Monday, November 23, 2020

Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years

*BUMPED.* 

At Amazon, Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years.

Also, a combined volume, Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography





Big Iryna Underboob

Did I say "big"? How about monstrously massive gargantuan milk cannons! 

Wow!

And don't miss Iryna's sex tape, man.



Additional Abby

Following up from yesterday, "Abby Rao." 

She's got more on Twitter, shoot!




American Carnage

It's Christopher Rufo, at the American Conservative:



The Problematization of Substack

Interesting.

See Jen Gerson, "Substack rats unite!"


Sunday Showers

Big busty nudes in the shower, dozens of photos. Nice. 


Sunday, November 22, 2020

Nice Calvins

Heh.

Seen on Twitter:

All Democrats Hate Thanksgiving and the Ones Who Don't Are Posers

It's true. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 


Chris Hemsworth’s One Badass Mofo!

Training for the "Thor 4." 

Damn!




Abby Rao

 Amazing find, on Twitter!




Hot Shendelle Schokman Long-Awaited Update (VIDEO)

Someone searched for this old post, "Smokin' Bikini Model Shendelle Schokman at Cardiff State Beach in Encinitas."

And I'm thinking this glorious woman needs an update, dang!



New Iryna Photos

I can't get enough of this woman.

Here's a topless gallery, for starts. 

More later.


The Elites Plan to Use the Pandemic to Finally Inflict Authoritarian Tyranny on Us

At AoSHQ, "Hard to disagree."


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...

Still more.


Jennifer Delacruz's Sunday Forecast

She's still at home, or she's back at home, amid the new state lockdown. When will this tyranny ever end, sheesh?

At ABC News 10 San Diego:



Saturday, November 21, 2020

Magnificent Sarah Hoyt

See, "We, Magnificent Bastards":
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)

The bitch is sorry. (*Eye-roll.*) 

At the Guardian U.K., "How Boris Johnson found grounds to ignore Priti Patel bullying verdict: Sir Alex Allan was clear in his central finding against home secretary but offered caveats":

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’

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

It's Kashmir Hill, a technology reporter at the New York Times, who used to be a tech blogger back in the day. Once she commented on a blog post of mine thanking me for a link. I'm still blogging. She's at the Old Gray Lady. And I know. I know. It's a despicable left-wing partisan propaganda outlet, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. 

In any case, this is cool.


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...

Keep reading.

 

'I love podcasts too...'

A classic:


Risque Kate Mara 'Doggy Style' Scene From the New Hulu Series, 'A Teacher' (VIDEO)

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