Month: May 2024

I've made this point before, but it's worth making again: inflation at the grocery story has been very, very low for over a year. Here is monthly inflation in groceries:

Over the past 12 months, inflation in groceries has averaged 1.1%, way below the normal rate.

The press ran about a million pieces when food inflation was high, complete with the usual B-roll of clanging cash registers and highlights of whatever product happened to be up the most. And they're still writing them!

But food inflation is nearly zero. When will they start writing about reality? That is:

• Food inflation has been super low for over a year now.
• In April prices went down.
• Compared to a year ago, eggs are down 9%! Apples are down 13%. Seafood is down 3%. Coffee is down. Citrus fruits are down. White bread is down. Peanut butter is down. Lunchmeat is down.

And this has all been happening while average wages have gone up 4% in the past year. You'd think all of this would be of some interest to news consumers.

Because of time zone challenges and my slothful ways, I don't normally post about new inflation figures until well after the rest of the world. My slothful ways aren't likely to change anytime soon, but today you all get the benefit of my being six time zones ahead of the BLS. So here are April's inflation figures bright and early in the morning.

It was all good news today: Inflation continued to slow down in April from its recent surge. On an annualized basis headline CPI inflation came in at 3.8%, down from 4.6% last month and 5.4% in February. Core CPI came down to 3.6%:

Groceries showed considerable deflation in April. The cost of food at home decreased 2.4% on an annualized basis.

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline CPI was 3.4% and core CPI was 3.6%.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that people are cheating on employment drug tests more often:

Approximately 6,000 urine samples out of about 5.5 million collected from the general U.S. workforce last year were classified as substituted, Quest said. That’s a more than sixfold increase from the previous year.

Well, sure, but as the orange line in the chart shows, this represents growth from 0.02% to 0.11%. Not really much to be worried about. In fact, I'm a little disappointed the number is so low. It suggests a lack of rebellious spirit among the American workforce.

But put that aside. What interests me is that this article goes into some depth with its statistics; explains how drug tests are gamed; and informs us that most failures on drug tests are due to marijuana. But what it doesn't do is question the sixfold increase.

And really, come on. Nothing real increases sixfold in a single year. So what's going on? Is it an artifact of better testing? It doesn't seem to be. A sudden surge in lawless behavior? Not likely. So what is it?

I have no idea, but here's my best guess: some non-obvious form of cheating—i.e., not asking your girlfriend to pee in a cup for you—went viral on TikTok or Instagram or something. This prompted a few thousand people to give it a whirl.

What other possibilities are there? Take a guess in comments.

The Washington Post writes today about President Biden's decision to transfer $1 billion in arms to Israel after halting a shipment last week:

The decision underscores the administration’s reluctance to defy pro-Israel donors in the Democratic Party who criticized Biden’s decision last week to withhold the shipment, which included controversial 2,000-pound bombs that have been involved in mass casualty events in Gaza.

I know it's longstanding habit to casually interpret every presidential decision in the rawest political terms, but this is crazy. Biden, for better or worse, has demonstrated from the start an absolute commitment to his principles in the Gaza war. He supports Israel utterly because he believes in Israel and always has. He simultaneously supports humanitarian assistance to Palestinians because he's a decent person and always has been. He withheld last week's shipment of bombs because recent events genuinely shocked him. But he continues to otherwise transfer billions of dollars in military aid because he hates Hamas and supports Israel—as he made clear at the time. There's not the slightest indication that he's been influenced in any of this by polls or Jewish donors or progressive aides or AIPAC or student protesters or Republican critics or personal pique at Benjamin Netanyahu's treacherous behavior.¹ He hasn't budged an inch from the convictions he's held for decades.

Why pretend otherwise? This is hardly some kind of 11-dimensional chess Biden is playing. It's all out in the open and has been plain since October 8th.

¹This one in particular impresses me. It's very mature, and presidents should put personal feelings aside in matters of great import, but damn. If I were Biden I'd want to spit in Bibi's face after the way he's betrayed years of (supposed) friendship and unquestioning support. The man is a total piece of shit.

The Danube floods every now and again, and in the town of Passau it's traditional for buildings to mark the heights of past floods. The most comprehensive set of markers was this one on the town hall. The highest flood was in 1501, but very close behind was an enormous flood just a decade ago in 2013. It inundated every building in town up to the second floor, and higher than that in some areas. Bring your galoshes.

One of Joe Biden's problems is that he has a hard time taking credit for his successes. He's taken oil and gas production to new records, but never mentions it because fossil fuels are unpopular with his liberal base. He got us out of Afghanistan, but can't brag about it because the press insists the withdrawal was a chaotic fiasco. He's been tough with China, but can't get any mileage out of it because Donald Trump will always be tougher. He's made the US economy the envy of the world, but can't get that across because our brief burst of inflation overshadows everything. He only occasionally tries to make hay over Trump's insane blathering because most voters have decided Trump is a blowhard and nothing he says matters. Crime has declined substantially on his watch, but that's hard to boast about for fear of alienating progressives who are allergic to anything that might be taken as cop friendly. He's brought hundreds of January 6 insurrectionists to justice but doesn't say much about it because—well, in this case I'm not sure why.

I don't have a profound point to make here. It's just sort of remarkable that Biden has been surprisingly successful as a president while simultaneously being surprisingly constrained from saying so. I'm not sure that's happened to such a degree in recent memory.

News from the Golden State:

California exodus left a gaping population hole. Can the Golden State bounce back?

Though the state population grew 0.17% in 2023 — the first year of growth since the COVID-19 pandemic — California is still 1.2% smaller than it was in 2019.... Experts said it’s still hard to know how quickly the state can rebound.

Oh ffs. California is 1.2% smaller? Who cares? It's certainly one way to ease our housing shortage.

And there's this:

LAUSD parents and teachers in uproar over timed academic testing for 4-year-olds

This month in her transitional kindergarten class at L.A. Unified, student Maria Arriaga will be timed to see how many uppercase and lowercase letters she can name in a minute. She’ll be tested to see if she can sound out nonsense words like vot, pag and lem, and asked to read sight words like young, speak and known.

It’s a test intended for kindergarteners, but Maria is only 4 years old.

In San Francisco they spent years trying to forbid bright middle schoolers from learning algebra. In LA, we're testing 4-year-olds to see if they can read yet.

What's the deal with kindergarten these days? My (admittedly extremely vague) memory is that my generation spent kindergarten doing finger painting, taking naps, and playing with crayons and paste. Today we're disappointed if preschoolers aren't solving differential equations.

Do I have any longtime kindergarten teachers in my audience? How much have things really changed in the last 50 years?

There's a point here, but probably not the one The Nation intends to make:

Has the pro-Palestinian movement really won a great historical achievement? There's little evidence for that.

This kind of pronouncement hinges on the belief that most people have always been pro-Palestinian, and the recent protests have simply shaken them out of their stupor and succeeded in pressuring Joe Biden to do what he's always known was right.

But this bowls right past the obvious fact that Biden—like lots of people—have long been ardently pro-Israel and were appalled by the October 7 Hamas attacks. That's the attitude he thinks is right, and what changed it weren't a few messy protests on college campuses. That is, after all, pretty routine stuff.

What changed it were the grotesque actions of Israel itself. A campaign of indiscriminate bombing. The casual slaughter of thousands of civilians. Complete destruction of Gaza's buildings and infrastructure. The routine murder of journalists and aid workers. The forced starvation of Gaza's people. A plan to continue doing all this in Rafah with no apparent goal other than bloody revenge. And all of it without even a rhetorical pretense that Israel gives a shit about 21st century humanitarian concerns in the slightest way.

No one needs a bunch of protesters to draw their attention to any of this. It's all in broad daylight. Any decent person—and Joe Biden is a decent person—would be having second thoughts at the very least by this point. The reality of what Israel is doing changed both public opinion and Biden's mind. Protests likely had nothing to do with it.

I missed out on the northern lights spectacle—Austria is a bit too far south and a moving boat isn't the best platform for night photography anyway—but that doesn't mean we're completely skyless today.

When I went out last week to image the Eagle Nebula, I had some time to kill because the Eagle doesn't rise above the horizon until midnight at this time of year. There weren't a lot of options for the 10-12 pm period, so I took a picture of yet another globular cluster. This one is the most famous cluster out there: M13, the great cluster in Hercules. It contains about half a million stars.

As near as I can tell, all the globular clusters I've photographed are about the same. If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. With summer approaching, it's time to move on to more interesting things.

Kevin Engel, a student protester at Dartmouth, explains why they won't give up:

“We’re not going to stop,” he said. “Palestine will be free within our lifetimes. The students are taking up the burden of doing that work because no one else really is.”

Engel is 19 years old and he's just one guy, but I still can't get over the hubris and ignorance on display here. I mean, "no one else really is"? Seriously? The fate of Palestine has been a burning worldwide issue for nearly a century. It's prompted multiple wars, half a dozen terrorist groups, UN resolutions by the bushel, endless peace talks, the only nuclear program in the Middle East, tens of thousands of rockets launched into Israel, and so many newspaper headlines as to be uncountable. But Engel thinks that living in a tent while attending an Ivy League university is "doing the work"?

Jesus. I've always figured the Gaza protesters have barely a clue about the history of the cause they're supposedly protesting, but I've never mentioned it because, of course, I don't really know for sure. Maybe they could all talk my ears off on the fine points of the Camp David talks.

Somehow I doubt it—though I suppose they can prove me wrong any time they want. However, that will require more than chanting a few stale rhymes.