Kevin Drum 🕸

I don't know a lot about sanctions, but I've learned two things over the past couple of decades: In general, unilateral sanctions don't work. They only work if they're backed by lots of countries. They take a while to work. Sanctions are sort of like a grinding medieval siege, something that's effective only if you ...continue reading "Our sanctions against Russia are tough but still probably won’t work"

What have Republicans done recently? They tried to extort Ukraine in return for military aid. They precipitated anti-mask/vaccine fervor, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. They defend the 1/6 insurrection as just an ordinary protest¹ and continue to support Trump's big lie about Democrats stealing the vote. They support efforts to allow red ...continue reading "Let us review the Republican record"

Nikki Haley has some advice for us: We need to become energy independent and we need to do it now. — Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 28, 2022 As it happens, we're already energy independent: We continue to import about a fifth of our energy for reasons of convenience and geopolitics, but we don't have to. ...continue reading "Let’s make Europe energy independent"

So it looks like Joe Biden will be giving his State of the Union address just as Russian troops are finally entering Kyiv. And make no mistake: despite Russian military clumsiness so far, they're going to take Kyiv and there's not much we can do about it. This puts Biden in a tough position. Will ...continue reading "This is a tough night for Biden to be giving a big speech"

Well, good news for me, anyway. As many of you know, there's been an explosion in recent years of what are called CAR-T treatments for blood cancers in general and for multiple myeloma in particular. Unlike ordinary chemo treatments, CAR-T involves taking T cells from a patient (e.g., me) and shipping them off to a ...continue reading "Good news today!"

For some reason, everyone seems to be missing the obvious reason why the US (and NATO more broadly) aren't attacking Russia directly: because we never have. Nor has Russia ever directly attacked us. This has been hard military doctrine in the nuclear era. Instead, both countries have fought lots and lots of proxy wars, the ...continue reading "We will not get into a hot war with Russia"

Showing support for Ukraine is the order of the day, but none of the pictures in my photo queue could be made to fit a Ukrainian theme of any kind. So instead I made my own. This is a Spanish needles daisy with the background converted to blue and then run through a Photoshop filter.

Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, wants us to take "Defund the Police" very, very seriously: Her new book, An Abolitionist’s Handbook, offers 12 steps in the form of a guidebook that everyday activists can use to fight for an abolitionist present and future—and her bold, humanistic approach can be previewed ...continue reading "Patrisse Cullors: Defund the police means just what it sounds like"

Why oh why? For the life of me I don’t understand why Dems aren’t falling over themselves to praise how Biden has handled things and express immense relief that he, rather than a fully compromised Trump, is leading the global response, but this delusional nonsense is what’s filling the void. https://t.co/0qBkAF2tRK — Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) ...continue reading "Democrats need to back Biden more loudly on Ukraine"

The New York Times reports today on a pair of studies that conclude with high certainty that the COVID-19 virus originated at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, not at the nearby Wuhan virology lab. Here's an annotated map that provides a simple look at how the virus initially spread: I think it's possible that ...continue reading "New studies confirm that COVID-19 virus occurred naturally"

In the New York Times, Chris Miller says there's a reason that Vladimir Putin keeps winning wars: For the past decade, Americans have come to believe that Russia’s strength lies in hybrid tactics — cyberwarfare, misinformation campaigns, covert operations — and its ability to meddle in other countries’ domestic politics. Yet as we have searched ...continue reading "Why Putin wins: Obvious answers to obvious questions edition"

AFPAC is for conservatives who think CPAC has sold out to the woke liberals. In other words, their applause for Joe Arpaio last night was not just a misunderstanding: Joe Arpaio tells the crowd at AFPAC that he has been named the biggest racist in the country. The crowd erupts in applause. "What are you ...continue reading "AFPAC: We love us some good ol’ school racism"

I was roaming around in the vicinity of John Wayne Airport earlier today and decided to take a bunch of pictures of planes taking off. My goal was to find the best spot and then decide if it was good enough to merit coming back when the light was better. In a nutshell, it wasn't. ...continue reading "Can you identify these airplanes?"

In the New York Times today, Jamelle Bouie fires away at moderate Democrats who, he says, derailed President Biden's agenda and are now trying to blame progressives for their own failure. I don't understand this. It's true, as Bouie says, that over the summer there was disagreement about whether to link the infrastructure bill and ...continue reading "Are Democratic moderates responsible for the party’s downfall?"

It's been a while since I took a look at the latest COVID-19 numbers, so let's do that. The powers that be have decided that the best metric is no longer cases or deaths, but hospitalizations, so here are hospitalization rates in the US plus the five biggest Western European countries: Everybody is way down ...continue reading "Raw data: The latest on the Omicron surge"

Charlie, like most cats, adores it when we change the bedsheets. He zooms around as we wave the sheets over his head and attacks anything that comes his way. In this photo he is just about to pounce on something, but I don't know what. Apparently I stopped taking pictures before he made his move.

After a dip in December, consumer spending is now back on track: There's nothing much to say about this. It just adds to the mountain of evidence that the US economy has recovered from the pandemic and is now back on its pre-pandemic growth path. This is all thanks to the massive amounts of stimulus ...continue reading "Consumer spending is totally normal"

After years of saying that someday I should go up to LA and check out their new subway, I finally did it this week. It's not so new anymore, but better late than never, amirite? I was mainly interested in taking pictures of the various pieces of artwork that adorn some of the stations, and ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Quick note: I'm sure I'll have occasional comments on Russia's invasion of Ukraine over the next few days and weeks, but only if I have something interesting to say. Beyond that, I'm no Ukraine expert and won't be writing about it more generally. You can get that from dozens of regular news sources. My basic ...continue reading "Vladimir Putin is (still) a thug"

A new poll from CBS News shows that "book banning" is pretty unpopular: a whopping 85% of the country thinks it's wrong to ban books for ideological or racial reasons—though I note that the pollsters didn't bother to ask about banning books due to sexual content or adult language. Liberals are touting this as evidence ...continue reading "New poll says a third of Americans believe racism has never been a big problem"