Kevin Drum 🕸

It's common these days to measure the impact of the COVID pandemic by looking at total excess deaths as a more accurate measure than deaths attributed directly to COVID. So here are excess death rates for most of the large European countries plus the United States. Do you notice anything interesting? Here's a similar chart. ...continue reading "Today’s interesting COVID factlet"

From TPM: House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said Tuesday morning that it was a “mistake” that the administration didn’t go through with bombing drug labs in Mexico after then-President Donald Trump suggested it in 2020. Okey dokey. It sure is good that the adults are back in charge in the House.

You might be tired of us Californians going on and on about our recent storms, as if a few feet of snow is some kind of otherworldly miracle. And it's true that if I wanted pictures of snowy peaks I could just hop in my car and drive north to Shasta or east to the ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The explosion that shut down the Nord Stream pipelines is suddenly back in the news. According to the New York Times: New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has ...continue reading "The Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed by six unknown people of unknown nationality"

Just to keep everyone up to date, here's what COVID-19 mortality in the US looks like these days: We are currently running at about 350 COVID deaths per day.

Here's the latest from the Wall Street Journal editorial page: If I were Tim Trevan I'd be pissed. Nowhere in his op-ed does he say that scientists got the lab leak theory wrong. He says only that a lab leak is "a possibility" that's "self-evidently plausible." Trevan does accuse some unspecified "others" of trying to ...continue reading "How things work on the Wall Street Journal editorial page"

A year after Obamacare passed we had reduced the uninsured population from around 17% to 11%. Since then, aside from a few small wobbles during the pandemic, it's stayed almost completely flat. There's no excuse for this. The correct number is 0%.

I've written many times about the Flint water crisis, and after all the data was in my conclusion was pretty simple: The screw-up with Flint's water was a terrible tragedy that never should have happened. However, in the end there was little damage done. Lead levels never got all that high and the problem was ...continue reading "The tragedy of Flint is not what most people think it is"

In the Washington Post today, Matt Bai writes about the Sierra Club's new style guide. It has the usual woke prescriptions ("stand with us" is offensive to the disabled, for example), which I understand is a topic of considerable interest these days. Therefore I'm going to ignore it and instead focus on a trivial pet ...continue reading "Stop bragging about being bad at math"

This isn't really a health update per se, but I did just return from a bone marrow biopsy in preparation for my CAR-T treatment next month. This procedure draws bone marrow from a hip bone and is short but painful. This time, however, it was very, very painful. Apparently my bone marrow was too soft ...continue reading "Health update"

Poppy season has begun. It's not widespread yet, but there are a few patches of California poppies here and there. In a couple of weeks we're likely to have a superbloom, but due to past transgressions The Man has closed off all access this year: Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said law enforcement will take ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The Wall Street Journal is skeptical about economic doomsaying: I don't know about that. I'd put it at about five months right now. My read of the evidence is that the economy is in OK but fragile shape, and by summer a whole bunch of things are likely to coalesce. This will be triggered by ...continue reading "We can’t put off a recession forever"

I hauled out the telescope a couple of days ago for some testing after I added a new part, and as long as it was all set up I decided to take some pictures. As usual in my backyard, I had very few choices and I eventually picked M106, a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy with ...continue reading "Bonus weekend astrophotography"

Emmanuel Macron wants to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64, and the French people are not happy about it. Rokhaya Diallo explains why: If it is adopted, Macron’s reform would disproportionately hurt more vulnerable populations: low-income workers, women and citizens from the French overseas territories, who are overwhelmingly people of color. ...continue reading "The French public is woker than you think"

What. The. Fuck. This is from a paper written in December by Yu Takagi and Shinji Nishimoto of the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences in Osaka. Subjects were put in an MRI machine and shown a series of pictures. The fMRI data was collected, and then software using an algorithm called Stable Diffusion attempted to ...continue reading "MRI machines can now (sort of) read your mind"

They're so adorable when they're sprawled out, taking a nap together. I'm not really sure where the odd coloring came from in this picture. I shot it using my flash unit, but for some reason the flash malfunctioned and provided much less light than it should have. When I corrected it in Photoshop, I ended ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 3 March 2023"

Peggy Noonan has a remarkable column in the Wall Street Journal today about the COVID lab-leak theory. Before I get to that, though, let's review why we're talking about this at all. A few days ago the Journal reported that: The Department of Energy had gathered some new intelligence about the possibility of a lab ...continue reading "Peggy Noonan and the common sense of COVID"

A conversation the other day prompted me to reevaluate the way we talk about teens and social media. It's usually framed as whether social media is good or bad, and that's obviously not very useful. The internet has a tendency to bifurcate things. Most famously, I believe that the internet makes smart people smarter and ...continue reading "How to think about teens and social media"

Tyler Cowen today: Recently I discussed the connection between high neuroticism and left-wing politics. In passing I mentioned that the right-wing had its own problems, leading a few of you to ask what those were. The classic response would be to accuse (credit?) conservatives as being low in empathy. Whether or not you agree historically, ...continue reading "We have nothing to fear but (conservative) fear itself"

Over at Vox, Alissa Wilkinson peddles an increasingly stale meme: It’s important for the purposes of this article that you know my age: I am on the verge of turning 40. Having been raised in that brief interregnum between the Cold War and the war on terror, I, like many of my peers, assumed that ...continue reading "The (not kids anymore) are doing alright"