Florida curtails reporting of coronavirus death numbers by county medical examiners
David Knowles

https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-curtails-reporting-of-coronavirus-death-numbers-by-county-medical-examiners-173503327.html

Yahoo NewsMay 1, 2020, 12:35 PM CDT


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The death count compiled by the Medical Examiners Commission was often found to be higher than the figures provided by Florida’s Department of Health, the Tampa Bay Times reported, prompting a review of the data and a suspension of its publication.

State officials have not specified what they find objectionable about the medical examiners’ count, nor when they might allow it to be made public again, the Times said.

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Dr. Stephen Nelson, chairman of the state Medical Examiners Commission, told the Tampa Bay Times that state officials informed him that they would remove the cause of death and a description of each case from statistics published by the examiners.

“This is no different than any other public record we deal with,” Nelson said. “It’s paid for by taxpayer dollars and the taxpayers have a right to know.”

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Guy To Travel Around Florida Dressed As The Grim Reaper To The Beaches That Opened Prematurely

Jonas Grinevičius and Ilona Baliūnaitė

Imagine you’re at the beach enjoying the waves washing over your feet and the sun warming your skin. That’s when you notice a tall, black-robed figure with a scythe out of the corner of your eye. You take a better look and that’s when you realize it’s the Grim Reaper!



Florida lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder plans to travel around his state beaches from May 1 to warn people about the dangers of not social distancing—all dressed up as the Grim Reaper. Uhlfelder was quite obviously inspired to do this by New Zealand’s public service campaign where a person dresses up as the infamous Swim Reaper to promote water safety and tries to prevent deaths from drowning.

While Uhlfelder’s main message is to make sure that Floridians know how important it is to stay at home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, he also plans to use his Reaper get-up to raise money for Democrats running for federal office.

https://swimreaper.co.nz/

Adm. Michael M. Gilday appears determined that his recommendations on the Roosevelt case will be made based on Navy principles and not on fears of what the White House might want.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/politics/coronavirus-carrier-crozier-gilday-trump.html

WASHINGTON —

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In recommending the reinstatement of the captain of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral Michael M. Gilday put the Navy before his own career.Credit...Mark Makela/Getty Images


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The admiral, who took a bold step last week — recommending that the captain of a virus-stricken aircraft carrier be restored to command after he was removed by the service’s senior civilian — was plucked from the military’s Joint Staff last July to take over a scandal-plagued sea service, leapfrogging several more senior four-star officers.

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Now, just as with Captain Crozier, Admiral Gilday’s fate is up in the air, current and former officials say, as the Pentagon tries to divine what, exactly, President Trump wants it to do. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper declined to endorse Admiral Gilday’s recommendations, and a final decision was kicked down the road when James E. McPherson, the new acting Navy secretary, ordered up another investigation. The Navy said Thursday it would be completed by May 27.

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Indeed, colleagues and friends say he is a sailor’s admiral — a quiet, self-effacing, no-nonsense officer who is comfortable in his own skin making what might be politically unpopular decisions.

“He is a high-speed intellect with low-drag ego, which is a very rare quality at the upper echelons of any government,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and former NATO commander. Admiral Stavridis, who commanded Admiral Gilday at NATO, said of him, “At 5-foot-6 and balding, Admiral Gilday hardly resembles the stereotypical tall, silver-haired admiral.”

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Admiral Gilday faces challenges beyond the Roosevelt case.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

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“And that’s a really difficult leadership challenge,” Admiral Mullen said, adding, “I think Mike Gilday is the right guy to lead in all of this.”

Amid a Rising Death Toll, Trump Leaves the Grieving to Others

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-grieving.html

President Trump has led no national mourning for the more than 63,000 Americans who have died from the coronavirus, emphasizing confidence about the future rather than dwelling on the present.

By Peter Baker

April 30, 2020

WASHINGTON —

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Empathy has never been considered one of Mr. Trump’s political assets. He views public displays of sadness as weakness and has made a point of stressing resolve, even at the risk of overlooking the deep pain afflicting so much of the country. His favorite words in his televised appearances of recent weeks are “powerful” and “strong.” He talks of “incredible” days ahead without dwelling on the miserable days of now. He plans fireworks while Americans plan funerals.

The contrast with his predecessors could hardly be starker. President Ronald Reagan captured the emotions of the nation with his poetic eulogy to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger after it exploded. President Bill Clinton channeled the country’s anger and grief after the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building 25 years ago.

President George W. Bush shed tears and shared hugs with the families of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the famously stoic President Barack Obama wept openly after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and sang “Amazing Grace” at a service for black churchgoers killed by a white supremacist in Charleston, S.C.

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Indeed, Mr. Trump appears reluctant to talk about the more than 63,000 people who have died in the United States from the coronavirus. He mentioned a few times that a friend of his, Stanley Chera, a major New York real estate developer, had been infected and later died, but did not dwell on it for long. In response to a question this week, the president said that he had also lost a few other friends and had spoken with families of other victims, but he quickly shifted the conversation to distance learning for children.

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white guys who face a superficial sort of "discrimination" and who who winge over their discrimination in my mind trivializes the experience of discrimination that starts with where one lives, what stores one shops, the way shop keepers, landlords, bosses look at and treat their employees of color, where one goes to school, the quality of that education, how cops look at someone, how different the "justice" is for one class of humans vs another based on prejudice and race, that's real.

It is NOT the same as mean tricks like hiding time cards, calling someone "whiteboy" etc. Not even close.

One of Geology’s Great Mysteries May Actually Be Many Smaller Mysteries

The “Great Unconformity” is a big chunk of missing deep time.

by Isaac Schultz April 28, 2020

The discrepancy pops up in the Grand Canyon, where ancient rock abuts, well, less ancient rock.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/great-unconformity-geology-mystery?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e5baa3a88a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-e5baa3a88a-68943029&mc_cid=e5baa3a88a&mc_eid=82460330cc

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It’s called the “Great Unconformity,” and it has long vexed geologists from Nevada to Scotland. Geology is often the study of layers, set one on top of each other for billions of years and compressed into sequences that provide geologists insight into how the Earth has evolved through the eons. Under the best circumstances, that sequence is more or less uninterrupted, but there can be gaps—sometimes big ones, like the Great Unconformity, which can be seen all over, from the Rockies to southern Africa to northern China. This gap spans one of the murkier periods in Earth’s history, before the Cambrian explosion, around 540 million years ago, when the diversity of life on Earth went wild.

Erosion is one natural process that wears layers away from the stack of geological deposits, but how so much was wiped out across such a wide range of places in one go has remained unknown. Even the unconformity isn’t uniform, ranging in scale from over a billion years of missing time to a mere couple hundred million. In the Grand Canyon, the timeframe of the unconformity jumps multiple times along its length.

According to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there’s evidence that this erosion didn’t all happen at once. There might have been many events involved—lots of little unconformities—the origins of which can be traced to about a billion years ago on the supercontinent Rodinia, a landmass three times as old as the supercontinent Pangea that broke up to form the world as we know it.

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At Manitou Springs, Colorado, one can clearly see a line between layers of rock that differ in age by hundreds of millions of years. Courtesy Christine Siddoway

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The unconformity has recently been associated with the theory of “Snowball Earth,” which posits that the planet froze over entirely around 700 million years ago, following Rodinia’s formation. The thought is that glaciation during the snowball years ground away rock all over the world, creating the gap in geological time. The Cambrian explosion followed, and can be seen clearly in the layers that eventually went down over the gap. Flowers’s recent work suggests that the unconformity her team analyzed, near Pike’s Peak in Colorado, was caused by erosion related to tectonic movement that preceded Snowball Earth.

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by whites. The discrimination you and I got was a situational thing. It happens. The discrimination a PoC gets started before they were born and goes on every day regardless of affirmative action, busing or any other kind of program and it goes on to where they can be buried and will be passed on to their kids.

What you and I got is nothing. Water off our backs - petty maybe but minor and not life threatening.

I'd much rather white and discriminated against than face the discrimination any person of any color faces. Too bad you missed the learning moment of your experience: what it felt like form your minor minimal experience and developed a little empathy. That fact you've felt it for sooo long and did not get any more lesson about racism and discrimination and the fact you don't get your white privilege in that you could move away from it is astounding. PoC get to carry their being discriminated against every where they go. They will never ever be able to move away from it like you did.

You lost the opportunity to learn from your experience and get past black and white which I guarantee would have happened if you would have stuck it out and learned about people and gave them an opportunity to learn about you.

He does these live at fund raisers and auctions them off.

Video Shows California Cop Pinning, Punching 14-Year-Old

Sen. Kamala Harris said the clip shows a “horrific abuse of power” by the Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rancho-cordova-police-officer-beating-14-year-old-boy_n_5ea92878c5b6fb98a2b500e7

By Dominique Mosbergen

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The video, first posted to Twitter by a person who identified herself as the boy’s sister, shows a white officer hitting the boy, who is Black, as he attempts to detain him. The officer, who is much bigger than the teen, appears to strike the boy repeatedly with a closed fist, push his face into the ground and yank him roughly by the arm.

In a follow-up tweet, the Twitter user said the teen has “a serious heart condition that could be triggered very easily by being hit in his chest/back! He’s a kid and has never been in any kind of trouble with the law!”

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The Rancho Cordova Police Department and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said in a joint statement that the officer was responding to complaints of alcohol, tobacco and drug sales to minors on Monday when he “saw what he believed to be a hand-to-hand exchange between an adult and juvenile.” The deputy was assigned to work with the police department under the city’s contract for police services.

The teen later admitted to KTXL-TV that he had asked a stranger to purchase tobacco for him and had it in his hand when the officer approached. He said he immediately handed over the cigar, but the cop became confrontational anyway.

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