Kevin Drum 🕸

My memory has always been the Sargasso Sea of storage devices, but I got a disturbingly concrete reminder of this a few days ago. Like many of you (probably) I enjoyed Cixin Liu's trilogy The Three-Body Problem. So when I saw that Amazon had made a series out of it I headed right over. It ...continue reading "My memory sucks"

You've heard endlessly that the Fed has raised interest rates by five percentage points since 2022. And that's true. But remember: always adjust for inflation! There's a big difference between 5% interest rates when inflation is running at 9% and 5% interest rates when inflation is down to 3%. The Fed effectively raised rates nearly ...continue reading "Real interest rates are quite high"

The best way to assess Joe Biden's mental condition would be to sit down and have a talk with him. Unfortunately, most of us never have that opportunity. White House staffers do, but obviously they're biased and can't necessarily be trusted. But it turns out that "most of us" doesn't include Paul Krugman: As it ...continue reading "Who’s visited Joe Biden recently?"

You may be surprised to know that opioid use hasn't increased in recent years. SAMHSA has tracked overall opioid use since 2015, and the number of regular users has declined 26% since then: Most of this is heroin and cocaine. Fentanyl use in 2022 was only about 10% of the total. The reason drug overdose ...continue reading "Raw data: Opioid use in the US"

Both the New York Times and Washington Post reported today on a $2 billion Medicare scam. The way it worked was simple: Scammers buy a few small medical supply companies (seven, to be exact). The companies send Medicare bills for millions of phony catheters. That's it! But how did they get away with it? The ...continue reading "$8 catheters add up fast if you bill for millions of them"

You've probably all seen those pictures of a gang of migrants beating up a pair of cops in Times Square. It's pretty disturbing, and there's no excuse for it. Nonetheless it's instructive to see what really happened. The cops say the migrants were told to move because they were blocking the sidewalk. But bodycam footage ...continue reading "Here’s the whole story behind the Times Square melee"

Special counsel Robert Hur's obviously partisan report on President Biden has raised a question: why are special counsels always Republicans? And they really are all Republicans. In the past 30 years not a single Democrat—or even someone with "Democratic ties"—has been a special counsel or independent prosecutor. It's no mystery why this is. Democrats appoint ...continue reading "Why are special counsels always Republicans?"

According to Politico, the big Republican pushback against Bidenomics is that, sure, inflation is lower, but the price of food hasn't gone down. For the record, this hasn't happened a single time in the past 50 years: Food prices never go down. Sometimes they only go up a little bit—as in 2010 and 2016—but never ...continue reading "What’s left for Republicans to complain about the economy?"

Here's a skycam view of Charlie and Hilbert snuggling up together on the living room sofa. This is a fairly rare occurrence these days.

Here's a comparison of GDP growth under Presidents Trump and Biden. I have deleted the last three quarters of 2020 since Trump can't be held responsible for the pandemic. Nobody ever shows this comparison. Is that fair? Why or why not?

Josh Marshall annotates the New York Times for us: Now compare this to the print edition: In the print edition, there's only one front page piece about the special counsel's report. It occupies less than 10% of the A1 real estate. It's not the top story. There's no accompanying art. And the headline is pretty ...continue reading "Web vs. print: A mini case study"

The latest from Gaza: The Israeli military is drawing up plans for both the evacuation of civilians from Rafah and a “massive” military operation.... More than a million displaced people are crowded into Rafah, and aid groups have warned against military action there. The United States “would not support” a major Israeli military operation in ...continue reading "Israel plans massive attack in Rafah"

Joe Biden continues to have problems enunciating certain sounds, and I also think that "angry" Joe Biden doesn't work for him. That said, here's his entire press conference this afternoon. It's only 13 minutes long. Watch for yourself and decide if, speech issues aside, he seems in any way cognitively limited. As usual, it strikes ...continue reading "Here is Joe Biden’s press conference. Watch for yourself."

A couple of years ago Microsoft stunned the AI world with a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. That's a lot of money! Or, maybe it's chickenfeed. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has apparently decided the world needs a lot more chipmaking capacity and he's just the guy to get it off ...continue reading "Sam Altman wants $7 trillion"

A dozen years ago Rand Simberg wrote a piece that said climate scientist Michael Mann had "molested and tortured" data to produce his famous hockey stick analysis of rising global temperatures in the 20th century. National Review's Mark Steyn agreed, adding explicitly that Mann's conclusions were "fraudulent." This all happened a couple of years after ...continue reading "Michael Mann wins libel suit against climate skeptics"

Special Counsel Robert Hur has cleared President Biden of willfully keeping classified documents in his home after he left the vice presidency. As usual with these things, however, he also wrote a "damning" doorstop report to go along with it. Don't they all? The whole case turns primarily on the word "willfully." Hur seems to ...continue reading "Special counsel clears President Biden in documents case"

Tyler Cowen points today to a 2021 study that investigates whether liberals or conservatives are more likely to believe viral misinformation. The researchers removed their own bias by using a third-party service to track the 20 most viral news stories (ten true and ten false) on a biweekly basis. At the same time they surveyed ...continue reading "The truth has a liberal bias"

Pelicans hanging out at sunset on the jetty at Dana Point.

The only thing wrong with this Wall Street Journal headline is that it doesn't say "Investors Are Almost Always Wrong," full stop. My keen observation about investors is that they think (a) whatever is happening now will keep happening, and (b) high things will come down and low things will go up. Of course, they're ...continue reading "Investors have no idea what they’re doing"

The February schedule for BLS releases includes something called "Occupational Requirements in the United States," and I've been waiting to find out just what this is. Today the 2023 edition was released and it turns out to be about.......occupational requirements. But not just education or experience. Are you OK with heights? Is the job outdoors? ...continue reading "Does your job require people skills?"