Kevin Drum 🕸

As long as we're talking about Gaza, here's an updated set of fatality figures: The cumulative death toll as of today is just over 29,000, about 1.3% of the total population of Gaza. Dead and injured come to just under 100,000, or 4.3% of the total population. On a population basis, that's six times the ...continue reading "Raw data: The death toll in Gaza"

Why oh why does the US keep vetoing UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza? Are we really that brutal and heartless? Oh come on. This isn't complicated. It's because these immediate ceasefire resolutions never demand that Hamas immediately release its hostages. That's a loud tell that the resolution backers aren't really serious about ...continue reading "Why do we keep vetoing UN resolutions over Gaza?"

This is Joe Biden's schedule today after landing at LAX:

A street performer in Laguna Beach.

Unless someone gets run over by a bus, the two candidates for president this year are Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That's it, like it or not. So can everyone please start dealing with reality on this? The endless pissing and moaning about Earth-2 scenarios is really starting to grate on me.

OpenAI recently released an AI video creator, and its ouput, though amazing, isn't perfect. Atrios comments: Not an expert on video/image editing, but I suspect editing out the 6th finger is a lot more work than it's worth. And, sure, these things will always get better, but some things need to be better than pretty ...continue reading "AI video isn’t perfect yet. So what?"

It's sad to see what's happened to the Hugo Awards, but I don't think this is right: really, the long and short of it is that just like elections, vaccines, vehicles, football, taylor swift, climate change, coffee, budweiser, gaming, journalism, polling, and everything else, The Hugo Awards got eaten by social media, and I'm not ...continue reading "The Hugo Awards are too small for a big world"

Moonset over the Sheephole Mountains.

By chance, I happened to mention exactly this to a friend of mine last night: Are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you ...continue reading "Violence is at the core of MAGA nation"

The history of egg prices is the history of bird flu:

Here is Robin Abcarian on Atlanta DA Fani Willis: After watching her testify for nearly two hours on Thursday, I think she made a convincing case that she did not [do anything wrong]. If anything, she spent more money on him than he did on her. But by engaging in a romantic relationship with Wade ...continue reading "Why does anyone take the charges against Fani Willis seriously?"

We have finally reached the logical conclusion of the belief that life begins at conception: An embryo created through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a child protected by Alabama’s wrongful death act and the Alabama Constitution, the Alabama Supreme ruled on Friday. ....The Supreme Court held in a 7-2 decision that parents of frozen embryos killed ...continue reading "Alabama puts the IVF business out of business"

Here's the latest from our fully lucid and astute former president: Trump: Thousands and thousands of people coming from all over the world. Yesterday, they had many from the Congo. Welcome to the Congo people because and where do you come in the Congo? pic.twitter.com/qLLjn4b5HR — Acyn (@Acyn) February 18, 2024 Idiocy aside, there are ...continue reading "Donald Trump is mentally impaired, part 457"

The latest kerfuffle over Joe Biden's age reminds me of the power of the hack gap. Cast your thoughts back over a few recent high-profile incidents: In 2016, liberals supported Hillary Clinton during her email difficulties, but hardly wholeheartedly. They constantly wrung their hands over her "admittedly poor judgment," "adversarial communication style," and "habit of ...continue reading "The hack gap, again and again and again"

Last month, GAO audited the auditors. That is, they took a look at IRS audits of rich people to see how much, on average, they collected from them. Here are the results: Oddly enough, the enormous jump in 2022 is because of a Republican initiative. By 2020 audit rates of rich people had gotten so ...continue reading "Auditing the rich really pays off"

I suppose this is well known among a select group of people, but not to me. So here is Albert Einstein after visiting the United States in 1921, just after his general theory of relativity had been confirmed via eclipse sightings. The quotes are from a story that ran on page 9 of the New ...continue reading "Einstein on America"

A few weeks ago NBC News reported on a suicide crisis among Hispanics. What's the cause? A variety of the usual suspects: The pandemic hit young Hispanics especially hard .... parents don’t speak English .... poorer households .... cultural barriers .... cultural and systemic obstacles .... minorities face added economic and societal obstacles .... may ...continue reading "Hispanic suicides aren’t really a crisis"

Everyone is familiar with the Amber Alert system. It's for abducted children, and it's named after Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1996. For some reason, though, its original backers thought it would be better to have a more official name for it, so by the time it was legislated nationwide in 2003 ...continue reading "Amber, Blue, Silver, Yellow, Feather, Ebony"

Spring training is upon us, but since no actual games have been played yet we need something else to be outraged about while we wait. Tyler Kepner of The Athletic reports that it's baseball's new uniforms: they're a "fashion flop" and an "assault on the eyes." But even by the end of a thousand word ...continue reading "Baseball’s new uniforms are literally violence against fans"

Joshua Keating asks today, "what does deterrence even mean, really?" It's a good question for at least two reasons: (a) deterrence against what? and (b) what's the evidence? The first question is critical. The most famous case of deterrence is the MAD doctrine during the Cold War. It worked! But in the modern world deterrence ...continue reading "Does deterrence work?"