Tag Archives: birthday

The Value and Gaps in a Big San Francisco Clean-Energy Conclave

by Myrna Posted on June 1, 2016

Can an international gathering in San Francisco take big greenhouse-gas emitters from ambitious clean-energy pledges to real-world action? Follow this link:  The Value and Gaps in a Big San Francisco Clean-Energy Conclave ; ; ;

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The Value and Gaps in a Big San Francisco Clean-Energy Conclave

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With Imposed Transparency and Concerned Millennials, a Boom in Corporate Responsibility?

by Myrna Posted on January 25, 2016

In an era of rising transparency and concerns about corporate ethics, companies eager to please millennials appear to be shifting business models and messages. Link –  With Imposed Transparency and Concerned Millennials, a Boom in Corporate Responsibility? ; ; ;

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With Imposed Transparency and Concerned Millennials, a Boom in Corporate Responsibility?

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Angela Lansbury Is 90 Years Old Today. She Is Why You Are Named Jessica.

by KarolCarvosso Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Come with me down a rabbit hole, won’t you?

The most popular name for baby girls in the United States from 1970 until 1984 was Jennifer. In 1985, Jessica surpassed Jennifer and stayed the top name until 1990.

Most common baby name for girls Jezebel/Reuben Fischer-Baum

What could have caused the change? Murder, She Wrote, in which Angela Lansbury played Jessica Fletcher, premiered on September 30, 1984, on CBS.

Did the one cause the other? Maybe! Maybe not! I think it did.

Today is Angela Lansbury’s 90th birthday. If your name is Jessica and you are between the ages of 25 and 30, you should thank her.

Unless you hate your name, in which case you should blame her. But it’s her birthday, so keep it to yourself.

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Angela Lansbury Is 90 Years Old Today. She Is Why You Are Named Jessica.

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Today’s Birthday Advice: Celebrate Responsibly

by RandalHardwick Posted on December 29, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s a fascinating new factlet. University of Chicago economics researcher Pablo Pena, who is apparently dedicated to putting the dismal back in the dismal science, tells us that we’re more likely to die on our birthdays. If you’re in your 20s, you’re 25 percent more likely to die on your birthday than on any other day. On weekends this rises to 48 percent.

Now, your chance of dying on any day is pretty small if you’re in your 20s, so a 25 percent increase isn’t actually much. Still! Watch out for those drunken birthday bashes! If you’re under ten, watch out for the sugar highs from too much cake and punch. If you’re in your 50s, watch out for….something. I’m not sure what. Above 60, apparently we all give up on birthday Saturnalias and our risk of dying isn’t much higher than average.

This comes via Wonkblog’s Jason Millman, who provides this sage advice: “celebrate responsibly.” I always do.

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Today’s Birthday Advice: Celebrate Responsibly

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If You Pay Them, They Will Come

by DorothyTremblay Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a news article about employers who desperately want to hire more people but just can’t find workers with the right skills. Oh wait. You do see that every day. What you don’t see are articles which make it clear that a willingness to pay higher wages is all it takes to fix this problem:

Manufacturing wages are rising at a rapid clip in some major industrial states as shortages of certain skills and gradually falling unemployment rates force more companies to pay up to attract and retain workers.

….“What we mainly need is welders,” said Terry McIver, chief executive and owner of Loadcraft Industries Ltd., a maker of parts for oil rigs in Brady, Texas….Dewayne Roy, head of the welding program at Mountain View College in Dallas, said he recently had a waiting list of about 250 people seeking to enroll. One student, Logan Porter, 22, started working for a metal-fabrication shop in the Dallas area in February and is putting in 55 to 60 hours a week. He earns $17 an hour, but with time and a half for overtime, his weekly take-home pay typically exceeds $800. “I love the work,” he said.

….Steve Van Loan, president of Sullivan Palatek Inc. in Michigan City, said job hopping is becoming more of a problem. “They get an offer for more money across town, and they’re gone,” he said. Wages on average at his firm, which makes compressors that power drills and other tools, are rising 4% to 5% this year, compared with 2% to 3% in recent years, Mr. Van Loan said.

How about that? If you pay more, you attract workers with the right skills. If you pay more, training programs start to fill up. If you pay more, you can steal folks away from your competitors.

Pay is the great equalizer. There are always going to be shortages of specific skills in specific times and places. But a long-term nationwide shortage? That just means employers aren’t willing to pay market wages. They should read their Milton Friedman. If you pay them, they will come.

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If You Pay Them, They Will Come

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Immigration, ISIS, and Ebola: A Perfect Right-Wing Storm

by AshlyV43nvle Posted on October 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Here is Republican congressman Tom Cotton, currently running for a Senate seat in Arkansas:

Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism.

And here is Republican congressman Duncan Hunter, currently running for reelection in California:

At least ten ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the border in Texas.

You will be unsurprised to learn that neither of these things is true. They were just invented out of whole cloth, much like Rep. Phil Gingrey’s fear that immigrant children might be bringing Ebola across the border. And I think we can expect more of it. The confluence of immigration, ISIS, and Ebola is like catnip to the Republican base. It appeals to their deepest fears. It demonstrates how feckless President Obama is. And it confirms that we need to be far more hawkish about national security. What’s not to like?

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Immigration, ISIS, and Ebola: A Perfect Right-Wing Storm

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Your Lesson for the Day: If You Decline to Use Military Force, You’ve "Kind of Lost Your Way"

by HarlanPrentice Posted on October 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today the Washington Post summarizes a new book by Leon Panetta, former CIA director and secretary of defense in the Obama administration, as well as an interview Panetta gave to Susan Page of USA Today:

By not pressing the Iraqi government to leave more U.S. troops in the country, he “created a vacuum in terms of the ability of that country to better protect itself, and it’s out of that vacuum that ISIS began to breed,” Panetta told USA Today, referring to the group also known as the Islamic State.

….The USA Today interview was the first of what inevitably will be a series as he promotes his book, “Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace,” which is sharply critical of Obama’s handling of the troop withdrawal from Iraq, Syria and the advance of the Islamic State. “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war” that will also sweep in conflicts in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and Libya, he told the paper.

My first thought when I read this was puzzlement: Just what does Panetta think those US troops would have accomplished if they’d stayed in Iraq? Nobody ever seems to have a very concrete idea on that score. There’s always just a bit of vague hand waving about how of course they would have done….something….something….something…..and stopped the spread of ISIS. But what?

My second thought was the same as Joe Biden’s: would it kill guys like Panetta to at least wait until Obama is out of office before airing all their complaints? Do they have even a smidgen of loyalty to their ex-boss? But I suppose that ship sailed long ago, so there’s not much point in griping about it.

In the end, what really gets me is this, where Panetta talks about Obama’s foreign policy legacy:

“We are at a point where I think the jury is still out,” Panetta says. “For the first four years, and the time I spent there, I thought he was a strong leader on security issues. … But these last two years I think he kind of lost his way. You know, it’s been a mixed message, a little ambivalence in trying to approach these issues and try to clarify what the role of this country is all about.

“He may have found himself again with regards to this ISIS crisis. I hope that’s the case. And if he’s willing to roll up his sleeves and engage with Congress in taking on some of these other issues, as I said I think he can establish a very strong legacy as president. I think these next 2 1/2 years will tell us an awful lot about what history has to say about the Obama administration.”

Think about this. Panetta isn’t even a super hawkish Democrat. Just moderately hawkish. But his basic worldview is simple: as long as Obama is launching lots of drone attacks and surging lots of troops and bombing plenty of Middle Eastern countries—then he’s a “strong leader on security issues.” But when Obama starts to think that maybe reflexive military action hasn’t acquitted itself too well over the past few years—in that case he’s “kind of lost his way.”

That’s the default view of practically everyone in Washington: Using military force shows strong leadership. Declining to use military force shows weakness. But most folks inside the Beltway don’t even seem to realize they feel this way. It’s just part of the air they breathe: never really noticed, always taken for granted, and invariably the difficult but sadly necessary answer for whichever new and supposedly unique problem we’re addressing right now. This is what Obama is up against.

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Your Lesson for the Day: If You Decline to Use Military Force, You’ve "Kind of Lost Your Way"

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

by AmieSheppard Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s been obvious for a while that sometime soon the Supreme Court is going to take on another major abortion case. So far, what’s kept it from happening is probably the fact that both sides are unsure how it would go. Nobody wants to take the chance of a significant decision going against them and becoming settled law for decades.

But Ian Millhiser suggests today that this might be about to change. Conservatives have been unusually aggressive over the past four years in testing the limits of the law at the state level, and yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court upheld a recently-passed Texas statute that had the effect of shutting down all but eight abortion clinics in the entire state. Ominously, Millhiser says, the majority opinion went to considerable pains to acknowledge that its reading of the law was different from that of other circuit courts:

That’s what’s known as a “circuit split.”….Judge Elrod’s lengthy citation — which includes one case that was decided three years before the Supreme Court built the backbone of current abortion jurisprudence in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — is an unusually ostentatious and gratuitous effort to highlight the fact her own decision is “in conflict with the decision of another United States court of appeals on the same important matter.” If anything, Elrod is exaggerating the extent to which other judges disagree with her.

That’s a very strange tactic for a judge to take unless they are eager to have their opinion reviewed by the justices, and quite confident that their decision will be affirmed if it is reviewed by a higher authority. By calling attention to disagreement among circuit court judges regarding the proper way to resolve abortion cases, Elrod sent a blood-red howler to the Supreme Court telling them to “TAKE THIS CASE!”

Elrod, it should be noted, is not wrong to be confident her decision will be affirmed if it is heard by the justices. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the closest thing the Supreme Court has to a swing vote on abortion, hasn’t cast a pro-choice vote since 1992. As a justice, Kennedy’s considered 21 different abortion restrictions and upheld 20 of them.

Conservatives, including those on the Fifth Circuit, are increasingly confident that Anthony Kennedy’s position on abortion has evolved enough that he’s finally on board with a substantial rewrite of current abortion law. And since the other four conservative justices have been on board for a long time, that’s all it takes. Kennedy might not quite be willing to flatly overturn Roe v. Wade, but it’s a pretty good guess that he’s willing to go pretty far down that road.

We are rapidly approaching a point in half the states in America where abortions will be effectively available only to rich women. They’ll just jet off to clinics in California or New York if they have to. Non-rich women, who can’t afford that, will be forced into motherhood whether they like it or not. At which point conservatives, as usual, will suddenly lose all interest in them except as props for their rants about lazy welfare cheats.

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

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Support for Ground War Against ISIS Keeps Growing

by JoshuaCBAwm Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

“So much for war weariness,” crows Ed Morrissey today, and unfortunately it’s hard to argue with him. Here’s the latest:

This is a Fox poll, so maybe we have to take it with a grain of salt. Question 22, after all, is about whether Barack Obama has been too tough or too soft on radical Muslim extremists, and that probably primes the ol’ military aggression pump a wee bit. Still, these are the highest favorability ratings I’ve seen yet for ground action against ISIS, and they seem to rise with every new poll.

So will these numbers just keep going up, until the whole country is good and lathered up for Iraq War 3.0? Or, after a few months, will Americans get tired of the whole thing and lose interest? The evidence of history can point either way. In the meantime, however, I reserve the right to remain very, very nervous about Obama’s ability to hold out against the tide of war.

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Support for Ground War Against ISIS Keeps Growing

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No, There Is No “Troubling Persistence” of Eugenicist Thought in America

by Julie9987s Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Andrew Sullivan points me to a piece by Michael Brendan Dougherty bemoaning the “troubling persistence” of eugenic thought in America. But Dougherty’s evidence for this is tissue-paper thin, especially in his credulous treatment of the high abortion rate among women with Down syndrome babies:

In an article that explores this sympathetically, Alison Piepmeier writes:

Repeatedly women told me that they ended the pregnancy not because they wanted a “perfect child” (as one woman said, “I don’t know what ‘perfect child’ even means”) but because they recognized that the world is a difficult place for people with intellectual disabilities.

If the numbers on abortion and Down syndrome are even remotely accurate, the birth of a Down baby is something already against the norm. As medical costs are more and more socialized, it is hard to see how the stigma attached to “choosing” to carry a Down syndrome child to term will not increase. Why choose to burden the health system this way? Instead of neighbors straightforwardly admiring parents for the burden they bear with a disabled child, society is made up of taxpayers who will roll their eyes at the irresponsible breeder, who is costing them a mint in “unnecessary” medical treatment and learning specialists at school. Why condemn a child to a “life like that,” they will wonder.

Oh please. These women were lying. The reason they had abortions is because raising a Down syndrome child is a tremendous amount of work and, for many people, not very rewarding. But that sounds shallow and selfish, so they resorted instead to an excuse that sounds a little more caring. Far from being afraid of eye-rolling neighbors who disapprove of carrying the baby to term because it might lead to higher tax rates, they’re explicitly trying to avoid the ostracism of neighbors who would think poorly of them for aborting a child just because it’s a lot of work to raise.

This has nothing to do with eugenic thought one way or the other. The more prosaic truth is simpler: Most of us aren’t saints, and given a choice, we’d rather have a child without Down syndrome. You can approve or disapprove of this as you will, but that’s all that’s going on here.

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No, There Is No “Troubling Persistence” of Eugenicist Thought in America

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