank you, and my family will thank you.

IT’S OUT, IT’S OUT:  Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections).

A RUBIO/VANCE TICKET IN 2028? One Veep, Two Prez? On a historian/pundit musing over one vice president serving under two presidents. Not unprecedented: “Two U.S. vice presidents did, indeed, served under two successive presidents apiece. In addition, two other ex-veeps were nominated to serve under second presidents, but the later tickets were defeated in the November polls. And in the most bizarre case, one former vice president considered a return to the vice presidency after having served as president.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Trumponomics is Working.

All the accredited experts have been wrong about Trump. He came back to office last year on a platform of common sense. They don’t teach that at Harvard. But in the real world it works like magic. Just a few days ago, the jobs report for January came out. “Unexpectedly,” the economy added 130,000 jobs. The green-eye shade chaps predicted 55,000. Another bright light: the government lost about 42,000 employees: that’s 42,000 paychecks that taxpayers will not have to pick up going forward. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3 percent – a number that, when translated into English, means close to full employment. Inflation rose just 0.2 percent in January, and fell to 2.4 percent on an annual basis.

The jobs report “strengthens the case for higher US Treasury yields and a rebound in the dollar over the coming months,” Jonas Goltermann, a senior economist at Capital Economics wrote. Can someone get Jerome Powell on the phone for me? Trump’s aggressive deployment of tariffs was supposed to wreak havoc on the economy. All the experts said so. But growth was 4.4 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and is estimated to have been above 5 percent in the fourth. Wow. More misery for the doomsayers. More goodies for the middle class.

Until Donald Trump swept back into office, the left in this country wielded an implacable one-way ratchet to torment the populace. “Affirmative action,” DEI, climate hysteria, smothering regulatory excess: the people in charge delighted in making people’s lives more burdensome.

Government has been run this way for many decades. Occasionally, a Republican would get into office and attempt to tamp down the administrative state. The left didn’t mind because whatever modest reforms were effected could be undone in a nonce once the “right people” got back into office. They never lost their one-way ratchets. That was a major reason that government always got bigger, that the left’s hobby horses never went away, that the regulatory environment became ever more stultifying and surreal. Men in women’s bathrooms? It’s mandated by Title IX or whatever, my friend. Cars that turn off and restart at every stoplight? We have to save the environment, you peasant, and where is your mask and vaccination affidavit?

Trump has smashed the left’s one-way ratchet. It can’t get purchase anymore. It just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and Trump has made that clear.

KURT SCHLICHTER: It Is Right and Proper to Laugh at the Suffering of Journalists.

I would tell them to learn the code, but that’s old and cliché. Instead, I’ve been on X, inviting them to earn a little money for their kombucha and rent by buffing out my sweet luxury ride, which I paid for with my writing jobs. I’m a professional writer, and they’re not. . . .

They haven’t taken their involuntary career tangent particularly well. They are all over X moaning about it and about us being giddy about it. Some people have told me that, because of my hysterical laughter at their situation, I’m going to be the victim of karma, but I think I’m actually karma’s enforcer. After all, these are the people who have done nothing but lie to us and about us for decades. From Russian collusion to Hunter’s laptop to J6 pogrom cheerleading to every other fraud and scam, they’ve obediently held to the Democrat line and done everything they could to screw with us patriots. Now that they’re being laid off en masse, we owe it to ourselves to take a moment and laugh at their pain.

Look, how about if I agree to care about them as much as they’ve cared about me for the last few decades? Agreed? Great. Now, back to reveling in their agony.

It’s been a few days, and I’m still laughing, and there is a smorgasbord of facets of their misery to laugh at. Certainly, the fact that a bunch of people who wanted us to lose everything – like our ability to govern ourselves, to be secure from criminals, and to keep our jobs (which they wanted sacrificed on the altar of their angry weather goddess) – are themselves losing everything is funny. There’s a glorious symmetry in their suffering, but there’s so much more. There’s their incessant whining about Jeff Bezos refusing to continue to subsidize their little bubble, like some bratty girl at Wellesley who graduates and finds that Daddy is cutting off her money and she’s got to actually work. Did these people actually work? They told themselves consistently how important and vital their “work” was, but mostly searched the thesaurus for admiring adjectives for dead monsters and retyped Democrat talking points for their dwindling coterie of readers. I guess that’s a kind of work, but it’s kind of hilarious how proud of it they were.

Plus: “Some people on the Right were kinder than I about the layoffs, cautioning that we shouldn’t take pleasure in our enemies’ suffering. This is so very wrong. I’ve never been a fan of the idea of conservatism without the concept of retribution. Too often, we are told that to be good people, we must forgo just consequences. But failing to pay back our enemies is only going to get us more reason to need vengeance. Our enemies aren’t going to take our weakness for anything but weakness. Time to give pain a chance. Time to laugh our tails off at the suffering of the fired Democrat transcriptionists of the Washington Post.”

Read the whole thing, and brighten your day.

THE EXPERTS HAVE SPOKEN:

On days like today, I like calling back to this headline from June 2024:

"Trump would make America’s inflation crisis worse, 16 Nobel economists warn"

CPI is at 2.4% YoY in January as gasoline declined 7.5%.

The "Nobel economists" were dead wrong. pic.twitter.com/89D9egXuoK

— Daniel Baldwin (@baldwin_daniel_) February 13, 2026

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

IF YOU MISSED THIS ONE, IT’S NICE, AND A REAL STORY:  Ring and Innocence. It’s for the best Sauron didn’t get ahold of this one.

#JOURNALISM: Media Actively Cover Up Obama Lawyer’s Chummy Ties to Epstein. “Democrats Sure Got It Good…Need I even point out what these headlines would look like if Epstein’s gal-pal spent five years in Donald Trump’s White House, or if she had been Trump’s legal counsel, or even if her association with Trump were something as fleeting as she was once his Uber driver?”

OH, FOR THE LOVE OF BOB. WE HAD ONE OF THESE WHEN THE KIDS WERE IN SCHOOL:  Catching Up.

Because it’s much cheaper to slice a piece of roastbeef into cold cuts for the two hollow-legged teens than to buy cold cuts, that’s why.

LIES, DAMN LIES AND WEATHER STATISTICS:  The climate scaremongers: BBC reports about January rainfall are awash with lies.

THEY JUS’ CAIN’T HE’P THEMSELVES:  House Dem Says the Quiet Part Out Loud About the DHS Funding Fight.

HOW DARE THEY DENY THE LEFT THEIR MARTYR?  Georgia Is Trying to Prevent a ‘Renee Good’ Situation in the State. It Will Make Libs Go Bananas.

HE AIN’T AFRAID O’ NO GERMS – AND HE AIN’T IMPRESSED BY BUREAUCRATIC ‘EXPERTS’:  RFK Revealed Why He Wasn’t Scared of COVID…It Was a Legendary Answer.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED, BEHOLD MY OH SO SHOCKED FACE:  Alleged NYC Antisemitic Stabbing Suspect Out on Bail as Incidents Rise 182% Under Mamdani.

GO READ WHAT THE MAN SAID:  Farming And The Death Thereof.

LUNATIC:  Kansas City Police Seek Woman Trying to Torch Warehouse Linked to ICE Sale.

THANK HEAVENS I PREPARED FOR THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY BY READING PULP SCIENCE FICTION!  USDA Deploys Sterilized Flies, High‑Tech Arsenal to Guard the Border Against Screwworm Threat.

GOOD. IT WON’T ELIMINATE ALL THE WASTE AND FRAUD BUT IT WILL ELIMINATE SOME OF IT:  Small Business Administration shuts out non-U.S. citizens from its main lending program.

CORRUPTION:  4 Yakuza, 4 Livers, 100+ Dead Americans; No problem. The UCLA Report You’ve Never Seen. Between 2000-2004, four vicious yakuza (Japanese gangsters) got liver transplants at UCLA. Tadamasa Goto, the most famous of them, died on February 8. Why was he given a life extension at all?

NICKI MINAJ, A CULTURAL INFLECTION POINT MOST DON’T GET. THIS INCLUDES ME: Wow. This made me so happy. Barbz, update the hashtag with #SaveAmericaAct beginning now & going forward. I’ll do a poll for you guys to choose if you’d like a new look or a new Spaces tonight.

And for the lack-x.

HHS GOES THE OPEN SOURCE, DIG UP PROBLEMS ROUTE:  HHS and DOGE Release Medicaid Dataset to Expose Fraud.