Kevin Drum 🕸

This is the main altar at the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris. The top photo is a panorama that shows everything from side to side. The bottom photo looks up into the dome.

Via Tyler Cowen, a new study attempts to estimate if crime goes up when a county elects a progressive chief prosecutor. Here's the key chart: As you can see, crime was on a generally downward path everywhere. So the question is whether it went down less when a progressive prosecutor was elected. The authors conclude ...continue reading "Study says progressive prosecutors are associated with slightly higher property crime"

A Utah couple accidentally wrapped up a box of Amazon returns while their cat was inside. Six days later she was freed in an Amazon warehouse in California: Carrie Clark said her family’s indoor-only cat, Galena, mysteriously disappeared on April 10. Friends and family helped them search their house, neighborhood and surrounding community for a ...continue reading "Miracle cat shipped to California and survives"

Did you know that for the past couple of years Russia has been jamming GPS signals in the Baltic? They have! Allegedly, of course: Tens of thousands of civilian flights have been affected by the GPS jamming in recent months, according to experts. The jamming, which affects all GPS users in the area when it ...continue reading "The perils of GPS jamming"

"What have the Romans ever done for us?" is a classic Monty Python bit: Fittingly, this takes place in Judea, because it's how I view modern-day Judea: From the Palestinian side: All right, but apart from the 1948 war, the Red Sea blockades, the creation of the PLO, the 1967 war, the 1973 war, the ...continue reading "What do I mean, there are no good guys in the Middle East?"

In the two-things-can-be-true-at-once file: The Gaza protests on university campuses are mostly peaceful. The extreme behavior is largely happening outside of campus walls. Nevertheless, Jewish students on these campuses widely report feeling scared and harassed. I feel a lot of sympathy for university presidents dealing with this, even the ones who have made some unquestionably ...continue reading "There are no good guys in the Middle East"

Via Kriston Capps, here's an interesting chart from a pair of researchers who have tracked how much Supreme Court justices interrupt each other during hearings: The court has gotten steadily testier over the past couple of decades. In 1997 there was about one interruption per hearing. Today it's up to six. Why? In addition, you ...continue reading "The Supreme Court has gotten testier over the years"

Today has been fun. Several months ago Cox decided to offload their email service to Yahoo, and this was the day. They're transitioning customers in waves, and apparently my wave came up today. So I hopped over to Yahoo for the first time in forever and chose a new password. This went wrong in some ...continue reading "I had a lovely time today getting my email unfucked"

This is so tedious: Restaurants for months have said menu prices in California would rise as the state raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers. Now they are following through. ....Since September, when California moved to require large fast-food chains to bump up their minimum hourly pay to $20 in April, fast-food and fast-casual restaurants ...continue reading "No, a minimum wage increase in April didn’t raise prices last September"

Obviously I'm way out of date, but I learned something new today from Charles Homans' big Donald Trump piece in the New York Times. The setting is one of Trump's campaign rallies: As the speech neared its conclusion, the room once again filled with music, a stately cinematic swell of synthesized strings. This recording, an ...continue reading "Donald Trump loves the QAnon song"

What are the signs that democracy is failing in the United States. Here's a comprehensive list: In 2020 Donald Trump tried to forcibly steal an election he lost. This is true, and a substantial chunk of the Republican Party and Fox News eagerly helped him. That's about as anti-democratic as it gets. But also keep ...continue reading "How are we doing on the democracy front?"

The Wall Street Journal editorial page continues its endless tedious jihad about Joe Biden being old and infirm: When the New York Post asked why Mr. Biden has taken to wearing tennis shoes with his suits, this was the comment from deputy press secretary Andrew Bates: “I know y’all aren’t partial to presidents who exercise, ...continue reading "Does anyone remember that Joe Biden broke his foot?"

Joe Biden has passed a lot of significant legislation, but he's also developed a reputation for "small ball" initiatives: minor rules that attack everyday annoyances. Here's a non-exhaustive sampling: Hearing aids. Allows low-cost hearing aids to be purchased without a prescription. Insulin. Limits the cost of insulin to $35 per month for people on Medicare ...continue reading "Here’s an update on Joe Biden’s small ball politics"

The feds have decided that Tesla's Autopilot technology needs to get better: The issue here isn't how good Tesla's unassisted driving is. The issue is that Tesla is supposed to make sure drivers are paying attention regardless, typically by beeping and alerting when they take their hands off the wheel or their eyes wander. The ...continue reading "How safe are Tesla cars with Autopilot?"

This is from a government record I randomly ran across today: “Document(s)” is used in the broadest sense of the word and shall mean all original written, printed, typed, recorded, or graphic matter whatsoever, however produced or reproduced, of every kind, nature, and description, and all non-identical copies of both sides thereof, including, but not ...continue reading "What is a document?"

Here is Hilbert surveying his vast domains, like Alexander after he had conquered the known world. Known to him, that is.

The Guardian today has a piece about Allan Lichtman's famous "13 keys" to winning the White House, which have a strong record of predicting the eventual winner. The party in the White House has to lose six of them to get voted out, so let's play along. Here are the 13 keys along with my ...continue reading "Joe Biden is going to win!"

David Brooks has a remarkable column in the New York Times today dedicated to one thing: our rising national debt. The reason it's remarkable has nothing to do with the subject matter. I'm not a big deficit hawk, but the long and steady rise in the national debt is at least concerning: Even after removing ...continue reading "America needs higher taxes"

March was another good-news-bad-news month for PCE inflation: Headline PCE inflation dropped a bit to 3.9%, but core PCE increased to 3.9%. The inflation level is proving to be a little more stubborn than anyone hoped for. On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE came in at 2.7% and core PCE was 2.8%.

Due mostly to laziness, I suppose, I've been laboring under the impression that last year the International Court of Justice ruled there was a "plausible" case to be made for genocide in Gaza. But Joan Donoghue, who was president of the court at the time, says this isn't so: The court decided that the Palestinians ...continue reading "International court didn’t say there was plausible genocide in Gaza"