Kevin Drum 🕸

A little while back the FBI modified its crime dashboard to show monthly figures instead of annual ones. Here's what it looks like: SRS is the old FBI crime reporting system. A decade ago they rolled out a new system called NIBRS. Over time, more and more police departments adopted NIBRS, and in 2021 the ...continue reading "The FBI’s crime data is crap these days"

It was actually this sentence that initially got my attention in Ross Douthat's column today: Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays. Um, what?

Ross Douthat suggests today that the country is ready for a return to religion. He recommends Spencer Klavan’s book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which he describes this way: It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like ...continue reading "Religion and quantum mechanics"

Elon Musk warns that under Kamala Harris, "All of America will be Californicated. And not in a good way." I don't know about that. California looks pretty good to me: What exactly is the problem here? Warts and all, it seems like the whole world, let alone the whole country, would be lucky to be ...continue reading "We should all be Californicated"

The homelessness rate in California is 3x the rate for the rest of the country.

Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri talk about housing: How the next president can solve America’s housing crisis U.S. housing costs are out of control.... Renters have not fared better.... The main reason housing is too expensive is that we don’t build nearly enough of it. The most recent estimates from Freddie Mac place the national ...continue reading "How are we doing with our housing crisis?"

Here's Hilbert in his box, staring into the room to keep an eye on Charlie, who was rolling around on the floor while I took this picture. Plus Marian was around. Hilbert loves to keep an eye on Marian.

Today is a milestone: it's been ten years since I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Since then I've been treated with Velcade, Cytoxan, an autologous stem cell transfer, Revlimid, Darzalex, Pomalyst, Emplicity, Carvykti CAR-T, and now Talvey. And of course the Evil Dex™ has been along for the whole journey. Overall, it hasn't been all ...continue reading "Ten years of cancer"

Donald Trump is full of stories about his negotiating prowess. Most of them are fiction, and even the ones based on a grain of truth are twisted and exaggerated to fit his standard heroic narrative: Often, no one has ever even negotiated the thing before Trump arrived. Why? Because they're stupid. His stories invariably involve ...continue reading "Donald Trump’s negotiating fantasies"

Nestlé is recycling inflation as an excuse for lousy sales: “The perception of consumers everywhere but especially in the U.S. is that food prices are high,” Chief Executive Laurent Freixe said in an interview, adding that many shoppers feel stretched after a period of surging inflation. ....The comments came as Nestlé reported weaker-than-expected third-quarter results ...continue reading "We’re all buying lots of food"

Behold the latest from our free-speech-lovin' former president: Trump and his fans are getting desperate. They've been trying for the past week to get someone, anyone, interested in their latest scandals—a trivial plagiarism tiff, an inconsequential clip from 60 Minutes, Tim Walz unloading a shotgun, Biden supposedly withholding aid to red counties—to no avail. That's ...continue reading "As pressure mounts, Trump’s threats balloon"

It's naptime at sea.

As time has passed, it's become clearer what really happened to sales of electric vehicles over the past year: There was no general slowdown. Rather, sales grew steadily until January 2024, when they suddenly fell off a cliff. Then they continued their usual growth rate. I have no idea what happened here. There were no ...continue reading "The great EV sales collapse of (January) 2024"

A reader points me to an Adam Tooze substack today about inflation. Tooze admits that even his own personal reaction to inflation hasn't matched the dry reports from the BLS: Because, yes, I actually do live in America and I have experienced what has happened on supermarket shelves. Several times I’ve been brought up short ...continue reading "Why has recent inflation been so unnerving?"

Here's an odd one. John Lott wrote a piece today claiming that the FBI has "quietly" revised their crime figures, and they now show that violent crime rose in 2022. This is all over the place on right-wing sites but hasn't been reported anywhere else, as near as I can tell. Needless to say, this ...continue reading "Did crime go up or down in 2022?"

Yesterday I showed you the Borromeo Church in the Vienna Central Cemetery and promised a follow-up someday. But there's no time like the present, so here goes. The cemetery is beautiful and perfectly maintained, as you can see in these two pictures: The tombstones are laid out with military precision and everything is kept neat ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

My old Washington Monthly colleague Nick Confessore, now at the New York Times, has a long magazine piece up today about the DEI program at the University of Michigan, one of the oldest and most expansive in the country: Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.”... ...continue reading "How is DEI going at the University of Michigan?"

The Guardian asked people exiting a Trump rally in Georgia why they were leaving early. Voni Miller said she didn't want to leave, but: “I’m actually leaving early because my phone is dying and I have a Tesla so I can’t get in. It’s really upsetting, because it meant a lot to be here, and ...continue reading "Locked out"

As long as I'm at it, here's a sampling of what Republicans think about various things according to YouGov: It's vibes all the way down.

While we're posting results from this week's YouGov poll, here's one that's crackers: 60% of Republicans say they're worse off than a year ago even though the economy has boomed over the past 12 months: The prime age labor force participation rate is up 0.3 points to the highest level in 20 years Real GDP ...continue reading "Republicans remain convinced that they’re failing financially"