Coronavirus News (252)

GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Delaware thanks Proud Boys for providing free security at the rally

Why Silicon Valley CEOs are such raging psychopaths  The patron saint of Big Tech douches, the one who inspired an entire generation of start-up entrepreneurs to put their worst face forward, was late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs. He disliked wearing shoes (or showering), preferred parking in handicapped parking spots and once motivated employees by calling them “f–king d–kless assholes.” ......... “His legacy has cultivated an indelible association between being a jerk and a genius,” writes Gavet. “Which has ballooned to the point where many people believe that a founder-CEO, in particular, actually has to be a jerk to be a genius.” ........ She calls it the Steve Jobs Syndrome, and she’s witnessed both powerful and up-and-coming tech exes believing in the myth like it’s doctrine. ...........  Former WeWork CEO Neumann was celebrated in the media for his audacious leadership style — from barefoot strolls through Manhattan to offering his employees tequila shots and Run DMC concerts in the office. ............... Not only is Musk still Tesla’s CEO, but his net worth also jumped this summer to $103 billion, up from $22.4 billion last year, making him the third-richest person in the world. ............ companies need to take a more empathetic approach. “They need to hire differently, promote differently, reward differently,” she says. “I’m an optimist, but I’m also a capitalist. I believe there are ways to make a company more empathetic, more reasonable, a force of good in the world. And I believe in the long run, that would actually be beneficial for the businesses.” ........... “Some of the CEOs I’m close to — and I still think they are, to a large extent, psychopaths — they’re struggling,” says Gavet. “They tell me, ‘It feels like I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t.’ They get criticized for being too aggressive, but when they try to be empathetic, they’re criticized for being too soft.” The trend of psychopathy at the top of Big Tech won’t be “disrupted,” Gavet says, until we stop expecting the next Steve Jobs to be as abrasive and psychotic as, well … Steve Jobs.

बिपी, हर्क गुरुङ र गाउँमुखी विकासको मोडेल 

Crisis Group Turns Focus to Risk of Electoral Violence in the U.S. 

For the Secret Service, a New Question: Who Will Protect Them From Trump? Central to the job is a willingness to say yes to the president no matter what he asks. Now, that means subjecting an agent’s health to the whims of a contagious president.

As Trump Seeks to Project Strength, Doctors Disclose Alarming Episodes The president made a surprise outing from his hospital bed in an effort to show his improvement, but the murky and shifting narrative of his illness was rewritten again with grim new details. ............ his doctors once again rewrote the official narrative of his illness by acknowledging two alarming episodes they had previously not disclosed. ........ The doctors said that Mr. Trump’s blood oxygen level dropped twice in the two days after he was diagnosed with the coronavirus, requiring medical intervention, and that he had been put on steroids, suggesting his condition might be more serious than initially described. ........... officials acknowledged providing rosy assessments to satisfy their prickly patient. ........ his seeming energy may have reflected the fact that he was given the steroid dexamethasone ............ Others questioned the president’s statement in his video that he had met soldiers while at Walter Reed. ......... “Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” Dr. James P. Phillips, an attending physician at Walter Reed, wrote on Twitter. “They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.” ............  the trip raised the alarming question of whether the president was directing his doctors. .......... it violated standards of care and would not be an option open to any other patient. “When I first saw this, I thought, maybe he was being transported to another hospital.” ...............  Mr. Trump was put on supplemental oxygen during the Friday spell over the president’s strenuous objections .......... During his briefing on Sunday, Dr. Conley acknowledged that he had provided a rosy version of events to please his notoriously sensitive patient. ............. In addition to the steroids, Mr. Trump has received an experimental antibody cocktail and is in the midst of a five-day course of remdesivir, an antiviral drug. The White House has a medical unit capable of responding to a president’s health troubles but not with the sophisticated equipment available at Walter Reed. .................   Mr. Trump, who historically hates hospitals and anything related to illness, has been hankering to get released ..........   some aides expressed fear that he would pressure Dr. Conley into releasing him by claiming to feel better than he actually does .......... a premature return could lead to a second trip to the hospital if his condition worsens. ........ The president has also been watching lots of television, even more than usual, and has been exasperated by coverage of Saturday’s calamitous handling of his medical information by Dr. Conley and Mr. Meadows, as well as speculation about whether he would transfer powers to Vice President Mike Pence. ......... He was also angry that no one was on television defending him, as he often is when he cannot inject his own views into news media coverage ............  In addition to Mr. Trump, a number of others who work or visit the building regularly have tested positive, including Melania Trump; Hope Hicks, a senior adviser to the president; Nicholas Luna, the director of Oval Office operations; Bill Stepien, the campaign manager; Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee; and Kellyanne Conway, the president’s former counselor. ................  a follow-up reception inside the White House on Sept. 26 for the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the event seen as a likely source of the outbreak. 

2020 Nobel Prize Winners: Full List

Coronavirus News (251)

Donald Trump’s narcissism betrays a fragile ego lashing out in rage The popular notion that narcissists are endowed with an extraordinary reservoir of confidence, self-importance and unconditional self-regard is mistaken Narcissists like Trump try to mask their shortcomings and constantly attack others to protect their own fragile egos from being exposed and collapsing ...........  The 90-plus-minute barrage of personal attacks, insults, interruptions and incoherence was often credited to Trump’s lack of integrity, intelligence and decorum. ............ many psychiatrists and mental health professionals in the United States are warning about the dangers of Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). ........ What is a narcissist? A common understanding is someone who is grandiose, entitled and lacks empathy. ....... Those who work with NPD in a clinical setting are familiar with a psychological reality that is in stark contrast to the common myth. The psychological structure responsible for NPD is actually a very fragile ego. Because it is too painful to get in touch with such fragility, the narcissist goes to extreme lengths to banish any inkling of their own imperfections. ........... “Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth – that he is none of those things – is too terrifying for him to contemplate.” ......... material we don’t want to deal with in waking life shows up in our dreams in disguised forms. ............ Donald Trump, who “began to believe his own hype, even as he paradoxically suspected on a very deep level that nobody else did”. ............. This is the plague of narcissism. Narcissists are persecuted by a fragile, impoverished ego; the only recourse to avoid the painful realisation of their fragility is to continuously inflate the ego as a countermeasure to keep their fragile ego from collapsing. When the mirror on the wall sends back a view that challenges the evil queen’s inflated sense of her prettiness, she responds with a murderous rage. This is not an uncommon response from a narcissist – any threat to their sense of superiority will be met with rage. .................  The president said so himself on Twitter: “When someone attacks me, I always attack back...except 100x more. This has nothing to do with a tirade but rather, a way of life!” ........... a psychological warfare that has no place for peace because one has to keep up the attacks on others to protect one’s fragile ego from being exposed and collapsing.

A North Carolina college student apparently died of rare neurological complications from the virus, his family says. A 19-year-old student at Appalachian State University — a basketball player “in tremendous shape,” according to his family — died Monday night, apparently of neurological complications related to Covid-19, his family and the university said............  New cases in Sweden, which became a lightning rod over its lax pandemic response early on, remain surprisingly low. ............. Almost alone in the Western world, Sweden refused to impose a coronavirus lockdown last spring, as the country’s leading health officials argued that limited restrictions were sufficient and would better protect against economic collapse. ........ The per capita rate is far lower than nearby Denmark or the Netherlands (if higher than the negligible rates in Norway and Finland). Sweden is also doing far better, for the moment, than Spain, with 10,000 cases a day, and France, with 12,000. ....... “Today, all of the European countries are more or less following the Swedish model, combined with the testing, tracing and quarantine procedures the Germans have introduced, but none will admit it”

‘The Social Dilemma’ Will Freak You Out—But There’s More to the Story    Dramatic political polarization. Rising anxiety and depression. An uptick in teen suicide rates. Misinformation that spreads like wildfire. The common denominator of all these phenomena is that they’re fueled in part by our seemingly innocuous participation in digital social networking. But how can simple acts like sharing photos and articles, reading the news, and connecting with friends have such destructive consequences? ............... the way social media gets people “hooked” by exploiting the brain’s dopamine response and using machine learning algorithms to serve up the customized content most likely to keep each person scrolling/watching/clicking. ........  “Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded,” says Jeff Siebert, a former exec at Twitter. The intelligence gleaned from those actions is then used in conjunction with our own psychological weaknesses to get us to watch more videos, share more content, see more ads, and continue driving Big Tech’s money-making engine. .............  For the first few years of social media’s existence, we thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Now it’s on a nosedive to the other end of the spectrum—we’re condemning it and focusing on its ills and unintended consequences. The next phase is to find some kind of balance, most likely through adjustments in design and, possibly, regulation. .......... The issue with social media is that it’s going to be a lot trickier to fix than, say, adding seatbelts and air bags to cars. The sheer size and reach of these tools, and the way in which they overlap with issues of freedom of speech and privacy—not to mention how they’ve changed the way humans interact—means it will likely take a lot of trial and error to come out with tools that feel good for us to use without being addicting, give us only true, unbiased information in a way that’s engaging without preying on our emotions, and allow us to share content and experiences while preventing misinformation and hate speech. ................ “While we’ve all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human strengths—when would we get the Singularity, when would AI take our jobs, when would it be smarter than humans—we missed this much much earlier point when technology didn’t overwhelm human strengths, but it undermined human weaknesses.”

How the Pandemic Is Affecting Working Mothers 

From ‘brain fog’ to heart damage, COVID-19’s lingering problems alarm scientists Life for the 38-year-old is a pale shadow of what it was before 17 March, the day she first experienced symptoms of the novel coronavirus. ............ she struggles to think clearly and battles joint and muscle pain. “I used to go to the gym three times a week,” Akrami says. Now, “My physical activity is bed to couch, maybe couch to kitchen.” ...........  “Everybody talks about a binary situation, you either get it mild and recover quickly, or you get really sick and wind up in the ICU,” says Akrami, who falls into neither category. Thousands echo her story in online COVID-19 support groups. ............  The list of lingering maladies from COVID-19 is longer and more varied than most doctors could have imagined. Ongoing problems include fatigue, a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, achy joints, foggy thinking, a persistent loss of sense of smell, and damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain. ..........  One group in Italy found that 87% of a patient cohort hospitalized for acute COVID-19 was still struggling 2 months later. ........... 10% to 15% of people—including some “mild” cases—don’t quickly recover. .............  Distinct features of the virus, including its propensity to cause widespread inflammation and blood clotting, could play a role in the assortment of concerns now surfacing. “We’re seeing a really complex group of ongoing symptoms” ................ Three months later, the man with the mild case “falls asleep all day long and cannot work” ................ Like a key fitting neatly into a lock, SARS-CoV-2 uses a spike protein on its surface to latch onto cells’ ACE2 receptors. The lungs, heart, gut, kidneys, blood vessels, and nervous system, among other tissues, carry ACE2 on their cells’ surfaces—and thus, are vulnerable to COVID-19. The virus can also induce a dramatic inflammatory reaction, including in the brain. Often, “The danger comes when the body responds out of proportion to the infection” ............. “What we’re experiencing is an epidemic of severe illness,” he says. “So therefore, there is an epidemic” of chronic illness that follows it. .............   One study of health care workers with SARS in 2003 found that those with lung lesions 1 year after infection still had them after 15 years. ............... The virus ravages the heart, for example, in multiple ways. Direct invasion of heart cells can damage or destroy them. Massive inflammation can affect cardiac function. The virus can blunt the function of ACE2 receptors, which normally help protect heart cells and degrade angiotensin II, a hormone that increases blood pressure. Stress on the body from fighting the virus can prompt release of adrenaline and epinephrine, which can also “have a deleterious effect on the heart” .............  78 of 100 people diagnosed with COVID-19 had cardiac abnormalities when their heart was imaged on average 10 weeks later, most often inflammation in heart muscle. Many of the participants in that study were previously healthy, and some even caught the virus while on ski trips ............ previously healthy people are not exempt from the virus’ long-term effects on the lungs ..............  After some severe viral infections, there are “those people who still don’t feel quite right afterward, but have normal brain scans” ............ Collectively, these “long-haulers” describe dozens of symptoms, including many that could have multiple causes, such as fatigue, joint pain, and fever. “It’s time to give some voice to this huge population of patients” .............. “You might have fibrosis in the lungs, and that will make you feel fatigued; you might have impaired heart function, and that will make you feel fatigued.” ........ The message many researchers want to impart: Don’t underestimate the force of this virus.