Of all the insane choices Trump could make for his cabinet, I didn't even see this one coming

Pete fucking Hegseth? He's been a TV asshole since 2014.

Over the years I've described this jackass as Trump's personal fluffer.

I'm not questioning his service, but this is fucking Looney Tunes.

Hegseth was a failed nominee for Trump for the position of Veterans Affairs back in 2018.

NewsHound Ellen wrote this article at the time: Fox Host Pete Hegseth Outed As Self-Dealing, Adulterous Hypocrite, Passed Over For VA Nomination

This twit even had the nerve to claim the term Redskins was a term of respect when the Washington football was embroiled in the name controversy. Fox's Hegseth: 'Redskins' Used Historically As 'A Term Of Respect'

Recently his claim to fame was to get war criminals found guilty by military courts pardoned by Trump.

It’s bad enough that Donald Trump seemingly plans to “honor” Memorial Day by pardoning a slew of war criminals, it’s even worse that the decision came after secret lobbying efforts by Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth.

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The Trump team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel *cough*Mike Flynn*cough* with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. What could possibly go wrong? Via the Wall St. Journal:

If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.

As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.

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The knives have come out. CNN is hosting many of these right wing Democrats who make millions off the party and its members and then use right wing rhetoric to take it down after their own failures.

I put up the entire transcript of his sleepwalking nonsense of what the Democratic party is. Reiness' version of what what he perceives the party is comes right out of the the dead hands of Roger Ailes.

It's ludicrous. Every "woke" complaint he has comes right out of the mouth of Christopher Rufo. Anus Reiness has taken Kellyanne Conway's alternative facts nonsense to the extreme. How CNN believes this man speaks for the party is beyond me.

REINESS: Either way, here's the problem, I'm not concerned right now what the right thinks about the Democratic Party.

I'm concerned about what I think about the Democratic Party. I don't like to echo the congressmen, all three of them, I don't like the fact that a small portion of our party is pretty much dictating where we are. That they are pretty much, we are being branded as the most extreme of us. It is not only politically problematic, as we just saw, because none of this stuff helped the other day.

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Fox News legal editor Kerri Urbahn told 'The Story with Martha McCallum that Trump could force a pardon from Gov. Hochul by threatening to withhold federal funds to New York unless she pardons his 34 felonies.

This shouldn't come as a surprise since Urbahn was the Director of Public Affairs for the Department of Justice under Attorney General Bill Barr during the first Trump administration.

This segment was prompted by the judge delaying a decision on Trump's 34 felony convictions for another week.

MACCALLUM: Governor Hochul could also pardon President Trump on these charges because it is a state charge, right?

URBAHN: Yeah that's right and look she needs to really be thinking through this because New York state needs federal money and they get a lot of it.

And there is a lot that the federal government could do in terms of pulling funding from both the city and the state of New York. There's a bunch of ways to do it through the Justice Department and other places, and you know, at the end of the day it's all politics.

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Between threats from Anonymous and a new crackdown from Twitter, ISIS is having a tough time reaching out and recruiting new psychopaths online.

To circumvent the censorship, the Islamic militant group has reportedly created its own social network called “Khelafabook.”

The Facebook clone claims it is independent and not actually sponsored by ISIS (even though it has ISIS logos all over its homepage). It says its goal is to show the world that they don’t only “live in caves” and “carry guns,” and they vow to “will rule the world by Allah’s permission.”

Khelafabook was set up by a man in Mosul, Iraq, according to The Independent, and is hosted in Egypt. There’s also an associated Twitter account which is linked to from the site.

The site first popped up last week, but has already been taken offline “to protect the info and details of its members,” according to a message on the page.

After it was taken down, Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous appeared to claim responsibility, as Vocativ points out.

For the the time being they’ll have to look elsewhere to share their terrorist pancake recipes.

TEAMWORK doesn't always work that well.

You’ve seen a one man band, but how about a complete symphony orchestra?

Ben Morfitt, a composer from England, recently created in a music video of one of his new, original songs, in which he plays every instrument while also acting as conductor.

The piece was written for a new cartoon he created called “Pegul,” which he describes in the video’s caption.

You could say he is a man of many talents.

Watch the video above, and you can check out more of his music on SoundCloud.

Design by Jim Vision and Dr. Zadok.

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Behind the Music: Taylor Swift

Red leader to bravo 4. The camels look a bit sus. You sure we're in the right desert?

GUINESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS The whitest people in the world.

Unlike medical doctors, Chiropractors can't bury their mistakes.

THAT'S WHERE WE PUT UNWANTED KIDS!!

We're already counting down the days until the 2025 DH season kicks off.

Sit back and enjoy as Dillon floats through the forest.
( Photos: 4, Comments: 2 )

‘Where people have made genuine mistakes they shouldn’t be prosecuted’ says transport secretary Louise Haigh

The service will run between Edinburgh and Cardiff passing through Birmingham New Street

The airline reported a revenue decrease of $61m compared to the same time last year

From trekking the foothills of Mont Blanc to snowshoeing in Oulanka National Park, here are some of the best European trails to tread this winter

OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday. Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

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Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software. I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could. I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

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AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect. "They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions." Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President and chief executive officer of Formula 1 owner Liberty Media, Greg Maffei, is to step down from his role at the end of the year.