Kevin Drum 🕸

"Remember when we could take a vacation?" say the Trump apologists. Indeed I can. It was last year.

It's April and we've had a lot of rain this year, so I figured I should go out and take some pictures of the local wildflowers. They are pretty much the same wildflowers as always, but they're new pictures of the same old wildflowers. This one is a white morning glory, also known as a ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

A team of researchers says the global economy is becoming more fragmented: To measure this phenomenon, we introduce an index of geopolitical fragmentation distilled from diverse empirical indicators. To do so, we rely on the use of a flexible, dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility. Then, we employ structural vector autoregressions and ...continue reading "The global economy is becoming more fragmented"

Every once in a while, when I'm bored, I'll pull up some big information source and just browse randomly to see if I find anything interesting. I was doing this a couple of nights ago and came up with this: The death rate from Alzheimer's disease has increased about 10% since 2000. This is age-adjusted, ...continue reading "Why have Alzheimer’s deaths increased among women?"

Madeleine Kearns says this about abortion over at National Review: The pro-life side can afford to acknowledge the best pro-choice arguments — a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, the intense difficulties an unplanned pregnancy can cause, the asymmetry of reproduction between the sexes, etc. They have counter-arguments for each of them. But the pro-choice side ...continue reading "I acknowledge that pro-life folks think abortion is murder. I just don’t believe it."

Wheel of Fortune has been on for something like 40 seasons, and you'd think that by now the basic strategies would all be no-brainers. And yet, you'll constantly see this dumb move. You're in the bonus round and the category is "What Are You Doing?" The puzzle looks like this: E __ T __ N ...continue reading "A Wheel of Fortune question"

I don't remember what got me interested in this, but here are the unit costs for the most popular (and expensive) fighter jets in the world: These are "flyaway" costs. That is, the cost per unit of the latest batch on the assembly line. It is not the total procurement cost, which includes the entire ...continue reading "Raw data: The cost of fighter jets"

For reasons of geometry, there aren't a lot of nebulas visible in spring. But there are plenty of galaxies around, which is why it's called galaxy season. Unfortunately, I've already taken pictures of most of the galaxies big enough to capture with my telescope, so there's not much to do in spring. Last year I ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

According to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, here's what the US tax system looks like today compared to 1980: For most people in the middle and upper middle classes, not a lot has changed. Tax rates are a few points lower than they were in 1980, but that's it. There are two big changes: Tax ...continue reading "Raw data: Tax rates since 1980"

From Anna North at Vox: Over the last 30 years, nearly every wealthy country in the world has made it much safer for people to have babies. Only one outlier has moved in the opposite direction: the United States, where the rate of people dying in childbirth continues, stubbornly and tragically, to rise. In 2021, ...continue reading "There is no maternal mortality crisis. The CDC needs to stop saying there is."

Um, what? Luckily for Trump, I guess there are no pictures. Can you imagine the storm of posts he'd be writing if Joe Biden had done this? Hell, there was a storm of posts when Joe Biden didn't do this but a few carefully selected pictures made it look like he had.

Alex Tabarrok says a record number of drugs are in short supply right now. But is this really true? Here are the latest figures from the University of Utah: Huh. Usually when people say this they haven't bothered to check the actual figures. But things have changed since the last time I looked in mid-2022. ...continue reading "A record number of drugs are in short supply"

Why do I keep reading Mideast hawks decrying the Iranian attack on Israel as "unprecedented" and demanding retaliation? They understand why it happened, right? IT WAS BECAUSE ISRAEL ATTACKED IRAN AND KILLED 16 PEOPLE, INCLUDING TWO OF THEIR GENERALS AND TWO CIVILIANS. The Israeli airstrike on April 1 was aimed at Iran's embassy in Damascus. ...continue reading "Why did Iran attack Israel? Hmmm."

If you've heard of the PISA test, you probably think of it as an international test of math and reading skills among high school students. But there's more. For example, they ask principals if bullying is a big problem in their schools. Here are the results for 2015: The Netherlands is the world champ of ...continue reading "The Dutch are the biggest bullies in the world"

Francis Collins, former head of NIH, writes about his recent diagnosis of prostate cancer: Things took a turn about a month ago when my PSA rose sharply to 22 — normal at my age is less than 5. An MRI scan showed that the tumor had significantly enlarged.... New biopsies taken from the mass showed ...continue reading "How quickly should prostate cancer be treated?"

The national media is finally catching up with the latest crime data: Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities Homicides in American cities are falling at the fastest pace in decades, bringing them close to levels they were at before a pandemic-era jump. Nationwide, homicides dropped around 20% in 133 cities from the beginning of the ...continue reading "Murder in the US is plummeting"

The Washington Post has a piece today about Truth Social that describes how proud they are that they have hundreds of thousands of retail investors: Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago.... That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as ...continue reading "“Retail investors” is the nice word for the force behind Truth Social"

The performative bullshit just never stops. Here's a press release from Mac Warner, the West Virginia Secretary of State: In March of 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14019 (the “EO”), which improperly claims, “it is the responsibility of the Federal Government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information[.]” ....There ...continue reading "How to win in West Virginia? Fake MAGA outrage, of course."

A couple of weeks ago Israel launched a missile attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing a general of the Revolutionary Guard. Today Iran retaliated: IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Hagari: More than 200 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles were fired from Iran. Most of the threats were intercepted outside Israeli airspace. A very ...continue reading "Iran sues for peace"

CBS News joins the moron brigade: Prices in March rose 3.5% from a year ago, accelerating inflation for the third straight month. For U.S. consumers, that means spending more, but actually buying less. CBS News' @jolingkent breaks down prices where some Americans are feeling it the most: the grocery store. Here's the truth about the ...continue reading "Food inflation is close to zero"