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richardmurray

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    #NY1 great interview with  @bcuza #ny1politics @insidecityhall  Albert fox 
    MTS safety has not increased, it is perceptions of negativity that have increased. New Yorkers, wake up

    Albert Fox Cahn talks about MTA’s new plans
    By Deanna Garcia New York City
    PUBLISHED 9:20 PM ET Sep. 29, 2022
    MTA will install two surveillance cameras inside every subway car over the next three years and begin phasing out MetroCards early next year. 

    Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a civil rights and privacy group, joined Bobby Cuza on “Inside City Hall” Thursday to talk more about MTA’s new plans. 

    “The problem is, people don’t feel safer even when they are safer. But the camera’s aren’t going to solve that,” he said. Cameras are not helpful for investigations and are “terrible” at deterring crime, he said. 

    “So what you’re going to see is subways where people feel even more at risk because you have even more images of crimes that take place, even as crime rates continue to go down,” Cahn said.
    Article with Video
    https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/inside-city-hall/2022/09/30/albert-fox-cahn-talks-about-mta-s-new-plans

     

    The view to incarceration is similar to those who few public transit a hazard.  

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    Illinois To END Cash Bail, Critics Say 'SAFE-T Act' Will Cause More Crime: Olayemi & Robby Debate
    video 


    A new Yorker who is honest and exposes the truth. Like many issues, when the goal for some is 100% and every negative instance becomes the standard, you get a false narrative.
    NYC has over ten million people. The public transit system is safe for over 95% of these people every day for 365 days. 5% or less deal with incidents and the media to sensationalize plus people who want zero negative incidents cause they have been hurt and feel fear or feel their safety demands no incidents proclaim terror throughout the city.

    https://twitter.com/errollouis/status/1579626913496461313


    the problem is a large percentage of people in NYC itself, not the majority, for various reasons will accept nothing but 0% incidents to admit they are safe or comfortable and that is impossible in a city of over nine million people, so inevitable cries of fear

     

    People in the USA talk about justice or the rule of law alot, talk about financial honesty a lot and yet the fiscal truth or legal truth of the usa is always the consistency of the powerful to maintain control and benefit with no penalty side a media presentation of acceptance

    How $600 billion was stolen from the American people
    By James Bovard
    “COVID fraud” is at this point a redundant phrase. Congress appropriated more than $5 trillion for COVID relief but almost $600 billion may have been lost to fraud — an astounding 12%. Washington’s pandemic pratfalls are the greatest federal boondoggle of this century.

    Prosecutors are having a turkey shoot nailing COVID crooks: More than 1,500 have been indicted and almost 500 have been convicted. On September 14, the Justice Department announced the creation of three COVID-19 fraud strike force teams.

    When President Biden recently signed a law to extend the time to prosecute COVID fraud, he declared, “My message to those cheats out there is this: You can’t hide. We’re going to find you.” But the sheer amount of fraud makes it unlikely that the vast majority of thieves will be charged.

    Policymakers acted as if waiving standard federal fraud protections would somehow thwart the COVID virus. On September 22, the Labor Department inspector general estimated that COVID-19 unemployment fraud amounted to $45 billion and could exceed $163 billion. “Overseas organized crime groups flooded state unemployment systems with bogus online claims, overwhelming antiquated computer software benefits in blunt-force attacks that siphoned out millions of dollars,” NBC News reported.

    Prison inmates, drug gangs and Nigerian racketeers easily plundered the program. One swindler collected unemployment benefits from 29 different states. In the first year of the pandemic, Maryland detected more than 1.3 million fraudulent unemployment claims — equal to 20% of the state’s population.

    Beginning in June 2020, the feds distributed $813 billion in Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses. President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin boasted that PPP is “supporting an estimated 50 million jobs.” But many of those jobs existed solely in the imagination of political appointees.

    The Small Business Administration (SBA), which administered the program, effectively told people, “Apply and sign and tell us that you’re really entitled to the money,” according to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The SBA camouflaged its “don’t ask, don’t tell” loan standard by claiming to perform economic miracles. The SBA ludicrously boasted that PPP loans saved more jobs than the total number of employees in at least 15 industries.

    Yet CBS News found that PPP loans had gone to more than a thousand “ghost businesses” in Markham, Illinois — indicative of a nationwide problem of deluging non-existent companies with federal cash. The feds gave “loans to 342 people who said their name was ‘N/A,’” the New York Times reported.

    Fraud permeated relief programs of practically every federal agency that gushered money. On September 20, the feds charged 47 people in Minnesota with looting $250 million from the federal child nutrition programs’ COVID aid. Prosecutors denounced the “brazen scheme of staggering proportions” but federal and state bureaucrats should have stopped the pilfering from the start. “Feeding Our Future,” a nonprofit organization, pocketed $300,000 in subsidies in 2018 and a windfall of almost $200 million in 2021. Fraud snowballed because the US Department of Agriculture issued waivers to “suspend all on-site monitoring of providers” of children’s meals.

    Instead of feeding hungry kids, tax dollars were pilfered using a list of phony recipients generated by the website listofrandomnames.com. (No wonder Feeding Our Future wasn’t invited to attend Biden’s White House Summit on Hunger last week.) When the state of Minnesota sought to cut off funding, Feeding Our Future sued, claiming the action “discriminated against a nonprofit that worked with racial minorities,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. Leftist firebrand Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) received thousands of dollars in donations from individuals indicted in the scandal.

    Fighting fraud is tricky for federal investigators when some politicians openly used COVID stimulus money to bribe voters. In the January 2021 Georgia runoff race for US Senate, the campaign of Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock distributed fliers declaring, “Want a $2,000 Check? Vote Warnock.” That promise helped Warnock win, sealing Democratic control of the Senate and opening the floodgates for trillions of dollars of additional Biden administration spending.

    .@KLoeffler isn't in D.C. fighting for a $2,000 relief check. She's on the campaign trail, trying desperately to save her own job.

    She’s fighting for herself. I’ll fight for you. pic.twitter.com/uS5lx4on9B

    — Reverend Raphael Warnock (@ReverendWarnock) January 1, 2021
    The single biggest COVID fraud will never show up in triumphal press releases issued by federal prosecutors. On August 24, Biden invoked the COVID-19 emergency to justify canceling $400 billion in student loans. A few weeks ago, Biden told “60 Minutes” that the pandemic was over — thus invalidating his justification for loan forgiveness.

    But Team Biden signaled that it was entitled to spend hundreds of billions of tax dollars to purchase Democratic votes in the midterm congressional elections regardless of the president’s admission.

    Plenty of scoundrels will be convicted in the coming months for stealing COVID money. But it was the politicians of both parties who unleashed the reckless spending that left us with a soaring national debt, roaring inflation, and a fading mirage of prosperity.

    Americans should never permit politicians to absolve themselves by uncorking geysers of tax dollars.

    Article

    https://nypost.com/2022/10/02/how-600-billion-was-stolen-from-the-american-people/

     

    Would you want this?

    Their Loved Ones Died. Preserved Tattoos Offer a Way to Keep Them Close.
    Laws in most states allow mourners to remove and preserve tattoos as memorial works of art. An Ohio company, Save My Ink Forever, is the pioneer.

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    Kyle Sherwood, left, and his father, Mike Sherwood, started Save My Ink Forever, which helps families preserve the tattoos of loved ones who have died.Credit...Daniel Lozada for The New York Times

    By McKenna Oxenden
    Published Oct. 8, 2022
    Updated Oct. 12, 2022, 3:15 p.m. ET
    Jonathan Gil knew he would never forget the details of the day his 24-year-old twin brother died in a boating accident on Lake Hopatcong in northern New Jersey — the frantic phone call from a friend, the dire search by rescuers and the dread of breaking the grim news to his mother.

    But Mr. Gil worried that as the months and years wore on, the memories he held of Jason beyond that tragic day would begin to fade. His family’s solution: Preserve a part of his brother.

    Now, anytime he seeks a quick reminder of his twin, Mr. Gil glances past a collage of photos to a shelf next to his desk that acts as an altar, where the tattoo of a black and white skull and three roses, lifted and preserved on skin from Jason’s left shoulder, sits protected in a frame.

    “We have his ashes, but with that you don’t see a physical part of him,” said Mr. Gil, 27. “But with the tattoo, you can. It’s nice to have a little piece of him, like you’re holding him close in one way or another and keeping him around.”

    The preserved tattoo is the work of the company Save My Ink Forever, started in 2016 in Northfield, Ohio, by Kyle Sherwood, a third-generation mortician, and his father, Mike.

    While limited attempts to preserve tattoos stretch back for decades, few other companies globally are doing the same work as Mr. Sherwood, who started his business at the nexus of two growing trends: More Americans are getting inked, and the idea of turning loved ones’ remains into keepsakes is surging in popularity. Some mourners are having cremated remains made into jewelry or infused into glass-blown sculptures — all in the name of keeping a loved one close.

    More mourners are also asking funeral homes about this service, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Walker Posey, a funeral home director and spokesman for the association, said more than half of his roughly 400 clients inquire each year about the keepsakes. That is a sharp increase from five years ago, when clients seldom made such requests. Funeral laws in 49 states — the exception is Washington — allow the tattoo preservation practice.

    And a record three in 10 Americans have at least one tattoo, according to a 2019 Ipsos poll, with the popularity of permanent ink continuing to grow among young people.

    The idea of keeping a beloved relative’s tattooed skin and hanging it on a wall may be hard for some to imagine. But families who have worked with the Sherwoods say it brings comfort and emphasized that a person’s tattoos often carry great meaning.

    Margie Gatehouse, of Salt Lake City, said that as her husband was dying of cirrhosis this past spring, her daughters approached her with the idea of preserving his tattoo. She was stunned at the suggestion.

    “I thought it was morbid and thought that it wasn’t even possible,” Ms. Gatehouse, 52, said. “How could you cut something off someone?”

    Her daughters, Courtney and Nichole, explained to their mother that their father was on board and that they had found Save My Ink Forever. They asked her to imagine how special it would be to have the black-and-white skull tattoo that has a ribbon with their names on it framed and preserved for years to come. She reluctantly agreed.

    Now, Ms. Gatehouse says she couldn’t be more grateful that she listened to her daughters as the frame, which hangs in her living room, continues to connect her to her husband.

    “I’m glad that I didn’t miss the opportunity,” she said.

    Historians trace the rise of tattoo preservation to the mid-to-late 19th century. Fukushi Masaichi, a Japanese physician, is credited as one of the pioneers in the field, said Karly Etz, a postdoctoral associate at the Rochester Institute of Technology who studies tattoo art history.

    While the concept of saving loved ones’ tattoos had been around in fits and starts, Mr. Sherwood sought a way to perfect the preservation process while treating the tattoo as a work of art, ironing out the details for two years.

    When Save My Ink Forever receives a request to preserve a tattoo, the company sends a package of materials to the funeral home for the tattoo to be excised. Morticians are directed through an instructional video to remove only the necessary amount of skin needed to preserve the tattoo. The process is “really hard to screw up,” Mr. Sherwood said. If something does go awry, he said, his team can usually fix it.

    The mortician places the tattoo into a preservative. It then is shipped to Ohio for the team of about five people to clean, trim excess skin and fix any blemishes.

    Sometimes, the skin is damaged. Or in the case of the waterlogged skin of Mr. Gil’s twin, extra care is required to bring the tattoo back to its original glory.

    “It’s sort of like cleaning a dirty window,” Mr. Sherwood said, emphasizing that his team does not alter the tattoo in any way. He declined to divulge further details of the process, which takes about three to four months per tattoo.

    Finally, the tattoo gets a frame. Families pick the type of frame and matting and then a professional framer gets started. Each tattoo is sewn to the canvas and the frame is pumped with nitrogen to help keep it pristinely preserved as museum-grade UV blocking glass is inserted into place.

    In order to have the materials to perfect the science, Mr. Sherwood came up with the idea to pay for people’s tummy tuck procedures, which remove excess skin and fat, in exchange for being able to practice on that discarded skin.

    The cost can range from about $1,700 for a small, 5 inch by 5 inch tattoo, to more than $120,000 to preserve an entire body suit.

    Mr. Sherwood said while some people may find his business outlandish, he takes pride in being able to give people a long-lasting physical memory of their loved one.

    The mortician recalled the case of one man who had a tattoo with both of his daughters’ names in a heart. The family contemplated whether to save the tattoo, but Mr. Sherwood suggested cutting it in half in the style of a friendship necklace, so each daughter would have a piece of their father with them.

    In another instance, he helped a grieving mother keep her son’s memory alive after he was murdered. The tattoo had “Papa Eddie” written in a scroll with a fishing rod, in honor of his grandfather, and had been inked by the man’s uncle, who had also died. By preserving the tattoo, Mr. Sherwood said it represented not only her son, but also “three generations of families.”

    “The gratification people have and that connection I’m able to make, you can’t explain it,” Mr. Sherwood said. “It’s very humbling and powering to have that impact on someone.”

    Tattoo preservation isn’t just for people who have died.

    Save My Ink Forever has preserved a handful of tattoos for amputees and recently received a new request from Asher J. Heart, who wants to preserve a tattoo after undergoing gender confirmation surgery next year. Mr. Heart, 30, from Muskegon, Mich., said the ink on his chest no longer felt right, but would serve as a tangible piece of the person he used to be.

    “For me, it will not be erasing my past but erasing the pain of it,” Mr. Heart said.

    For Mr. Gil, in addition to keeping his twin brother’s tattoo in a prominent viewing spot, he decided to honor him by getting two more tattoos — a portrait of Jason’s face and a replica of a glowing lantern tattoo that Jason had.

    Mr. Gil said he hoped those tattoos, too, survived longer than he did.

    “I hope someone else does it for me,” Mr. Gil said. “I don’t need this while I’m gone. Once you die, you die. You don’t take anything with you.”

    Article
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/arts/save-my-ink-forever-tattoo-preservation.html

     

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