Biden Commutes the Sentences of Almost All Federal Convicts on Death Row

MXMNews:

President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates, including child killers and mass murderers, two days before Christmas. The clemency move, part of Biden's opposition to the death penalty, reduces their sentences to life in prison without parole.

Key Details:

Among those spared execution are Thomas Sanders, who brutally killed a 12-year-old girl and her mother, and Iouri Mikhel, responsible for the ransom killings of five immigrants.

Three high-profile inmates, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, did not receive clemency.

Biden defended the decision as necessary to ensure justice but provided no specifics on why these cases warranted commutations.

Diving Deeper:

President Joe Biden ignited a firestorm of controversy on Monday by commuting the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates. The move spares the lives of individuals convicted of some of the most heinous crimes, including the murder of children, mass killings, and acts of extreme violence while in custody. Biden cited his long-standing opposition to the death penalty as justification, framing the decision as an effort to establish a "fair and effective justice system."

"Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims... and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss," Biden said in a statement. He added that he could not, in good conscience, allow a future administration to resume executions.

The list of spared inmates includes Thomas Sanders, who killed a mother and her 12-year-old daughter, and Anthony Battle, who murdered a prison guard with a hammer while already serving a life sentence for raping and killing his wife. Others, like drug kingpins Kaboni Savage and James Roane, Jr., were responsible for the deaths of multiple victims, including children, in violent drug-related crimes.

However, Biden excluded three infamous individuals: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber; Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter; and Dylann Roof, who killed nine worshippers at a Charleston church.

So either he actually does believe in the death penalty, or he's just a weak cowardly leftist virtue-signaler who's too afraid of the consequences for commuting the sentences of these people.

...

The president's decision has reignited debates over the death penalty and his broader approach to criminal justice. Some see his actions as aligning with progressive goals, while others view them as an affront to justice and accountability. With just weeks left in his presidency, Biden's clemency spree cements his legacy as a divisive figure in the criminal justice reform debate.

I'll say.

Some few of you might actually be almost 29 years old and may forget the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

He was the worst. Carter's humiliating failure of the presidency set up three consecutive conservative presidential terms. Well, two Reagan terms and one liberalish Bush term. But the country was ready to vote for a conservative three times.

For fifteen years the humiliation and misery of the Carter years was a powerful memory that animated voters to vote Republican.

Joe Biden is now a worse president than Carter, and his corruption, fecklessness, failure and lying will set up at least two more Republican presidential terms.

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (404) | Trackbacks (Suck)

THE MORNING RANT: America’s Gerontocracy – AWOL Texas Congresswoman Found Living in Memory Care Facility

A local online media outlet that serves as competition to the legacy newspapers in Dallas and Ft. Worth just broke a huge scandal that was hiding in plain sight.

Representative Kay Granger (R – TX) has not cast a vote in Congress since last July. Her extended absence would seem newsworthy, and with Republicans holding a very narrow House majority, you’d also think that the Republican leadership would be concerned about her vote, especially considering the high-profile votes in the past week regarding the federal debt limit. As it turns out, Ms. Granger is living in a memory care facility. But it’s even worse, her entire staff appears to have shut down all constituent services, along with any pretense of there being Congressional representation for Texas’ 12 Congressional District.

The Dallas Express received a tip that “the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.”

As detailed in its exclusive story titled “Where is Congresswoman Kay Granger?” the Dallas Express first called Rep. Granger’s local and D.C. offices but only got voice mails. They then visited her local office only to find the door locked and its windows covered. Other occupants of the building advised that Rep. Granger’s staff all departed the office before Thanksgiving.

The journalists at the Dallas Express then paid a visit to the memory care facility, where several employees confirmed that Rep. Granger was indeed a resident.

The Express quoted Tarrant County (Ft. Worth) GOP Chairman Bo French as saying, ”The lack of representation for CD-12 is troubling to say the least. At a time when extraordinarily important votes are happening, including debt ceiling, disaster relief, farm bills and border issues, Kay Granger is nowhere to be found. The margin in Congress is razor thin and the lack of a Republican vote representing CD-12 disenfranchises 2 million people. We deserve better.”

In addition to noting that Ms. Granger and her absent staff are all still being paid by taxpayers through the end of her term in January, the Express posed these questions:

• Why have the public and Ms. Granger’s constituents been left in the dark about her whereabouts and the nature of her absence?

• Why has Congressional District 12 gone without representation for more than five months? And how has no one in Fort Worth or her larger district, particularly the Fort Worth establishment media, seemed to notice or care?

• If Ms. Granger is mentally incapacitated, why didn’t she simply retire early and allow Congressman-elect Craig Goldman to be appointed in the interim so the district could be represented during this critical vote and transition period?

Kay Granger is almost 82 years old, and was elected to Congress 28 years ago. To her credit (?), she did not seek re-election this year, and she’ll be replaced by a new Congressman when the next Congress is sworn into office in January. But she should have already stepped down, and she was almost certainly not fit for re-election in 2022, so why did she return then?

Posted by: Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM | Comments (253) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mid-Morning Art Thread

Preparing for Christmas (Plucking Turkeys)
Francis William Edmonds

Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (341) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Report — 12/23/24

Good morning kids. For those of a certain age, you'll recognize the name of singer Petula Clark and might be able to hum or sing a few bars of her smash 1967 hit "Don't Sleep in the Subway." As I once heard ad-libbed by famed DJ Harry Harrison on the now defunct NYC oldies station WCBS-FM after playing the tune, "You might miss your own mugging!"

Or in this case, your own immolation. Dear Lord!

A Guatemalan migrant has been arrested for allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire in Brooklyn on Sunday morning — then watching as his innocent victim burned to death in what the police commissioner called “one of the most depraved crimes one person could possibly commit.”

The savage killing — which happened at about 7:30 a.m. on an idling F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station — shocked commuters, MTA workers and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who said Sunday that the heinous crime “took the life of an innocent New Yorker.” “As the train pulled into the station, the suspect calmly walked up to the victim, who was in a seated position at the end of a subway car … and used what we believe to be a lighter to ignite the victim’s clothing, which became fully engulfed in a matter of seconds,” Tisch said at a press conference. Patrolling cops smelled and saw the smoke, then followed it to the flame-covered woman, the commissioner said.  They extinguished the blaze, but the victim died at the scene.

Officials said the 33-year-old suspect came to the US in 2018 from Guatemala. He was detained by border patrol agents in Arizona in June of that year, sources said. His legal status wasn’t immediately clear Sunday night.

He received a transit summons in May 2023, but his criminal record in New York City was largely clean otherwise, sources said. He was living at a shelter on Randall’s Island at the time of the infraction.

Horrifying video obtained by The Post showed the suspect calmly looking on as flames consumed the still-unidentified woman, who stood inside the open subway car door.

He lit her on fire, he knew he could light her on fire, and no Daniel Penny appeared to save her.

A message was sent with the prosecution of Penny that anyone trying to save people on a subway from psychopaths with fiery murder on their minds would go through the prosecution he did, acquitted or not. That horse has left the barn.

What's more, as the cops slouched by, no one stepped in to try to put out the fire or rescue the victim. One cop bumblingly told the accused murderer, sitting on the subway station bench in order to gloatingly watch the crime, to move along, rather than collar him. He should have known better but didn't, so the alleged perp got away, until a couple of alert high schoolers called in that they saw him on another train. That was much less risk than stopping him, and with all the massive media coverage, the cops got serious about apprehending him, so he was finally picked up. He easily could have gotten away otherwise.

But at the same time this horrific drama was taking place, New York's Gov. Kathy Hochul was out crowing and gaslighting about how much safer she made the subways of New York:

In March, I took action to make our subways safer for the millions of people who take the trains each day.   Since deploying the @NationalGuardNY to support @NYPDnews and @MTA safety efforts and adding cameras to all subway cars, crime is going down, and ridership is going up.

Meanwhile, just across the East River at almost the same time. . .

The audience at NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” cheered upon hearing the name of Luigi Mangione, the man who is charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City earlier this month.

It happened when “Weekend Update” anchor Colin Jost began to talk about Mangione being transported back to New York City by authorities after he was captured in Pennsylvania. Jost barely managed to mention Mangione’s name before the audience cheered and he stopped mid-joke to acknowledge the elation in the room.

Ignore the context, that is the disease-ridden sewer from which these words emanate:

“I think the whole country has what I call a low-grade fever,” Warnock said. “You know some mornings you wake up and you just don’t feel really well. You can’t even put your finger on it. We’ve been through four years of COVID. And people — you know, the early years of that, the early months of that, having to shelter in, all the trauma around that. Twenty years of what felt like an endless war, and then demagogues who make — you know, who exploit this moment through exacerbating the fault lines, the cultural fault lines of division in our country. And I think people just feel the full weight and the trauma of all of that.”

The unmitigated gall of this degenerate, savage, criminal vampire to dare state this when it is he, his political party and those who installed him in office (via actual legal votes or in his case, fraudulent ballots) that have utterly trashed this nation for over 200 years in an unslakeable lust for absolute power and control that at its core is the perverted vision of absolute moral superiority and belief not just that God is on your side but indeed that you and yours are Gods and that we are an evil to be eradicated.

And yet, how right he is, only not in the way perhaps he thinks. Cheering cold-blooded murder as well as what the majority of headlines in the links state, indicate how low we as a society and how much of the west has degenerated along with it.

The great Victor Davis Hanson ponders whither America and the World in the wake of Donald Trump's titanic and perhaps miraculous victory last November:

In sum, for the last four years, the world has watched aghast as the United States lost its collective mind and became a radical Jacobin revolutionary society.

So why is there not a sense of almost ecstatic relief, not just among conservatives but even among Democrats, that the years of darkness and madness are ending?

. . . Summed up, the welcomed counterrevolution is one of restoration—to dream again that nothing is impossible, and the dreary age of stasis, envy, cynicism, and nihilism is ending, replaced again by a world without limits. No one knows quite what is ahead, but all know that it is at least better already than the current nightmare.

I wish I could share the good Dr. Hanson's optimism, if indeed he is being optimistic. It's because I know as my dear mother of blessed memory taught me that evil never rests. Sadly, it is part of the human condition. It must be resisted by each of us in our own hearts and minds, and taught to the children lest we allow ourselves to be immolated on a subway car, or after a nightmarish trip in a cattle car in a gas chamber and ultimately to be turned into ashes in the crematoria.

This is where it eventually leads unless we not only pay attention but are willing to risk our own comfort and perhaps security to preserve this little slice of paradise that still in many ways is the last greatest hope for humanity. We, and the relative condition of living in peace and prosperity, faltering as it had in decades past is indeed not the norm. The notion of American exceptionalism is not that we are an exceptional people, but that the nation and society our founders created was intended to be the "exception" to history, which since the beginning of human history, in one form or another were tyrannies that placed the individual citizen at the bottom of a hierarchy that more often than not ground said citizen into the earth for the benefit of kings, tyrants, dictators and czars.

Well, for the first time in many many years both Christmas and Hanukkah fall on the same day. On that happy note, it is indeed a season and a time to celebrate holidays of salvation and of miracles.

Lastly, a shout-out and thank you for your continued support in hitting our tip jar. It truly is appreciated more than you can know. Have a great day! See you tomorrow for Christmas eve and the remainder of the week.

God bless us, everyone!!!

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
• Thad McCotter: Populism’s focus on domestic concerns may be flawed, but history proves globalist ideologies have wrought far greater destruction.
  A Distinction Between Populist Movements and Globalist Ideologies
  
• Roger Kimball: Elon Musk’s push for transparency and fiscal responsibility has reshaped the debate over government spending, exposing inefficiency and forcing Congress to answer to the public.
  Musk Derangement Syndrome
  
• “He is a politician,” Putin said of Biden. “And it is always important what is more in you — a politician or a human being. It turned out that Biden is more of a human being. I would not condemn him for this.” He’s not saying that as a complement! He’s saying that Biden is corrupt!
  Putin: Joe Biden Is Corrupt, Unpresidential… and Less Honorable than Stalin!
  
• Victor Davis Hanson: Eagerness to get rid of the current nightmare is pervasive.
  Are the Years of Madness Ending?
  
• They break everything on their way out.
  Democrats Don’t Transfer Power Peacefully

Posted by: J.J. Sefton at 07:30 AM | Comments (395) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 23 December 2024

Top Story

• OpenAI's next generation model, GPT-5, is ahead of schedule and coming in under budget. (WSJ / MSN)
  
  Sorry, just kidding. GPT-5 is not working, may never work as planned, and each training run takes six months and costs half a billion dollars.

  OpenAI has conducted at least two large training runs, each of which entails months of crunching huge amounts of data, with the goal of making Orion smarter. Each time, new problems arose and the software fell short of the results researchers were hoping for, people close to the project say.

  Also there's the tiny problem that with GPT-4, OpenAI already looted the entire public internet. GPT-5 needs a lot more data for its training, and there isn't more data.

  OpenAI's solution was to create data from scratch.

  It is hiring people to write fresh software code or solve math problems for Orion to learn from. The workers, some of whom are software engineers and mathematicians, also share explanations for their work with Orion.

  But, you say, the internet contains all human knowledge. Won't trying to expand that significantly take a long time? Won't it cost a huge amount of money?
  
  Yes.

  The process is painfully slow. GPT-4 was trained on an estimated 13 trillion tokens. A thousand people writing 5,000 words a day would take months to produce a billion tokens.

  What about using AI to train your new AI?

  OpenAI also started developing what is called synthetic data, or data created by AI, to help train Orion. The feedback loop of AI creating data for AI can often cause malfunctions or result in nonsensical answers, research has shown.

  
  Scientists at OpenAI think they can avoid those problems by using data generated by another of its AI models, called o1, people familiar with the matter said.

  Scientists at OpenAI are paid to think that. They are paid a lot to think that.
  
  In short, your job is safe for now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (120) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gun Thread: Sunday Before Christmas Edition!

Howdy, Y'all! Welcome to the wondrously fabulous Gun Thread! As always, I want to thank all of our regulars for being here week in and week out, and also offer a bigly Gun Thread welcome to any newcomers who may be joining us tonight. Howdy and thank you for stopping by! I hope you find our wacky conversation on the subject of guns 'n shooting both enjoyable and informative. You are always welcome to lurk in the shadows of shame, but I'd like to invite you to jump into the conversation, say howdy, and tell us what kind of shooting you like to do!

Holy Shitballs! How in the ever-loving Hell did it get to be the Sunday before Christmas? Have you finished your Wish List and distributed it to all of your gift givers? What are you hoping to find under the tree come Christmas morning? Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

With that, step into the dojo and let's get to the gun stuff below, shall we?

Posted by: Weasel at 07:00 PM | Comments (270) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Food Thread: End Of Year Coasting...

I love those things! Yorkshire Pudding isn't a pudding, and I doubt it's from Yorkshire originally, but it is also a simple, delicious, and undeniably festive addition to a holiday or everyday table.

It's equal parts eggs, milk, and flour, with a pinch of salt. How much easier can a recipe get! Then into hot muffin tins with beef tallow, a 15-20 minute bake on high heat (425 degrees), and you are done!

Of course you have to render your own beef fat, because that's half the fun of it. And while you are doing that you might as well make beef stock, because why not? Did I say this was easy?

***
I will be mostly absent this afternoon; we are having a Sunday Roast! So please...put your pants on!

Posted by: CBD at 04:00 PM | Comments (246) | Trackbacks (Suck)

First-World Problems...

Those flowers are so large and numerous that I had to stabilize the stems!

The struggle is real!

Seriously, We bought a couple of amaryllis from the high school band. They go door to door every fall, selling them or poinsettias to finance...something. Hopefully not a cocaine-driven orgy.

The kids are always earnest and friendly and very focused. It is a real pleasure, and makes me hopeful for the future.

Posted by: CBD at 02:00 PM | Comments (219) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Merry Christmas!

America is a Christian country.

Yes, I said it, and I am very happy that is the case. What is stupendous and unique about this marvelous country is that it is also a secular republic that is structurally respectful of the minority view.

The Christmas season is my favorite time of the year. I am firmly and contentedly Jewish, so my appreciation is focused on the happiness and joy and beauty that is so evident everywhere. Let us get rid of the silliness of "Happy Holidays," and accept the reality that the "Holiday" is Christianity celebrating the birth of Jesus. It's called Christmas...Christ's Mass. That's pretty clear!

And in case you were wondering whether you were going to dodge a bullet and miss Luciano Pavarotti?

Nope.

That was my father's favorite Christmas song, and this version is marvelous. He would listen to it and sing along in Latin, which he gave a French accent. But it stuck in my head, and whenever I listen to it (and I listen to it a LOT), I think of that...

Thank you all for being loyal and engaged readers and commenters. This strange place would be very different, and not nearly as fun (and maddening) without the vigorous participation of so many of you.

I hope all of you have a wonderful and peaceful and satisfying Christmas, however you may enjoy it. I will be hosting a Sunday Roast this afternoon, which seems appropriate for the season! If you are having 75 people for a Christmas party, or a quiet evening alone, please enjoy the season, our wonderful country, and the renewed prospects for the coming years!

Merry Christmas!

Posted by: CBD at 12:00 PM | Comments (159) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Sunday Morning Book Thread - 12-22-2024 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, sugar those plums, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:00 AM | Comments (234) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 22 December 2024

Top Story

• Why AI is stupid garbage and everyone in the industry is lying frantically to cover up the truth. (Ars Technica)
  
  Okay, I may have paraphrased Tim Lee at Ars just a little there, but if you look at the promises AI leaders have made against the mathematical problems they face, that is the gist of the situation.
  
  AI - LLM-based generative AI, not the more interesting discriminative AI - uses a technology called transformers which lets it process data in a massively parallel way. This requires about the same amount of work as a traditional neural network on simple prompts, while being able to use highly parallel hardware like graphics cards, so you get the result much faster.
  
  For simple prompts:

  The longer the context gets, the more attention operations (and therefore computing power) are needed to generate the next token.

  This means that the total computing power required for attention grows quadratically with the total number of tokens. Suppose a 10-token prompt requires 414,720 attention operations. Then:

  • Processing a 100-token prompt will require 45.6 million attention operations.
  • Processing a 1,000-token prompt will require 4.6 billion attention operations.
  • Processing a 10,000-token prompt will require 460 billion attention operations.

  So as you make your question more detailed and specific, the amount of time taken to produce an answer increases rapidly.
  
  Work is now on to replace transformer models with classic neural networks, which don't have these limitations, but also don't have the magical ease of development of the transformer model.
  
  But that means that promises of AGI next year are simply lies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (233) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Open Thread

[Hat Tip: TC]

Yes...Yes. It's confusing, but you maniacs will power through it!

Posted by: CBD at 10:13 PM | Comments (289) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 12/21/2024

IT

A couple of years ago, I decided that I was going to read Stephen King's novels in publishing order until they bored me. I've made it into his 80s output, and I picked up IT, his magnum opus. Reading it in about a month, the 1200 page novel is...a complete and total mess. The first 20% had me hooked, though. It was great. There was this promise and sense of ill-defined danger that worked marvelously well as King jumped us between 1958 and 1985 with this sense of impending doom infecting everything.

And then things began to unravel. He focuses fully on 1958 for a long stretch, and it feels like a more typical King novel than the promise of greatness that had started things. There's a heavy issue with repetitive vignettes that don't actually feel that dangerous because kids keep escaping the central monster. The adults don't actually have a whole lot to do, and when they do become the focus just after the halfway point, they also go through their repetitive, but not dangerous vignettes. Things really pick up again in the final 20% of the book when the jumping between time periods ramps up as both adults and children go into the sewers underneath the central New England town of Derry, Maine, danger ramping up once more. And then...King lets his freak flag fly while also demonstrating that he doesn't know how to pull off endings or fulfill the promise of Lovecraftian horror like he would dream.

And yet...there are people who love this book. Love it. Think it's one of the greatest pieces of English literature ever written. I'm only noting that I don't agree, and I think I am closer to the general consensus which is: good, not great, and could use real editing (I'd go with okay, not good, and in need of an axe).

In the context of film, that presents an interesting question. The book has been adapted twice over the past thirty-five years. The first was on network television, a three-hour mini-series on ABC directed by Tommy Lee Wallace (an early close compatriot of John Carpenter). The second was a two-part, big budget, feature film directed by Andy Muschietti. With such a large, messy, and generally accepted flawed original source material, it presents an interesting case study in how to approach adaptations. Add in the fact that both filmed versions are actually quite different from each other, and you've got an interesting slice of cinematic adaptation.

And, as a note, this is going to feel a fair bit opaque to those not at least passingly familiar with the characters. Sorry, but I don't think I can drag this out another 1,000 words to give that clarity. It's way too long as it is.

Posted by: TheJamesMadison at 07:45 PM | Comments (235) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hobby Thread - December 21, 2024 [TRex]

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread.

As previewed, the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies(TM) has determined that the Hobby Thread theme of the week is Christmas and Hanukkah crafting. The Wheel is feeling festive and might be a little tipsy after getting into the spiked eggnog.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (148) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, December 21

Courtesy of Sarah Hoyt by way of mindful webworker who sent me the link to Hoyt's webpage . . .

Enjoy!

"Perfessor" Squirrel

Heh.

* * *

Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. Thanks for stopping by. Kick back and enjoy the world of animals.

Would you like a treat?

Let's relax a little with the animals and leave the world of politics and current events outside today.

Posted by: K.T. at 03:00 PM | Comments (98) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Dec 21

Merry weekend before Christmas! And Hanukkah! It's a time for gardening eye candy. Above, a boxed Amaryllis (Hippeastrum) grown by a cousin whose husband ordered bulbs for her from a "Bulb of the Month Club". Great gift!

Below, another one that started blooming on November 21, grown by her friend:

Posted by: K.T. at 01:00 PM | Comments (43) | Trackbacks (Suck)

A bold educational change in New Zealand

The Culture of New Zealand

* * * * *

Something to talk about while the family is home for the holidays

Steven Hayward:

It is a rare day that I suggest we follow New Zealand’s example for anything, but this is one step Congress and the Trump Administration should strongly consider in their efforts to force universities to reform themselves (which they are not going to do without concentrated and sustained outside pressure):

From Science magazine:

Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences

This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded.

Links at the link.

BOLD! What do you think led to this move?

Hmmmmm . . .

New Zealand expects to post budget deficits over five-year forecast period

Immigration: Another annual record for departures from New Zealand

Posted by: K.T. at 11:00 AM | Comments (199) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 08:46 AM | Comments (357) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 21 December 2024

Top Story

• Here's a list of the 49 American AI startups that have raised $100 million or more in 2024. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Top among them is OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion this year, but close behind is Elon Musk's xAI, which raised $6 billion.
  
  Interestingly Europe didn't miss the boat with Mistral leading the table there with $1.2 billion raised.
  
  What all that money will achieve I don't know.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (172) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Just The ONT, Ma'am

Hi Horde! Friday night, what's everyone up to? Time to get silly.

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (245) | Trackbacks (Suck)