The post How Many Hours Does a Cat Sleep? Vet-Reviewed Facts & FAQ by Jessica Kim appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. Click to Skip Ahead Average Hours of Sleep Why Do Cats Sleep So Much? When to Be Concerned If it seems like your cat sleeps a lot, it’s probably because it’s true. Cats love nothing more than having a few cat naps throughout their day. The average number of hours a cat sleeps a day will vary depending on several different factors, including their age and breed. However, healthy adult cats can sleep from anywhere between 12 to 16 hours a day.1 Cats have different sleeping habits than humans, and it can take new cat owners some time to get used to them. Getting enough sleep is vital to a cat’s health and well-being. So, if you’re ever concerned about your cat’s sleeping schedule, consult your veterinarian to determine if your cat’s getting just the right amount of sleep. Average Hours of Sleep for Kittens and Cats The amount of sleep a cat gets in a day can vary depending on their age. In general, young kittens tend to sleep more than adult cats. They can sleep for about 20 hours a day.2 During the hours they’re awake, they’re usually extremely active, curious, and playful. By the time a kitten reaches young adulthood, they require less sleep and will sleep between 12 to 16 hours. The number of hours they sleep will increase again when they start to reach their senior life stage. Senior cats tend to sleep more and move around less, especially as they start to experience mobility loss and other age-related health issues. It’s important to note that cats don’t sleep for multiple consecutive hours at a time throughout the day. They usually sleep for a little over an hour and will engage in some sort of activity before taking another nap. Their sleep is broken up at various parts of their day, and the cumulative amount of sleep they get per day adds up to about 12 to 16 hours. Image Credit: Tucker Horan Media, Shutterstock Why Do Cats Sleep So Much? Cats and humans have different sleep patterns. Most humans are monophasic sleepers, which means that we’ll sleep for one long period, typically at night. In contrast, cats are polyphasic sleepers. This means that they sleep for shorter periods of time throughout the day and night. It’s believed that polyphasic sleeping is beneficial for survival because it enables cats to get rest without falling into deep sleep and being easy prey for natural predators. In the wild, cats will also consume a lot of energy during their waking hours because they’re usually hunting for prey. They have to engage in strenuous activities, like climbing trees and pouncing. So, it’s important for them to get enough rest in between to be able to have enough energy for their next hunt. You may also notice that your cat is most active during sunrise and sunset. This is because they’re crepuscular animals, and these times of day are when they naturally feel energized and ready to hunt and explore. Image Credit: rai106, Shutterstock When to Be Concerned Since sleep is essential to your cat’s well-being, it’s important to familiarize yourself with your cat’s sleep patterns. While cats do sleep a lot more than most humans, sometimes they may sleep too much. Sometimes, cats will oversleep if they’re bored and under-stimulated. Boredom is a significant wellness issue, as bored cats are susceptible to developing behavioral issues, including destruction, over-grooming, and depression. It’s important for cats to get plenty of exercise, mental stimulation, and social interaction every day to keep them happy and healthy. Sometimes, increased sleep can indicate an underlying health issue or an injury. Injured cats may sleep or rest more to recuperate from their injury and because they’ve lost some mobility. Many health issues, such as hyperthyroidism, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, and liver disease, can also cause increased sleep or changes in sleep patterns. If you notice any sudden changes in your cat’s sleep patterns, it’s best to consult your veterinarian. Your veterinarian can complete a physical exam on your cat and run additional diagnostic tests to diagnose any underlying health issues that may be causing sleep. They can also let you know if the increased sleep is simply due to aging. Conclusion Cats spend about half their day napping or sleeping. Their sleep is usually distributed at various parts of the day, and it’s common for them to nap after they’ve expended their energy from exercising or playing. Since sleep patterns can help you keep track of your cat’s health, make sure to keep an eye on your cat’s sleeping habits. This will help you to act as quickly as possible if they need veterinary care. Also see: How Many Hours Do Kittens Sleep? Early Habits & Behaviors Explained (Vet-Verified Info) Sources https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0014488674900326 Featured Image Credit: Garna Zarina, Shutterstock The post How Many Hours Does a Cat Sleep? Vet-Reviewed Facts & FAQ by Jessica Kim appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

THE CENTER SQUARE—Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the U.S. military are ineffective, a new Arizona State University study suggests. The study done by the university’s Center for American Institutions argued that there is an emphasis on training new soldiers about social issues like “unconscious bias” and “intersectionality” in a way the center says runs contrary to typical American ideals. The study examined DEI plans in different sectors of the military, including DEI office staffing and education at academies like West Point. “The massive DEI bureaucracy, its training and its pseudo-scientific assessments are at best distractions that absorb valuable time and resources,” the executive summary states. “At worst they communicate the opposite of the military ethos: e.g. that individual demographic differences come before team and mission.” Donald Critchlow, the director of the center, wrote in the studies introduction that it was focused on looking at the influence of critical race theory in the U.S. armed forces training. “The Commission on Civic Education in the Military began as a project to review civic education in the military. Our research team did not expect to find critical race theory so embedded and pervasive. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are found throughout the U.S. armed forces and our service academies,” Critchlow wrote. “This yearlong study documents just how pervasive these training programs are in our armed forces and service academies and that DEI extends well beyond just formal training programs in the military and service academies.” “The Founders of our nation understood and feared a politicized military. History had shown them that a politicized army easily became the tool of tyranny. The armed forces of the United States has proudly upheld this long tradition of separating mission from politics,” he continued. >>> Panel Highlights Negative Effects of DEI on US Military Readiness In terms of recommendations, the study suggests that DEI office’s be completely scrapped, but said it may be politically unlikely for the time being. “The surest way to eliminate the concerning trends we have identified, and the growth of race and sex-based scapegoating and stereotyping in the U.S. military, is to altogether end the DEI bureaucracy there,” the study states. “However, until such a time as the executive or legislative branches of the government choose to end the DEI bureaucracy in our federal agencies and military, we are left to advocate the pursuit of alternative avenues that may affect positive change despite existing policies.”  They also suggested that the military prioritize civic education with a focus on “America’s commitment to freedom and opportunity.” The study comes as some branches of the military continue to struggle with recruiting new service members. Originally published by The Center Square. The post University Study: ‘Vast DEI Bureaucracy’ Negatively Impacting US Armed Forces appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Directed by Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is an iconic 1966 Italian Spaghetti Western film starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach. To this day, the film continues to captivate audiences with its impressive use of camera work and extremely high tension, not to mention its violence. Deemed one of the most classic Spaghetti Westerns ever made, it is the third and final... Source

Animals have been on the earth longer than humans, so they are bound to have some unique qualities. At first glance, they may seem like cute and cuddly creatures, but there's more to them than meets the eye. Many species of animals have impressive abilities such as being super-intelligent, having a great memory, or superb survival skills. Many of their traits are similar to humans... Source

Native Americans are the indigenous people who inhabited what is now the United States thousands of years before a single settler step foot on the shore. They lived in tribes, developing complex yet simple societies, establishing villages and distinct cultures depending on the region and people. However, they were greatly affected by the European colonization of the Americas which began in 1492. Source

Among the various unhinged responses to the Supreme Court’s opinions from the spring 2024 term, some of the most thoroughly deranged relate to the decision in NetChoice v. Paxton earlier this week. The hysteria around NetChoice — including, for example, the attorney general of Florida claiming as a victory what was clearly a defeat, or the New York Times running an op-ed that described the First Amendment as out of control — belies the fact that NetChoice is a simple case. It concerns whether the government has a right to dictate what you see online or not. The true target of any censorship scheme on social media is rarely a corporation or an industry and more often you, the ordinary internet user. Adding color, NetChoice is about the legislatures of Florida and Texas thinking that they have the power to dictate to social media companies what political opinions can and cannot be expressed on their websites. These states passed laws that said social media companies couldn’t remove content in a manner that was not viewpoint-neutral and would require the companies to carry “conservative” content that, at the time, was widely regarded as being suppressed by social media companies for political reasons. The social media companies sued, saying this violated their free speech rights. The content-based powers of the kind Texas and Florida sought are routinely exercised by governments outside the United States but almost never exercised here, thanks to the First Amendment. The First Amendment was deliberately designed to get government out of the business of policing political speech, initially by abolishing the common law of seditious libel and later by extending itself by analogy to newer schemes, whether they be criminal syndicalism statutes or content moderation statutes, which seek to achieve similar ends but via different means. The Supreme Court has long been hostile to laws that offend the First Amendment, and its opinion in NetChoice v. Paxton is no exception; the court, 9-0, vacated the lower court’s ruling and remanded it with a harsh warning to the lower courts: When moderating content, “social media platforms are making expressive choices … because that is true, they receive First Amendment protection.” That Justice Kagan wrote those words makes it all the stranger that backing the defendants in NetChoice is a group of very strange bedfellows — hard-charging Southern conservative populist attorneys general on the one hand and Manhattan liberal law professors, who wouldn’t be caught dead attending the same cocktail party as those attorneys general, on the other. What such lawyers share, at least among those of us who are more commercially minded, is that they can tend to be long on opinions and short on experience, and their opinions on this matter are lengthy indeed. Even a scintilla of experience with state censorship would reveal that the true target of any censorship scheme on social media is rarely a corporation or an industry and more often you, the ordinary internet user. And many long-form rationalizations have emanated from the left-leaning supporters of Paxton et al. in this case with a view to obscuring this simple fact. The first of these was a completely bizarre and (judging from SCOTUS’ disposal of the case) legally 100% wrong amicus brief submitted jointly by a number of nationally known, left-leaning law professors, including Larry Lessig, and the American Economic Liberties Project, who argued that NetChoice’s position on this matter — that states have no business policing speech — somehow threatened non-discrimination laws and would “[place] social media beyond the reach of the States’ police power.” More recently, on Tuesday, July 2, the New York Times published another legal academic op-ed, this time titled, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” by Columbia law professor Timothy Wu, who not coincidentally was also one of the co-authors of the aforementioned wacky and wrong amicus brief. Wu rails against the decision, describing the federal judiciary as having “lost the plot” with the decision in NetChoice, “[transforming] a constitutional provision meant to protect unpopular opinion into an all-purpose tool of nullification that now mostly protects corporate interests” and “blithely assuming that [content moderation] decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.” Which, of course, they are — as anyone who has any experience at the coalface of social media, rather than simply talking about it, would doubtless be aware. Just log into a social media website’s content moderator interface, and you’ll be able to see it plainly; flagged content gets served to an editor, who is then in a position to decide whether the content stays up or disappears. The moderator’s array of buttons, ranging from warnings to mutes, deletions, and bans, is the means by which the moderator metes out editorial justice in accordance with corporate policy and his own discretion. The decision he makes is functionally no different from that of an editor spiking a piece by pressing “send” on an email or a newspaper comment editor deleting a comment below an article in a comment section. It is a human editorial decision carried out by electronic means. Nor does a content moderation law such as Texas’ police “Big Tech” — because content moderators don’t police “Big Tech’s” speech. So-called “Big Tech” platforms, as a general rule, say very little using their own platforms; where they do, it is done carefully and via, for example, government relations accounts or press releases. This is done for both practical and legal reasons: As a commercial matter, having your users create free content and page views scales considerably better than paying people to do it for you. Legally, thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law refuses to impute liability to hosts of online services for the speech of their users, subject to certain limited exceptions, so the less you say, the less likely it is that you will get sued. This rule means that a company like, for example, the New York Times, will not be liable for what users of its comment section say, just as a company like Twitter/X will not be liable for what its users tweet. Content moderation laws, then, do not police companies. They police people who make that content and seek to both impart and receive it from others, with a view to influencing information that those users see in the direction that the law’s writers prefer. Content moderation laws are tools of social control. Necessarily, they call balls and strikes about viewpoints, choosing which views are disfavored and which ones are not. Otherwise, why have a law at all? That’s how they’re used abroad, and Texas’ social media law — which called for “neutrality” and mandated hosting all viewpoints — was no exception. This law was enacted before Elon Musk bought Twitter and when content moderation on the major websites skewed left. The law required social media platforms not to “censor a user … or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another … based on: the viewpoint of the user or another person [or] the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression.” Under this law, a Jewish-themed social media platform would thus be unable to exclude a user from posting Nazi propaganda all over its site. A forum for new mothers would not be able to exclude anti-natalist Malthusians from insulting mothers for having given birth, so long as the insults were viewpoint-based. Forcing companies to carry terrible speech and terrible speakers infringes upon their freedom to decide what they want to say and quite transparently is designed to force a social media company’s users to be exposed to particular ways of thinking. Once we accept that social media content is a valid subject of government regulation, there will be no end to attempts by the government to patrol it. This is a fact of which Ken Paxton and his apologists are fully aware. Personal insults, political insults, and inconvenient facts are routinely censored by governments all over the world. To see how truly absurd unrestrained censorship regimes can grow, for one recent example from April of this year, the German government sent a criminal investigative inquiry to a U.S. social network because one of its users had dared to make fun of a fat German politician for being overweight. Making a true statement of fact about an obese parliamentarian was apparently contrary to German “defamation of honor” laws, which operate identically to the seditious libel laws the First Amendment once abolished. The issues in NetChoice v. Paxton are thus very simple to understand. A bunch of Southern conservatives and Northern liberals, mostly lawyer-politicians, think their respective one-party states should have the power to dictate what you say and see online. These individuals are willing to engage in all manner of lengthy legal theoretical gymnastics to disguise the truth of the matter: They are petty censors who hate you for disagreeing with them. They want to use the the government, backed by the full force of its monopoly on lawful violence, to silence your speech, if not by shutting you up, then by drowning you out. Our response as a society should be, in the immortal words of Elon Musk, “Message received.”

The State Elections Enforcement Commission in Connecticut has issued yet another criminal referral for a Democrat official in Bridgeport, where four other Democrats and former campaign operatives have already been accused of mishandling absentee ballots.Maria PereiraOn Wednesday, the SEEC added a criminal referral for Bridgeport City Councilwoman Maria Pereira in connection with absentee ballots collected for her Democrat primary last year. On Primary Election Day 2023, Pereira seemed to be losing her re-election bid until absentee ballots added later that evening suddenly pushed her over the edge to victory.'Maria likes to bribe the seniors, bringing them Christmas presents … buying them food, getting them little things.'The SEEC's referral stems from a complaint issued by one of Pereira's Democrat opponents, Kevin Monks, and includes statements from several residents of one particular low-income apartment complex "heavily targeted by campaigns in the 2023 primary," the CT Mirror said."Maria Pereira came to my home and took the ballot," one resident said. "She indicated that she would mail it for me. She told me what line to vote for and I sign[ed] it.""For 4 years Maria Pereira has taken my voting ballot and stuffed it in her bag to drop it off," another resident wrote in a letter. "Maria likes to bribe the seniors, bringing them Christmas presents … buying them food, getting them little things."Screenshots of handwritten notes scribbled on what appear to be absentee ballot materials and shared on X by John Craven of News 12 Connecticut indicate that Pereira — or someone pretending to be Pereira — attempted to influence the way people completed their ballots."You get to vote for whoever you want, just like I get to choose which residen[ts] I help or don’t help," Pereira allegedly wrote on one person's absentee ballot instructions.On another set of instructions, she allegedly wrote, "No one will ever know!" followed by a heart and her name."Both during the Primary and afterwards, we heard from many residents who complained that Pereira had engaged in illegal and unethical behavior both during the election and past elections," Monks wrote in the complaint.Despite the statements and apparent evidence against her, Pereira brushed off the criminal referral as mere grandstanding from a bitter political rival. "I am not worried about it in the least," she said in a statement. "This is not a sprint but a marathon, and I’m preparing a massive lawsuit against the city."Leaders of the Yankee Institute, a government watchdog organization in Connecticut, believe this latest referral demonstrates the "systemic rot" that pervades state politics and will further erode public trust in the electoral process."For Americans — regardless of party — to have confidence in our electoral process, they have to know the government is committed to enforcing clean, fair elections," said Carol Platt Liebau, president of the Yankee Institute. "Defending the integrity of the ballot is one of government’s most sacred duties.""The latest allegations in Bridgeport demonstrate systemic rot in Connecticut, where elected officials have been largely absent in safeguarding absentee ballots — fair and free elections must transcend partisan politics," Frank Ricci, a Connecticut fire chief and Yankee Institute fellow, told Blaze News.The SEEC investigates complaints of election fraud and then makes recommendations for possible criminal charges to Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin as appropriate. A spokesperson from Griffin's office did not respond to a request for comment from the Trumbell Times.Pereira was arrested in connection with an altercation that broke out at a "balloting" location on Election Day last fall, but prosecutors declined to pursue charges.Bridgeport elections in recent historyAbsentee ballots sure seem to have outsized impact on elections in Bridgeport, Connecticut's most populous city. In both 2019 and 2023, incumbent Mayor Joe Ganim — whose decades in office were interrupted when he spent seven years behind bars for felony convictions related to political corruption — managed to squeak by a tough challenger in the Democrat mayoral primary, as Blaze News previously reported.The 2023 primary was so problematic that a judge tossed the results and ordered a primary do-over.In both primaries, Ganim's challenger seemed to have a healthy lead until absentee ballots were later added to the mix. Those absentee ballots ultimately gave Ganim a 270-vote victory over state Sen. Marilyn Moore in 2019 and a 251-vote victory over John Gomes last fall.Last month, three members of Ganim's 2019 campaign and one member of Moore's campaign were slapped with criminal charges in connection to some of those absentee ballots. The charges range from mishandling or illicitly possessing an absentee ballot to witness tampering.Two of the defendants in that case are current Bridgeport Democrat officials. Alfredo Castillo is a Democrat city councilman. Co-defendant Wanda Geter-Pataky, a longtime supporter of Mayor Ganim, is the vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic Party. Geter-Pataky was apparently caught on surveillance cameras stuffing ballot boxes outside City Hall for the 2023 mayoral primary as well. In fact, that 2023 mayoral primary was so problematic that a judge tossed the results and ordered a primary do-over, though Ganim prevailed in the second primary as well as the general election. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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