Here’s another amusing short film with a Christmas theme, this one from the UK, where cats are often called Moggie. (Running time 3 minutes and 20 seconds.)
Sainsbury's 'Mog’s Christmas Calamity' from Outsider on Vimeo.
Link: https://vimeo.com/145612004
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In this charming short film sponsored by the Spanish national lottery, a night watchman does things to amuse the daytime workers he never sees. (Running time 3 minutes and 32 seconds.)
loteria de navidad 2015 from againstallodds on Vimeo.
Link: https://vimeo.com/145958553
by I’m really, really late posting this. If I’m not mistaken, it dates back to the July 21 edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, back when they were broadcasting live every night after the Republican National Convention. But there’s actually something to be said for watching it now, with the benefit of some historical perspective.
Stewart’s time away from his show hasn’t diminished his talent for hilarious and spot-on commentary, and Colbert’s not bad either. It’s worth 13 minutes of your time. Actually, it’s worth at least half an hour of your time, but it only runs 13 minutes and change.
by The Republicans running the North Carolina state legislature are currently holding a special session for the purpose of ramming through major changes to state government. They kept plans to hold the special session secret, announcing it just as another special session on disaster relief was ending. They had also kept secret the purpose of the session until the new bills were introduced. The goal, it turns out, is to cut the authority of the next governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, who will take office January 7. (Cooper is currently the state’s attorney general.)
Republican will still hold a veto-proof majority in the legislature next year, so there’s no obvious need for the rush or the secrecy. But they were apparently afraid that if they waited, allowing time for public discussion and debate, opposition would have time to develop to what they’re trying to do.
One provision would combine the state ethics board with the state elections board, which is odd. It would also require that combined board and all county election boards to be balanced by party. Bipartisan election boards aren’t bad in themselves, but the legislature didn’t feel the change was needed under the current governor, Pat McCrory, a Republican. The state elections board is currently divided 3-2 in favor of Republicans and the county boards are all 2-1 Republican.
(Update 2017 Feb 2: One more obnoxious feature is that the chairmanship of the state ethics/elections board with bounces back and forth between the parties which sounds fair until you realize that the Republican Party is to head the board in even-numbered years, which is when almost all elections of consequence take place in the state.)
In addition, the legislature plans a change that will prevent over a thousand of McCrory’s political appointees from being replaced by Coper. Here’s the background:
Some jobs in the state government of North Carolina are exempt from civil service protections, meaning the governor is free to fill the positions with political employees at will. When the last governor, Democrat Bev Purdue, was in office, up to 400 people could fall into this so-called “exempt” category. But when Republican Pat McCrory succeeded her as governor, the Republican legislature expanded the number to 1500. Now the legislature is trying to reduce it to just 300, preventing Roy Cooper from replacing the remainder of McCrory’s political appointees.
Republicans are defending their actions by saying Democrats did partisan stuff in the past, and that’s true, but it doesn’t make it right. I complained about Democratic Governor Jim Hunt’s efforts to politicize state jobs as well.
Next year we’ll have a Democratic governor willing to work with a Republican legislature. That would be a good time to try to come up with some changes both sides can agree to with open public debate. This legislature does too much with rushed special sessions. (That’s also how they passed the ridiculous “bathroom bill” that even doesn’t do what they intended it to and cost the state jobs and respect.)
by Samantha Bee urges Democrats to continue their historical support for working people and civil rights. I could quibble about some things, but on the whole I agree with her. One point she could have added is that by far the biggest practitioner of identity group politics was Trump. Trump did manage to avoid explicit racism (though he had no reservations about explicit misogyny), but it’s not an accident that white nationalist groups celebrated his victory. The Klan even held at least one widely publicized Trump victory parade in North Carolina.
Bee also makes a good point that a lot of criticisms of what the Democrats did or didn’t do the last campaign are based more on misperceptions or on news media failures rather than reality. She’s also right that while Republicans did very well in North Carolina, the two loudest GOP supporters of HB2 (the ridiculous “bathroom bill” that doesn’t even do what its advocates wanted it to do; more on that here) lost to their Democratic opponents.
by A few years ago a friend of mine, who at the time worked for a great metropolitan newspaper (let’s call her Lois), told me that the paper had installed exercise equipment in the offices for free use of the staff, something I suspect their health insurance company might have encouraged them to do. It was nice to have the machines on site, she said, and the only problem was that they had been set up in a gigantic empty room, and it was spooky to work out with nobody else around. I asked her if this was the newsroom, and she replied very solemnly that that was very funny Gary, ha, ha.
I used to work in journalism (or at least its periphery) myself, way back in my distant youth, and I still subscribe to Columbia Journalism Review, which in recent years has made for depressing reading (and in fact has just converted itself into a website with a very infrequent print magazine as a sort of vestigial organ). Newspapers used to be a license to print money, and a lot of them employed a lot of very dedicated reporters. I was fortunate to grow up when most newspapers and network radio and television news were close to their peak of quality and professionalism. They weren’t perfect, but they mainly tried to do a good job, and they had the budget to report on state and local governments and to carry out serious investigations.
Now nobody knows how to make news pay (update: except a certain French duck). Advertising revenues are down, and few of us are willing to pay a subscription fee. Papers now even look undernourished. I remember when holding open a full size bedsheet newspaper almost required stretching your arms apart as far as they’d go. Now look at them: scrawny, emaciated things.
Here’s John Oliver from HBO’s Last Week Tonight last August lamenting the state of the press. As usual for Oliver it’s very informative and entertaining, and while it’s longer that the clips I normally include here, I think this is worth the time. If we can’t find a way to preserve journalism, we’re among other things creating a great environment from corrupt politicians, especially at the state and local level. There’s a funny but depressing star-filled movie parody at the end.
by One of the stranger developments in the United States over the last couple of decades has been a rise in rates of illness and mortality for non-Hispanic white Americans, especially women, the middle-aged, and those with low levels of education. Despite this, U.S. life expectancy continued its decades-long rise, at least up until the start of last year.
However, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2015 overall U.S. life expectancy fell slightly, from 78.9 to 78.8. For males, it declined from 76.5 to 76.3 and for women from 81.3 to 81.2.
A modest one-year drop isn’t in itself necessarily cause for concern. U.S. life expectancy also fell in
1980 and in 1993, but those drops were attributable to specific problems, namely, a really bad flu season in 1980 and the AIDS epidemic in 1993. In addition, even the reduced life expectancy for 2015 was still longer than any year prior to 2012 (see Table 8 on page 34 of this PDF from the CDC. Note that the 2014 data in the table were later adjusted slightly based on data from Medicare; prior to the adjustment the 2014 life expectancies were about the same as those now reported for 2015.)
Even if the one-year drop doesn’t necessarily imply that it will continue, it’s still troubling that life expectancy seems to have reached a plateau, with no improvement since 2012. (See the same table just mentioned.)
And there’s also the negative trend for some white Americans I mentioned in the first paragraph above. Whites, and especially white women, still have significantly better life expectancies than blacks in the U.S., but the trend-line for notable subgroups of whites is downward while for African Americans the numbers are improving. I linked to more information on this in posts from September of 2013 (link), April 2015 (link), and December of 2015 (link). For more on misconceptions about life expectancy, see earlier posts addressing misstatements on the subject by former governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) (here) and former senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) here.
Here are some links to more information about yesterday’s CDC report:
Finally, I should emphasize that all the life-expectancy figures mentioned here are for life expectancy at birth, a figure computed from current death rates for people of different ages. It’s an estimate of the average age of death for Americans born in 2015. If you’re an American reading this, your own actuarial life expectancy is greater, because you’ve outlived the people whose deaths at an earlier age brought down the average. You can look up the estimated remaining life expectancy for people your age at this link on the Social Security website.
by Most developed countries and many places in the U.S. require paid sick leave, and it turns out to have a lot of unambiguous benefits for businesses as well as sick employees and their coworkers and customers. But somehow a lot of people in the U.S. think it wouldn’t work. Yes, some people fake being sick. But it’s silly to focus on only one problem and ignore the overall story.
Here pediatrician and medical professor Aaron Carroll summarizes in five minutes what research has uncovered about the net benefits of paid sick leave:
The video above is based on an article in The New York Times.
by To put it mildly, not everything about 2016 has gone well. But as novelist and polymath John Green points out here (in a video originally posted August 16), there have been some items of pretty good news as well, many of them you may never have heard about.
At under four minutes, it’s definitely worth your time, and besides, it has video of an actual, not metaphorical, Dumpster fire.
(For my other posts referencing John Green click here.)
by I dedicate this to my friends Carolyn and Dave, who have actually done professional recipe testing, some of which sounded as scary as this:
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