'The pandering ... it’s not a respectful tone or manner'

Energy for years

'More or less than Joe Biden right now?'

'Adjustments have been made to the former president’s detail'

'There's absolutely no sensible explanation'

What's fascinating about TV is the impact it's had on our lives. It sits in the living room where families gather to watch shows, news, and sports. Nonetheless, with so much going on, there have been a few moments where time stood still in front of the small screen. We've all had that 'I remember when' moment when sitting in front of the TV. From Johnny Carson's goodbye to ending the longest... Source

Machines can’t have the “divine spark” of humans, but Americans can make machines “with our values,” a Heritage Foundation technology expert said last week at the National Conservatism Conference in the nation’s capital. “Conservatives must offer our own affirmative vision for AI,” said Kara Frederick, director of Heritage’s Tech Policy Center, referring to artificial intelligence in her talk at the Capital Hilton.   That vision would include “genuine American values,” “transparency,” and “self-government,” Frederick said during a Tuesday breakout session of the conference called “High Tech and the Nation” that also featured a Polish sociology professor and a former State Department official.  If the U.S. can design technology for the rest of the world that incorporates American values, it “will create a bulwark against Chinese LLMs that integrate those core socialist values in their models,” Frederick said. Frederick, a former Facebook official who worked on counterterrorism and intelligence issues for the social media giant, was referring to so-called Large Language Models, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that allows advanced language processing.  The Heritage scholar, a regular guest commentator on the Fox News and Fox Business channels, proposed a digital bill of rights to “enshrine the ability of families and individuals to process and compute as they see fit.” “The machines are here, AI is here,” she said. “We are the image bearers of God, after all, and we can bend the machines to our will. Indeed, we should.”  In a talk focused on social media, Andrzej Zybertowicz said participants in the digital revolution must reverse “the civilizing process” by making “the real” more attractive than the cyber again. “The digital revolution demands us to understand a much more complex situation but devoids us of the mental capacities of dealing with them,” said Zybertowicz, an adviser to Poland’s president and professor of sociology at that nation’s Nicolaus Copernicus University. New communication technologies have succeeded in degrading our social life and internal psyches, he said, in part because they’re based on systems of simple pleasure.  Families, communities, nations, traditional values, and loyalties are all real, but hyperindividualism is digital, Zybertowicz argued. He outlined five categories that account for how the “digital infosphere is algorithmically [and] structurally poisoned”: overload, structure of knowledge, addiction, multitasking, and haste.  The situation “has made our minds susceptible to accept various crazy ideologies,” Zybertowicz warned.  If society confronts the “cyberlords” of social media, he said, it can reach “real communication” and “real understanding.” Mike Benz, the former State Department official who now directs the Foundation for Freedom Online, said he would focus on NATO’s influence on the censorship industry because the alliance was holding its 75th anniversary summit the same week in Washington. Many believe that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in charge of the censorship industry, Benz said, but “the story really begins with NATO.” When the internet arrived in 1991, about the time the Soviet Union dissolved, Benz said, both the U.S. military and NATO still prized free speech. So it took NATO by surprise in 2014 when eastern provinces of Ukraine began flirting with becoming part of Russia, he said. Russia then invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region. “This is really when the military began to take a much more active role in the media,” Benz said, particularly “to stop enemy propaganda” in a kind of hybrid warfare. He said NATO scholar Mark Galeotti coined the term Gerasimov Doctrine, named after a Russian general and essentially holding that war “was no longer about tanks, it was about tweets.”  This marked the beginning of NATO’s funding of billions of dollars worth of “psychological operations and online disinformation,” Benz said. Benz said the transatlantic military alliance funds nearly every major participant in what he called the censorship industry, either directly or indirectly with “military pass-throughs like our National Science Foundation.”  To restore democracy in America and encourage it around the world, he argued, “we need to bring the military and intelligence use of AI to heel.” The post Some ‘Affirmative’ Conservative Solutions to Big Tech Dangers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The country music genre has a massive fan base and is listened to all over the world, especially in the United States. Even if country music isn't your thing, you'd probably be lying if you said that you didn't know some lyrics here and there to a few songs. In the genre, there is also a base group of artists who are the face of the music and are loved by the majority of country fans. Source

The landmark animated film Shrek was released in 2001 by Dreamworks and immediately became a blockbuster. Shrek was so successful it skyrocketed Dreamworks to prominence alongside Disney and Pixar. But despite the popularity of the entire franchise, there are a lot of secrets you may not know about. From the tragic events which put the film on hold, to the hilarious pop culture references littered... Source

My Reaction to Vance Pick, FWIW