Kevin Drum 🕸

Today the Supreme Court heard a case about environmental impact statements allegedly running amok. The case concerned an 88-mile railway line in Utah that generated 3,600 pages of environmental reports but was sued because it analyzed only the local effects in Utah. Environmental groups argued that it connected to a national network—how could it not?—so ...continue reading "The dreaded NEPA has been put on a diet of two years and 150 pages"

Matt Yglesias writes today about the widely reported revolt against experts: “Experts” is not an incredibly precise term, and “elites” is even vaguer. When Sean Trende says (and Nate Silver agrees) that “it hasn’t exactly been the best century for the expert class,” I both know what they mean and also struggle to pin down ...continue reading "The revolt against experts has been very calculated and very Republican"

For God's sake: With students at many colleges wrapping up final exams this week and preparing for their winter break, a number of schools, including Harvard, U.S.C. and Cornell, are warning their international students to return to campus before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20. ....“A travel ban is likely to go ...continue reading "Foreign students warned: Get back to America before Trump takes over"

I am comfortably ensconced once again at my local Kaiser Permanente hospital, this time waiting for my first itsy-bitsy injection of Tecvayli. My view is slightly better this time: Still not much, but it's Wednesday so I can see the weekly farmers market in action. Like last time, I'm here for observation only. One of ...continue reading "Health update"

Matterhorn and moon at Disneyland.

Today's inflation report was oddly mixed: Here are the overall numbers: Both headline and core CPI were up sharply in November. That's not good news. But the odd part is how this breaks down: The inflation rate in services, which is usually the most stubborn component, went down by a nice 1.6 percentage points. But ...continue reading "Inflation rises in November"

Remember back during the housing bubble when the price-rent ratio of housing got really high and it made everyone worried that maybe we were in a housing bubble? Well, I didn't notice this until today, but we've been back at 2006 levels for a couple of years now: Actually, it's even a little worse than ...continue reading "Man, the price-rent ratio is really high"

In the Atlantic, Rogé Karma says that Democrats have long believed they needed to take liberal positions on immigration in order to hold onto the Latino vote. But this year that turned out to be catastrophically wrong: If that analysis were true, then the nomination of the most virulently anti-immigration presidential candidate in modern history ...continue reading "We’re still trying to figure out why Latinos abandoned Kamala Harris"

Andrew McCarthy finds himself on the horns of a dilemma: Now that “person of interest” Luigi Mangione has been apprehended in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel on Wednesday morning, we have a dilemma — or, at least, I do. Can Alvin Bragg — the paragon progressive prosecutor who seems ...continue reading "Will Alvin Bragg quietly whisper “nice work” to the UHC killer?"

Musing on Krugman's column today makes me feel like Cassandra: doomed to never be believed. When you look around even a little bit, it's astonishing how good things are right now. I mean, take a look at this: The poorest group of Americans has an average household income of $56,000. The middle class is at ...continue reading "Life is good, says the second coming of Cassandra"

Here are the federal agencies that America's civilian workers call home: Two-thirds of all civil service workers are in Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. Unless you're planning to slash those departments, there's not a whole lot left to slash.

This is the Naschmarkt in Vienna. It's been there since the 16th century and nobody really knows why it's called that. Just look at all the pretty produce!

Elon Musk, the Sarah Palin of the '20s, has something to say: The “save the homeless” NGOs are often paid according to how many homeless people are on the streets, thus creating a strong financial incentive for them to maximize the number of homeless people and never actually solve the problem! Incentives explain outcomes. That ...continue reading "The Elon Musk slop machine is in overdrive"

In his final column today, Paul Krugman reflects on what's happened to the country in the past 25 years: What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then.... It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and ...continue reading "Optimism on the decline? Blame Fox News."

Does the jackboot of the federal government throttle economic activity in the US? It doesn't seem that way: I'm a little surprised to see Hong Kong still at the top of the list. I guess that when China cracked down on civil liberties they left all the economic regulations alone. As usual, we're in the ...continue reading "The US kicks ass on economic vitality and regulatory efficiency"

I see that, as usual, the postal service is in crisis: Last week, Senator Rand Paul used an oversight hearing on the USPS to reveal that much of its problem lies in its decision to convert 190,000 employees to permanent positions with union benefits — thus ballooning its debt. Paul told Postmaster General Louis DeJoy ...continue reading "The postal service is (always) in crisis"

I've been wanting to take a picture of the Milky Way with my new camera, but hospitals and meds kept me home for too long. We're way past Milky Way season now. But why let that stop me? The bright core of the Milky Way is way below the horizon at the moment, but the ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Here's an odd thing. While I was poking around in the TIMSS mathematics results, I took a look at the size of the decline in test scores during the pandemic: Scores among Black students barely dropped at all. This conflicts with every other analysis of test scores I'm familiar with, which unanimously find that Black ...continue reading "Raw data: Black learning loss on the 2023 TIMSS mathematics test"

I haven't followed the Daniel Penny trial especially closely, but this morning he was acquitted of killing Jordan Neely in a subway incident last year: A Manhattan jury found Penny, 26 years old, not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the killing of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator with a history of mental ...continue reading "Jury acquits Daniel Penny in weird result"

Are you curious about how the US did on the latest international TIMSS test of mathematics? Here it is: I had to leave some countries out to make everything fit. All the Asian countries topped the charts, so you can take that as read. I also removed some tiny countries that don't test their entire ...continue reading "Raw data: TIMSS math test results for 2023"