Kevin Drum 🕸

This is Charlie sitting on the fence with a nice patch of sunlight framing his face and showing off his two-tone whiskers. He's such a photogenic cat.

I've written a lot about crime over the past month or so. Here's a summary of the most important bits. First, crime has gone down steadily over the past decade. Property crime continued to go down in 2021 while violent crime remained stable. In 2022, the largest cities in the US almost all reported lower ...continue reading "Raw data: Why America thinks violent crime is up even though it isn’t"

This is a sculpture of a pale, hairless hand holding a bunch of colorful marshmallows on sticks. Wait. No. It's a Jeff Koons sculpture "donated" to the city of Paris after the 11/15 attack that killed 130 people, and those are tulips, not marshmallows, as anyone who follows Koons knows. Ahem. I guess I don't ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Speaking of newspaper stories about Thanksgiving, the Guardian gets it right this year. And so do the turkeys of Woburn, Massachusetts:

This is not the most inspiring Thanksgiving front page I've ever seen. I guess it could be worse, though. At least there are no recipes for cauliflower mashed potatoes or Beyond turkey slices.

It's dex night and I would like to be out in the desert with my telescope since the moon is down all night. Unfortunately I'm sick and I hurt my leg and the weather is apparently lousy, so instead I'm sitting at the computer clicking aimlessly at whatever catches my eye. This means I'm going ...continue reading "The curious case of the decline and fall of “internet”"

This is off the beaten path, isn't it? But I was over at Google's Ngram Viewer trying to remember what I had planned to look up, and while my neurons were betraying me I started entering dirty words. That was interesting, so I got more rigorous about it. Here are the most popular current obscenities, ...continue reading "Raw data: What popular obscenity has grown the most?"

The White House sent out some talking points to help you deal with your Fox-loving uncle on Thanksgiving Day, and I wish they hadn't. This is one of the most tiresome memes ever. But if you're going to do it anyway, for God's sake please proofread it: Two typos in a single sentence? It should ...continue reading "The White House needs a copy editor"

This is Seal Beach, California. Sadly, there are no longer any seals there.

David Dayen reports today on a letter from the "Blockchain Eight" suggesting the SEC should back off any investigation of crypto trading exchanges: The March letter from eight House members—four Democrats and four Republicans—questioned the SEC’s authority to make informal inquiries to crypto and blockchain companies, and intimated that the requests violated federal law. Rep. ...continue reading "A few trillion dollars is plenty big enough to be regulated"

I posted a GAO chart yesterday showing that Millennials had pretty good retirement prospects compared to Boomers, and then mentioned in passing that this "gibes with projections from the Social Security Administration." However, that was based on my memory of an old Social Security report, and I had just warned everyone not to assume that ...continue reading "Another look at Millennial vs. Boomer retirement"

This is Eve Despairing by Auguste Rodin. In the background is the dome of Les Invalides, the complex built by Louis XIV for soldiers who were wounded and disabled in his interminable wars. Adjusted for population, Louis's wars accounted for about half as many fatalities in Western Europe as in all of World War II. ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Every year I like to take a look at the Washington Post's Fatal Force database to see if we're continuing to make progress on police shootings of unarmed suspects. We are: This is adjusted for population shares. Black suspects are still killed at the highest rate, but only slightly. Hispanics are killed at the lowest ...continue reading "Raw data: police shootings of unarmed suspects are way down"

Fox News should be proud: Fox “News” violent crime segments before and after Election Day. pic.twitter.com/DGkMmWNZ2G — Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) November 22, 2022 Apparently their ceaseless campaign against violent crime finally paid off and crime dropped by more than half. The pen really is mightier than the sword!

Believe it or not, I came home from Virginia with a homework assignment. The assignment was to answer this question: Is it really true that the share of wealth owned by Millennials is much lower than the share of wealth owned by Baby Boomers at the same age? The simple answer is: Yes. The better ...continue reading "Millennial wealth is suddenly looking very normal"

This is Great Falls Park in Virginia. The Potomac is impassable at this point unless (a) you have a kayak or (b) you build a canal to get around it, as George Washington did. Today, the canal is gone but the kayakers remain. The top photo shows Great Falls in lovely, velvety splendor thanks to ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

It's still 43 days until the new Congress starts up, but it's never too early to take a deep dive into some the important issues Republicans will be addressing when January 3rd rolls around. And anyway, there's only one, so it's not like you have a ton of homework to do. The subject, of course, ...continue reading "Here’s a deep dive into the Hunter Biden laptop scandal"

Like many people, I have long feared that Chinese authorities would eventually find it impossible to keep up their drastic COVID lockdown policies. Well, it's starting: November 21, late evening in China The disobedience continues. Haizhu District, Guangzhou, people escape from quarantine.#Haizhu #China #Guangzhou #ChinaUprisingThread pic.twitter.com/Dat3Ip5WLH — 247ChinaNews (@247ChinaNews) November 21, 2022 And here's the ...continue reading "China may be getting close to COVID-19 meltdown"

Paul Campos recently went to Wikipedia to look up the highest grossing concert tours of all time. Long story short, the #1 spot is held by Ed Sheeran, which Paul found dismaying because he had never heard of Ed Sheeran. This is life for us oldsters. Sorry. But really, it's mostly related to interest in ...continue reading "Ed Sheeran?"

At this moment, the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian are all giving front-page play to the fact that Elon Musk has decided to reinstate Donald Trump's Twitter account. Why? Have we learned nothing in the past few years about the difference between news and ...continue reading "Elon Musk has— oh forget it"