Tip Jar for the usual suspects! (borrowing orlbucfan’s line-thanks orl!)

Thank you all so much for your contributions. I love this nest.

❤️

Of course some call this day of the week Caturday.

That gives me an excuse to post a little video that brightened my day (so I wanted to share it with you all). It was posted a few days ago.

The Nkuhuma pride is the dominant pride in the Djuma waterhole area in South Africa. When the cubs get a bit bigger they will be introduced to their aunties and cousins and join the pride.

Author Susan Cooper knows what it is to be scared of the dark. As a child growing up in England during World War II, she remembers long, dark nights, with Nazi bombers flying overhead.

“We would be sitting in a raid shelter underneath the back lawn with Mum reading books to us by the light of a candle,” she recalls. “When the bombs came closer, the candle would shake.”

Now, nearly a lifetime later, Cooper’s book The Shortest Day, is a celebration of light gradually returning after the winter solstice. Saturday, Dec. 21, is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

“I’ve spent my life writing about the light and the dark,” Cooper says. And this latest book is “a family celebration of the light coming back after the dark threatens to take over the world.”

Ellis switched gears and made illustrations that told the story of traditions that developed around the solstice – she says the winter holidays are an extension of the joy and relief of light gradually returning after a long winter. More than half the book depicts darkness and then …

“When the sun rose on the morning after the shortest day, I wanted it to feel really joyous,” Ellis says. “I wanted a sublime sunrise and a blue sky and it to feel like a new day and a new dawning.”

Cooper says she hopes the book helps communicate a universal and timeless message of hope and peace.

Reason #125,683 (give or take a few thousand) that we need Bernie to become the Democratic nominee. Such a worry!

‘Catastrophic’ Wildfires Continue To Rage Across Australia

My Australian facebook friends are kind of freaking out 🙁

This link is to a fire map of the Australia area in case you are interested and have the stomach.

A very scary situation.

“The problem is that it’s so dry that we cannot put out these fires. And that’s what’s different this time around,” she said.

I’m still pissed that Bernie was admonished (is the way the media has been framing it) when he started talking about climate change when given a racism question. Why can’t people get that climate change (and other environmental issues) hurts people of color the most?

From the link up top:

Asked if he had fun at the debate, the senator sighed. “Fun is the wrong word. It’s frustrating! You don’t have time to get into the issues.”

From NPR (!) – this is the MSM content I crave:

‘The Speech’: How Sanders’ 2010 Filibuster Elevated His Progressive Profile

It was 2010, and Sen. Bernie Sanders had already been in Congress for nearly two decades. The Vermont independent had a long — and consistent — track record, but at that point, he hadn’t yet emerged as a national figure on the left.

That quickly changed on Dec. 10, starting at 10:25 a.m. and over the following eight-and-a-half hours.

Die-hard Sanders supporters simply know it as “The Speech”: a filibuster he launched decrying a bipartisan tax deal crafted primarily by then-Vice President Joe Biden and then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“You can call what I am doing today whatever you want. You can call it a filibuster. You can call it a very long speech,” Sanders said toward the top of his marathon. “I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have to do a lot better than this agreement provides.”

The moment resonates nearly a decade later, as Sanders battles for the Democratic presidential nomination with the chief architect of the deal, Biden.

Sanders kept circling back to two main points as the speech went on.

First, that public opinion was on his side. “The polls show us the American people do not believe millionaires and billionaires need more tax breaks,” he said at one point.

And, foreshadowing his future presidential campaigns, Sanders made a point to talk past the other lawmakers — who he likely realized were mostly going to vote for the bipartisan deal. He kept urging people to call Congress to complain.

“By and large, it is not a good deal. We can do better,” he said several hours in. “And if the American people stand up and work with us, if they get on the phones — if they call up their senators, if they call up their congressmen — if they make their voices heard and said, ‘Enough is enough. The rich have got it all right now,’ ” Sanders thought the deal could be scuttled.

That’s when Democrats really began to take notice. “The calls to offices, after a couple hours of the speech, they couldn’t get in,” Reid said earlier this year. The Senate website was also briefly overwhelmed by traffic. And, at a time when the feat was more of a political novelty, Sanders trended on Twitter and added scores of new followers.

but it wasn’t until the White House responded in a dramatic way that (Warren Gunnels) fully realized how much of an impact the speech was having in progressive circles.

“I don’t even know if they had a topic in mind, but they just rolled out Bill Clinton while Bernie was speaking,” Gunnels recalled, laughing.

In a move that launched scores of pre-meme memes, Obama had strolled into the White House briefing room with the 42nd president, who looked thrilled to be back at the famous lectern.

As Obama stood next to him — and then alone, after Obama left to return to a holiday party — Clinton defended the deal for more than a half hour. “The agreement taken as a whole is, I believe, the best bipartisan agreement we can reach to help the largest number of Americans,” he said.

Meanwhile, on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Sanders kept going.

He railed on corporate pay and government subsidies for energy giants like Exxon Mobil — familiar themes for his later presidential runs. He decried the deal’s increase in deficit spending.

And he bluntly criticized Obama. “His credibility has been severely damaged. We are caving in on this issue and we should not be,” Sanders said.

in the immediate wake of the filibuster, Sanders told NPR he was tired of compromises. “Might we have to compromise? Yeah. Maybe we do. But you’ve got to wage the fight before you compromise. You’ve got to take the case to the American people. And we didn’t do that.”

We Must Address the Roots of Inequality to Keep It From Killing Us

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau confirms that the gap between the richest and poorest households in the U.S. is the largest it has been in over 50 years, and that economic power is more concentrated than ever before. Democrats and Republicans may have different interpretations of these facts, but in public health, decades of research are coming to a consensus: Inequality kills.

I like that this article is asserting that we need to go even further than MFA. We need to keep pushing the boundaries.

What drives population health are the social determinants of health. Lowering premature mortality in the U.S. requires something even more radical than Medicare for All; it requires concerted action to limit the concentration of wealth and power. If unchecked, rampant inequality will continue to exert a heavy toll on the population.

While pundits have waged bitter battles over the need to reform the U.S. health care system, focus on the structural root of the problem is still missing. To be sure, access to the health care system is critically important, and when someone is sick, they need a system that guarantees equitable access to treatment. But the true problem remains the social and economic drivers of health, including stagnant or declining wages, job insecurity, food insecurity and neighborhood deprivation.

Change is possible.