JardNe

Happy Birthday !!

I see you. Actually, I can smell you. You smell nice. You’re wearing a little bit of cologne today. It’s not a special day. It’s just a day, and you’re wearing a dash of something nice. Why? Because you understand the importance of quality even in the day to day. You understand luxury. You understand the Infiniti Q45. You might be thinking, aw man, nah. Infiniti? Pff. Infiniti? My dad’s brother has one. I don’t know about him. Infiniti? My mom’s friend has one, and she’s great but she’s also, uh, loud? Not like super loud, just, like, higher volume. She’s fine, it’s just, you know, I don’t know. That’s not me, you’re thinking. You have it all wrong. Infiniti: that’s the good stuff. You want a smooth ride. You want a leather-lined interior. You want a blank, unblinking, grill-less face of confidence, gliding aerodynamically past the swathes of McMansion-buying, no-bargain-knowing people you have to deal with. 00:00 00:00 You want the calm of a naturally-aspirated 4.5-liter VH45DE V8 humming away ahead of you, silently spinning a driveshaft to the rear wheels. Rear-wheel drive. Yes. Again, quality in your every waking moment. Does every second of your every drive require rear-wheel drive? It does not. But it benefits from it, tickling the back of your brain like a better shirt than you needed to wear. Luxury. Not excess, not some kind of glitzy broken-down, tarted-up Maserati kind of bullshit. A quiet quality in every moment. Quality, unto infinity.

Take a look at this. It’s a Toyota Sera. You might think it’s a fantasy car that fell out of one of your brain folds. Nope! This is a real car, a car that exists, a car that was sold to you, a member of the public. Well, sort of. The Toyota Sera was like the Toyota Paseo. Remember the Paseo? Remember teal? Do you remember it? Can you smell what The Rock is cooking? Both the Paseo and the Sera were little sporty coupes with small inline-four cylinder engines and front wheel drive. The Paseo was a jellybean with no distinguishing features. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s face in car form. It was fine. The Sera was much like the Paseo, only it had wing doors of great joy, flapping in wonderment to the deep hum of the universe. We never got it in America, but it was a thing that was to be had by you. Maybe not you personally, but out there there is a you that was a you that could have had bought the Sera, personally, though not the you personally who is reading this, unless the you personally who is reading this is not American. Do not let your dreams be nothing more than dreams. Let your thoughts ride Sera wings, into reality and existence. 00:00

A baby boy mistakenly declared dead by an Indian hospital last week, passed away on Wednesday morning. Dr. Sandeep Gupta, who was treating the baby at the Delhi New Born Center said "we knew from the beginning that he may not survive but we were trying our best." The baby was born at the Max Super Speciality Hospital in Shalimar Bagh, New Delhi, last Thursday but pronounced dead two hours later, the boy's grandfather, Praveen Malik, told CNN. His mother had given birth to twins but the girl was declared stillborn. On the way to the cremation ground, the family found the boy still breathing after noticing "some movements" inside one of the polythene bags containing the babies' bodies. "When we opened the bag, we found the boy breathing. I was shocked. I couldn't believe my eyes," Malik said in a previous CNN report. Speaking with CNN after the baby's death on Wednesday, Malik said the family was devastated. "Our final demand with the government, with the world, is that we need justice," he said. Malik said the family had requested financial assistance from the Delhi government to move the baby to a "bigger and better" facility. "We didn't get anything from the government except false promises," he said.According to Gupta, the baby died due to multiple organ dysfunction. "He was unable to keep his vitals up," Gupta said. "We knew from the beginning that he may not survive but we were trying our best. Had the baby not been exposed for so many hours after his birth, maybe we could have probably prolonged his life longer." Max Healthcare fired the two doctors considered responsible earlier this week, but emphasized that the decision to let the doctors go should not be interpreted as an admission of guilt. "We wish to clarify that this action should not presuppose finding of any lapse by the expert group and should not be construed in any way to be anything other than an expression of our continued commitment to providing quality healthcare," the statement from Max Healthcare said. This case of medical negligence has received significant attention from local politicians. State Health Minister Satyendar Jain tweeted last week that he has ordered an inquiry "into this unacceptable act."

No American woman has ever won Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” by herself, over the course of the 91 years that the magazine has proffered the title. The first time an American woman was named “Person of the Year” (or, at that time, “Man of the Year”) to the exclusion of any man was in 1975, when the winner of the title was … “American Women.” (Before that, American women were included in the winning group twice, first when “The Inheritor” won in 1966 — apparently a reference to baby boomers — and then in 1969 when “Middle Americans” did.) On Wednesday, the magazine announced its 2017 winner, as you’ve probably heard: “The Silence Breakers,” a reference to the women (and a few men) who spoke out about sexual harassment, precipitating a remarkable moment of public accountability for people — almost all men — in positions of power in the country. Power is at the heart of the issue, as we’ve seen while watching the revelations unfold. NBC’s Matt Lauer, movie producer Harvey Weinstein and prominent elected officials all held positions of authority that were leveraged to silence those whom they’d allegedly abused. The New York Times’s exhaustive assessment of how Weinstein kept his actions out of the public eye is, in part, an overview of the power he wielded. Economic power. Corporate power. It’s a journal of how to twist the dials and yank the levers of authority to facilitate shocking and apparently criminal behavior. That the accusations that have emerged are so pervasive in our culture is a reflection of how pervasive pockets of power are, as well. The Weinstein revelations cracked the dam on any number of situations that had been kept in the dark, but the conditions for that outpouring were established in other ways. The power of the Internet created a sense of community among those who’d been similarly victimized. The election of President Trump despite the accusations against him, as Time’s essay about the winning group notes, inspired a political movement among women on top of which harassment revelations overlapped neatly. Time’s “Person of the Year” winners are themselves a reminder that power has long been concentrated in the hands of men. In 66 of 89 years, the winner of the title has been a man, by himself. Four times, the winner has been a woman by herself — never an American woman. (That’s only two times more than a non-human — “The Computer,” “The Endangered Earth” — has won the title.) On nine occasions, the winner has been a group of mostly men; on three occasions — including this year — a group of mostly women.