zoran59

Da ne kvotujem sve, da ne ispa'ne post od tri ekrana.... Voleo bih da se rec "forum" pojavi iznad "repa" dvojke i siri do ivice "X". Istina, ovo je subjektivno. Kad dodjemo do konacnog resenja, hteo bih da isprintujem nalepnice i posaljem zaineresovanima, pa bi mi bilo lakse da logo bude u jednostavnom pravougaoniku...

Kako ne razumes? Ako je turnir virtualni, moze i povreda da bude virtualna!?

Nemacki profesor Drosten je dao intervju za engleske novine The Guardian. Odnosi se na situaciju u Nemackoj i Engleskoj, pa cu preneti samo jedno pitanje i odgovor, a vi vidite kakve veze ima sa USA i Trumpom: Aj'mo sad u trolersku raspravu: je li Angela Merkel "profesionalni" ili "amaterski" politicar?

Ajme, Andjo! I ja sam gledao istu KSZ. Dakle, cinjenice. Gledali su i republikanci koji vole Trumpa. Evo sto kaze njegov omiljeni FOX News: izvor: https://www.foxnews.com/media/gov-hogan-on-trumps-comments-on-disinfectant-and-sunlight-to-cure-coronavirus Dakle, desnicarski medij objavljuje da je republikanac guverner rekao "... has not been great..." Eh, ja nisam ni desnicar ni republikanac, pa kazem: Trump je apsulotno napravio totalnu budalu od sebe. Evo cinjenice, transkript iste KZS koju smo oboje gledali: izvor: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-suggests-infecting-disinfectant-video-transcript-2020-4 Kako je moguce braniti takav idiotizam? Sugestijom da je i Biden osumnjicen za sexual harrassment? Ja ovde ne pisem o predizbornoj kampanji i ekonomskoj politici, nego o cinjenici da je Trump najbolji predsednik kakvog virus moze pozeleti. Jebogabog, ideja "bring powerful light into the body..." Istina je da Ameri u proseku nisu bas nesto impresivno obrazovani, al' ovo je predsednik. Podrzava ga i moj techa, no taj je redneck automehanicar u penziji - a cak i za njega se nadam da si nece nagurati jaku UV lampu u dupe ili piti Lysol, i on je pametniji od Trumpa...

The Communist Cookbook That Defined Prague’s Cuisine https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-communist-cookbook-that-defined-prague-s-cuisine?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Coronavirus and the Price of Trump’s Delusions A cult of personality is no match for a pandemic. In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that a second wave of coronavirus infections this coming winter “will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” because it will coincide with flu season. He also called the protests against stay-at-home orders “not helpful.” Donald Trump was apparently not pleased, tweeting that Redfield was “totally misquoted by Fake News @CNN.” On Wednesday evening, after another rant about fake news, Trump brought Redfield onstage at his daily press briefing, where Redfield had the unenviable task of trying to explain his remarks, which he acknowledged were quoted accurately, without contradicting the president. The fall and winter might be “more difficult and potentially more complicated” due to the confluence of coronavirus and influenza, Redfield said, but that didn’t mean the second wave would be “worse.” Trump, meanwhile, spoke of the crisis in the past tense, as something America is now emerging from, suggesting that all the country will face in the future is “some embers of corona.” The day before, the country had recorded around 2,200 deaths, making it one of the deadliest days of the pandemic in the United States. Over the last three and a half years, Americans have had to accustom themselves to a relentless, numbing barrage of lies from the federal government. In one sector after another, we’ve seen experts systemically purged and replaced with toadying apparatchiks. The few professionals who’ve kept their jobs have often had to engage in degrading acts of public obeisance more common to autocracies. Public policy has zigzagged according to presidential whim. Empirical reality has been subsumed to Trump’s cult of personality. But as long as the economy was decent and many of the crises Trump created were far away, the immediate costs of Trump’s narcissistic governance have been, for most citizens, more psychic than material. That changed with the coronavirus. Today the lies are no longer about the size of the audience at Trump’s inauguration, the fruits of sucking up to North Korea or the findings of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation. Now the bill for a president with a tyrant’s contempt for truth and competence has come due. This week brought a barrage of new evidence of how Trump’s assault on nonpartisan expertise has undermined America’s fight against coronavirus. On Wednesday, The Times broke a story about Dr. Rick Bright, the official who led the federal agency working toward a coronavirus vaccine. Bright claims he was reassigned because he “resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.” Specifically, Bright says he was cautious about the use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, touted as a coronavirus “game changer” by some Fox News personalities. One recent study showed no benefit from the drug in Covid-19 patients, and on Friday the F.D.A. warned of “reports of serious heart rhythm problems in patients with Covid-19 treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine.” Also on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump wanted to fire Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a C.D.C. expert on respiratory diseases, when she warned, on Feb. 25, that community spread of the coronavirus was likely in the U.S. and that everyday life could be severely disrupted. Reuters reported that Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, assigned his department’s day-to-day responsibility for coronavirus to an aide with little public health experience whose previous job was running a Labradoodle-breeding business. Today our country, with a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, has almost 32 percent of the world’s coronavirus cases. Some countries in Europe have had more deaths per capita, but America had the opportunity to learn from their example, and squandered it. Further, the federal government still has no discernible plan for instituting the sort of mass testing and tracing regime that, according to most experts, we’ll need to return to some semblance of normal life. Hospitals have been reduced to cloak-and-dagger schemes to source coveted protective equipment from private brokers. “The cavalry does not appear to be coming,” a Massachusetts doctor told The Associated Press. Instead, Trump has repeatedly denied the need for more testing and set arbitrary dates for lifting lockdown orders. He’s tweeted support for demonstrators, some armed, defying social distancing guidelines. According to The A.P., Trump initially told Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia that he approved of the state’s plan to allow businesses like gyms, tattoo parlors and movie theaters to start operating, before publicly changing his mind when aides convinced him the scheme was too risky. Even now, thanks to industry lobbyists, gyms are on the administration’s list of businesses that should be among the first to reopen, despite surely being easy places for disease to spread. America was once the technological envy of the world. Now doctors have to warn the public that, contrary to the president’s musings in the briefing room, it is neither safe nor effective to inject disinfectant. “If you look at why America rose so much after 1945, it was because America attracted the best scientists in the world,” Klaus Scharioth, Germany’s ambassador to America from 2006 to 2011, told me. “America attracted expertise. You had the feeling that all governments, be they Republicans or Democrats, they cherished expertise.” Like many Americanophiles abroad, Scharioth has watched our country’s devolution with great sadness: “I would not have imagined that in my lifetime I would see that.” Recently Adam Higginbotham, author of the acclaimed book “Midnight in Chernobyl” (and the husband of my book editor), told me he felt a shiver of recognition when he read about Trump, in January, reportedly calling Azar’s concern about the coronavirus “alarmist.” A senior Soviet apparatchik used the same word to brush off a call for evacuation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. As the coronavirus crisis has unfolded in America, Higginbotham has noticed other parallels. “The response that I see has followed a very similar trajectory: initial public denials or reluctance to publicly admit that anything was wrong, then attempts to minimize the severity of what was happening, rooted in an institutional inability to acknowledge failure,” he said. “The initial response was hampered by a lack of equipment and a breakdown in communication that revealed that despite years of planning, the state was hopelessly ill prepared for such a catastrophe.” Yet one crucial difference also stands out to him. Soviet officials lied about Chernobyl and tried to shift blame but accepted that remediation was the state’s responsibility. “There was a lot of disinformation and cover-up, but as far as I know nobody in the Politburo was on the phone to the party leaders in Kyiv and Minsk saying, ‘You’re on your own — sort it out yourselves,’ ” said Higginbotham. Chernobyl is now widely seen as a signal event on the road to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Coronavirus may someday be seen as a similar inflection point in the story of American decline. A country that could be brought to its knees this quickly was sick well before the virus arrived. izvor: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/opinion/sunday/trump-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=moreIn&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Sunday Review Kako god okrenes, krme na celu Vlade (u USA vladu formira predsednik a ne premijer kao u vecem delu Evrope) je iskljucivo opstrukcija u resavanju epidemijske krize. A nista, vi nastavite raspravu o tome da li je on "profesionalni" ili "amaterski" predsednik...

Neki komentari citalaca u danasnjem Chicago Tribune: I’m a 50-year-old conservative Republican, and I need to ask my party a question. What will be enough for you to denounce and remove this man? When he bankrupts the Federal Reserve? Now that the first known COVID-19 death in the U.S. as in the San Francisco Bay area, when does The Lying Impeached (but not Convicted) Incredibly Stable Genius with the Great and Unmatched Wisdom start blaming it on California and calling it the Pelosi Virus? First he was “a stable genius,” then he was possessed of “unmatched wisdom,” then he was “I’m very smart,” and now he has “a good you-know-what,” pointing to his head. This is the same person who wonders about injecting people with disinfectant or figuring out ways to make the sun shine inside their bodies. What intelligent leadership! How did we get so lucky?

Say it loud, say it clear: Donald Trump needs to resign over his handling of the coronavirus The United States has just over 4 percent of the world’s population, but had about one-third of all global coronavirus cases and one-quarter of the fatalities, as of Friday. This is a catastrophic failure that can be laid largely at the feet of President Trump. Editorial boards and politicians — both Democratic and Republican — should be calling on him to resign immediately. It’s not just the catalog of screw-ups that led us to this point — the playing down of the threat, the lack of testing, the spread of misinformation and lies, and the government-wide inattention to the issue. It’s that Trump represents an ongoing danger to the health and well-being of the American people. Consider, for example, the strange case of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that Trump began publicly touting several weeks ago as a potential treatment for the coronavirus. “What do you have to lose?” the president asked, about a drug that had not been approved by the FDA for that purpose. It turns out the answer is “your life.” We already know of at least one couple in Arizona who took a related drug in an effort to ward off the coronavirus after hearing the president speak positively about it. The husband died and his wife ended up in the hospital. A new study of Veterans Health Administration patients, not yet peer reviewed, has concluded that COVID-19 patients who take hydroxychloroquine are more likely to die than those who do not. As remarkable as it is for the president to be suggesting the use of unproven drugs, Trump topped it on Thursday when he suggested that ultraviolet rays and cleaning disinfectants, injected into the body, should be examined as possible treatments for coronavirus. These comments led public health experts and companies like Lysol to remind Americans of something we regularly tell children: They shouldn’t ingest cleaning products. The Trump administration also allegedly forced out the official in charge of the federal agency responsible for developing a vaccine for the coronavirus after he says he raised concerns about money being directed toward hydroxychloroquine. Pushing aside qualified public officials and allowing politics to drive the development of a vaccine makes Trump not just an incompetent president, but a malevolent one. There’s more. Trump has egged on the smattering of protests around the country pressing for an end to social distancing orders, with calls on Twitter to “LIBERATE” states run by Democratic governors. These demands directly contradict the Trump White House’s own guidance. And his obsession with reopening the economy has likely been a catalyst for governors in red state America, such as Bill Lee in Tennessee, Henry McMaster in South Carolina, and Brian Kemp in Georgia, to weaken social distancing regulations. (Trump, who initially backed Kemp’s bizarre and dangerous order allowing hair salons, tattoo parlors, gyms, and restaurants to open, has since backtracked and is now openly criticizing Kemp.) Trump isn’t even participating in the federal response to the coronavirus. He reportedly watches television most of the day, doesn’t attend coronavirus task force meetings, and then uses his daily press briefing — for which he barely prepares — as a platform to self-aggrandize and lie. All of this has crippled Trump’s credibility: As one recent poll showed, less than a quarter of voters put a high level of trust in what Trump is saying about COVID-19. When the president has lost the confidence of the American people and when his words and actions are doing far more harm than good, there can be little justification for him to stay in office. Granted, we’ve never really encountered a situation like this before. In modern times, there were calls for Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton to resign. But those were for crimes in office, not incompetence. Mishandling a crisis has rarely been grounds for a president to resign. But we’ve never had a president like Trump, who is making the crisis worse simply by remaining in office. I’m under no illusions that Trump is going to resign. But as I wrote in September when I argued that politicians should call for Trump to step down over the Ukraine whistleblower allegations, “A call for resignation is a statement of principle that Trump’s actions so clearly violate the public trust that his position in office has become untenable." Demanding accountability would serve as a reminder that even in the wreckage of the Trump era some basic political norms still matter and we, as a nation, cannot become inured to having such a dangerous and unqualified leader in the nation’s highest office. It would also force Trump’s defenders to explain why his continued service is in the interest of the American people. Anyone who has regularly watched Trump’s press conferences knows that the president is detached from reality, indifferent to the suffering around us, and more concerned about his political standing than the health and well-being of the American people. Calling for the resignation of a president who muses about the use of household cleaning products to fight a deadly virus is not a partisan exercise or a futile plea for political sanity — it’s common sense. (bold moj) izvor: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/25/opinion/say-it-loud-say-it-clear-donald-trump-needs-resign-over-his-handling-coronavirus/

Hvala ti na ovome! Potrudicu se da procitam transkript citavog podcasta. Moj medicinski nemacki je nepostojec, ali sa engleskim sam "kod kuce"...

We Are Living in a Failed State The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken. When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government? This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together. Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.” All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse. This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s. Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist. Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen. Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying. Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end. This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future. If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot. The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face. When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals. We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home. The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay. The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter. Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model. So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death. In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors. To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat. The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning. We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone. izvor: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

Piskaram ovo za one koji nesto znaju o medicini, izvinjam se onima kojima ce biti dosadno... Vidim da je neko na "opstoj" corona-temi napisao da postoje neke vesti kako SARS-Cov2 izaziva "mozdani udar" kod mladje populacije. Nisam ih video, ali nagadjam (dakle, ne znam!) odakle bi mogla doci takva ideja. Jedan od simptoma Covid-19 zaraze je gubitak cula mirisa i okusa. Citao sam jutros razgovor sa ENT (ear/nose/throat) specijalistom koji je rekao da je rano da se zna da li virus izaziva samo inhibiciju funkcije olfaktornog nerva ili trajno ostecenje. Ovo dalje je samo moja spekulacija... Na zalost, bez obzira da li je trajno ostecenje ili privremena disfunkcija, bilo bi moguce da ostecuje i neke druge nerve. U tom slucaju, bila bi moguca klinicka slika cerebralnog infarkta, mada ga nema. Jos losije bi bilo da virus ne napada samo periferalne nerve nego i sam CNS. Zna li neko, da li se ovo istrazuje, ima li kakav link? (steta sto nam se nije Vladan prikljucio, sa njegovim poznavanjem neurologije voleo bih da procitam sta misli) Pre nekog vremena je neko (wwww?) prosledio neciji neki FB ili twitter post sa dva razlicita torakalna CT-a, od kojih je jedan bio radjen P.E. protokolom. Danas mi je jasnije zasto. Citam da se kod Covid-19 pacijenata javlja i poviseni D-dimer, koji je inace indikator fibrinolize. Cesto se kod kombinacije poviseni D-dimer/snizena O2 saturacija javlja sumnja na pulmonary embolism. Nadam se da lekari paze i na ostale simptome i ne salju svakoga na CT samo zbog jednog indikatora. Inace, rasturice CT department u bolnicama... A pneumonija se vidi i na obicnoj brzoj rendgenskoj slici.

Jebeni idiot! Coronavirus: Djokovic opposed to vaccines, could be forced into career decision link na vest: https://www.yahoo.com/sports/coronavirus-djokovic-opposed-vaccines-could-023342604.html

Vjekoslave, iako su na prvi pogled dobronamjerne, tvoje kritike su promasene. Pocnimo od donacija. Svrha donacije je da se osjecas bolje misleci da si pomogao necemu sto ti se svidja ili cije ciljeve podrzavas. To moze biti donacija Crvenom krizu ili crkvi ili bbilo cemu, ali ti ni tamo nemas utjecaja kako se sredstva trose. Ja sam se posljednji put "opekao" glupanski poslavsi novac na drzavne racune otvorene za pomoc stradalima u poplavama u Hrvatskoj, BiH i Srbiji. Nikad vise, jer nikada nije objavljeno gdje je novac zavrsio. Poslati cu mozda nesto nekom pojedincu direktno... U konkretnom slucaju foruma, svrha donacije je bila da se pokaze dobra namjera i interes, a i pomogne maloj grupi ljudi koji su sve obavili u kratkom roku, da ih ne lupi previse samo po njihovom dzepu. Kad zelis utjecaj na (u nedostatku boljeg izraza) "uredjivacku politiku" zato sto si nesto donirao , to izgleda kao da mislis da si kupio dionice dionicarskog drustva pa hoces glas u upravnom odboru. Ili bar da glasas za clana istog... To ne funkcionira tako. Ako ti sam od sebe, dobrovoljno, dam nesto novca da ofarbas auto (jer smo clanovi istog auto-kluba a tvoj auto jede korozija), to ne znaci da imam pravo birati boju. Zamisli da se neki forumas pobuni jer je (zasluzeno) banovan - a, bogamu, poslao je donaciju. Ne ide to. Dalje, o tvojem misljenju o "regionalnosti stokavskog foruma", a i kalkulaciji o skoro 1,5 mil. potencijalnih clanova. Prvo, istina je da bilo pozeljno da se prikljuci vise ljudi koji imaju sto reci, po mogucnosti pametno. No, internet je svjetska stvar, a forumi su mjesta gdje se okupljaju ljudi slicnih interesa. Pogotovo ovakav forum "opceg" karaktera na kojem ima mjesta za razlicite interese, a mnogi imaju po nekoliko njih. Pa i ti pises na razlicitim temama, od politike do kulinarstva... Za razliku od jednog drugog "mojeg" foruma koji se bavi radioloskom tehnologijom i nema tema o kosarci ili motociklima. "Regionalnost" ima smisla samo na nekim temama na Politici, utoliko sto nema smisla da da Pakistanci tu pisu jer nista ne znaju niti osjete. Ipak, i ovaj (u principu, balkanski) forum ima teme o Kini ili USA jer se sranja tamo preliju na citav svijet, pa ih i ti nekako osjetis. A bogme i ja u USA osjetim balkanska sranja, sto direktno, sto preko familije, pa se osjecam slobodnim komentirati. Sto se tice brojnosti forumasa i tvoje nerealne procjene - da, bilo bi ljepse da nas je vise. No, mnogi nisu zainteresirani. Ja sam nagovarao kcer i njenog decka da nam se pridruze, no nemaju vremena. Za svoje sportove u kojima su oboje uspjesni, druze se na specijaliziranim mjestima. Lokalne politike ih ne zanimaju jer ce najvjerojatnije zavrsiti na Novom Zelandu ili u Australiji, a nisu jos odlucili. A o kulinarstvu jos uvijek brinu mame i bake.... O tvojem potencijalnom broju "stokavskih" forumasa - pitanje je koliko njih ima pristup internetu i barem minimalnu kompjutersku pismenost. Ipak, to je manji problem. Postoji puno veci. Citas li vijesti u raznim (stokavskim!) medijima koji dozvoljavaju komentare citalaca, pa i same komentare? Prema njima, moglo bi se zakljuciti da smo mi "stokavski Balkanci" primitivna banda sa tuzno malim % normalnih ljudi. Ne bih htio sudjelovati na forumu sa takvom vecinom, a ovdasnja moderaciju to manje-vise uspjesno "filtrira". Nadam se da i drugi ljudi preporucaju ovaj forum, kao i ja, onima za koje misle da bi mogli biti zainteresirani i pridonijeti raspravi. No, aktivno ga negdje reklamirati nema smisla jer nema te moderacije koja bi zaustavila navalu botova i sabotera. Ovo je sasvim OK, a mala poboljsanja su uvijek moguca.

Odlicno - NASCAR na staroj Monzi! Lepo izvedeno. Inace, i MotoGP se "elektronski/virtuelno" takmice. Za vreme trke se vide i face takmicara, Rossi se danas smejao k'o lud kad se par puta skrsio... Ovde je danasnja trka: https://www.motogp.com/en/videos/2020/04/10/stay-at-home-gp-watch-the-motogp-virtual-race-2/329158

Ko ti je bio profa iz latinskog? Ili je izlapitis acutus ili izlapia acuta... troll off...

Mladjima to ime ne znaci bog zna sta, no za nas koji smo "nabrijavali" fice (i Zastave uopste) u Jugoslaviji '70-ih - kao i nasi uzori '60-ih - Abarth je bio bozanstvo. O istoriji same marke postoji gomla clanaka na netu, ima i knjiga, pa necu ovde "prodavati pamet". No, juce se navrsilo 70 godina od prve pobede automobila sa Abarthovim imenom. Na brdskoj trci Palermo - Monte Pellegrino je pobedio Cisitalia-Abarth. Za volanom je bio legendarni Tazio Nuvolari, tada vec 57 godina star! Abathova prva pobeda, a Nuvolarijeva poslednja - par godina kasnije je umro od tuberkuloze. Kraj jedne legende i pocetak nove... Auto je jos ziv i danas vredi 10 do 15 miliona $ (poslednji put je promenio vlasnika za oko 10 pre nekoliko godina):

Radoye, hvala! Izvanredan film!

Za "pacijente" kao sto sam ja, pocetnicki... https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/31/21199708/yeast-diy-baking-covid-19-shortage-make-it-yourself-bread

Ja sam u USA, al' ga gledam...

Prvi deo: Nisam nista ocekivao. Ponajmanje da idiotski negira realnost i sere. Jesi li procitala moj prethodni post, kakve je sve gluposti izvalio? Recimo, " It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” Poredi to sa reakcijama Angele Merkel ili nekih drugih normalnih sefova drzava. Drugi deo... To moze da bude tako u politici, ali ja ne moram da to prihvatim. Nisam sveznajuc, ali nisam ni ovca koja sledi politikanta. Trump je pokvareni lazov i kreten na sto nacina, Srecom, u USA predsednik ima ogranicene ovlasti. Ekonomija ide gore-dole u zavisnosti od milion faktora. Nije predsednik ni kriv ni zasluzan, on je samo ornament - kao znacka na haubi automobila koja ne garantuje motor ispod. Mene vise interesuje sta ce reci Federal Reserve Chairman nego predsednik. Trump je pokvarena lajava vaska. Nezgodno je sto na horizontu nema nikoga pametnog, ni u jednoj partiji. Samo mogu da se takmice u budalastinama. Opet, kad bolje razmislim, sve ovo je u stvari dobro. Pomisli, kako je ovo zdravo i otporno drustvo: funkcionise uprkos Trumpu ili nekima na vlasti!

Andjo, ti znas da inace cenim tvoje misljenje - ali ovde braneci Trumpa gubis (da ne upotrebim neki vulgarniji izraz). Here’s what the president said in public remarks, interviews and tweets from Jan. 22 to March 10 -– one day before the World Health Organization declared the global outbreak a pandemic. Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” — Trump in a CNBC interview. Jan. 30: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us … that I can assure you.” — Trump in a speech in Michigan. Feb. 10: “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” — Trump at the White House. (See our item “Will the New Coronavirus ‘Go Away’ in April?“) Feb. 14: “There’s a theory that, in April, when it gets warm — historically, that has been able to kill the virus. So we don’t know yet; we’re not sure yet. But that’s around the corner.” — Trump in speaking to National Border Patrol Council members. Feb. 23: “We have it very much under control in this country.” — Trump in speaking to reporters. Feb. 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” — Trump in a tweet. Feb. 26: “So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.” — Trump at a White House briefing. Feb. 26: “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” — Trump at a press conference. Feb. 26: “I think every aspect of our society should be prepared. I don’t think it’s going to come to that, especially with the fact that we’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.” — Trump at a press conference, when asked if “U.S. schools should be preparing for a coronavirus spreading.” Feb. 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump at a White House meeting with African American leaders. Feb. 29: “And I’ve gotten to know these professionals. They’re incredible. And everything is under control. I mean, they’re very, very cool. They’ve done it, and they’ve done it well. Everything is really under control.” — Trump in a speech at the CPAC conference outside Washington, D.C. March 4: “[W]e have a very small number of people in this country [infected]. We have a big country. The biggest impact we had was when we took the 40-plus people [from a cruise ship]. … We brought them back. We immediately quarantined them. But you add that to the numbers. But if you don’t add that to the numbers, we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.” — Trump at a White House meeting with airline CEOs. March 4: “Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number.” — Trump in an interview on Fox News, referring to the percentage of diagnosed COVID-19 patients worldwide who had died, as reported by the World Health Organization. (See our item “Trump and the Coronavirus Death Rate.”) March 7: “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.” — Trump, when asked by reporters if he was concerned about the arrival of the coronavirus in the Washington, D.C., area. March 9: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” — Trump in a tweet. March 10: “And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” — Trump after meeting with Republican senators.

Za one koji imaju vremena, 45-min. dokumentarac o tome kako je sve krenulo:

Fact-checker counts 16K false, misleading claims by Trump in three years izvor: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/479041-fact-checker-counts-16k-false-misleading-claims-by-trump-in-three

Alene, olaksao si stvar tako sto se krivine ponavljaju konstantnim ritmom - jednom kad nadjes najbolju putanju kroz jednu, kad opet naidjes na istu, samo ponovis rutinu...