Let us continue our year-end search for random things to write about because nothing important is happening. Did you know that the number of twin births has been rising steadily for the past three decades? It has. And the number of triplet births skyrocketed through 1998, but has been dropping ever since.

This comes from the CDC’s final report on births for 2014, which is chock full of everything you might want to know about US birth and fertility rates. The increase in triplet births is most likely due to the rising use of fertility therapies, and the drop after 1998 is likely due to improvements in fertility therapies. The reason for the steady increase in twins is less clear, since it seems too large to be accounted for by fertility treatments.

Interestingly, blacks have the highest twin rate and Hispanics have the lowest. For triplets, whites have the highest rate—probably because the triplet rate is influenced by expensive fertility treatments, which whites are more able to afford than others. Other statistics for 2014:

• Number of cesarean births: 32 percent
• Number of babies that are firstborns: 38.8 percent
• Number of babies that are 8th-borns or higher: 0.5 percent
• State with the most births: California
• State with the highest birth rate: Utah
• State with the lowest birth rate: New Hampshire
• Births to unmarried women: 40.2 percent
• Number of mothers with weight gain of less than 11 pounds: 8.7 percent
• Number of mothers with weight gain of more than 40 pounds: 21.6 percent
• Number of births in hospitals: 98.5 percent
• Number of births 3+ weeks early: 9.5 percent
• Number of babies with very low birthweight: 1.4 percent
• Number of black babies with very low birthweight: 2.9 percent
• Teen birth rate: 2.45 percent, yet another record low

Over at the Washington Post, Jessica Contrera has a list of what’s out and what’s in for 2016. I assume that all the out stuff used to be in, and I was curious how many I had heard of. Answer: 45 out of 64. There were 19 items on the list that I had no clue about. Vetements? Ghosting? Pulp? (Actually, I’ve always liked my OJ pulpy, but I didn’t know this had become a thing.) Additionally, there are items like squad goals and walls, which I either understand or can figure out, but which I also didn’t know had become things. I assume squad goals are like group goals, but for small groups? Let’s google it.

Crap. I was totally wrong:

Everyone has a different name for that group of friends you do everything with….A group of friends is called a squad now (as seen in the phrase: squad deep, when your whole crew is together). Squads, of course, have goals….So, what are squad goals, then? Well, there’s no official definition for it (yet), but here’s mine:

Squad Goal (skwäd/??l) (noun) (plural noun: squad goals): an aspirational term for what you’d like your group of friends to be or accomplish.

Your squad goals are entirely dependent on the members of your squad; so, while some people’s squad goals involve looking like the celebs in the famous Ellen selfie, others might involve reading every Jane Austen book in the NY Public Library. Much like eating a Reese’s, there is no wrong way to squad goal.

This was a thing in 2015? Seriously? I guess this is yet another reason I’m not really going to miss 2015. I’m guessing that 2016 is the year that Donald Trump finally gets his inevitable comeuppance, so it’s almost bound to be better. Right?

I forgot to blog about this when the numbers came out, but the CDC has now updated their survey of the uninsured through the second quarter of 2015. Results are on the right.

The number of uninsured adults under 65 continues to decline, from 10.7 percent in Q1 to 10.3 percent in Q2. Four percent of all Americans under 65 have now purchased health insurance via the exchanges, and many others have purchased Obamacare coverage off exchange. Not bad.

My colleague Russ Choma, who was apparently denied entry to a Donald Trump rally in chilly New Hampshire, nonetheless reports that Trump says he will soon begin spending millions of dollars on television ads in early primary states. Maybe so—or maybe it’s just Trump jabbering again. Who knows? But this is interesting:

In recent days, Trump’s campaign has faced a slew of new attacks from rivals and questions from the media about his viability. Jeb Bush’s campaign has been running regular anti-Trump ads in the Granite State, featuring Bush sternly scolding Trump at the most recent GOP debate, while Trump makes exaggerated and silly faces.

OK, OK, it’s not that interesting. But I thought “no use” clauses were pretty commonplace in political debates. You’re allowed to use clips from the debate for the purpose of news analysis, but not for advertising. But I assume Bush isn’t breaking any rules here, so I guess debate footage is fair game this year. That has the potential to be bad news for Trump.

Why are more young people signing up for Obamacare this year? According to Mike Perry and Tresa Undem of the polling firm PerryUndem, it’s because this year they’re being successfully browbeaten:

“They’re not like other groups,” says Perry. “In focus groups, they don’t talk about wanting preventive care, or the importance of covering their family. Young adults really talk about two things: accidents could screw me over, and I don’t want to pay the fine.“

….[Anne Filipic of Enroll America] said that her group wanted to understand what they should call the individual mandate. Should it be the mandate? Or a tax? A fine? A penalty? Enroll America tested out the different words in different versions in the subject lines of their emails, seeing which ones recipients were more or less likely to open. They found that fine worked best — so they went with that.

….Enroll America has a calculator that lets potential enrollees see how much financial help they’d be eligible to receive if they signed up for coverage….”The calculator is consistently the most visited page on our site, so we’re testing different ways to incorporate that information,” she says. “We want to give consumers specific information, related to their own situation, rather than generalities.”

It also helps that the fine for not buying coverage is going up. In Obamacare’s first year the minimum fine was only $95. In 2015 it was $325. In 2016, it jumps to $695. This is a much stronger motivator, and it also makes the financial case for buying coverage a lot stronger. In other words, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Steven Rattner has collected 10 charts to describe 2015, but the most interesting one is actually for 2014: It shows terrorist deaths in Western nations versus the rest of the world. For all the fear that terrorism inspires in us, the entire Western world accounted for only 0.1 percent of all terror fatalities in 2014.

That number will go up in 2015, thanks to Paris and San Bernardino, but will still be no more than about 0.5 percent. Bottom line: Don’t listen to Donald Trump. Over the last 15 years, those of us who live in rich countries have been astonishingly safe from terrorists.

Paul Krugman presents us today with an updated version of his chart showing private employment gains during the Obama administration compared to the Bush administration:

But Obama’s performance is even better than it looks. Here’s an updated version of my chart showing total government expenditures for both the Bush and Obama administrations measured since the end of the recessions they inherited:

Bush inherited a mild recession and got a huge fiscal boost. Obama inherited a deep recession and got a huge fiscal headwind. Even so, Obama’s employment performance has been far better than Bush’s.

As it happens, I don’t think presidents have a dramatic effect on the economy. But they have some. John McCain wouldn’t have fought for stimulus spending or extensions of unemployment insurance. He would probably have appointed more conservative members of the Fed, who might have tightened monetary policy sooner. He would have insisted on keeping the portion of the Bush tax cut that goes to the rich.

So Obama deserves some of the credit for this. George Bush squandered his political capital on tax cuts for the wealthy and soft regulation of Wall Street. We saw the results of that. Obama spent his political capital on stimulus and health care and the social safety net. The result has been a sustained recovery despite a net decrease in government spending over the past six years. Not bad.

This is—and no, I’m not kidding—from presidential wannabe Ben Carson:

It’s discouraging to know that we’re at that stage in our country where people don’t care so much about the truth. It’s just what’s sensational, what’s the shiny object. It’s all “Who’s in the football game? Who’s on ‘Dancing With the Stars’? Who’s yelling the loudest?” And I’m not sure that’s what we need right now because we’ve got some real big problems in our country.

Yes, this is from the person who, to this day, has not uttered a single plainly true statement according to Politifact.¹ It’s from the person who, along with Donald Trump, has been the ultimate shiny object in the Republican race. Then there’s this:

When I was appointed director of pediatric neurosurgery, pediatric neurosurgery at [Johns] Hopkins wasn’t on the map. By 2008, it was ranked number one by U.S. News & World Report. A weak person doesn’t do that. A weak person isn’t named one of 89 living legends by the Library of Congress on the occasion of its 200th anniversary. A weak person isn’t selected by CNN and Time magazine as one of the 20 foremost physicians and surgeons in America. That was before they discovered that I’m conservative. A weak person doesn’t have all of these honorary degrees. Most people of accomplishment have one, maybe two or three honorary degrees at most. It’s the highest award that a university gives out. I have 67. That’s probably not indicative of a weak person who doesn’t get things done.

Jesus. Does this guy ever listen to himself? He really is Trumpesque, isn’t he? Just substitute honorary degrees for polling reports and lower the voice about ten decibels, and they could be twins. Carson must have an inferiority complex about the size of Mt. Everest.

¹Even Donald Trump has one, for chrissake.

We can file this post under “personal indulgences,” but something funny happened to me over the weekend: my YouTube video of Hilbert and Hopper play-fighting went viral. Not Kardashian viral, mind you, but it’s had over 100,000 views.¹

Why? Beats me. Apparently it somehow landed on Google’s trending list and took off from there. That’s what I gather from comments, anyway, which have been flooding my inbox because I can’t figure out how to get YouTube to stop sending me email every time someone leaves a comment on the video.² Still, it’s been…educational. As bad as comments can get here, even the trolls are basically literate. They write in complete sentences and sometimes their insults are entertaining. But YouTube comments are crazy. A big portion were indecipherable (example: “that ending got me XD (slap!) did u.. oh…oh hell naw!”); some were concerned that this was a real fight and wanted to report me to the ASPCA; others were calling the former idiots and explaining that it was just mock fighting; others were outraged that this stupid video had somehow gone viral; and yet others were outraged by the clunky titles at the beginning. At least two people have outright stolen the video and reposted it on their own accounts.³

On the other hand, the guy who left the comment #CatLivesMatter was pretty clever.

Anyway, there you go: my first viral video. I’m so proud.

¹This compares to about 20 or 30 for the average cat video I put up—though I notice that all of my videos are in the thousands after the breakout success of Ultimate Cat Fighting.

²I turned off the setting that sends email every time someone leaves a comment, but the emails keep on coming anyway.

³I would pretend to be outraged, but…you know.

I don’t suppose I really have a lot to say about this, but perhaps we can file it under the widespread belief that “America is going to hell but things are OK in my neck of the woods.”

It’s from the AP/Times Square Alliance poll, which is primarily interested in whether you plan to watch the Times Square ball drop on New Year’s Eve. However, they also asked how things went in 2015. Answer: Personally, more people thought it was better than 2014 than thought it was worse. But for the country, way more people thought it was worse than 2014.

This dynamic—I’m doing OK but the rest of the country is going to hell—is so widespread that it’s hard not to blame the media for it. Is that fair? Or is it just something about human nature? In either case, it’s kind of crazy. Not only was 2015 as good or better than 2014 for a huge majority, but optimism was high too: an even bigger majority thought 2016 would be better yet. But for America as a whole, far more people thought 2015 was worse than thought it was better. It’s hard for me to think of any important metric by which 2015 was worse than 2014, but apparently mass shootings and terrorist attacks weighed heavily on everyone. Those were, by far, the news stories that everyone rated the most important.

So how was your 2015?