Kevin Drum 🕸

This is extraordinary: Here are the basic stats: Among all Americans, 4.5% of deaths are due to opioid overdoses, mostly fentanyl Among the youngish middle-aged (20-39), 21% of all deaths are due to opioids. Among men in this age group, 30% of all deaths are due to opioids. Now, part of the reason the percentage ...continue reading "Raw data: Opioid deaths in America"

Next week there's a NATO summit in Vilnius and naturally Ukraine is on the agenda. Today, a group of 46 foreign policy experts signed a letter recommending membership for Ukraine as soon as possible: In Vilnius, the alliance should launch a roadmap that will lead clearly to Ukraine’s membership in NATO at the earliest achievable ...continue reading "Remember NATO Article 5?"

Charlie really looks like he means business here. He's obviously a cat with a mission.

On Wednesday Meta launched Threads, a new social media app designed to compete with Twitter. It's already signed up 30 million users, and you'd think this would be broadly welcomed since Twitter users have been bitching forever that Twitter is a cesspool that's only gotten worse since it was purchased last year and subjected to ...continue reading "Threads needs a little time before it descends into bedlam"

Do you think that all the MAGA vaccine denial and mask vitriol is basically harmless? Hell, let 'em do whatever they want to their own bodies and then vent about it on Facebook. There's one group that would disagree: A new survey of physicians and biomedical scientists in the U.S. found that nearly two-thirds experienced ...continue reading "Two-thirds of all doctors have received vicious harassment over COVID-19"

Over at New York, John Herrman pulls no punches describing the American news business: American news is a smoldering wasteland....Cable news is in trouble, the twin threats of streaming and social-media video having sapped it of relevance....Print media is simply disappearing in much of the country, and where it still exists, it is in barely ...continue reading "Journalism is doomed! Journalism is better than ever!"

The American economy gained a meager 209,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at an even more meager 119,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.6%. This is a bad report, but at least there ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in June"

I don't have any special reason for writing this post. There's no hook. It's just something that bears knowing about. The failure of Democrats to maintain support among the white working class is a frequent topic of concern. But the truth is that it's not really a thing. Not nationally, anyway. Democrats have lost a ...continue reading "Democrats and the non-South"

How tight is the labor market? I've long been mildly skeptical that it's as tight as people seem to think, and today Jason Furman tweets the following chart: If this is correct, the labor market was equivocal around 2021, with two measures suggesting looseness and three measures suggesting tightness. Since then, the measures showing tightness ...continue reading "Are we in a tight labor market? Have we ever been?"

Here's a pigeon hanging out on a traditional French chimney. But where? I can't quite remember. It's just across one of the bridges on the right bank of the Seine, but I can't put my finger on exactly where I was.

Here's a little something not to take too seriously. Today the Institute for Supply Management released its latest indexes, one of which is a price index for services. This is a number worth following since services continue to be the component of inflation that's staying stubbornly high. However, ISM doesn't report a specific price increase ...continue reading "Inflation for services is (probably) coming down"

The latest JOLTS data is out. Here's a nickel summary of changes from the previous month: Hires are up 1.8%. Job openings are down 4.8%. Quits are up 6.6% (shows confidence about getting new job). Layoffs are down 2.2%. Aside from the drop in job openings, these are decent numbers. However, the longer term trends ...continue reading "JOLTS data shows softening economy"

Over at the New York Times, Jessica Grose urges us to be optimistic about vaccines even with nutballs like RFK Jr. running around badmouthing them. And she's right. Here's the latest CDC data for childhood vaccines: Vaccine takeup has been generally flat or up for the past decade and showed no sign of slowing down ...continue reading "Vaccination rates are going up despite everything"

Judge Terry Doughty's judicial handiwork is having an immediate impact. He must be feeling so proud: One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration's communications with tech firms, the State Department canceled its regular meeting Wednesday with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats. ....The canceled meetings ...continue reading "Judge Doughty has driven off the State Department. Who’s next?"

I know this is obvious, but . . . Everybody seems to have forgotten what Elon Musk's real problem with Twitter is. The wellspring of everything that's happened since last year was a single moment of stupidity in which he agreed to massively overpay for it. And it's not like he doesn't know this. He ...continue reading "The real problem with Twitter"

The state of Wisconsin allows the governor to eliminate parts of legislation he doesn't like using a line item veto. Today, Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a couple of digits and a hyphen from a two-year increase in the school budget. The original said this: for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add ...continue reading "News of the weird, Wisconsin line-item veto edition"

Who has the most new solar capacity? Obviously big states do. But what if you adjust for population and look at solar module shipments per capita? It turns out it's mostly still the big states that are solar leaders: California, Texas, Georgia, and Illinois. But Nevada has them all beat by a mile.

Here are last night's fireworks. This year I decided to trek around to the far side of the lake and shoot with our (patriotically lighted) bridge in the foreground. Much hilarity ensued because my flashlight didn't work and I kept fumbling with the camera buttons. Eventually I got everything set right and captured a few ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The other recent Supreme Court case that I'm on the fence about is 303 Creative. In that one, Lorie Smith didn't want to create a website celebrating a same-sex marriage and the Court upheld her refusal. In my initial post about it, I said the Court relied on a "thin distinction indeed": namely that while ...continue reading "Can a shop owner be compelled to celebrate same-sex marriage?"

Earlier this morning I said there were two recent Supreme Court cases that left me conflicted. One of them was the decision that killed off the student loan forgiveness program, so let's take a closer look at that. The easiest legal argument in favor of allowing the program to continue is a simple syllogism: The ...continue reading "Why can the Supreme Court overturn the student loan forgiveness program?"