Kevin Drum 🕸

The vote is beginning for Speaker of the House. Will Kevin McCarthy lose and be completely humiliated? I sure hope so. No spineless toady could ever deserve it more. Some other lunatic will step up to take his place, so this is hardly a national crisis. And it doesn't matter who it is since House ...continue reading "It is time to root for Kevin McCarthy’s utter humiliation"

Yesterday I asked why there's no name for a unit of momentum. Today I have answers. Plus, if you read all the way to the end, I have a genuinely constructive suggestion. First things first, in case you have no idea what I'm talking about. In the metric system—officially known as SI—there are three basic ...continue reading "Emmy Noether and the conservation of momentum"

I haven't paid any attention to the demolition of Confederate statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, so I didn't know it had all been done by a single person, Devon Henry: The name carries weight in Richmond these days. Over the past three years, as the former capital of the Confederacy has taken down more ...continue reading "White people in Richmond refused state jobs to demolish Confederate statues"

This is a fountain at the Place de la Concorde at dawn.

Tyler Cowen explains today why he's skeptical of the lead-crime hypothesis. It turns out that it's because of a simple bit of confusion. You'll have to click the link and read Tyler's post to understand my reply—so don't blame me if you're too lazy to do it—but the key thing is that the LCH is ...continue reading "Yet more on lead, crime, and Tyler Cowen"

Why is there no name for a unit of momentum? Or for angular momentum? Did we run out of famous people to name things after? How about one sina or one descartes for linear momentum and one foucault for angular momentum? UPDATE: More here.

Our views of human extinction have changed over the millennia. Here are the ten best in more-or-less chronological order. Wrath of God. Wickedness of man causes God to destroy us. Reasons for hope: In Christian theology, anyway, God promised never to do it again after the whole Noah affair. Mayan calendar. December 2012 marked the ...continue reading "Top ten ways the world could end"

These are in no particular order. Kevin McCarthy still can't scrounge up the votes to become Speaker of the House. Ha ha. Vladimir Putin is getting his ass handed to him by a ragtag bunch of Slavs. The thuggish Jair Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid and fled Brazil for a life of exile in Orlando. ...continue reading "Top ten good political news of 2022"

"Self portrait, 2022." After seeing this, you can't unsee it.

This is an idiosyncratic collection. These charts don't "tell the story of 2022" and they're not the most important things I published all year. They just happened to intrigue me. First up, naturally, is this chart of PCE inflation. I've posted it about a dozen times this year, so I might as well put it ...continue reading "Top ten charts of 2022"

Yes, I know I've chosen more than ten. Deal with it.

Earlier this week, the cranky and long-retired founder of Home Depot belched out his considered opinion about the state of today's youth—by which he apparently means anyone under the age of 70: Nobody works, nobody gives a damn...."Just give it to me. Send me money. I don't want to work — I'm too lazy, I'm ...continue reading "There is no worker revolt"

A few days ago, Tony Pipa of the Brookings Institution wrote about the dire state of America's rural communities: A Policy Renaissance Is Needed for Rural America to Thrive Shamokin [Pennsylvania] is a cautionary tale for what happens when we lack policy solutions that can truly help places cope and adapt to major economic and ...continue reading "Let’s talk about the real problems with rural America"

Here is Hilbert and the grasses again. This time, as near as I can tell, he's just licking the grass, not eating it.

Donald Trump's full tax returns for the past six years have been released. Now we wait. Tick tick tick....

Tyler Cowen weighs in today on a study of the lead-crime hypothesis: These results seem a bit underwhelming, and furthermore there seems to be publication bias....I have long been agnostic about the lead-crime hypothesis, simply because I never had the time to look into it, rather than for any particular substantive reason. (I suppose I ...continue reading "Yet another look at that lead-crime meta-study"

This is a flower that was growing in one of the British World War II cemeteries in Normandy. But what is it? It's nothing I can come even close to recognizing.

I was browsing around this evening and ran across a piece from Glenn Greenwald in which he complains that a clip from his streaming news show was removed from TikTok—apparently because he called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a "corrupt, authoritarian oligarch." Glenn goes on to suggest that this might have happened due to influence from ...continue reading "TikTok offers to let US agencies oversee content moderation"

For those of you who have heard about Tesla's plummeting stock price and wonder what's going on, a quick look at their history might clear things up: Tesla was not always a crazy unicorn stock. For ten years it just slowly burbled along. Then, for some reason, it exploded at the beginning of the pandemic. ...continue reading "Tesla is just a car company"

If you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe the brilliant Cal economist Brad DeLong: Remember: NONE of the interest-rate increases the Fed has undertaken since its lift-off from zero have yet had time to affect the real economy of demand, production, and employment. And NONE of the interest-rate increases the Fed has undertaken since its ...continue reading "The Fed’s future is barreling toward us"