Kevin Drum 🕸

Today we get one second more daylight than yesterday. Hooray! That may not seem like a lot, but don't worry: it adds up fast. This week, instead of a boring old accurate photograph of Hilbert, I asked GPT4 to create a portrait of him. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. It says it can't ...continue reading "Friday AI Cat Blogging – 22 December 2023"

First things first: maybe I'm an idiot. It's always a possibility. But more and more I find myself wondering: Where is all the antisemitism on university campuses that we hear so much about? Are there examples? I'm very much not talking here about merely pro-Palestinian activities. Nor about "river to the sea" or any of ...continue reading "How much antisemitism is there on university campuses?"

Inflation just keeps dropping and dropping: The headline rate in November for PCE inflation was substantially negative. The core rate, which the Fed tracks closely, was 0.7%, far below their 2% target. Measured on a more conventional year-over-year basis, PCE headline inflation came in at 2.6% while core inflation was a bit higher at 3.2%. ...continue reading "PCE inflation goes negative in November"

The New York Times tells us today about a new bit of research showing that Donald Trump had the worst record in front of the Supreme Court of any modern president. That's interesting, and it says something about the lunacy of the Trump presidency, but it buries the lead. When I took a look at ...continue reading "Today’s Supreme Court is the most partisan in modern history"

It has become an article of faith on the right that the huge number of immigrants flooding our borders is a direct result of Joe Biden refusing to enforce the law. What's more, he's doing it deliberately. His reasons for this act of obvious political suicide vary depending on who you listen to, and mostly ...continue reading "Does Joe Biden really want lots of illegal immigrants?"

For what it's worth, I want to point out that it's not all that unusual for a popular politician to retain a loyal following regardless of criminal indictments or even convictions. Marion Barry was back on the DC city council almost the instant he was released from prison. Bill Clinton got impeached and emerged more ...continue reading "Sometimes a few felonies just make you more popular"

We've all heard about the replication crisis, right? It turns out that lots of well-known results in the social sciences are the result of crappy, small experiments that fail when researchers try to reproduce them. But that's social science. An article in Nature a few months ago says we have the same problem in clinical ...continue reading "Lots of clinical trials are just faked"

Happy winter solstice! This is the mesa after which Mesa Verde National Park is named.

The Washington Post says it's unlikely Hamas used the tunnel network under Al-Shifa hospital to direct its attacks against Israel: The evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery ...continue reading "WaPo says little evidence of Hamas activity at Al-Shifa hospital"

Here's the latest chatter inside the beltway: The Biden administration is discussing raising tariffs on some Chinese goods, including electric vehicles, in an attempt to bolster the U.S. clean-energy industry against cheaper Chinese exports, people familiar with the matter said. What's the point of this? We already have 25% tariffs on Chinese EVs, which means ...continue reading "Why do we need higher tariffs on Chinese EVs when no Chinese EVs are sold in America?"

This is pretty brutal: JUST IN: Judge HOWELL has ordered immediate enforcement of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss’ judgment against Rudy Giuliani, contending they have ample reason to doubt he will make good on it. pic.twitter.com/C9Hl1gePNE — Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) December 20, 2023 The jury in Rudy's case was instructed to assume that he was ...continue reading "Judge to Rudy: Pay up. Now."

Hold on a second: As dawn broke at a frigid Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday morning, workers using a crane and harnesses began to take down a controversial statue that had stood there for more than a century. Hours earlier, a federal judge had ruled an effort to halt the removal of the towering Confederate ...continue reading "Arlington’s Confederate memorial removed in a few hours"

This is a.......yellow flower of some kind. It seems like it should be easy to identify, but I tried a couple of flower ID sites and they didn't help. Any ideas? I took the picture in southern Colorado.

For the record, I'm not keen on the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment bars Donald Trump from office. My reason is simpler than most: unless you were an officer of the Confederacy, I think the 14th Amendment should apply only if you've been convicted of some insurrection-like act. ...continue reading "Convict Trump first, then bar him from office"

How about yet another different look at inflation? Here is inflation in goods (top) and inflation in services (bottom): As you can see, inflation in goods has been right around zero for a full year.  Inflation in services has been more stubborn: it's come down from its peak but has remained about 1% above its ...continue reading "Inflation in goods and services"

According to FBI data through September, violent crime is down 15% in big cities and down 8% overall: Murder is down 25% in big cities and down 16% overall. Property crime is down 6% so far this year. Burglary is down 12%. Both property crime and violent crime are on track to be at their ...continue reading "Raw data: Crime is way down this year"

This is the Eglise Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris and it's one of the great things about a city like Paris. It isn't a cathedral. It isn't a basilica. It's just a parish church that happens to have been built in the 13th century and is about the size of Notre Dame. Just your ordinary old ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

So here I am this morning, reading an LA Times piece about people migrating out of California to places like Texas. This is old news, but the twist this time is that affluent people are moving away at higher rates than before. This is chalked up to California's high tax rates, but I'm thinking: hold ...continue reading "Quick quiz: Where have housing prices gone up the most? LA or Dallas?"

If you're a young lefty who supports the Palestinian cause, it's natural that you'd be critical of Joe Biden. But Summer Jennings is a young Republican who supports Israel: Though Mr. Biden’s policies may favor Israel, she said she believed that Mr. Trump would take the same approach, but with more muscle: “As much of ...continue reading "Blood and muscle in the Middle East"

NBC News has yet another story out today about young voters who supported Biden in 2020 but aren't sure they will again. They all have their reasons, some more sensible than others, and sure. Whatever. It probably doesn't matter much because most of them will come back home once the campaign starts. But there's one ...continue reading "Young voters and student loans"