Malformed booze trollop Pete Hegseth is juggling a lot of balls right now — almost literally, which we’ll get to in a moment. The war in Iran is going badly, US weapons stockpiles have reportedly shrunk to dangerously low levels with no quick restocking available, female Marines are acing the fitness test that Hegseth instituted in the hopes that it would weed all the women out of the military, thereby defeating one of his cherished beliefs that females should limit themselves to homemaking and breeding ...
Truly, it has been a bad time for his worldview, assuming he’s not too deep into a bottle of Mad Dog to notice.
Because things are not going well. In addition to the ungodly strain that he is imposing on America’s military, recent reports are that the Pentagon has been purposefully undercounting the number of American war dead. As if this will make the state of the war look less grim. And if the Pentagon is undercounting the dead, we can only imagine how badly it is undercounting the number of soldiers wounded when Iran bombed several of our Middle East bases to smithereens.
Hegseth has also been a big fan of using AI systems to help America’s war fighters achieve maximum lethality, or whatever. Last week we learned that lethality could have reached nearly unimaginable numbers, if an AI screwup had kicked off World War III with China. So that’s neat.
Here is what happened: a special operations intelligence analyst generated a report with the help of AI, and that report indicated that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying components for building a nuclear bomb, presumably to Iran. The military made plans to send soldiers to board the ship, with aircraft backing them up.
Then, with the planes in the air, planners realized an AI chatbot used to assemble the report had misidentified the cargo, and called off the operation, thereby narrowly averting an incident where American troops would have boarded a Chinese vessel on a mistaken pretext. You can imagine it spinning out from there.
We bet the chatbot’s apology was epic: You’re right, I should have realized China would see an armed force seizing its ship carrying cheap trinkets in international waters as an act of war. I’m sorry, that was my mistake. Let’s fix it. Would you like me to calculate how far the jet stream will carry all the nuclear fallout?
There was also this story from Bloomberg reporting that an over-reliance on AI for targeting bombing missions led the US to blow up an Iranian school that it thought was still a naval installation. The strike killed at least 123 schoolgirls at the beginning of the war:
Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets ... It’s not clear why they had such expectations.
Possibly because dumb people like Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump have been touting AI as some sort of miracle worker. Hegseth has been pushing to integrate AI tools across the military. Don’t expect him to let a little thing like dead Iranian girls or world war slow him down.
As we said, Hegseth is juggling a lot of balls. Including those of his soldiers, as the Pentagon has announced it will institute mandatory testing of testosterone levels in all male soldiers over the age of 30:
Pete Hegseth will make sure that America’s warriors are prodigious fuck machines, or at least will check their morning wood. The military should put that in recruitment ads in some sort of unholy Army-Hims brand mashup. Hi, I’m Doug Flutie. Low libido? Erection problems? Is your inability to be intimate with your partner hurting your relationship? Well, now you can make her smile again by enlisting in the Army! Not only will we teach you how to kill America’s enemies, we’ll give you the tools to once again kill it in the sack! Now that’s something to smile about!
And if that doesn’t work, maybe the Pentagon can call Jake and Logan Paul in to give a motivational speech to the troops for some reason, as it did last week. We’re not sure what the purpose of this was. Maybe Jake’s boxing career needs a boost after he got his jaw broken by an actual boxer last December.
The Pauls are the perfect celebrities for the Trump administration though: D-listers with no discernible talents behind a knack for getting themselves some attention who always look like they just crawled out of a dumpster behind an In-N-Out after getting beaten up and tossed there by the national rugby team.
Given all this, it makes sense that Hegseth would want to take a couple of days off to fly down to Texas A&M, do a little PT with some students while wearing a T-shirt reading THIS IS WAR, give the kids a pep talk about them being warriors for Christ or something, and jinx the school’s Top Ten-ranked football team just before its game against unranked Kentucky.
It was the perfect weekend getaway for a dipshit who oozes insecurity and faux machismo from every pore: hanging out with co-eds half his age.
Hegseth is billing this as the “Send Me Tour,” an explicit nod to a moment in the Book of Isaiah when God asks “Whom shall I send” to be His messenger and Isaiah responds, “Here I am, send me!”
This being Hegseth, the Lord’s message comes with a healthy dollop of LETHALITY FIGHTERS WAR BONER YARRRRRGH:
Well, we guess he does need to recruit soldiers to replace the ones dying in the war we’re losing that Hegseth helped talk the president into starting for no reason.
After Hegseth’s little pep talk, the Texas A&M football team went out and laid an egg against unranked Kentucky in only the fourth meeting of these schools in 74 years. The last time Kentucky won the matchup was in 1952. The Hegseth Curse is real! A&M loses to Kentucky, the US loses to Iran ... is there any contest Pete Hegseth cannot lose? He could be confounded by a doorknob.
Soon, Hegseth will return to the Pentagon to prepare for his upcoming State of the Force speech, which is becoming a yearly tradition, where he invites all the senior military leadership back to the US to sit in a room while he berates them for being a bunch of fatties. This time, he’s making sure at least some soldiers in attendance will meet his exacting standards:
[T]he Pentagon is looking for servicemembers who fit certain “physical standards,” to attend the event: passing the Army’s waist-to-height ratio and the Army fitness tests, and having “impeccable grooming and uniform standards (no exception).”
This obsession with looks and fitness is, in addition to being a silly thing to focus on, so damn creepy. My man, do you want American soldiers at your speech, or do you want Germany’s 1936 Olympics team?
No, no, don’t tell us. Just let us tune in to your speech to see if we’re surprised.
OPEN THREAD.
[Times of Israel / CNN / Bloomberg / Yahoo / WSJ]
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Panther in the park update.
Today I went back and the kitty is still in the same place in the park. I think she likes me. Tomorrow I have a kitty backpack being delivered which I will need to get her home on my scooter, the hard carriers I currently have will not work. I have built up some trust with her and think I should be able to get her into the backpack. First thing will be a vet visit: scanned for a chip, general check up, and getting her spayed. then a slow introduction to Harry. Fingers crossed I can get this all to work!
You need to see the video, this kitty is so sweet.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-342603573?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
At least he’s focused on the junk of grown men and not little kids. That’s a step up for a republican.