Kevin Drum 🕸

It turns out that the country behind the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline was almost certainly Ukraine—and US government officials have known it all along. The Washington Post reported this today based on intelligence leaks from the Discord Papers: Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were ...continue reading "Ukraine was behind the Nord Stream bombing all along"

The postal service announced today, as part of National Dog Bite Awareness Week, that more than 5,300 postal carriers were attacked by dogs in 2022. They list California and Texas as the top dog attack states, but of course this is only because California and Texas are the biggest states. A different story emerges if ...continue reading "Missouri leads the nation in dog attacks on mail carriers"

The ocean is basically a giant heat engine, absorbing heat from the atmosphere and recycling it via rising and sinking waters. It can absorb a vast amount of heat, but it has its limits, and eventually the surface water absorbs so much heat that it can't absorb more without itself heating up. We reached this ...continue reading "Sea temperatures are at a massive record high"

One of the (many) downsides of the debt ceiling debacle is the possibility that it undermined faith in US treasury bonds. If that happened, interest rates on treasuries would increase, potentially costing the government billions in higher funding rates. So did this happen? A very rough back-of-the-envelope look at treasury yields suggests it did—a little ...continue reading "The debt ceiling crisis probably cost less than half a billion dollars"

Over the past year three huge crypto firms have failed: Genesis, FTX, and Three Arrows. At least two of them came to ruin because they were fundamentally corrupt and misused customer funds. But none of these three is the biggest crypto firm. Binance is. A few months ago I noted this and asked, "When Binance ...continue reading "SEC sues world’s biggest crypto firm over commingling and diversion of customer funds"

This is the damnedest thing I've seen in a long time. The Cato Institute recently commissioned a YouGov survey about support for a Central Bank Digital Currency. For what it's worth, only 16% support it, but that's of minimal interest. Cato also asked a few other questions, and for some reason one of them was ...continue reading "A quarter of young people support surveillance cameras in every house"

Here is a triptych of wind turbines. All of them were shot in the vicinity of Whitewater, a pass in the mountains near Palm Springs that's home to a huge wind turbine farm.

Adjusted for inflation, new manufacturing orders for consumer goods fell another 0.5% in April, continuing a decline that began a year ago: Since June of 2022, new orders for consumer goods have declined nearly 10%. New orders for all manufactured goods have declined 5%.

LA mayor Karen Bass is using the return of congressional earmarks to get creative with homelessness: Bass asked every member of the House and Senate who represents Los Angeles to use one of their allotted 15 annual earmark requests on a project relating to the homelessness and housing crisis that her team had identified in ...continue reading "More money won’t help LA’s homeless"

OpenSecrets has released a new report that highlights the growing nationalization of House and Senate races. In the past, nearly all funding for these races came from in-state donors, but over the past two decades candidates have relied more and more on donors from across the country: Senate races have become steadily more nationalized since ...continue reading "House and Senate races have increasingly become national contests"

According to a recent tally by New America, 267 people have been killed by terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11. Virtually all of these attacks were home-grown, not the result of planning or training by foreign terrorist groups: These numbers include only attacks coded as terrorist, not mass shootings and the like. Nearly half ...continue reading "The far right is responsible for half of all terrorist killings"

Here is something you probably didn't know: The majority of goat herders in California — of which there are probably fewer than 100 — come on temporary work visas from Peru, usually staying for about three years. Our goat herders come from Peru! The reason they're in the news is because of a mysterious change ...continue reading "Little-known facts about California goat herders"

Here is Joe Biden's job approval compared to his immediate predecessors: Biden's approval level remains low, but it's not really much lower than Trump's or Obama's at this point in their first term. Within a few weeks it's likely to be almost exactly the same.

Here's an odd thing: Residential construction plummeted in May 2022 as mortgage rates went above 5%. That's no surprise. But nonresidential construction started to rise at exactly the same time and has continued rising ever since. Why? Nonresidential construction is largely financed by public or corporate bonds, and high-quality bond rates rose at the same ...continue reading "Raw data: Construction spending in the US"

CNN has a remarkable story today about the vast difference in cost between warships built in the US and those built in Japan: The country’s newest Maya-class destroyers are armed with 96 VLS cells that can fire both anti-ballistic and anti-submarine missiles, while the “quality of its sensors and systems stands at the very top ...continue reading "US warships cost at least twice as much as they should"

Yesterday I noted that although the number of jobs was up, the number of employed people was down considerably while the number of unemployed people was up. This divergence represents one of the ongoing mysteries of the labor market. Is it strong or is it weak? Here's another mystery: aggregate hours worked: Through the end ...continue reading "Employment is up, but hours worked are down. Why?"

It begins: When ChatGPT came out last November, Olivia Lipkin, a 25-year-old copywriter in San Francisco, didn’t think too much about it....In April, she was let go without explanation, but when she found managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying a writer, the reason for her layoff seemed clear. ....For some workers, ...continue reading "The beginning of the end of work"

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Norway on Thursday to announce the most remote US diplomatic post in the world: Blinken said the U.S. would open what is known as an “American Presence Post” in Tromso, about 215 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The post will open this year and be staffed by ...continue reading "US adds consul to remote Norwegian town"

According to the CBO, interest payments are going to hit a postwar high within ten years: The previous postwar record was set during the Reagan era and peaked at 3.1% of GDP. CBO estimates that interest payments will attain that level again in 2028 and then keep climbing until they reach 3.7% by 2033.

Here's a quick update on the COVID death rate in the US and other peer countries: In every country the death rate has fallen below 0.5 per million, and in a few it's under 0.1 per million. In the US we're at our lowest death rate since the start of the pandemic, but this still ...continue reading "COVID deaths are at their lowest rate ever"