Wednesday 30 December 2020
Tuesday 29 December 2020
Do You Love Me?
It’s been a while since we’ve seen new robots from Boston Dynamics!
Robot Handle makes an appearance in this dance-off, shaking its counterweight to Berry Gordy Jr.’s “Do You Love Me” as performed by The Contours.
Now that Boston Dynamics is owned by the Hyundai Motor Group, their robots have reemerged, showing off their impressive capabilities in this year-end video. Apparently, their objective and ultimate goal is total dominance on the dance floor. Or the eradication of all humans.
Or both!
Election witness speaks: ‘Abnormal 20,000 vote spike’ | NTD
Garland Favorito, IT professional, co-founder of VoterGA, and elections director for the Constitutional Party of Georgia, has said that he personally witnessed irregularities in the November election.
During the election, Favorito worked as an observer at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, as well as a Fulton County tabulation observer, an audit monitor, and a recount monitor.
“As a Fulton County tabulation observer, I noticed an abnormal 20,000 votes spike for Joe Biden, while the President’s votes appeared to have actually gone down a tad,” he said.
Favorito said that after he reported what he witnessed in an affidavit, he notified the elections director, the Fulton County Board of Elections, and the county attorney.
Monday 28 December 2020
David Baltimore (Caltech): Introduction to Viruses and Discovering Rever...
David Baltimore outlines the sequence of events that led to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that converts a sequence in an RNA molecule into a sequence in a DNA molecule.
Talk Overview:
The first video is a shortened version in which Dr. David Baltimore introduces the different types of viruses, and defines how viruses are classified depending on their genetic material. Using HIV as an example, Baltimore explains what constitutes an equilibrium versus a non-equilibrium virus, and shows how the discovery of the reverse transcriptase helped scientist understand viruses.
The second video is an extended edition in which Baltimore also outlines the sequence of events that led to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that converts a sequence in an RNA molecule into a sequence in a DNA molecule. As Baltimore explains, the discovery of reverse transcriptase has revolutionized modern molecular biology, and it has aided in the understanding of viruses like HIV, and the genetic basis of cancer.
Speaker Biography:
After serving as President of the California Institute of Technology for nine years, in 2006 David Baltimore was appointed President Emeritus and the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology. Born in New York City, he received his B.A. in Chemistry from Swarthmore College in 1960 and a Ph.D. in 1964 from Rockefeller University, where he returned to serve as President from 1990-91 and faculty member until 1994.
For almost 30 years, Baltimore was a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While his early work was on poliovirus, in 1970 he identified the enzyme reverse transcriptase in tumor virus particles, thus providing strong evidence for a process of RNA to DNA conversion, the existence of which had been hypothesized some years earlier. Baltimore and Howard Temin (with Renato Dulbecco, for related research) shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery, which provided the key to understanding the life-cycle of HIV. In the following years, he has contributed widely to the understanding of cancer, AIDS and the molecular basis of the immune response.
In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Baltimore's numerous honors include the 1999 National Medal of Science, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974, the Royal Society of London, and the French Academy of Sciences.
Sunday 27 December 2020
Thursday 24 December 2020
In full: Boris Johnson announces post-Brexit trade deal with the EU
Boris Johnson said a deal reached with the European Union will help protect jobs and provide certainty to businesses.
The Prime Minister said the agreement resolves the European question which has "bedevilled" British politics for generations.
In a Downing Street press conference Mr Johnson said the UK had managed to "take back control" as promised in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
The Prime Minister told a No 10 press conference: "We have taken back control of our laws and our destiny. We have taken back control of every jot and tittle of our regulation in a way that is complete and unfettered.
"From January 1 we are outside the customs union and outside the single market.
"British laws will be made solely by the British Parliament interpreted by British judges sitting in UK courts and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice will come to an end."
Wednesday 23 December 2020
Tuesday 22 December 2020
Sunday 20 December 2020
Saturday 19 December 2020
Game Never Over: Maxim Miheyenko On Mindfulness In Gaming
Game Never Over: Maxim Miheyenko On Mindfulness In Gaming
Game Never Over: Maxim Miheyenko On Mindfulness In Gaming
Stephan Rabimov
Frontiers beckon the bravest as fortune favors the bold. One of the seismic cultural shifts of the last decade has been the rise of the gaming and esports industry. It has outgrown its escapist reputation to become a nearly $160 billion global market. What used to be the stereotypical domain of teenagers, now vies for mainstream influence with traditional media and institutions of power. Take fashion headlines, for example. British powerhouse Burberry showed its latest collection on Twitch, a messenger platform exclusive to the gaming community. Louis Vuitton unlocked a collaboration with League of Legends while Marc Jacobs checked-in at Animal Crossing as did Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. In 1964, American psychiatrist Eric Berne published a provocative bestseller Games People Play claiming that “pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy.” Fast forward half a century and our understanding and experience of individual relationships and community dynamics have been enhanced by the complexity of digital interactions and shared virtual spaces.
To better understand the profound appeal and impact of “games” I turned to someone whose passion as a player powered his knowhow as a developer and an investor. Maxim Miheyenko is the co-founder and COO of 5518 Studios, which ranks among the hottest art providers in the game industry, also Maxim is investor and business angel in the game industry. He was one of the success stories in a recent Russian Silicon Valley documentary (with 24 million views and counting) by Yuri Dud - Russia’s most popular independent journalist. Miheyenko was born in Ulyanovsk, a historic engineering hub in the Volga heartland. The city is famous as the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin and his signature philosophy: communism. For better or worse, it had disrupted all global systems. Technological evolution could be another potential conceptual gamechanger for the world. I wondered what it takes to run a team of digital comrades from across Eastern Europe (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and Serbia) while managing world’s biggest clients out of an office in California. We connected on Zoom across several time zones as Maxim divides his time between Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv and Los Angeles. 2020 meets globalization. Game on!
How has gaming disrupted the global infotainment ecosystem?
No other industry is so driven by the desire to impress its customers. It is the main goal to make everyone go wow every time. Great games just keep getting better and more accessible. As I see it, 5G and cloud streaming directly on mobile phones is changing everything. People love the free-to-play format and they want to start playing right away. There will be no need to buy consoles, potentially. At the same time, there is a lot of investment pouring in so gaming business is not about making immediate money now. It is about creating relationships, building communities based on shared philosophy, about loyalty instead of chasing a final dollar from the customer. Now is only the foundation. The great history of the gaming industry is just beginning. Really.
What makes a good game?
From the product point of view, you need a generous budget for developers and marketing, a high-end design team and then, magic… [Laughs] From the player point of view, it must have a good reason to come back. It is about motivation and connection. People are no longer interested in high-realistic art and explosions. Photorealism is a bit boring already. Most games now use unique stylizations to create their universes: Roblox, Subnautica, Fortnite, Apex Legends. The focus also shifts to storytelling. My great friend, co-founder and our CEO, Michael Casalino was an art-director of Disney Mobile and VP of art at Scopely. He always tells us that all the little details, each stone, barrel, cloud should have a story! What I love about The Last of US or Ghost of Tsushima is their grand narrative: trying to find community, trying to find love, trying to fix the world, big existential questions. You can see this change in Hollywood too. Compare the action heroes from the Schwarzenegger and Van Damme era to the action heroes today like new Batman or Joker. There is more character, more sensitivity. People no longer want to see power used without responsibility.
How difficult is to keep up with the changing consumer expectations?
On one hand, this is a stable business with pillars like Call of Duty, FIFA or NBA. They are reliable and relatable. On the other hand, it is very risky business. You can also put a lot of effort into something for nothing. There are too many promising startups you never hear about in a year or two. Publishers cannot predict success before release. For example, Fall Guys came out of the blue like “hidden dagger” and became one of the biggest gaming stories in 2020. Personally, I also want to acknowledge fresh stars like Promethean AI, Loona.app, and Mortal Shell.
Is such fierce competition beneficial or does it compromise the product?
For the gaming industry, competition is everything! People try to reinvent the ways we play. You cannot have monopolization in creativity and distribution. There are giants like Sony, Microsoft, Amazon. You have newer forces getting into it like Epic Games. They have high goals and I love it. There are more niche segments waiting for quality offers. For example, games in education is one of the hottest trends today, because timely content is king for kids and parents who must figure out home school options during lockdown periods. I am following a new generation of ideas like the EduDo app which combines user-generated short videos with interactive teaching and game elements. Gaming companies themselves make big headlines, too. Roblox is coming to IPO soon with expected valuation of over $4 billion! That is very exciting news for the industry.
Where does your work fit into this dynamic industry moment?
As an external art provider, our team is not some “outsourced talent.” We are strategic partners. We work with AAA-level blockbuster games and indie studios. Our job is to curate workflow for the right teams. Our small size and international positioning allow us to be proactive and very responsive. There is only one secret sauce to real quality in this industry. Communication. We encourage our artists to find the balance between functional works and masterpieces. For example, when we get a new client, we played all the games from that universe first. It is very important! We look at their souvenirs and hang out at fan forums. Then we talk with them about what they don’t like. We want to make a process and a result better. Our art is always at the service of these stories and we recruit the best people in the industry.
How do you put together a successful design team?
When we look for artists, we review anonymous portfolios. No name, nationality, gender, other identification. We only care about their vision, their passion, and skills. If we like it, we hire them. Then we find out who this person is and where they are from. It is impossible to be a single-country business in global creative industries today. For example, one of our lead 3D artists, Alexander Stepanchikov, fell in love with games as a boy in a village in Kazakhstan. He has been making amazing art for games for almost 20 years, and we hope he will continue to wow us for 20 more. It is a way of life for him. We also bring people from cinema, theater, fashion, sports on board to brainstorm new, unique and innovative ideas. Gaming will be the fastest growing intercultural platform in the next years. We have to welcome all perspectives to offer something unique.
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected the gaming industry? Aside from more people having time to play games at home…
Well, I think the bigger story is that many people are re-discovering the love of games and their new, amazing capabilities. They go, “Oh it’s not killing zombies and sudoku anymore” [Laughs] There is less and less focus on the spectacle of violence and more attention to skillshare, co-working and living together. Microsoft Flight Simulator is not a game, per se. It’s a real training program and maybe even a meditation masterpiece. Personally, I love Subnautica, World of Tanks, Transport Fever, and Age of Empires. Why? Because these are games for my brain. I love that I must establish communication with others, to think about future and how my actions impact that, to strategize my missions accordingly. Then I use these game skills in my work every day!
How do you respond to critics that emphasize addictiveness of gaming?
I liked how the Netflix docudrama Social Dilemma talked about it. The same principle is true for any mass industry: fast fashion, fast food, social media, gaming. The goal is to find human balance in the world of devices, in a world of huge amount of content. Look, I am a Gamer. I collect all consoles and games and play them every day. I also understand it is a part of my life. That is why I play only one hour daily. I do this out of respect for the rest of my life which includes my girlfriend, family, friends, wellness, the joy of swimming, the fun of going out. As I see it, gaming can be another tool to practice mindfulness… With so many specialists coming into the gaming industry from different spheres of life and business, we will soon see absolutely new projects that will change our lives and the world-at-large. The Game is never over!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephanrabimov/2020/11/01/game-never-over-maxim-miheyenko-on-mindfulness-in-gaming/?sh=48eaedb643ab
Friday 18 December 2020
Thursday 17 December 2020
Wednesday 16 December 2020
Tuesday 15 December 2020
Monday 14 December 2020
GOP electors in 5 battleground states cast votes for Trump; Trump announ...
NTD Evening News- 12/14/2020
1. Attorney General Barr Resigns
2. Group Demands Election Evidence Be Kept
3. Dominion Design Altered Election: Report
4. Wisc. Supreme Court Throws Out Trump Case
5. Electoral College Casts Presidential Votes
6. Congress Decides Who Wins Presidency
7. Naysayers Turn Away From Evidence: Powell
8. 3,987 Non-Citizens Voted in NV: Affidavit
9. Hack Raises Alarm About Election Security
10. Reps Ask FBI to Move On CCP Spy Report
11. Gingrich: More Policing for Senate Runoff
12. California Anti-Fraud Protest
13. Freedom Rally in Washington State
14. Police Shoot Gunman Outside NYC Church
15. California Governor Businesses, $3M in Loans
16. California Restaurant Adapts to Lockdown
17. Leak: 2M CCP Members Staffed US, UK Firms
18. Chinese Gene Editing Controversy Reemerges
19. China Vaccine Developer’s Bribery History
20. London Moving to Highest Tier Restrictions
21. British-Iranian Academic Sentenced in Iran
22. Brexit Deal Still Possible
23. EU Rights Watchdog Warns of AI Pitfalls
24. Danish Mink Industry Decimated
25. Europe’s Most Active Volcano Erupts
26. Estonian Winter Swimmers Break New Record
Saturday 12 December 2020
20 Weird things ONLY British people do!
Twenty weird habits that British people thing are normal!
A satirical take on the perceived quirks of British culture.
Friday 11 December 2020
Getting To Know Lucy from English With Lucy || Interview
Learn Australian English by listening to this awesome interview of Lucy Bella Earl of English With Lucy.
She is currently one of the top creators in YouTube helping people with British English!
Thursday 10 December 2020
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab Responds To Boris Johnson's Brexit Deal |...
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab responds to the Boris Johnson's comments from June where he said a 'no-deal Brexit was vanishingly small'.
Epidemiologist: We face an “evolutionary arms race” against Covid mutations
Freddie Sayers meets David Engelthaler, co-director of the T-Gen Research Institute and former state epidemiologist of Arizona.
The New York Times recently reported that, in the early months of the pandemic, a particular genetic strain of Covid-19 known as D14G was shown to be more prevalent in Italy than any Asian countries. This may have helped explain why the disease spread so fast in that country, and elsewhere in Europe and America.
David Engelthaler has been investigating this idea. His view is that there is now “really compelling evidence” that this strain replicates faster than earlier strains, which "likely" came out of China and through to Europe. "It's really quickly dominated all of the other strains that were seen in Europe at the time, it became the predominant strain that came into the Americas, spread throughout the United States and is now spread to pretty much every corner of the planet".
In his own state of Arizona, Engelthaler witnessed several of the early introductions to Arizona, coming from the Pacific coast straight from China, but fizzled out quickly, with less effective transmission. “And then all of a sudden we started having explosive outbreaks. When we go back and look genomically, the vast majority of those cases where we had very large outbreaks were being driven by the strains that were coming from the East Coast out of Europe, which all seemed to have this particular mutation in the spike protein.”
This doesn’t mean that the mutation is more deadly, simply that it may be more faster at transmitting, and therefore it harder to "get our arms around the virus". As such, Engelthaler argues that trying to eliminate the virus was not the right approach and instead we should have been trying to slow its spread: "What we're really seeing is a SARS-like infection that spreads like the common cold. And with there's no way that we could put in mitigation strategies to stop the common cold".
So were uniform national lockdowns the right solution with this newer mutation that potentially spread more effectively? "As an epidemiologist I think they have has just been devastating in a way that we haven't even properly appropriately characterised yet". He says that the "vast majority" of at-risk people "could have been prevented if the focus was on protecting them, rather than on trying to prevent any spread of this virus, which is pretty much is un-containable".
Engelthaler is also one of the few epidemiologists to have publicly spoken out against school closures, for which there is "no scientific evidence". "Privately, behind closed doors, there's definitely been a lot of discussion from the very beginning that there's no scientific evidence that shutting down schools actually helps to stop a pandemic...Epidemiologists knew that from the beginning, but that was not a popular opinion to take publicly and seems to have been kind of left to the side".
Ultimately, Engelthaler believes that human agency in the midst of a pandemic has been overemphasised: "I do think that one thing that does seem to get lost in all of this is that there's a really important factor in this pandemic, and it's the virus, it's not just people's policies and people's behaviours". That is especially true when there are "different strains that are acting differently in different parts of the world, leading to different outcomes, at least in some part because of that virus, not just based off of public policies in response, no matter what you do".
Wednesday 9 December 2020
The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast #37 - Marian Tupy: Things Are Not As Bad A...
Marian Tupy (senior policy analyst at the @The Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity) co-author of Ten Global Trends (Every Smart Person Should Know) and Mikhaila Peterson discuss global trends, economic inequality between countries, and a realistic look at the current state of the trajectory of the world.
Show Notes:
[2:00] Marian Tupy speaks about his work with the Cato Institute, analyzing the data of different countries worldwide. He gives background to Mikhaila how digging into the numbers actually changed his pessimistic view on world trajectory to an overall positive outlook to where humanity as a whole is headed.
[6:00] Negativity biases are built into us through survival due to natural selection. Humans that had a higher reaction to possible danger were the ones that survived to have kids. Now we as a race tend to naturally gravitate toward imagining and operating, assuming the worst-case scenario.
[8:00] Mikhaila asks Marian to cover some of the main misconceptions commonly held when it comes to global trends.
[10:00] Two dollars per person per day is what the world bank estimates to be the absolute poverty level. If a person is making this amount or any less, they will be starving to death most likely. Trend data shows that average income across the whole world has risen from the eighteen hundreds from two dollars a day to about forty dollars a day, and that is with both those numbers adjusted for inflation difference.
[12:00] “Modern life and abundance of resources has only been around for 0.08% of our time on earth.” Human psychology has not really fully adapted to generally having what we need to survive and be happy just yet.
[14:00] Climate change is a hot topic. What was ten or twenty years ago a very disputed topic is now accepted by most to be fact. What trends does the data support on the human influence on climate into the future?
[17:00] Tupy outlines the two main camps that have formed while seeking to address climate change. Those who believe that limiting population and usage of resources (what Marian refers to as a restrictionist), and those who believe climate change will be addressed through technological innovation and adaptation as many crises.
[20:00] Marian and Mikhaila discuss possible alternatives to C02 producing energy production. Nuclear power is an already available alternative.
[22:00] Is nuclear power a safe option to use? Incidents in Fukushima and Chernobyl have cast a very negative public view on nuclear usage. Marian believes that humanity improves its designs and processes through the direct result of encountering problems. “Adversity is how we as humans usually learn”
[25:00] Another issue on many minds is overpopulation. Is this going to be an issue in the near future?
[32:00] Marian and Mikhaila talked about misconceptions in trends, and now they take a look at real trends that may be very troubling for everyone if they continue. What trends would we be concerned with? Freedom of speech in western society is one area Tupy says they have been watching closely.
[37:30] Political correctness at its worst can even influence the science or technology a country invests in. Lysenkoism in the soviet union was an example of bad science because the Soviet government didn’t want research surrounding genetics as it was a politically incorrect subject for the time.
[42:00] Are monopolies operating in capitalist nations an issue?
[44:00] Positive trends in I.Q. from the nineteen hundreds to the early 2000s have added, on average, almost thirty I.Q points to the global population. It also appears the opportunity to use higher than average I.Q. to better oneself, and the world has never been at a higher point in history.
[52:00] Marian explains how the human life span is increasing, and not just the one percent. The average life span of the richest people in the nineteen hundreds was about 50 years.
[56:30] Infant mortality was dreadful even as recently as a few hundred years ago.
[58:00] Washing of hands was discovered not long ago; even the notion of germs is a completely modern concept.
[1:00:30] Find more of Marian Tupy at his website HumanProgress.org, a source that is always trying to provide positive stories of human triumph in a difficult world, and read his book Ten Global Trends to further investigate if what we are all assuming in the world is truly happening
Sunday 6 December 2020
More English Idioms - 5 - With Tenuous Links To London Locations
Another video about English language idioms and why we use them. This time Joolz shows you some interesting parts of London too as a tenuous link to some of the phrases that have crept into the language over the years.
Saturday 5 December 2020
Giuliani, TRUMP Legal Team Testify in GA.FULL 12/3/20
Giuliani, TRUMP Legal Team Testify in GA.FULL 12/3/20
Wednesday 2 December 2020
In full: Boris Johnson faces Sir Keir Starmer in PMQs as Pfizer Covid va...
Boris Johnson faces Sir Keir Starmer in Prime Minister's Questions as Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for UK use
Tuesday 1 December 2020
Plank Of The Week with Mike Graham (1st December 2020)
Mike Graham picks this week's biggest planks with Emily Carver and James Max.
29. Mystery Story / Narrative Tenses [Originally published in September ...
This podcast is about narrative tenses (past simple, past continuous, past perfect - see details below).
Saturday 28 November 2020
Rory Stewart: 'Covid could spell the end of Boris Johnson's premiership'...
Former prime ministerial candidate Rory Stewart has said the coronavirus pandemic could cost Boris Johnson his premiership, because grasping detail is his "greatest weakness".
Friday 27 November 2020
Pennsylvania GOP seeks to reclaim power to appoint electors; 5 ways Bide...
NTD Evening News- 11/27/2020
1. The Trump Family Reunites at Camp David
2. Trump: Hard to Concede Due to Fraud
3. Top Iranian Nuclear Scientist Killed
4. Michigan Complaint: Vote Counts ‘Not Normal’
5. Third Circuit Throws Out PA Lawsuit
6. 1.2M Pennsylvania Votes Could Be Fraudulent: Expert
7. Pennsylvania GOP Seeks to Appoint Electors
8. 5 Ways Biden Allegedly Crushed Vote Norms
9. Questionable Votes Exceed Margin: Analyst
10. Dominion Employee Worked for China Telecom
11. Why GA’s Audit Did Not Expose Problems
12. GOP Flips 3rd House Seat in California
13. LA Closes Indoor and Outdoor Dining for 3 Weeks
14. Schools Remove 5 Classic Novels From List
15. Holocaust Museum Gets Backlash for Exhibit
16. US Pushes for New Alliance Against China
17. HK Chief Uses Cash Due to US Sanction
18. Venezuela Resumes Oil Shipments to China
19. US to Blacklist 89 Chinese Companies
20. Black Friday Shopping in New York City
21. USPS Recommends Shipping Packages Early
22. Rapid Test Gets Orchestra Back to Work
23. Brexit: UK, EU Trade Talks Resume
24. Academic Foreigners Detained by Iran
25. Europe: This Christmas Is Different
26. Growing Trees in Preparation for Christmas
27. A French Church Organist at Play
Thursday 26 November 2020
In full: England's new tier system announced - London and Liverpool in T...
The announcement of tougher tier restrictions sees millions of people in England placed under the highest levels of restrictions. Manchester, Birmingham, Kent and parts of Essex have been placed on very high alert under Tier 3.
The Health Secretary is setting out which tier each local authority in England will fall under in Parliament, after the end of the national lockdown on December 2.
The system has been toughened from the previous regime, meaning more authorities will move into the higher tiers.
The new tier restrictions are listed below:
Tier 1: Medium alert
Isle of Wight
Cornwall
Isles of Scilly
Tier 2: High alert
Cumbria
Liverpool City Region
Warrington and Cheshire
York
North Yorkshire
West Midlands
Worcestershire
Herefordshire
Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin
Rutland
Northamptonshire
Suffolk
Hertfordshire
Cambridgeshire, including Peterborough
Norfolk
Essex, Thurrock and Southend on Sea
Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes
London (all 32 boroughs plus the City of London)
East Sussex
West Sussex
Brighton and Hove
Surrey
Reading
Wokingham
Bracknell Forest
Windsor and Maidenhead
West Berkshire
Hampshire (except the Isle of Wight), Portsmouth and Southampton
Buckinghamshire
Oxfordshire
South Somerset, Somerset West and Taunton, Mendip and Sedgemoor
Bath and North East Somerset
Dorset
Bournemouth
Christchurch
Poole
Gloucestershire
Wiltshire and Swindon
Devon
Tier 3: Very High alert
Tees Valley Combined Authority:
Hartlepool
Middlesbrough
Stockton-on-Tees
Redcar and Cleveland
Darlington
Sunderland
South Tyneside
Gateshead
Newcastle upon Tyne
North Tyneside
County Durham
Northumberland
Greater Manchester
Lancashire
Blackpool
Blackburn with Darwen
Yorkshire and The Humber
The Humber
West Yorkshire
South Yorkshire
Birmingham and Black Country
Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent
Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull
Derby and Derbyshire
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire
Leicester and Leicestershire
Lincolnshire
Slough (remainder of Berkshire is tier 2: High alert)
Kent and Medway
Bristol
South Gloucestershire
North Somerset
Wednesday 25 November 2020
Monday 23 November 2020
Sunday 22 November 2020
Marco Pierre White | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union
Marco Pierre White is a British chef, celebrity, restaurateur and television personality. He is noted for his contributions to contemporary British cuisine. White has been dubbed the first celebrity chef, and the enfant terrible of the UK restaurant scene. He was called the godfather of modern cooking by Australian MasterChef (Season 4, Episode 53). White was, at the time, the youngest chef ever to have been awarded three Michelin stars. He has trained chefs including Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone and Shannon Bennett.
Saturday 21 November 2020
Friday 20 November 2020
The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast #32 - Matthew McConaughey
Matthew McConaughey (actor, producer, and best-selling author of Greenlights) and I spoke about his new book “Greenlights”, and how to live a good life.
Thursday 19 November 2020
Watch again: Trump's legal team holds press conference about the election
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Attorney Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held a press conference on Thursday calling for 682,770 ballots to be thrown out in Pennsylvania due to voter fraud.
Philadelphia officials BLOCKED GOP election observers from observing the counting of ballots after election day.
Democrats were able to “find” one million ballots in the next 48 hours!
This was a stolen election and everyone knows it!
President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on Thursday aggressively made the case for the Trump campaign's legal challenge of the 2020 election results, alleging in a firery news conference that there was a "centralized" plan to carry out voter fraud around the country.
"What I’m describing to you is a massive fraud," Giuliani said at the Capitol Hill news conference with other members of Trump's legal team, who repeatedly lashed out the news media and accused them of treating their efforts unfairly.
At one point, Giuliani repeatedly told one member of the press, "you're lying."
The former New York City mayor spoke to incidents in Pennsylvania where Republican poll watchers claimed they were not allowed to observe the counting process because they were kept too far away. A judge had ruled in their favor and ordered that they be permitted six feet away from the counting at a center in Philadelphia, but that was overturned after officials appealed.
Giuliani also claimed that while Pennsylvania does not allow absentee voters to fix any errors with their ballots, some were given that opportunity -- but not those from Republican areas.
He cited sworn affidavits from cases in Pennsylvania and Michigan from poll workers who spoke about instructions from supervisors. One affidavit said that workers in Pennsylvania were instructed to assign ballots without names to random people, resulting in thousands of people in Pittsburgh showing up to the polls to find that votes had been cast in their names.
Another affidavit said that in Michigan a supervisor instructed workers to change the dates on absentee ballots to show that they arrived earlier than they had. An affidavit also claimed that workers were told not to request photo identification from Michigan voters, even though state law requires it.
Giuliani also said that approximately 100,000 absentee ballots in Wisconsin should have been deemed invalid because there were no applications for them. President-elect Joe Biden leads President Trump in that state by roughly 20,000 votes.
“If you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin," Giuliani said.
Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis explained the lack of new evidence at the news conference to support their allegations by saying this was merely an "opening statement," and that more evidence would be forthcoming in court.
Giuliani also said that more lawsuits could be coming in Arizona and potentially New Mexico, where Trump trails Biden by nearly 100,000 votes. He also said a challenge could come in Virginia, where Biden leads by almost 500,000 votes, if they believe they could overcome that deficit.
Wednesday 18 November 2020
'Greenland': Film Review | Hollywood Reporter
'Greenland': Film Review | Hollywood Reporter
'Greenland': Film Review
by Jordan Mintzer
Gerard Butler stars in GREENLAND
Courtesy of STXfilms
'Greenland,' a Gerard Butler action movie, was the first film Anton fully financed and produced
A gritty doomsday flick that’s mostly down-to-earth.
Gerard Butler stars in Ric Roman Waugh's apocalyptic thriller, which was released theatrically overseas and will roll out on Premium VOD in the U.S. starting mid-December.
From quarantines to climate change to the Boogaloo Bois, it feels like we’re living in the midst of a real-life disaster movie. So who, in that case, actually wants to go and watch a disaster movie?
And yet, Greenland, the latest action vehicle to feature Gerard Butler in raging midlife crisis mode, offers up the kind of doomsday catharsis that the world perhaps needs. It’s premise may be a bit second- or third-grade-ish — Butler has to save his family from a comet threatening to destroy all of humanity — but the gritty verisimilitude that the star and director Ric Roman Waugh bring to the table goes a long way in making this B-level blockbuster a timely and guilty pleasure.
Released over the past months in a few dozen foreign territories, where the moderately budgeted production has so far grossed just under $28 million, the movie’s domestic theatrical plans were recently scrapped by STXfilm for a Premium VOD strategy, making it available for download by mid-December. Such a move will likely deal another blow to U.S. cinemas in desperate need of Sturm und Drang spectacles like this one, where the end of the world can be both terrifying and pretty awesome to behold.
Like a Roland Emmerich movie made with less money, bombast and in-your-face patriotism, Greenland is a darker and more ground-level experience, only really going big when it needs to (and can afford it). If anything, if feels closer to a film like World War Z than to giant-rocks-destroying-the-planet flicks like Armageddon or Deep Impact (the latter, directed by Mimi Leder, still holds up rather well), with set-pieces that play as unnervingly real no matter how improbable they may be.
At the center of all the mayhem is Butler, playing a middle-aged construction manager named John Garrity who’s been kicked out of the house by his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and could use either a stiff drink or a prescription for beta-blockers, or probably both. The only thing keeping John from going off the deep end is his son, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd), who’s about to celebrate a birthday party at the couple’s picturesque suburban home — well, in John’s former home.
That party comes to a quick and teary-eyed end with the arrival of Clarke, a comet passing dangerously close to earth that leaves multiple fragments crashing into the atmosphere, sending one of several shockwaves straight into John’s messy life. Soon the family is rushing together toward a military evacuation zone — as an expert at building skyscrapers, John has been selected by the U.S. government for survival — facing tons of obstacles along the way, with pieces of Clarke raining down at untold intervals and wiping out entire cities. (For some reason, Tampa is the first to go.)
Waugh and screenwriter Chris Sparling (The Sea of Trees) do a terrific job teasing out the action in ever-increasing waves of fury, starting relatively small and then pulling out the big guns in the final act. News coverage, radio reports and other official messages lend an eerie, realistic air to the proceedings, beginning with the fact that experts seem to fully underestimate the scope of the calamity, until it’s too late and people are out raiding supermarket shelves or otherwise scrambling for their lives. Sound familiar?
Separated from his wife and son about a third of the way into the plot, John spends much of the film trying to make his way back to them, at one point traveling like a refugee in a truck headed for the Canadian border that doesn’t wind up going very far. Meanwhile, Allison and Nathan get picked up by a creepy Southern couple (David Denman, Hope Davis) who looks like they’re on their way to an Evangelical revival meeting and take way too much interest in Nathan’s future.
If it’s fairly obvious where Greenland is going from there, with all the requisite stumbling blocks en route to a treacly and hopeful finale, Waugh’s attention to detail makes this effort more than mere catastrophe porn.
The images of social breakdown — whether rioting, looting or, in one memorable scene, a bunch of millennials celebrating the mass destruction at a rooftop kegger — are telling in how they appear to be torn from the here and now. Likewise, the way the 24-hour news cycle covers events, with catchy on-screen tags like “Clarke’s Planet Killer,” underline how easily the end of the world is transformed into a spectacle that can both decimate us and serve as infotainment.
While Butler has headlined these kind of scenarios before, such as in the much less notable Geostorm, or else in the Olympus Has Fallen series — the third and best installment of which was directed by Waugh, a former stuntman whose other credits include taut thrillers like Snitch and Shot Caller — here he plays an ordinary hero whose only major skill seems to be his ability to competently drive SUVs, pickup trucks and other giant gas guzzlers. Still, this is one of his better recent performances, perhaps because he’s particularly convincing as a paunchy desperate husband who seems to be just one custody battle away from having a massive coronary.
The other key turn comes from Scott Glenn as Allison’s crusty rancher dad, Dale, a man who welcomes the apocalypse with ample supplies of sangfroid and Maker’s Mark. The calm interlude that takes place on Dale’s horse farm offers John and his family a bit of respite before a race-against-the-clock denouement that provides the film’s most daunting set-piece, when an interstate highway is suddenly pummeled by comet debris.
Such sequences remind us of why we love disaster movies in the first place: They dish out sensational depictions of earth-shattering events that we can relish from the safety of our seats (or, in the case of most U.S. audiences now, from our couches). And yet, what makes Greenland stand out is how, at certain times, what we’re watching doesn’t seem so spectacular, but very much like the real thing — albeit with a fair amount of VFX and Butler’s own brand of sweaty, stress-bucket bravado. Both of those are to be expected in this type of mid-sized blockbuster, while what sticks in your mind most about Greenland are those moments when it doesn’t feel like a movie at all.
Production companies: STXfilms, G-BASE, Anton, Thunder Road Pictures
Distributor: STXfilms
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, David Denman, Hope Davis, Roger Dale Floyd, Andrew Bachelor, Merrin Dungey, with Holt McCallany, and Scott Glenn
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Screenwriter: Chris Sparling
Producers: Gerard Butler, Basil Iwanyk, Sébastien Raybaud, Alan Siegel
Executive producers: Nik Bower, Brendon Boyea, Alastair Burlingham, Jonathan Fuhrman, Carsten H.W. Lorenz, Deppak Nayar, Danielle Robinson, Harold van Lier, John Zois
Director of photography: Dana Gonzalez
Production designer: Clay A. Griffith
Costume designer: Kelli Jones
Editor: Gabriel Fleming
Composer: David Buckley
Casting directors: Mary Vernieu, Michelle Wade Byrd
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/greenland-film-review
Tuesday 17 November 2020
Kim Guilfoyle: The people, not the media, decide an election
National Chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee and Senior Advisor for the Trump Reelection Campaign Kimberly Guilfoyle comments on the president's legal efforts to make sure every legal vote is counted!
BREAKING: Michigan's largest county refuses to certify election results
The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked 2-2, with both Republican members refusing to certify the results after discrepancies were discovered in absentee ballot poll books. Similar problems were discovered in the county's summer primary and the November 2016 election but did not impact the board's vote then.
Chairwoman Monica Palmer, a Republican, said the refusal to certify results was based on the fact that she and her GOP colleague "believe that we do not have complete and accurate information in those poll books."
Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser for the Trump campaign, immediately hailed the decision, telling a Just the News-Real America's Voice special on Tuesday night that it could impact the entire state of Michigan's ability to certify the results.
"WHY DO YOU CENSOR US?" Ted Cruz SLAMS Twitter And Facebook During Elect...
Republicans put Facebook and Twitter to the question on censorship and the future of social media
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey again testified before the Senate.
Senate Republicans grilled the heads of Facebook and Twitter at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on big tech censorship in the 2020 presidential election Tuesday, calling into question the tech companies' content moderation policies and threatening government action to end perceived bias against right-leaning points of view on their platforms.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey faced questions on their content moderation enforcement, on examples of apparent bias against President Donald Trump's supporters and conservatives, and what the role of government should be in regulating social media platforms. Republicans came prepared with specific examples of censorship, asking about the suppression of the New York Post's Hunter Biden reports, about social media posts challenging the official results of the presidential election being flagged as misinformation, and more.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Facebook and Twitter's content moderation enforcement has convinced him to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that protects internet companies from being liable for content posted on their platforms by third parties.
Citing the suppression of the New York Post's articles, Graham accused Twitter and Facebook of exerting "editorial control" over the paper.
"What I want to try to find out is, if you're not a newspaper at Twitter or Facebook, then why do you have editorial control over the New York Post?" Graham said during his opening statement.
"They decided, and maybe for a good reason, I don't know, that the New York Post articles about Hunter Biden needed to be flagged, excluded from distribution or made hard to find. That to me seems like you're the ultimate editor," Graham continued.
"The editorial decision at the New York Post to run the story was overridden by Twitter and Facebook in different fashions to prevent its dissemination. Now if that's not making an editorial decision, I don't know what would be."
Whether Facebook and Twitter make editorial decisions by moderating content on their platforms is crucial to the debate on how government should regulate big tech. If these social media companies are providing platforms for people to use, then they are protected under Section 230 and they can't be sued, for example, for slanderous content posted by a third party that appears on their website. However, if they are making editorial decisions about the content they host on their websites, then Republicans argue they are behaving like publishers and as such would not be protected by Section 230.
Questions for Dorsey from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) focused directly on this distinction, citing Twitter's misinformation label on tweets about voter fraud as an example of an editorial action that would suggest Twitter is behaving like a publisher.
Cruz asked Dorsey directly, "Is Twitter a publisher?"
"No, we are not, we distribute information," Dorsey replied.
Reading from Section 230, Cruz defined a publisher as "any person or entity that is responsible in whole or in part for the creation or development of information provided through the internet or any other interactive computer service," then asked Dorsey if Twitter acted as a publisher by censoring the New York Post.
Again, Dorsey said Twitter is not a publisher but that it has policies and terms of service that users agree to abide by with enforcement action taken against users who violate the agreement. But Cruz accused Twitter of applying its policies "in a partisan and selective manner," criticizing Twitter for enforcing its "hacked materials" policy against the New York Post but neglecting to do so against other news outlets that reported news obtained from "hacked materials."
Continuing, Cruz said Twitter has a "star-chamber power" over speech on its platform and accused the company of making "publishing decisions" by putting warnings on statements about voter fraud that state, "Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the United States."
"That's taking a disputed policy position, and you're a publisher when you're doing that," Cruz charged.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also raised concerns about what he called Twitter and Facebook's "distinctly partisan approach" to moderating content on their websites. Citing about an incident in October when Twitter locked U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan's account, flagging as hate speech a seemingly benign tweet about how new wall on the southern border "helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country," Lee asked why the tweet was censored.
"We evaluated his tweet and we found that we were wrong. … That was a mistake; we reverted it," Dorsey explained. But Lee expected this answer.
"What we're going to see today is that mistakes happen a whole lot more, almost entirely on one side of the political aisle rather than the other," he said before turning to Zuckerberg and asking why Facebook "stunningly" took almost two weeks to unblock an advertisement from the Susan B. Anthony List that a third-party fact-checker mistakenly said was "partly false."
"I'm not familiar with the details of us re-enabling that ad ... it's possible that this was just a mistake or a delay," Zuckerberg said.
"I appreciate your acknowledgement of that the fact that there are mistakes. As I noted previously, those mistake sure happen a whole lot more on one side of the political spectrum than the other," Lee said. Noting that more than 90% of employees at both Twitter and Facebook donated to Democratic candidates, Lee wondered aloud if those political biases affect the apparent one-sided nature of big tech's "mistakes."
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) picked up this line of questioning, inquiring about the political leanings of Facebook and Twitter employees and asking if it's possible there's "systemic bias" within these companies.
"I do think it's undisputed that our employee base, at least the full-time folks, politically would be somewhat or maybe more than just a little somewhat to the left of where our overall community is," Zuckerberg said, acknowledging that his company likely leans farther left than the average American Facebook user.
Zuckerberg did point out that it employs 35,000 content moderators in locations around the nation, not just in Silicon Valley, and that it would be incorrect to assume that they all are biased against Republicans.
Dorsey said political biases are not something his company would "interview for" before acknowledging that most people perceive that his company leans left and judge Twitter's intentions based on that perception.
"If people don't trust our intent, if people are questioning that, that's a failure and that is something we need to fix and intend to fix," Dorsey said.
Sasse did break with his colleagues and express skepticism about having the federal government take action to regulate social media in response to bias.
"I especially think it's odd that so many in my party are zealous to do this right now when you would have an incoming administration of the other party that would be writing the rules and regulations about it," he said.
His final question inquired about where Zuckerberg and Dorsey see the future of content moderation going over the next three or five years if the government does not act.
Zuckerberg said Facebook will increase its focus on transparency. He said Facebook has "already committed to an independent external audit" of its content moderation enforcement metrics and suggested that such a review could be part of a government regulatory framework created by Congress.
Dorsey said that a "centralized global content moderation system does not scale" and said tech companies need to "rethink" how they operate content moderation. He suggested a decentralized approach that gives users more choice about how they interact on social media.
"Having more control so that individuals can moderate themselves, pushing the power of moderation to the edges and to our customers, and to the individuals using the service is something we'll see more of," Dorsey said. "Having more choice around how algorithms are altering my experience and creating my experience is important."
https://www.theblaze.com/republicans-put-facebook-and-twitter-to-the-question-on-censorship-and-the-future-of-social-media
Monday 16 November 2020
Sunday 15 November 2020
Saturday 14 November 2020
Friday 13 November 2020
Thursday 12 November 2020
Wednesday 11 November 2020
Monday 9 November 2020
Sunday 8 November 2020
Saturday 7 November 2020
Friday 6 November 2020
Thursday 5 November 2020
Wednesday 4 November 2020
Tuesday 3 November 2020
Monday 2 November 2020
Saturday 31 October 2020
Wednesday 28 October 2020
Tuesday 27 October 2020
Monday 26 October 2020
Sunday 25 October 2020
Saturday 24 October 2020
Thursday 22 October 2020
Wednesday 21 October 2020
Tuesday 20 October 2020
Monday 19 October 2020
Saturday 17 October 2020
Friday 16 October 2020
Wednesday 14 October 2020
Tuesday 13 October 2020
Monday 12 October 2020
Sunday 11 October 2020
Saturday 10 October 2020
Tuesday 6 October 2020
Saturday 3 October 2020
Friday 2 October 2020
Wednesday 30 September 2020
Tuesday 29 September 2020
Monday 28 September 2020
Sunday 27 September 2020
Friday 25 September 2020
Tuesday 22 September 2020
Monday 21 September 2020
Sunday 20 September 2020
Saturday 19 September 2020
Wednesday 16 September 2020
Monday 14 September 2020
Saturday 12 September 2020
Thursday 10 September 2020
Saturday 5 September 2020
Friday 4 September 2020
Thursday 3 September 2020
Saturday 22 August 2020
Wednesday 19 August 2020
Thursday 13 August 2020
Monday 10 August 2020
Sunday 9 August 2020
Thursday 6 August 2020
Monday 3 August 2020
Friday 31 July 2020
Thursday 30 July 2020
Wednesday 29 July 2020
Tuesday 28 July 2020
Monday 27 July 2020
Sunday 26 July 2020
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)