U.S. life expectancy hits record high

Infidel753 linked to Rising US life expectancy isn’t what it seems in Link round-up for 22 August 2026, reminding me that I haven't examined the topic since Listening to people worry about lower birthrates on World Population Day is enough to drive me to drink on National Mojito Day, when I wrote, "U.S. life expectancy still hasn't risen to its 2014 value of 78.9 years." It finally passed that figure in 2024, as WBIR Channel 10 reported in New data says Americans are living longer than ever.

Life expectancy in the U.S. climbed to 79 years in 2024, the highest it's ever been.

It took four years, but the statistics finally said the pandemic ended. It took even longer, but the U.S. is finally making progress against the opioid epidemic. Both of those figured in Fox News Clips trumpeting US life expectancy SURGING as Americans rebound after COVID.

New CDC data suggests Americans are living longer, with experts pointing to declining overdose deaths, improved cancer survival rates, and continued recovery from the COVID era. Family medicine physician Dr. Jessica Gray explains the latest longevity trends.

As a cancer survivor, hearing about "improved cancer survival rates" is music to my ears. On the other hand, hearing "MAHA Monday" makes me wish for brain bleach. Fortunately, WKOW 27 News provided some in the form of Study finds life expectancy lower in Republican-held districts than Democratic ones.

A new federal report shows Americans living in Republican House districts have a lower life expectancy than those in Democratic districts.

Welcome to a theme I explored in PBS NewsHour explains 'How misinformation and the partisan divide drove a surge in U.S. COVID deaths,' a pandemic update on Throwback Thursday, worse health outcomes in Republican areas. It's not just COVID.

That's a wrap for today's topic. Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature.

Brad Parscale working with Caitlyn Jenner updates the Trump Campaign's 'Death Star' for the Revenge of the Sixth on Throwback Thursday

Beware the Revenge of the Sixth, the dark side of Star Wars Day! For today's celebration, I'm revisiting Brad Parscale calling the Trump digital campaign the "Death Star" in a tweet, the most active link from this blog on Twitter during Crazy Eddie's Motie News during its tenth year. Think of it as a serious Star Wars political self-parody.

I'll cover the blog's year on Twitter over the jump. First, I'm sharing Inside Edition's Caitlyn Jenner Will Run for Governor of California.

Caitlyn Jenner has announced that she’s running for governor of California. The reality star and former Olympian kick started her first bid for public office on social media, tweeting, “I’m in,” with a link to her campaign website. She’s assembling a high-powered campaign team including Brad Parscale, who was Donald Trump’s campaign manager until he was arrested last year. Jenner is running against current governor Gavin Newsome, who is facing a recall because of his handling of the pandemic.

It looks like I'll be blogging about Newsome's recall election, a consequence of how he handled the pandemic, from today until November 2nd. It also looks like Inside Edition, not the hardest news source, compressed two events in Parscale's timeline, Parscale's demotion from campaign manager and his arrest, and likely reversed cause and effect. CNN reported on both, beginning with Brad Parscale out as President Trump's campaign manage on July 15, 2020.

President Donald Trump shook up his campaign leadership announcing he was promoting Bill Stepien to be his campaign manager and demoting Brad Parscale, who had been serving in that role.

There is no mention of any arrest, which came more than two months later on September 28, 2020. Watch CNN's Video showing Trump's former campaign manager arrested by police.

Fort Lauderdale Police released segments of bodycam video showing officers handcuffing former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. It is not clear what occurred in the moments not shown in the edited three-minute compilation provided by FLPD.

CNN did not speculate on what prompted Parscale's meltdown, but People summarized a Fox News interview of him and a statement he and his wife made to Politico in which he explained what happened.

Brad told MacCallum in his interview Tuesday that he and his wife "went through a very stressful time" in recent years, amid the back-to-back presidential campaigns.

He said he and Candice "lost two children during the election," suggesting she miscarried, and he said he had deteriorated over time.

“We were completely attacked by the left, the right, the media. And I got to a bad place. My wife was worried about me, and she helped," Brad said. "And she was there every day, by my side, and I love her for it.”
...
He resigned shortly after the incident, having been demoted from his role as captain of the campaign earlier in the summer.

“I am stepping away from my company and any role in the campaign for the immediate future,” Brad said in his Sept. 30 statement to Politico, adding that he intended “to focus on my family and get help dealing with the overwhelming stress.”

The stress of the campaign got to him causing him to leave the campaign. I think that's true as far as it goes, but blaming the media and opposition doesn't tell the whole story. For that, read Amanda Marcotte's article Death Star blows itself up: Trump ran his campaign finances like his businesses — into the ground in Salon.

Life rarely plays out like a children's sci-fi movie, but I am happy to say that the people who made Death Star jokes turned out to be right. The Trump campaign's Death Star had its own version of the ray-shielded particle exhaust vent that allowed the Rebel Alliance to fly directly into its reactor core to blow up the entire apparatus: The greed and incompetence that defines Trump and everyone around him.

On Monday night, the New York Times published an article so satisfying that it felt almost pornographic, about how the Trump campaign has burned through most of that Death Star cash, with little to show for it — except, of course, when it comes to the bank accounts of the Trump family and their ancillary leeches.

It appears much of the problem was the way that Trump himself, along with Parscale, the Trump's family and other associates, treated the campaign as a personal piggybank. Trump paid his family's enormous legal bills with campaign cash. Money was routinely spent to fluff Trump's ego, as with the reported $11 million spent on Super Bowl ads. Nearly a third of the cash was routed through "a single limited liability company linked to Trump campaign officials." The partners of Trump's two sons are literally on the payroll. Trump's own incompetence is also a factor, leading to massive losses as he impulsively switched the Republican convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville to and then, effectively, to Washington. And the campaign spent far more money on fundraising than is typical, suggesting that Parscale was more interested in bragging about his Death Star than making it run efficiently.

Say what you will about Darth Vader, but at least he didn't destroy the Empire by greedily sucking all its resources dry so nothing was left to fight the rebels.

LOL, Darth Trump and Moff Brad did it to themselves. Jenner better hope she doesn't allow that to happen to her campaign although I wouldn't mind if it did, just as long as Parscale doesn't harm himself or pose a physical threat to others. Once was enough.

Follow over the jump for a retrospective about the highlights of Crazy Eddie's Motie News on Twitter.

Part I of When did speculative fiction go 'mainstream'? What the critics think

At his new blog Ecosophia, John Michael Greer made several claims about science fiction that I feel inspired to test.  Today, I'm examining the easiest one to verify or falsify, Greer's claim that "science fiction went mainstream in the late 1970s."  He's basing it on the criterion that "tenured academics stopped turning up their noses at 'all that Buck Rogers stuff,' as a handful of the more literary SF authors found their work being reviewed in highbrow periodicals and the genre as a whole found itself afflicted with creeping respectability."  That's a difficult criterion for me to evaluate.  As much as I am becoming an expert on current science fiction in film and television and am starting my project of blogging the Saturn Awards to become better versed in the history of speculative fiction on the large and small screens, I am not yet ready to do this for literary science fiction in the way I think this claim deserves.  To begin with, I do not have the access to an academic library full of literary reviews to examine to see if that indeed began happening then based on identifying the subjects of reviews and counting the relevant ones by year to detect a trend or inflection point.  So, I'll have to do it some other way.  After all, this is a blog entry, not a formal academic paper.

For plan B, I'm citing two articles on the subject, When sci-fi went mainstream from the Los Angeles Review of Books republished in Salon and a review of "The Secret History of Science Fiction" at Tor.com to see if there is an alternative hypothesis about when science fiction "went mainstream" (I'm not disputing that it has; my writing about science fiction and other speculative fiction genres being successful at awards shows demonstrates that has happened).  The first, published in 2012, refers to science fiction's "meteoric rise over the last thirty years from lowbrow genre to literary respectability," placing the beginning of science fiction becoming mainstream about 1972.  The author Lee Konstantinou then writes about how the process really began in 1960 with the publication of "New Maps of Hell" by Kingsley Amis, a series of literary essays about science fiction.  One of Amis's predictions, that "this genre will never make it in film or television," amuses me, as it quite evidently has.  In fact, it already had made it on television with "The Twilight Zone" debuting in 1959.  I won't let that bad prognostication stand in the way of using Amis's book as evidence for an eariler date for the beginning of science fiction's mainstream acceptance.  Konstantinou also cites the early science fiction works of Anthony Burgess, particularly "A Clockwork Orange," published in 1962, as an example of a mainstream novelist finding science fiction a respectable enough genre to write in.  Both examples point to science fiction becoming mainstream before the late 1970s.

"Genre in the mainstream: The Secret History of Science Fiction" also argues that mainstream writers have been writing science fiction since the 1970s and points to an incident in the early 1970s that supports the mainstreaming of the genre then.  The nominees for the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel included "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon, a mainstream writer.  It lost, but its mere nomination shows that, not only were mainstream novelists accepting science fiction by writing in the genre, but science fiction writers were beginning to accept them as well.  Again, this is evidence that science fiction was becoming mainstream by the early 1970s, if not earlier.

Having looked at some of the previous studies of when science fiction and other speculative fiction genres becoming mainstream, I now have an alternative claim from Greer's that the mainstreaming of speculative fiction genres started happening by the early 1970s, if not by 1960.  Stay tuned for my testing that hypothesis by using another data series and a slighly different criterion.  On Tuesday, I plan to use the Publishers Weekly lists of bestselling novels in the United States and Lists of The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers to determine when science fiction and other speculative fiction genres became mainstream from the perspective of the book-buying public instead of the critics.  Why Tuesday?  Tomorrow is the Great American Eclipse.  I can't miss that!

Seth Meyers takes a closer look at Trump and climate change

In the middle of Rick Perry nominated to lead department he wanted to eliminate but couldn't name, I noted that I should have been more upset.

I should be more appalled at what Perry's policies are likely to do to the environment, but I can't help but laugh at the sheer irony of Perry as Energy Secretary.  Given what the rest of Trump's Cabinet of Deplorables looks like, Perry looks relatively reasonable, if in a conventionally awful way.

Last night, Seth Meyers examined more of Trump's Cabinet of Deplorables and their effect on the enviroment in What Trump's Presidency Means for Climate Change: A Closer Look.

Seth takes a closer look at the affect [effect] Donald Trump's cabinet picks might have on climate change.

Of course Meyers made fun of Rick Perry, as quoted by The Huffington Post.

Citing a Daily Beast story, Meyers noted that while in college Perry apparently got two C grades, a D and an F in chemistry, a C in physics, and a D in “Meat.”

“How do you get a D in Meat?” Meyers asked. “Are you a Chipotle?”

No, he's an Aggie, one who lives down to the stereotype lampooned in Aggie jokes.*

Salon's story featured more serious quotes.

“Trump confirmed everyone’s fears by scouring the country to find the worst possible choice to head the Environment Protection Energy: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt,” Meyers said.

As I wrote, a Cabinet of Deplorables.  As for Trump himself...

“Trump’s past statements on climate change have not been promising, like his infamous claim that the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese, as opposed to Trump, who was created by and for the Russians,” Meyers noted.

I might have more on Trump and Putin's Bad Bromance in tomorrow's celebration of Festivus.  It's perfect for an airing of grievances.  Stay tuned.

*I first became acquainted with my ex-wife by telling Aggie jokes.  She went to the University of Texas, so she had lots of them.  The odd thing is that, other than Perry, all of the Texas A&M alums I've met were nice, intelligent people who didn't deserve the jokes told about them.  Perry does, though, so expect me to tell Aggie jokes from now on when I write about him.

Syrian Electronic Army takes credit for hacking AP's Twitter account

This has been a weird news day.

On the way out the door from from work, I noticed that there had been a flash crash of all three U.S. stock indices.  Joe.My.God captured the 140+ point drop in the Dow shown below.


I was afraid it was a computer trading glitch like the 2010 Flash Crash, but it turned out that it was the traders responding to a tweet from the hacked AP account, as CNN reported.

The shocking tweet came from the Associated Press earlier this afternoon: "Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured."

The AP's communications team quickly tweeted from its own account that the main AP Twitter was compromised, but investors had already panicked. The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) immediately plunged by more than 140 points.

And there it is: After years of hacks that typically involved little more than obscene language, Twitter's subpar security measures have now caused serious real-world consequences.

Tech Feed then reported that the Syrian Electronic Army, a
"cybermilitia" (actually a bunch of hackers and script kiddies) loyal to the Assad government took credit.  Here is their video report: Who Hacked the AP Twitter Account?

This morning a tweet was sent from the official Associated Press account that read, "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured." Although the tweet was bogus (the account had been hacked), it had a very noticeable effect on the stock market, as Annie explains. She also takes a look at the Syrian Electronic Army, who have taken credit for the hack.

The Syrians?  Really?  I'd never have guessed.

When I came home, two other stories relating to last week's  terror attacks awaited me.

First, Nebris had this gem on his Facebook wall: Former GOP Candidate Reacts After Man He Allegedly Framed For Ricin Poisoning Is Released.  Elvis has left the building just as the rabbit hole was revealed to be even deeper.

Second, another Facebook friend shared Salon's report that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an Alex Jones fan.  Jones immediately claimed that the news was evidence of a plot against him.

UPDATE: Sure enough, within minutes of the AP story breaking, Jones told BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray that it’s all a conspiracy against him:

“I’ve seen this before,” Jones said. “The federal government trying to connect me to tragedies. That’s the media and the government’s own conspiracy theories.” Jones compared the situation to when Richard Andrew Poplawski, a Pittsburgh man who killed three police officers in 2009, was shown to be a conspiracy theorist who frequently visited the Infowars website. “It’s standard for them to talk to people, go through computers, and any time someone’s done something bad they connect it to us,” Jone[s] said.

Shorter Jones, courtesy of Ambassador Vreenak.


And so we come full circle, starting with a fake AP story and ending with claims of another fake AP story.   Jones' protests to the contrary, I think that final AP story is real, although I'm motivated to do so.  After all, it means that the U.S. Right now has to disclaim Tsarnaev, as the Infowars association makes him one of them.  Excuse me while I suppress a wicked snicker.

Pizza Man Cain wants a third party for conservatives, never mind three already exist

I thought I'd said goodbye to Herman Cain, but it turns out that he's in the news again. Here's the relevant passage from Salon's GOP civil war: Herman Cain calls for third party.

Appearing on Bryan Fischer’s radio program this afternoon, Cain called for a large faction of Republican Party leaders to desert the party and form a third, more conservative party.

“I never thought that I would say this, and this is the first time publicly that I’ve said it: We need a third party to save this country. Not Ron Paul and the Ron Paulites. No. We need a legitimate third party to challenge the current system that we have, because I don’t believe that the Republican Party … has the ability to rebrand itself,” Cain said.
...
“It is more viable today than it has ever been,” Cain told Fischer today of a third party.

I first heard about this a couple of days ago, so when Hunter at Daily Kos gave me an opportunity to express myself this afternoon, I jumped on it.

Conservatives have *three* third parties already, the Libertarians, the Constitution Party, and the Reform Party (or what's left of it). They don't need another. The dissidents can go pile into one of them and take it over. Cain would probably feel most at home in the Reform Party. After all, it already has a history of being run by an eccentric egomaniac with lots of money and being a haven for ambitious conservatives who don't feel at home in the Republican Party.

If that doesn't work, they can continue to run out the moderates and keep the GOP for themselves. The refugees who won't become Democrats can hijack the revived Whig Party or what's left of Americans Elect.

Either way, they lose power and we win.

G-d, that felt to good to type. I've been waiting to say this since I first heard Cain's foolish remarks.

I mentioned the positives for Cain in joining the Reform Party. I covered the negatives involved in joining the Constitution Party in another comment.

I cover politics here in Michigan and have spoken to Bill Mohr, the head of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, Michigan's state affiliate of the Constitution Party, about their nominees. He told me about how Alan Keyes tried to become their nominee in 2008 and the party rejected him. According to Mohr, they figured out that Keyes was a Trojan Horse for a GOP takeover, or something like that, and rejected him in favor of Chuck Baldwin. I figured something like that would happen to Cain, which is why I recommended he take over the Reform Party. It would be much more to his liking.

As for which Republican politician I would like to see go to the Constitution Party, it would be Sarah Palin. She'd fit right in with their wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible theocratic vision. Also, she's already familiar with one of its state affiliates, the Alaska Independence Party. She and Todd can be in the same party again.

Someone else mentioned the American Independent Party, to which I replied:

I had to check that one. I counted the American Independent Party as part of the Constitution Party, as they were California's state affiliate of that organization until 2008. They split because of Alan Keyes' failed attempt to become the Constitution Party candidate...So, that means that there are three nationwide, but a fourth one with ballot access in California. Ask Roseanne Barr how being on the ballot only in California worked out for her.

As if that wasn't snarky enough, someone mentioned Cain "going Splitter." That deserved a video.



Reposted at Daily Kos.

More on when Romney came to town

I collected a lot of links and excerpts for my posts on Bain Capital and Mitt Romney, but didn't get around to using them until now. I decided to put together a meal of leftovers before the Florida primary tomorrow so that they don't go to waste. Enjoy!