I have a feeling I'm going to regret watching this.

I'm one episode in working on two

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PSA - Christmas games will be on Netflix

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President-elect Donald J. Trump’s support for Pete Hegseth, whom he announced as his nominee for defense secretary shortly after Election Day, is wobbling after a crush of controversy over a rape allegation and a 2018 email from Mr. Hegseth’s mother accusing him of a pattern of abuse toward women.
How Mr. Hegseth fares through a series of tests on Wednesday will be critical for his chances. He is set to continue his meetings with key senators, including Joni Ernst of Iowa, a combat veteran who has spoken about being sexually assaulted herself, and his mother is expected to sit for an interview on Fox News. He is also set to start defending himself on television.
Mr. Trump has made clear to people close to him that he believes Mr. Hegseth should have been more forthcoming about the problems he would face getting confirmed, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking.
The combination of events could determine whether he hangs on as the expected nominee. Mr. Trump is openly discussing other people for the job, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he defeated in the Republican presidential primaries and with whom he has had a contentious relationship. Mr. Trump likes the story of bringing on someone he dominated publicly, and he talked about it with Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday at a service honoring three Florida sheriff’s deputies who were killed in a car crash.
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The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Mr. Trump’s discussions about Mr. DeSantis.
But the number of people in Mr. Trump’s world who dislike and distrust Mr. DeSantis — and bitterly recall the campaign he ran against the president-elect — is vast. Those people are discussing other options, including whether Mike Waltz, the Florida congressman whom Mr. Trump picked as his national security adviser, could slide into the job, expecting he would be confirmed fairly easily by the Senate. While criticizing Mr. Trump in the past is not always an obstacle for his appointees, Mr. DeSantis threw aggressive jabs at Mr. Trump during the primary. They included a flip line about paying money to a porn star, which was the basis for an indictment against Mr. Trump.
“I think some of these articles are very disturbing,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, told CBS News, referring to Mr. Hegseth. “He obviously has a chance to defend himself here, but some of this stuff is going to be difficult.”
Mr. Trump has spent little if any personal capital with senators trying to push Mr. Hegseth through. And the incoming president’s advisers are mindful in private discussions that Republican senators are trying to be respectful of Mr. Trump while not approving of a nominee who concerns them.
Mr. Hegseth, 44, could become the third person whom Mr. Trump has announced as a nominee to withdraw from the role after Matt Gaetz withdrew his name for attorney general and Sheriff Chad Chronister withdrew as D.E.A. administrator.
In the past two weeks, Mr. Hegseth has come under intense scrutiny. It was revealed that he had entered into a settlement agreement with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017; he had insisted it was a consensual encounter, and Mr. Trump told aides at the time that he wanted to stick with his announced nominee.

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But the troublesome headlines, which Mr. Trump hates, only grew worse. The New York Times reported on an email his mother wrote him in 2018 as he was going through an acrimonious divorce, in which she told her son he had “abused” a number of women “in some way” over the years. Mr. Hegseth’s mother has recently said she regretted sending the email and has retracted the comments that she said she made during an emotional time as he was going through a divorce — a comment she is expected to expand upon in her Fox appearance.
Mr. Trump has told people he was unhappy with the story about the email.
Mr. Hegseth was also the subject of a damning article in The New Yorker, which reported that he had been forced out as the head of two veterans’ groups because of his behavior. NBC News reported on Tuesday that Mr. Hegseth’s drinking worried his colleagues at Fox News.
It was unclear how extensive the vetting was into Mr. Hegseth’s past by Mr. Trump’s transition team.
Now the Trump team will watch closely how Mr. Hegseth and his mother perform in the interviews, knowing they will be critical for the incoming president in deciding whether to stick with the former Fox News host and combat veteran whose qualifications to lead the Pentagon have come into question.
The perception from people close to Mr. Hegseth is that if he wants to save himself, he must perform well. The Trump team is particularly worried about female Republican senators breaking with Mr. Hegseth, and especially Ms. Ernst.

He is your daddy! >

This shit is insane! And a pretty sad reflection on modern society in this grumpy old man's opinion.

The first step to F1​

The preteen go-kart drivers spending millions on a shot at professional motorsports​

By Kevin Sieff
,
Claudia Gori
and
Zoeann Murphy
December 11, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EST

Julian and Alessandro were walking to the starting line, trying their best not to look at each other. They wore child-size racing uniforms and tiny driving gloves. Behind them, mechanics pushed their 160-pound cars with a list of corporate sponsors on the hood. The team’s name was emblazoned on the side: Baby Race.
The two boys were Baby Race’s star drivers, among the favorites to win the World Series of Karting championship that was minutes away. In theory, they could work together to secure a team victory. But Alessandro Truchot and Julian Frasnelli had been fierce competitors since they were 9 and 10. Now they were 11 and 12, respectively, and the rivalry had grown violent, culminating in high-speed crashes that caused a roaring crowd to hold its breath.
As its popularity has boomed, Formula One has faced a problem: how to identify future champions who can’t yet drive a car. Karting is the sport’s best approximation, a birthday party diversion that has been bankrolled and professionalized into a series of miniature Grand Prix races. Every current F1 driver started in a go-kart.
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Julian and Alessandro’s race in Sarno was a battle for childhood pride, but it was also leverage in dueling quests to reach Formula One. The boys’ parents and sponsors had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in their careers. Julian and Alessandro had stopped attending school full-time to focus on racing. They were too light for the karts, so mechanics added weights to the chassis to keep them from flipping over. Scouts representing Mercedes and Ferrari, who are now tracking drivers as young as 6, know their names.
Before they got to the pit, Julian removed his SpongeBob sandals, took off his helmet, vomited and cried. Alessandro, who wore only gray and black Nike apparel, repeated over the grunts of go-kart engines what he had said to himself many times before: “I’m not here to make friends.”
Unmute the videos below to meet Alessandro and Julian.


Julian


Alessandro
Elite go-karting has become both maniacally competitive and wildly expensive. To become one of Formula One’s 20 drivers — the sport has only 10 teams with two cars each — now requires an absolute commitment years before a child is eligible for a driver’s license.
By the time a driver makes it to Formula One, his parents and sponsors will have invested several million dollars in his career. Go-karting has become a magnet for the money and power flowing through motorsports. Baby Race charges its drivers $7,500 for a four-day race event (plus a $600 entrance fee).
The team motto: “The First Step to F1”.
Julian, who is Italian, and Alessandro, a French American citizen, represent different marks on the spectrum of go-karting wealth. Julian’s father owns a karting track in northern Italy, where he had finagled sponsors to finance his son’s career. Alessandro’s father started a string of technology companies that brought him enough wealth to bankroll the soaring costs of racing. The two families, who spend weekends under the same Baby Race tent, do not speak to each other.
TOP: Drivers prepare for race in Brescia, Italy, on Sept. 8. Every current F1 driver got their start in racing in a go-kart.

BOTTOM: Racing fans gather for a look at the podium in Brescia, Italy, following a race in early September.
When the Sarno race started, with the karts quickly nearing their top speed of 50 mph, even a casual fan could tell that Julian and Alessandro appeared to be in their own class.
“There goes Frasnelli,” the Australian commentator bellowed over the loudspeaker at the racing facility south of Naples. “There goes Truchot.”
The boys’ parents watched from opposite ends of the track, screaming, “Pass! Pass!” in French and Italian when their sons drove by in a blur. Julian and Alessandro had freakish control over their lawnmower-size vehicles, weaving expertly through a mass of other drivers. Julian had just won the Italian championships. Alessandro was the second-ranked driver on the karting tour. Either could be the next Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton, F1’s current superstars. But the chances that both boys will make it to Formula One are almost zero.

As they neared the end of the fourth lap, Julian was in second place and Alessandro was a few feet behind him. The two cars rocketed toward the front. But Julian and another driver made contact coming around a turn. Julian lost control. His kart went airborne.

“Huge crash!” the announcer exclaimed.

Julian’s father gripped the metal fence at the edge of the track and then put his hands on his face, almost covering his eyes.

“No, NO, NO!”



Formula One scouts swear they can predict future greatness in the way a child handles a tight turn or avoids a crash. They’ve identified talent that way before.
At 6, Michael Schumacher, one of Formula One’s all-time greats, won a karting race with a vehicle his father put together with spare parts. In the early ’90s, Hamilton started racing in a secondhand kart while his father washed dishes to pay for races.

But the sport is now unrecognizable. The surge in global interest in Formula One has transformed karting into a kind of oligarchy. It is now crowded with the sons and daughters of multimillionaires (and actual oligarchs) who crisscross Europe every weekend for mini-Grand Prix. The circuit is a traveling carnival for the global elite, a series of racetrack parking lots colonized by parents in luxury athleisure wear.

There is effectively no way for young American drivers to aspire to Formula One without relocating across the Atlantic. Alessandro flies from Miami, where he lives, to Italy once a week during peak karting season. That’s where the F1 scouts spend their time.

The races are dominated by prestigious teams, like Baby Race, which supply personal mechanics to each child. Some kids arrive with their own bodyguards. Some arrive in helicopters. Many parents seek sports psychologists for their preteens. A number of Baby Race’s 25 drivers — it’s obvious which ones — are extremely wealthy and extremely average.

“I’m paying 50,000 euros a year for you to race like this?!” one of the lesser drivers’ fathers screamed at him one morning in Sarno.

Who’s buying goog stock tomorrow?
Sure hope they manufacture the chips locally and secure the tech from theft.

“Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.”

Interesting list. Click on the screen at the bottom for the larger list. Don’t know how accurate but …

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Marine veteran Daniel Penny's defense team is eyeing a malicious prosecution lawsuit against District Attorney Alvin Bragg and others behind the charges, turning the tables after the lengthy high-profile case concluded with an acquittal.

"Just like Danny said in his interview, it was like they wanted to try and get him on something," Penny's defense attorney Steven Raiser said Wednesday, reacting to the acquittal on "Fox & Friends."

"They knew they weren't going to be able to get him, so they had to get rid of that top count in order to get to that second count, just in hopes that maybe they could pull out a win here, and they were unsuccessful, thank God."

Raiser said the suit would target Bragg for "blurring" the "ethical lines" with the case's handling. The filing would also home in on the medical examiner's office, which he alleged colluded with Bragg's office.

"The record was made fairly clear as to the extent of his involvement and what occurred here," he said. "He was appointed by Mayor Adams, [who belongs to the] same political party as Alvin Bragg. There was collusion there, and the collusion began from the very beginning of this case and all the way through. The district attorney needed the medical examiner and needed the medical examiner to act quickly, and he did just that."

Penny was charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in 30-year-old homeless man Jordan Neely's death on a New York City subway after he put Neely in a chokehold for threatening other passengers.

The manslaughter charge was dropped at the prosecution's request on Friday after jurors failed to reach a unanimous agreement twice, setting the stage for deliberations on the lesser, and arguably easier to prove, charge of criminally negligent homicide on Monday.

After a brief return to deliberations, jurors found Penny not guilty.

In a sit-down interview with Fox News' Jeanine Pirro after the trial concluded, Penny said he didn't regret his actions and that he "couldn't live with" himself if he had allowed Neely to hurt someone.

Redshirt freshman DT. On scholarship.

I’ll have a story with more details later this evening. At the gym right now.

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Illinois on top of Badgers by 4 , 7 + minutes left

Elliot
When will the 2025 Football Scholarship Distribution Chart be updated?

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Spot on once again. Its so funny that this board acts the same to the MSM when it comes to politics lolz

I wonder if it can pass anti-trust muster.

Wonder if Hy-Vee is a target.

Big Grocery

With 42 days left in office, Biden avoids unscripted moments or press questions.

Joe Biden is president of the United States for 42 more days. But within the Democratic Party, on Capitol Hill — and even within his own administration — it feels like he left the Oval Office weeks ago.

Biden has effectively disappeared from the radar in the wake of Democrats’ bruising electoral loss. Since Nov. 5, he’s largely stuck to prepared remarks, avoided unscripted public appearances or press questions and opted to sit out the raging debate over Donald Trump’s victory, policy conversations in Congress and the Democratic Party’s future.

“He’s been so cavalier and selfish about how he approaches the final weeks of the job,” said a former White House official.




Across nearly two weeks abroad since the election, Biden spoke just seven words to the media traveling with him. He has yet to schedule a post-election press conference, as Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush did when they were on their way out of office. He went to the Rose Garden to publicly praise a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and spoke to the press Sunday about Bashar Al-Assad fleeing Syria, but otherwise his post-election domestic schedule has been filled with events such as honoring the 2024 NBA champions, thanking longtime supporters at a South Lawn dinner and participating in a Friendsgiving event.
Biden’s low profile since the election has contributed to the sense of rudderlessness that’s taken hold across swaths of Washington, as lawmakers, aides and party officials brace for Trump’s return to power and seek a new direction and vision ahead of the midterms and 2028.
The White House and Biden, they say, has shown little interest in helping chart the party’s future beyond Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration. Biden has focused his aides’ energies largely on managing the presidential transition and tending to a few final items meant to burnish his legacy, including a speech on the economy Tuesday. And Vice President Kamala Harris, who cast herself on the campaign trail as the future of the party, has all but disappeared from the scene.
“There is no leadership coming from the White House,” one Democrat close to senior lawmakers stated bluntly. “There is a total vacuum.”

Some Biden aides acknowledge the president’s absence from the broader discussions about how to address Trump’s coming presidency and the future of the party. They say that reticence is rooted in two factors: Biden’s own recognition that few are eager to hear from him, and his own lingering personal belief that he doesn’t owe much more to a party that unceremoniously pushed him aside. Some aides have also said Biden believes he has to take a more measured approach in how he talks about Trump given his focus on facilitating a peaceful transfer of power.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates defended Biden, saying the president “is making every day of this term count” and is “leading by example for the sake of American democracy, honoring his campaign promise to respect the will of the voters and provide an orderly transition.”

Bates noted that Biden, in an exchange with reporters last month, “criticized President-elect Trump’s agenda – including across-the-board tariffs that will force American families to pay higher prices for everyday necessities.” Biden during that brief back-and-forth called such tariffs “counterproductive,” but expressed hope that Trump would reconsider.

Still, the void at the top has alarmed Democratic officials who worry and the country is heading toward next year without a concrete plan for combating Trump — or even tangible motivation to put up much of a fight. POLITICO spoke to almost two dozen party officials, lawmakers, current and former White House aides and other Democratic staffers for this story, some of whom were granted anonymity in order to offer their candid assessment.

“Elections have consequences — It’s a new sheriff in town,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said.

While Biden has offered little in the way of leadership, officials say there’s also not much demand from the party’s rank and file — including lawmakers and aides — to hear from a president they still blame for relegating them back into the minority. Biden, at 82, is at the end of a political career tarnished by his refusal to step aside earlier and a last-minute pardon of his son Hunter. Few are now clamoring for him to return.

“In conversations that I’m having, they don’t even mention the president. It’s kind of sad,” said the Democrat close to senior lawmakers. “It feels like Trump is president already.”

Many party officials and staffers no longer track Biden’s daily activities or are even aware that he’s spent much of the last month out of the country. In the last week, the dominant conversation among them tied to the president has been about Hunter’s pardon, who got invitations to the White House holiday party and whether current and former White House staffers would get to take the traditional departure photo with the president.

“Democrats in Washington just want to get him and the people around him out the door,” said the former White House official. “All he’s done in the last year has hurt the party every step of the way.”

There’s some question of whether Biden’s presence has been missed, even if only to tout his accomplishments.

Asked last week about the role they see Biden playing within the party, several Democratic lawmakers demurred.

“There’s sort of a tradition of former presidents not getting too involved in it, and he’s transitioning into that,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.). “So I think he has to be careful.”

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a close Biden friend and ally, said that he expected Biden to devote his post-presidency to several specific issues, including cancer research and global diplomacy — leaving his involvement in party affairs up in the air.

“I still think he has a lot for us to learn from going forward,” Coons said. “But, you know, there are lots of other standard bearers who are clamoring for attention.

Inside the West Wing, aides have focused primarily on accelerating a final slate of policy priorities before January, including allocating billions of dollars in tech and infrastructure investments and cementing regulations designed to further safeguard consumers from bad corporate actors.

Senior White House officials have also spent much of their time managing the nation’s foreign entanglements in Ukraine and the Middle East ahead of an incoming administration that they worry will take both conflicts in a sharply different direction. Those efforts reflect a central agenda that Biden laid out shortly after the election, aides said, and that has consumed much of his own time in the weeks since.

Biden aides in the process have sought to more explicitly document the administration’s accomplishments in statements, fact sheets and video clips. That’s partly a legacy project for historians who may comb Biden’s presidential library in years to come. But there is also hope it will provide Democrats with easy reference points during the Trump era for reminding voters how life was under Biden — and comparing it with how key measures like inflation and health coverage have changed since then.

Still, Biden officials and allies acknowledged that the president has been conspicuously absent from the broader public discourse, especially as the rest of the Democratic Party debates how best to resist Trump and rebuild the party.

The silence from Biden is “a case of just reading the room,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic campaign veteran and a former senior adviser to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“If him speaking out doesn’t achieve any actual strategic objectives, there’s no real point in doing it,” she said.

Biden has avoided questions about what went wrong in the lead-up to the election and where Democrats should go from here and has given no substantive public comments on whether he still believes American democracy is under threat with Trump set to take power. Few expect him to endorse a candidate in the crowded race for DNC chair that could go a long way toward determining the party’s direction, although a Biden adviser said multiple people who are running or considering running for DNC chair have been in touch to ask for the president’s thoughts.

The adviser also said Biden was still playing an important role in discussions about the future of the party, which was a topic of conversation at a recent lunch he hosted with Minyon Moore, Donna Brazile, Leah Daughtry, Yolanda Caraway and Tina Flournoy — Democratic operatives close to the Harris campaign.

“Typically when you’re in that so-called transition phase, the president and vice president essentially thank the team, thank the staff, help pay off the debts. It’s not like an incoming president who will play a more strategic role in determining the future of the party,” said Brazile, a former DNC chair.

But Biden’s overall attitude has left a sour taste in the mouth of some members of the party who feel his supporters who knocked doors, donated money and supported his administration deserve to hear from the president before he leaves office.

It seems like the online testosterone is flying out of folks on Hbot lately. Who is the baddest of the bad Hboter of them all?

We could use 100% of all NIL funds and still not come close to the blue bloods of college football. Why not put it all towards men’s and women’s basketball and Wrestling.
Yes, I’m dumb. I’m just over this team and the landscape of college football.

Just lost Caden Crawford to the portal, that one stings the DL depth, or is great news for being passed up. As of 11 CT

1.) Lainez
2.) Crawford
3.) Leeper
4.) Reasar
5.) Bowie
6.) Williams
7.) Brown
8.) Pascuzzi
9.) Cade (bye Felicia)

You just know this imbecile feels entitled to steal everything not nailed down on top of the reparations he was counting on >

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I don’t play as much as I use to. Mainly because I feel bad for wasting away a hundred hours playing a game, when I could be doing something else. My main genre is rps/action rpgs.

Early access for Path of Exile 2 comes out in a couple weeks. That game looks bad ass. Looks like everything Diablo 4 should have been. Played the shit out of The original Path of Exile years ago. I’m probably going to pull the trigger on this one. I don’t feel as bad about playing a game in the winter when it’s cold and dark and nothing to do anyway.

You come up on a vehicle that’s driving 5-10 mph under the speed limit.

Most times, what is it?

I’m voting Prius. What is it with those people?

Its so entitled to its craziness, it can't even begin to answer the bleeding question >

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