Kevin Drum 🕸

A few days ago I promised to tell you all about my new astrophotography setup, and today's the day. Let's start with a picture: The four main parts are: OTA stands for Optical Tube Assembly—more commonly known as a "telescope." Mine is a Skywatcher ED100 apochromatic refractor. ED means "extra-low dispersion" and refers to a ...continue reading "A tour of my telescope"

I have no special reason for posting this. I just happened to run across yet another item fretting over the possibility of China becoming bigger than the US and what that would mean for the future of the galaxy. But come on. Sure, total GDP matters for the heft it allows you to throw around ...continue reading "China’s autocratic ways will eventually doom them"

According to Know Your Meme, the platforms that generate most of our memes have changed over the past decade: Back in the day, when dinosaurs trod the earth, our memes mostly came from YouTube and 4chan. Today, in our sleekly modern era, most of our memes come from Twitter and TikTok. I'm not sure what ...continue reading "Raw data: Where our memes come from"

This is Charlie testing out our new area rug. He seems to approve, which is a good thing since we got it because the old rug had to be vacuumed practically every day to get rid of all the Charlie fur. We are hoping the new one hides the fur more effectively so we can ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 2 September 2022"

A newly released property inventory from the Mar-a-Lago search indicates that the FBI found lots of classified documents. We already knew that. But they also found lots of folders marked classified but with no documents inside: In Box No. 2, for example, taken from Trump’s office, there were 43 empty folders with classified banners; 28 ...continue reading "The FBI found an awful lot of empty folders marked “Classified” at Mar-a-Lago"

The American economy gained 315,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 225,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate went up a bit to 3.7%. This is an almost perfect jobs report. It's healthy enough that it means the ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in August"

From the editor of National Review: It’s amazing that Biden and his team feel comfortable lecturing us about the rule of law and the Constitution without feeling the slightest self-consciousness about his having just lawlessly spent up to $1 trillion… They think they can get away with it—and they’re right — Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) September ...continue reading "NR editor: Biden has no right to attack Trump"

This is Honey Island swamp in Louisiana. I took this picture at the end of the tour as the sun was going down, which helped provide an interesting sky. I wish I could have taken it an hour later, but you take your pictures at the tour times you have, not the tour times you ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

How are Democrats doing at the moment? Here are three takes on the generic congressional ballot during the last week of August: Morning Consult has Democrats ahead by four points. The two aggregators have it at about a tie. All three show Democrats doing about four points better than a couple of months ago. Conventional ...continue reading "Democrats continue to make slow progress in congressional balloting"

Do you need a good job but don't have any skills? Move to California! We just passed a bill that sets up a Fast Food Council, and among other things it's tasked with setting a new minimum wage for the industry. The legislation caps the minimum wage at $22 per hour in 2023, which presumably ...continue reading "$22 an hour to flip burgers in California? Maybe!"

My plea for everyone to react calmly to the NAEP's test scores of fourth-graders during the pandemic has apparently been ignored: These headlines are technically correct: Scores declined to the level of 1999, which is indeed "decades." (Two of them.) But that was possible only because we had made such small gains since then in ...continue reading "Let’s not panic over fourth-grade test declines during the pandemic. Not yet, anyway."

Earlier this year the Department of Education conducted a "special administration" of the long-term NAEP test for 9-year-olds. Why the long-term test instead of the main NAEP test? Because by chance they had conducted a long-term assessment in 2020, which meant that a 2022 retest would tell us a lot about how the COVID-19 pandemic ...continue reading "Fourth graders lost about half a grade level of learning during the pandemic"

Jim Geraghty is afraid that maybe we didn't win the Cold War after all. Sure, he says, it seems like we won: And yet… Putin-era Russia doesn’t look all that different from the bad old days of the Soviet Union, particularly this year. The Russian army invaded neighboring territories....horrifying brutality and the deliberate targeting of ...continue reading "Our victory in the Cold War is still intact"

Sarah Palin has lost the special election for Alaska's House seat. So sad. Better luck in November, Sarah.

The good people of Michigan recently gathered a huge number of signatures to put an abortion-rights measure on the November ballot. The Bureau of Elections examined the petitions and found that the vast majority of signatures were valid. So, the citizens having spoken, they duly recommended it be put on the ballot. But wait. The ...continue reading "Michigan Republicans refuse to approve abortion initiative just because they don’t feel like it"

This is—finally!—the first real picture I've taken with my new telescope. It's an image of the Iris Nebula (NGC 7023), a reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus. It's blue thanks to the romantically named SAO 19158, the young star in the center that illuminates it. This is not a bad image, but it's not as ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Unemployment has plummeted everywhere: Unemployment rates were lower in July than a year earlier in 383 of the 389 metropolitan areas, higher in 5 areas, and unchanged in 1 area, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Well, almost everywhere. So who are the five unlucky areas that managed to beat the odds and ...continue reading "Unemployment is down everywhere except Indiana"

Republicans in swing districts are running scared: At least nine Republican congressional candidates have scrubbed or amended references to Trump or abortion from their online profiles in recent months, distancing themselves from divisive subjects that some GOP strategists say are two of the biggest liabilities for the party ahead of the post-Labor Day sprint to ...continue reading "Election momentum is swinging toward Democrats"

This might well be my last M-protein test: It's been flat for the past three months, which is fine. It would be a little worrisome under normal circumstances, but since I'm now off the chemo regimen and just waiting for the CAR-T treatment, all that matters is that I'm not getting worse. And I'm not! ...continue reading "Health update"

This was taken in the Saint-Martin neighborhood near the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad. This is apparently a guy whose wife/partner/whatev really, really doesn't want him smoking indoors.