Kevin Drum 🕸

Matthew Desmond has a very odd op-ed in the New York Times today. His topic is the lack of improvement in poverty despite 50 years of effort: What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the ...continue reading "Helping the poor has been one of the great triumphs of the progressive movement"

Welcome to Paris, home of the greatest subway system in the world. Only New York comes close. Anyone disagree?

I've mentioned several times that the bulk of the scientific evidence points to a natural origin for the COVID virus, but you may be wondering just what that evidence is. First off, there's this: The early cases of COVID in Wuhan clustered almost entirely around the Huanan Market. That's a helluva coincidence in a city ...continue reading "Three reasons to believe that COVID evolved naturally, not in a lab"

Today Freedom House delivered its report on 50 years of political rights and civil liberties around the world. The United States managed to avoid another year of decline, but has still fallen precipitously over the past decade: Currently the United States is rated just above Poland and just below Mongolia. At the risk of being ...continue reading "USA autocracy score doubles over past decade"

The response of the punditocracy to ChatGPT has entranced me. I mean, here we have a tool that, judged by ordinary standards, is absolutely remarkable. It's not playing chess or Go or Jeopardy! It's a computer program that produces high-school level text on pretty much any subject you throw at it—and will likely produce college-level ...continue reading "The descendants of ChatGPT will eventually be smarter than us"

Check out the bicycle cops at LAX waving for the camera just before our trip to France last year. But where's the fourth bicycle?

I always assumed that Rupert Murdoch founded Fox News, put Roger Ailes in charge, and then pretty much ignored it after it was up and running. He had black-tie fundraisers to attend, wives to divorce, and all the other accoutrements of the modern billionaire. Why waste time overseeing the daily ops of a cable news ...continue reading "What did Rupert Murdoch know and when did he know it?"

The Wall Street Journal has a seemingly insatiable appetite for trend stories that just aren't true. Here's the latest: Women’s Return to the Workforce Piles Momentum on a Hot Economy American women are staging a return to the workforce that is helping propel the economy in the face of high inflation and rising interest rates. ...continue reading "No, women aren’t returning to the workforce at an unusual rate"

I've been wondering for a while what lessons we should take from the COVID pandemic. We've had three years to collect data, after all, and another pandemic is likely to come along someday. Nobody with real expertise seems to have written about this, so I figure I'll take a crack at it. If nothing else, ...continue reading "What should we do differently in the next pandemic?"

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"