Kevin Drum 🕸

Among Republicans, sympathy for Israel far outweighs sympathy for the Palestinians, and this hasn't changed much over the years. The story among Democrats is different. Although sympathy for Israel has long been firmly positive, around 2015 it began to steadily deteriorate. Then, in 2023—but before the Gaza war started—it finally went negative, with more Democrats ...continue reading "Among Democrats, support for Israel has cratered"

Yesterday I posted a chart comparing illegal immigration to the number of job openings in the US. It was only for the past few years, and I thought you might be interested in a longer term look. Here it is: Illegal immigration has roughly followed job prospects for the past two decades. The number of ...continue reading "Illegal immigration is mostly driven by availability of jobs"

It was cold on Monday night: 33°F at the top of Palomar Mountain, where I did this month's bit of astrophotography. I thought my fingers were going to fall off. The sky wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good and nothing went wrong. I got a full night's worth of images and all of them ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Finally I have a chance to post some cheesecake with a genuinely newsworthy purpose: This might not look especially racy to you, and when I first heard about it I figured it was just an ordinary case of a conservative guy trying to make a buck. But no! Vox informs me today that it's become ...continue reading "Calendargate is splitting the right"

The Artemis II mission to orbit the moon has been pushed back: The space agency had planned to send four astronauts around the moon late this year, but pushed the flight to September 2025.... NASA cited safety concerns with its own spacecraft, as well as development issues with the moonsuits and landers coming from private ...continue reading "No moon orbit this year"

Alex Tabarrok takes on federal dishwasher regulations today: Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products ...continue reading "Why are modern dishwashers so slow?"

Ha ha ha: Former President Trump won’t make his own closing argument in his New York civil business fraud trial after his lawyers objected to the judge’s insistence that the former president would stick to “relevant” matters. Poor Donald. The judge won't allow him to rant about how unfair everything is, so instead he's going ...continue reading "No closing argument from Donald Trump"

Here is the average rental price of a vacant apartment over the past couple of decades: Note that this is the asking price for a vacant apartment, so it represents the actual cost of moving into a new place. Income is for nonsupervisory workers, who represent about 80% of the workforce, so it isn't skewed ...continue reading "Raw data: Rent in the US"

Today we have a new entry in the Annals of Pseudoscience: an estimate from Bloomberg News that war over Taiwan would be really expensive: This is based on some handwaving estimates that in the event of war Taiwan's GDP would fall 40%, China's would fall 17%, and US GDP would fall 7%. Add it up ...continue reading "War over Taiwan would be very bad"

Joshua Benton of Nieman Labs points us today to a recent study about people who "do the research" on fake news. In a nutshell, the researchers found that when people searched Google to check out a news article, it more often than not made them more likely to believe misinformation. But why? Here's the technical ...continue reading "“Doing the work”: Does it work?"

This whole Lloyd Austin thing is damn weird. He went into the hospital on January 1 due to "complications" from surgery but didn't tell anyone until four days later. I had a vague thought that maybe it was because the surgery was for something he didn't want to make public, like a vasectomy or syphilis ...continue reading "Lloyd Austin had prostate cancer"

Why has illegal immigration skyrocketed over the past few years? Steven Camarota provides a common explanation: Once it became clear that the administration was not going to detain people, send them home quickly, or require them to wait in Mexico, the number of people coming to the border skyrocketed. Here are total border encounters over ...continue reading "Why did illegal immigration surge after 2020?"

This is the Cluny-Sorbonne metro station in Paris. Pretty cool, isn't it?

The non-oil trade deficit declined slightly last month: We've recovered from the worst of the pandemic, but we're still running bigger trade deficits than we did during the teens. This was a big concern back in the day, but for some reason nobody seems to care about it anymore.

Apparently there's some kind of foofarah over Elon Musk highlighting a tweet that claims more illegal immigrants are coming into the country than there are native births. As near as I can tell, this isn't true using any statistics, including the raw number of border encounters. Here's my best take at a true number: Net ...continue reading "How does illegal immigration compare to US birth rates?"

Credit card debt rose in November at an (annualized) rate of 17.7%. Holy cow! But here's what that looks like: Credit card debt has been rising steadily ever since it recovered from the pandemic crash. It's now back to about where it was in 2019. True, 17.7% is a lot. But the data is pretty ...continue reading "Credit card debt keeps sneaking up"

Last week I went whale watching off the coast of Dana Point. I didn't see any of the fabled killer whales that are supposedly puttering around right now, but we did see some gray whales. The good news is that this was an early sighting and it was a pod of three, so I was ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

David Leonhardt writes today about the misguided campaign against using standardized tests like the SAT in college admissions. It's easy for lefties to hate on the SAT, but there was a time when lefties loved the SAT because it was a way of identifying smart kids who didn't necessarily grow up in great neighborhoods or ...continue reading "There’s no good reason to ditch the SAT"

Time offers the following numbers about the Israeli campaign to starve Gaza: A December report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification predicted that by February, all 2 million people in Gaza would face crisis levels of acute food insecurity, with at least one in four households facing famine-like conditions. ....[Colonel Elad Goren] says Israel ...continue reading "Biden needs to stop aid to Israel until its campaign of starvation stops"

The Wall Street Journal reports today that office vacancies are at their highest level since records began: A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in ...continue reading "Raw data: Unleased office space sets new record in 2023"