Tag Archives: icons

Ireland Is Latest Country to Approve Gay Marriage

by KishaMoncrieff Posted on May 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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I don’t have anything profound to say about this, but it’s just a nice piece of good news. And I could use some good news these day:

Irish voters have resoundingly backed amending the constitution to legalize gay marriage, leaders on both sides of the Irish referendum declared Saturday after the world’s first national vote on the issue.

As the official ballot counting continued, the only question appeared to be how large the “yes” margin of victory from Friday’s vote would be. Analysts said the “yes” support was likely to exceed 60 percent nationally when official results are announced later Saturday.

Congratulations to Ireland. This is both a human and humane gesture in a world that could use more of them.

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Ireland Is Latest Country to Approve Gay Marriage

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Friday Cat Blogging – 21 November 2014

by RobynKirwin Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here in Drumland we have a new version of the Second Commandment. Here’s the rewrite:

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to any other cats: for I, the Lord thy Hilbert, am a jealous cat.

Here’s the backstory. Last week I got slightly concerned that Hopper was getting a bit less sociable. It was nothing big. She was still perfectly friendly, but she never jumped into our laps anymore. She’s always had too much energy to be much of a lap cat, but when we first got her she’d occasionally get tuckered out and curl up with us.

Long story short, my concern was completely misplaced. It turns out the reason she was avoiding our laps was because of Hilbert. Even if he was three rooms away, his spidey sense would tingle whenever she curled up with us, and he’d rush over to demand attention. Eventually he’d push her off completely, and apparently Hopper got tired of this. So she just stopped jumping into our laps.

But as soon as we began restraining Hilbert, it turned out that Hopper was delighted to spend a spare hour or so with her human heating pads. This was easier said than done, since Hilbert really, really gets jealous when he sees Hopper on a lap. There’s always another lap available for him, of course, but that’s not the lap he wants. He wants whatever lap Hopper is sitting in. Keeping him away is an endless struggle.

But struggle we do, and we figure that eventually Hilbert will learn there are laps aplenty and Hopper will realize that sitting in a lap isn’t an invitation to be abused by her brother. Peace and love will then break out. Someday.

In the meantime, here’s this week’s catblogging. On the left, Hopper is curled up in a sink that just fits her. Like so many cats, she’s convinced that we humans might not know how to use the bathroom properly, so she always likes to come in and supervise. On the right, Hilbert is upstairs surveying his domain. Probably checking to ensure that no one else is sitting in a lap.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 21 November 2014

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Kids Today Are No Dumber Than Their Elders

by DennyCornejo Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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One of my little pet peeves—occasionally given expression on this blog—is the notion that kids today are dumber than they used to be. I’d say that both the anecdotal and statistical evidence suggests just the opposite, but it’s hard to get good comparisons since children are tested constantly while adults almost never are. Every year we hear horror stories about how few teenagers can locate France on a map, but who’s to say whether adults are any better? After all, we never get the chance to herd them into classrooms and force them to tell us.

Today, however, Andrew Sullivan points me to a lovely little tidbit that I can’t resist passing along. As true evidence, it’s pretty much worthless. But who cares? This is a blog! If I can’t draw sweeping conclusions from minuscule data here, where can I? So here it is: a YouGov survey of a thousand adults asking them six grammatical questions. The results are on the right. As you can see, every age group did about equally well. In fact, if you average all six questions, the results ranged from 75 percent correct for the youngsters to 73 percent correct for the senior citizens. That’s no difference at all.

So there you have it. The kids today are all right. Or alright. Or something. In any case, their grammar appears to be every bit as good as that of their elders.

Link – 

Kids Today Are No Dumber Than Their Elders

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Why Won’t Orrin Hatch Blame Republicans For the Failure of Immigration Reform?

by ClarencXQA Posted on November 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch cracks me up:

Hatch expressed concern that President Barack Obama may soon take executive action on immigration and protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. “It would be catastrophic for him to do that,” said Hatch. “Part of it is our fault. We haven’t really seized this problem. Of course, we haven’t been in a position to do it either, with Democrats controlling the Senate. I’m not blaming Republicans. But we really haven’t seized that problem and found solutions for it.”

….”Frankly, I’d like to see immigration done the right way,” Hatch added. “This president is prone to doing through executive order that which he cannot do by working with the Congress, because he won’t work with us. If he worked with us, I think we could get an immigration bill through … He has a Republican Congress that’s willing to work with him. That’s the thing that’s pretty interesting to me.”

You know, it was only 17 months ago that the Senate passed a vigorously negotiated and tough-minded bipartisan immigration bill that was actively supported by President Obama. You know who voted for it? Orrin Hatch. The only reason it’s not the law of the land today is….Republicans in the House. That’s it.

So what’s the problem here? Why shouldn’t we blame Republicans?

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Why Won’t Orrin Hatch Blame Republicans For the Failure of Immigration Reform?

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Yet More Housekeeping

by RaymonGillen Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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How much detail do you want about my medical woes? Well, I’m bored, so you’re going to get more.

By the time you read this, I should be sedated and ready for a something-plasty, a procedure that injects bone cement into my fractured L3 lumbar vertebra. In other words, I will become a low-grade Wolverine in one teeny-tiny part of my body. According to the doctors, the cement dries instantly and should relieve my back pain almost completely. It sounds too good to be true, and of course it’s always possible that I have some other source of back pain in addition to the compression fracture. But this should help a lot.

There is more to this story, and hopefully tomorrow will wrap everything up as all the rest of the test results come back. I’ll keep you posted.

On a related subject, I have to say that the Irvine Kaiser hospital is excellent. I have a very nice little single room with good visiting accommodations. It features all the usual annoyances of a hospital, some of which have made me grumpy, but everyone has been very nice and professional. They’ve made my stay about as nice as it could be under the circumstances.

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Yet More Housekeeping

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 October 2014

by ReaganRowland Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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I don’t know about you, but I could stand to have catblogging a little earlier than usual this week. What you see here is one of the many cat TVs now installed in our home. This is the dining room TV. There are also cat TVs in the kitchen and the study. The kitchen TV apparently has most of its good shows at night, and it’s not clear what those shows are about. But they are extremely entrancing.

The dining room TV, by contrast, is sort of our workhorse cat TV. They both love it all day long. Needless to say, this is something new for both Hopper and Hilbert, since they spent the first ten months of their lives in a shelter, where cat TV mostly just starred other cats. Who knew there were so many other channels to choose from?

Excerpt from – 

Friday Cat Blogging – 17 October 2014

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Talk, Talk, Talk to Your Kids

by AlfredoParnell Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve long been sort of interested in the ongoing research that shows the importance of building vocabulary in children. This is famously summarized as the “30 million word gap,” thanks to findings that high-income children have heard 30 million more words than low-income children by age 3. But apparently new research is modifying these findings somewhat. It turns out that quality may be more important than quantity:

A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!”) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

….In a related finding, published in April, researchers who observed 11- and 14-month-old children in their homes found that the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2. The total number of words had no correlation with future ability.

In practice, talking more usually leads to talking better, so there’s probably a little less here than meets the eye. Still, it’s interesting stuff. Regardless of parental education level, it turns out that simply interacting with your newborn more frequently and more conversationally makes a big difference. So forget the baby Mozart, all you new parents. Instead, just chatter away with your kids. It’s cheaper and it works better.

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Talk, Talk, Talk to Your Kids

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Please Rescue Us. Now Go Away.

by CharlesFiem Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore brings the snark:

I realize the remarks of politicians should not be imputed to the entire populations they govern or represent. But still, it’s hard to avoid noting that Texas—the very sovereign State of Texas, I should clarify, where the federal government is generally not welcome—was at a loss in dealing with a single Ebola case until the feds stepped in.

Sure, this is just a cheap gotcha. But sometimes there’s a real lesson even in the simplest gibe, and Kilgore offers it: “It would be helpful to see some after-the-fact reflection on why the resources of a central government are sometimes necessary to avoid catastrophe.”

That won’t happen, of course. Instead, conservatives are already using this as an excuse to trash the federal government for not coming to their rescue sooner. This will undoubtedly be only a brief preface to yet another round of across-the-board budget cutting because everyone knows there’s far too much waste and fat in the system. The irony of it all will, I’m sure, go entirely unnoticed.

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Please Rescue Us. Now Go Away.

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There’s No Ebola Vaccine Yet Because We Cut the NIH Budget Ten Years Ago

by MariettWorden Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

As we all know, the federal budget is bloated and wasteful. It needs to be cut across the board. Right?

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has “slowed down” research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'” Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

Collins obviously has some skin in this game, but he’s probably right. What’s more, even without a vaccine we’d probably be better prepared to react to the Ebola outbreak if we hadn’t spent the past decade steadily slashing funding for public health emergencies. The chart on the right, from Scientific American, tells the story.

There are consequences for budget cuts. Right now we’re living through one of them.

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There’s No Ebola Vaccine Yet Because We Cut the NIH Budget Ten Years Ago

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Charts: How Work Email Has Taken Over Our Personal Lives

by CandacePapst Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s dinnertime, and you know its just wrong to be checking your email. Your spouse and kids are giving you the stink-eye. But it’ll just take a minute. One minute. Seriously. There’s just this super-quick thing from the boss that you’ve gotta deal with.

American workers, especially white-collar workers, are becoming an army of smartphone addicts, and we beat ourselves up even as we indulge in the rudest of modern habits. But we’re not entirely to blame for our weakness, as Clive Thompson reports in the latest issue of Mother Jones. Much of the encroachment of technology into our lives is driven by work, and workplace demands are escalating as a direct result of the so-called convenience that Steve Jobs has placed in our pockets. As Thompson notes in his must-read essay, “You could view off-hours email as one of the growing labor issues of our time.” So here are a few stats that outline the issue, and one that suggests how smart companies might help address it.

Link:  

Charts: How Work Email Has Taken Over Our Personal Lives

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