Kevin Drum 🕸

Gallup's global survey of positive and negative emotions sheds some interesting light on the proposition that smartphones are harming young people. Here are positive emotions: There's no change after 2012, when smartphones became widely used. Now here are negative emotions: Negative emotions did start to rise around 2012. However, this was a broad trend that ...continue reading "Young people worldwide aren’t getting any more negative than their parents"

According to preliminary estimates from the Border Patrol, it looks like total illegal border crossings in June were down to about 84,000: This doesn't include requests for asylum, which usually amount to about 50,000 per month. Is this decline because of summer or because of President Biden's recent crackdown on border crossings? That's impossible to ...continue reading "Preliminary estimate shows illegal immigration way down in June"

Here is YouGov's weekly tracking poll of the presidential race: After Joe Biden's disastrous CNN debate, he lost a grand total of two points of support. Trump gained nothing. Among independents Biden lost four points and Trump, remarkably, lost one point. Their support mostly went to RFK Jr. and Jill Stein. This suggests that Trump ...continue reading "Joe Biden lost about two points of support after the CNN debate"

This is world famous Melk Abbey, about halfway between Linz and Vienna in Austria. At any given time, its population is 22 monks and about two thousand tourists. Those 22 monks do a helluva job raising funds.

Employers have increasingly turned to surveillance of keystrokes to make sure their workers are actually working, and this is especially true of people working from home. However, remote workers can fight back with hacks that fake keyboard strokes and mouse movements. The Wall Street Journal reports: When Teramind examined an anonymized sample of 1,000,000 workers ...continue reading "Remote workers spend less time working"

Quite a few people have called for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race, but I'm surprised that so few have taken the logical next step: urging him to resign immediately. At the risk of being overly earnest, this is not—or shouldn't be—a matter of partisan politics. It's not about who's most likely ...continue reading "Joe Biden doesn’t need to drop out of the race. He needs to resign."

The panic over the Supreme Court's immunity decision has reached absurd levels. Today the New York Times reports that our allies can no longer trust us: “If the U.S. president is free from the restrictions of criminal law, if he has that level of criminal immunity, the other leaders of the allied nations cannot trust ...continue reading "The Trump immunity ruling is not the end of democracy"

Washington DC is suddenly full of anonymous Democratic insiders who are dishing dirt on Joe Biden's parlous mental state. The New York Times rounds up a lot of them for a long story today, and if you read carefully one of the recurrent themes is that Biden's mental state has fallen off a cliff in ...continue reading "Biden’s cognitive decline may be fairly recent"

When a federal agency issues a new rule, you can sue them in federal court if you think the rule was wrongly approved. For example, maybe you think the agency violated proper procedure or failed to properly account for public comments. The default statute of limitations for filing a suit is six years. But six ...continue reading "The Supreme Court really hates federal agencies"

Stare decisis has really taken a beating over the past few years. Here's a non-comprehensive list of longstanding precedents the Supreme Court has tossed aside recently: Loper Bright overturned Chevron, a 40-year-old precedent. Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, a 50-year-old precedent. Shelby County overturned key parts of the Civil Rights Act, a 50-year-old law. Students ...continue reading "Precedent? We don’t need no stinkin’ precedent."

Not everyone appreciated the green mamba snake last week, so here's a cute little wallaby chewing on a leaf. This particular brand of wallaby is a tammar wallaby, named after "thickets of the shrub locally known as tamma that sheltered it in Western Australia." This of course just begs the question of where that got ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I sympathize with lifelong Republicans who hate Democrats and therefore remain unsure of whether to vote for Donald Trump. After all, I've long wondered how bad a Democrat would have to be to make me vote for Republican. The problem is that I've never been able to come up with a plausible Democrat as bad ...continue reading "The voter’s dilemma"

Hiring ticked up 2.5% in May, but after two years of decline it's still well below its pre-pandemic trend: Hiring looks to be leveling out a bit, which is sort of consistent with the soft landing hypothesis. We can hope.

Early this year the Department of Energy paused approvals of new LNG terminals. Several states sued, saying the decision was arbitrary and was costing them a lot of money. Yesterday a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana (of course) issued a preliminary injunction against the pause and told DOE to start issuing approvals again. It's possible that ...continue reading "Federal judge uses very strange words to overturn LNG pause"

Nonresidential construction fell in May, marking the fifth straight month of losses. The post-pandemic building boom has well and truly ended.

I'm no great fan of today's Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, but I've seen some fairly outlandish responses about how this makes the president a king, or it allows the president to assassinate political opponents, etc. Everyone needs to cool down a bit on this. First, it's true that this is the first time ...continue reading "Donald Trump still can’t shoot someone on Fifth Avenue"

Today brings weird news. It's bad news, but peculiar bad news. As you'll recall, the main marker of multiple myeloma is M-protein. The lower the better, and late last year it dipped below detectable levels. A second test, serum immunofixation, went from detecting cancer to maybe detecting something to flatly reporting no hint of cancer. ...continue reading "Health update"

We have one final Supreme Court decision to look at this year: Moody v. NetChoice. It's a bit tricky. The headline result is that it was a unanimous opinion, and technically that's true. In reality, it was probably more like a 6-3 decision. The background is pretty simple: Texas and Florida both passed laws banning ...continue reading "Free speech probably lives, though only 6-3"

Over at National Review, Matthew Wilson clucks over Taraji P. Henson's claim that the Supreme Court has criminalized homelessness: In fact, the Supreme Court did not make it a “crime to be homeless.” In Johnson, the Court held that it is not a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment for ...continue reading "Yes, the Supreme Court now allows cities to make homelessness illegal"

This is the famous statue of Athena outside of Parlament¹ in Vienna. As you may remember, Athena has always been my favorite of the Greeks gods. She could kick butt when she needed to, but had the wisdom to know when not to. As for her unfortunate participation in the Trojan War, we'll just let ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"