Monday, November 23, 2020
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years
Big Iryna Underboob
Wow!
And don't miss Iryna's sex tape, man.
LINK IN BIO 😻 https://t.co/y7ybnf2n7U pic.twitter.com/Sa4RAbT0B5
— playmateiryna (@IrynaIvanova) November 22, 2020
American Carnage
"@realchrisrufo examines what life is like in Youngstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Stockton, California. All three cities have distinctly different histories, and yet the collapse of each has resulted in a nearly identical reality on the ground." https://t.co/pM3j6lQefV
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) November 17, 2020
Sunday, November 22, 2020
Nice Calvins
Missouri State pic.twitter.com/0XlMqsaTHq
— Old Row Rad Chicks (@OldRowRadChicks) November 19, 2020
Hot Shendelle Schokman Long-Awaited Update (VIDEO)
New Iryna Photos
I can't get enough of this woman.
Here's a topless gallery, for starts.
More later.
I wear this around the house what do u think about that? 🤯 https://t.co/M03maYOVmJ pic.twitter.com/U4UZI42zky
— playmateiryna (@IrynaIvanova) November 20, 2020
Hundreds of New York City's Bodies Still Stored in Pandemic Freezer in Brooklyn
This is just gross.
Horrific too. But just gross, disrespectful to the dead and their families, and a damning indictment of New York's "award-winning" leadership in this catastrophe.
At WSJ, "NYC Dead Stay in Freezer Trucks Set Up During Spring Covid-19 Surge":
The bodies of hundreds of people who died in New York City during the Covid-19 surge in the spring are still in storage in freezer trucks on the Brooklyn waterfront.
Many of the bodies are of people whose families can’t be located or can’t afford a proper burial, according to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner. About 650 bodies are being stored in the trucks at a disaster morgue that was set up in April on the 39th Street Pier in Sunset Park.
Before the pandemic, most if not all of the deceased would have been buried within a few weeks in a gravesite for the indigent on Hart Island, which is located in the Long Island Sound near the Bronx.
But Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged in April that mass burials wouldn’t take place following reports that New York City was considering the use of temporary graves on Hart Island.
Officials at the chief medical examiner’s office said they are having trouble tracking down relatives of about 230 deceased people. In cases like these, a spokeswoman said, it isn’t uncommon for the deceased to have been estranged from families and for next-of-kin details to be dated or incorrect. When next of kin have been contacted, officials said most bodies haven’t been collected because of financial reasons
New York City increased its burial assistance to $1,700 from $900 in May. That is still short of the average $9,000 cost of a traditional service with burial in New York, according to the New York State Funeral Directors Association. A typical cremation with service costs about $6,500, according to the group.
Every family has a right to request a free burial on Hart Island. Some families are confused about what to do, according to Dina Maniotis, the chief medical examiner’s office’s executive deputy commissioner, who oversaw the unit’s pandemic response.
“This has been traumatic,” Ms. Maniotis said. ”We are working with them as gently as we can and coaxing them along to make their plans. Many of them will decide they want to go to Hart Island, which is fine.”
The chief medical examiner’s office wasn’t built to deal with a global pandemic that killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers in a matter of months. Its forensic-investigations department has 15 staff members tasked with identification of bodies. A further seven people are responsible for contacting next of kin.
The unit is set up to handle about 20 deaths a day, said Aden Naka, the office’s deputy director of forensic investigations. During the peak of the pandemic it was inundated with as many as 200 new cases daily. Scientists from the laboratories of the chief medical examiner’s office were drafted to reinforce the investigations team and speed up the identification process, Ms. Naka said.
Family members deluged the office with calls seeking information about relatives who might have died as well as advice on requesting a death certificate, viewing a loved one’s body and making funeral arrangements. Officials of the chief medical examiner’s office said the city’s health department redirected more than 100 staff from other fields to manage the volume of calls, which soared to 1,000 a day from the usual 30 or 40.
Ms. Naka said many of the callers were struggling with problems of their own. Some were recovering from the virus themselves or had lost their jobs because of the pandemic. Others were dealing with the second or third family member to die of Covid-19...
Jennifer Delacruz's Sunday Forecast
Saturday, November 21, 2020
Magnificent Sarah Hoyt
But even if you want to believe lockdowns would work, the way they’re implemented tells you that we’re under psychological warfare that might be on the excuse of a virus, but have nothing really to do with it. No sane human being can say that more than 10 people in a CATHEDRAL designed for 2000 is a danger, but while you at the same time keep dispensaries open for pot? Yeah, no. In the same way, no sane human being can think wearing a mask at the zoo or botanic gardens, outside and in a sparsely “peopled” environment is going to make any difference, even if masks made a difference. (And before you say they make a marginal difference, no. Not really. The difference was “in the margin of error”, and that was before you take in account the masks involved had SEVENTEEN layers of fabric, relying on the “complicated pathway” to stop the virus. And no, I don’t have a link to that study, but trust me on this, it was one of the deep dives. Frankly, with four layers I can’t BREATHE, much less seventeen.)
RTWT.
Priti Patel is Sorry (VIDEO)
Boris Johnson’s decision to ignore the verdict of his independent adviser on ministerial standards, Sir Alex Allan, on a bullying inquiry into the home secretary has been met with indignation. Allan, a public servant with a 47-year career in the civil service, was clear in his central finding that Priti Patel’s behaviour was in breach of the ministerial code, and he has resigned in the face of Johnson’s contrary ruling. But did Allan’s statement on his findings leave the prime minister with some room for manoeuvre? Here we look at some of the key passages: ‘Justifiably frustrated’How Boris Johnson found grounds to ignore Priti Patel bullying verdict https://t.co/BZJlAw6rUA
— The Guardian (@guardian) November 20, 2020
The home secretary says that she puts great store by professional, open relationships. She is action-orientated and can be direct. The home secretary has also become – justifiably in many instances – frustrated by the Home Office leadership’s lack of responsiveness and the lack of support she felt in DfID [the Department for International Development] three years ago.Analysis Allan says civil servants – particularly senior civil servants – should be able to handle robust criticism, though they should not “face behaviour that goes beyond that”. In his advice, Allan suggests that on more than one occasion Patel was justified in being frustrated at the operation of the Home Office. The background to the inquiry is a rift between Patel and the former top civil servant at the Home Office, Sir Philip Rutnam, who quit and launched tribunal proceedings against the minister. Allan acknowledges there were issues with the Home Office leadership – an allusion to Rutnam – and the lack of support.
Mind-Bogging Artificial Intelligence
They look stunningly real at first, and the technology used to create them is getting better — quickly. https://t.co/rNQXV2jh73 pic.twitter.com/MDHUXm7EHT
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 21, 2020
The creation of these types of fake images only became possible in recent years thanks to a new type of artificial intelligence called a generative adversarial network. In essence, you feed a computer program a bunch of photos of real people. It studies them and tries to come up with its own photos of people, while another part of the system tries to detect which of those photos are fake. The back-and-forth makes the end product ever more indistinguishable from the real thing. The portraits in this story were created by The Times using GAN software that was made publicly available by the computer graphics company Nvidia. Given the pace of improvement, it’s easy to imagine a not-so-distant future in which we are confronted with not just single portraits of fake people but whole collections of them — at a party with fake friends, hanging out with their fake dogs, holding their fake babies. It will become increasingly difficult to tell who is real online and who is a figment of a computer’s imagination. “When the tech first appeared in 2014, it was bad — it looked like the Sims,” said Camille François, a disinformation researcher whose job is to analyze manipulation of social networks. “It’s a reminder of how quickly the technology can evolve. Detection will only get harder over time.” Advances in facial fakery have been made possible in part because technology has become so much better at identifying key facial features. You can use your face to unlock your smartphone, or tell your photo software to sort through your thousands of pictures and show you only those of your child. Facial recognition programs are used by law enforcement to identify and arrest criminal suspects (and also by some activists to reveal the identities of police officers who cover their name tags in an attempt to remain anonymous). A company called Clearview AI scraped the web of billions of public photos — casually shared online by everyday users — to create an app capable of recognizing a stranger from just one photo. The technology promises superpowers: the ability to organize and process the world in a way that wasn’t possible before...
'I love podcasts too...'
A classic:
i would like to introduce you all to one of the funniest tik toks of all time pic.twitter.com/d2dYDlP9im
— rohan ramdin (@rohanramdni) November 19, 2020