Kevin Drum 🕸

Every year an outfit called Climate Action Tracker publishes an estimate of how much warming we're on course for by the year 2100. Cipher, a news site focused on climate change, has collected those estimates for the past decade and made a chart out of them: The projected amount of warming has dropped from 3.7°C ...continue reading "We’ve made surprising progress on climate change over the past decade"

I just saw a tweet about Groq, an AI chatbot that uses Meta's LLaMA-3 engine. It's incredibly fast! You should try it! So I did. And it is incredibly fast. But there are still problems. I asked it about myself and got five paragraphs in return. Four were basically fine, but there was also this: ...continue reading "I am now a physical chemist"

Over at Vox, Kelsey Piper lays down some stats on airline problems: Are more planes having incidents than ever before? Or are we just hearing about more incidents? It’s mostly the latter.... The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which investigates aviation incidents and accidents, lists 12 incidents on commercial aircraft in the United States so ...continue reading "Vox takes a look at all those Boeing stories"

According to the latest Harvard Youth Poll, liberals outnumber conservatives among college educated young people by 3:1. The precise split is 58%-21%. In other words, among those who profess any ideology at all, only a quarter are conservative.

Do we have a housing shortage? How is that possible if the number of housing units per capita is at an all-time high—which it is? Kevin Erdmann has a long, complicated post explaining that this is all about families having fewer children, but he never takes this to its logical conclusion. To recap: we don't ...continue reading "Another look at America’s housing shortage"

The jury has been chosen for Donald Trump's hush money trial and the judge has moved on to what's called a Sandoval hearing. This is where the prosecution explains the kinds of questions it would like to ask Trump if he decides to take the stand. For my own amusement and yours, here's a selection ...continue reading "Prosecution says jury should know that Trump is a big fat liar"

Here is Charlie using his IEEE-standard petabit-per-second NoseLink to gather information about his brother. Apparently everything checked out.

This week the Economist wrote about the way American trust in institutions has collapsed over the past couple of decades. This is not news. However, this is a very interesting comparison: Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. Why? Because we have Fox News and the others don't. Oh, they have tabloids ...continue reading "Fox News has destroyed American confidence in itself"

The Ukraine aid bill has finally passed the House Rules Committee so it can come to the floor for a vote: The House Rules Committee is pretty much what it sounds like: a committee that formulates the rules of debate before a bill is allowed on the floor. Back in the day, the chairman of ...continue reading "Democrats shatter the rules to pass Ukraine aid through the Rules Committee"

I want to highlight something I posted yesterday that might have gotten lost: Up through 2014, teen suicide among girls was no different from suicide among adult women. Then, in 2015, it suddenly shot up, opening up a huge gap in only three years. This is very unusual. Very often, when you see a sudden, ...continue reading "What happened to teen girls in 2015-17?"

I was thinking some more about yesterday's comment that Joe Biden had given Israel 95% of what it wanted. So what's the other 5%? It's certainly not any kind of concrete support, which Biden has never even momentarily withheld. It's mostly just some occasional mild requests. In the approximate order he made them, here they ...continue reading "What has Biden asked from Israel?"

Politico reports: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle aired outrage Thursday after a POLITICO report that the Chinese embassy lobbied members of Congress on legislation that would force the sale of TikTok by its Beijing-based parent company. Let me get this straight. Members of Congress are allegedly outraged because Chinese diplomats told them in ...continue reading "Congress is supposedly mad about something"

I got my bone scan a couple of days ago and the results were back in a couple of hours. Would you like to see them? Impression: Evidence for abnormal activities in the spine ribs and pelvis and questionably long bones. A PSMA PET scan is recommended for correlation Findings: There is suspicious increased radiotracer ...continue reading "Health update"

In case you're curious, first quarter GDP will be released next week, which means we're close enough that the GDPnow forecast from the Atlanta Fed is probably pretty accurate. Here it is: Not bad. If this pans out it would be slightly down from 3.4% in the fourth quarter of 2023.

In the past few months I have gotten an: MRI Ultrasound CT scan Full-body bone scan PET scan (in a few weeks) This will mean I've been scanned by: Radio waves High-frequency sound X-rays Gamma rays Positrons (though really just gamma rays again) That's a lot of things to be scanned by. Are there any ...continue reading "How many ways are there to scan a person?"

Charlie Cooke has good words for Speaker Mike Johnson: “I’d like to praise Speaker Johnson,” Charlie says, “who, I think last night . . . effectively said at a press conference that he was done catering to the fringe, that he was not going to spend his time worrying about one or two members using ...continue reading "How good is “better late than never”?"

Have you been keeping track of the brutal civil war in Sudan? No? Here are the basics: Central government vs. paramilitary group. Check. Millions forced to flee their homes. Check. On the brink of mass famine. Check. Atrocities by both sides. Check. Woefully insufficient aid from the US and the rest of the West. Check. ...continue reading "A quick rundown on events in Sudan"

I just ran across someone remarking on the suicide crisis among teen girls and it immediately struck me as wrong. Didn't I just recently say that the suicide rate had grown about as much for both adults and teens? Yes, but it turns out that's mainly because of men, whose suicide numbers are far higher ...continue reading "Raw data: The suicide rate among teen and adult women"

Sunset over Dana Point.

Over at National Review, Philip Klein comments on Mike Johnson's plan to force a vote on Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid: It appears that House Speaker Mike Johnson is at his breaking point. Like prior Republican leaders in his position, most recently Kevin McCarthy, Johnson was willing to humor the pugilistic members of his caucus for a certain ...continue reading "Running the House of Representatives is like running a kindergarten class"