Author: Kevin Drum

I've posted this before, but I feel like putting it up again for all the folks who think illegal immigrants are taking away all the jobs:

In 2021-22 there was a huge demand for workers, and that really did produce a rise in illegal immigration. But this was only because the high demand was still there even after companies had hired every last native-born worker they could get their hands on.

The chart tells the story. Among prime-age native-borns, the labor participation rate after 2021 rose to its highest level in 20 years. It was maxed out. Everyone with even the slightest interest in working had a job.

So companies began hiring foreign-born workers—many of them here illegally—in a desperate attempt to fill open spots. The participation rate for prime-age foreign-borns also rose to record levels.

This is all the result of a red hot labor market. Everyone got jobs: natives, foreign-borns, and illegal immigrants alike. Nobody's jobs were taken away by anybody.

Atrios thinks it's weird that there isn't more discourse over the possibility of war with Iran. I get that, although since the discourse would be dominated by hawks (it always is) the ongoing silence might not be such a bad thing.

Part of the reason, I think, is that "war with Iran," if it comes, would be a strange creature indeed. Neither Israel nor the US can invade Iran even if they wanted to. Nor can Iran invade Israel. It's 600 miles through Jordan and Iraq to get to Israel from the border of Iran.

The only thing left is an air war, and that wouldn't be easy. Most of Iran is only barely in range of either Israeli fighters or American carriers in the Med. Carriers in the Persian Gulf could do better, but fighters don't carry big payloads in any case and can inflict only limited damage. Heavy bombers can fly from the mainland US, but it's not easy and we couldn't support very many missions.

Plus it's risky. Iran has legit air defenses and can shoot stuff down.

That leaves two things. First, we could wreak hell on Iran's Persian Gulf oil facilities. However, that risks both serious retaliation and damage to shipping channels that would cut off world oil supplies. Purely for reasons of our own national security, it's pretty unlikely.

Second, both sides have missiles. And missile defenses. How much damage could the US and Israel do with a serious commitment to a missile war with Iran? I don't know, but that would be one weird war if it were just two sides launching waves of missiles at each other. We could obviously keep this up longer than Iran, but it's unclear how much it could accomplish.

Right now, Israel's war with Iran is limited to proxies (mainly Hezbollah), cyberattacks, sabotage, and so forth. A real live hot war with Iran would increase that intensity, but mostly via missile attacks unless both sides decided to risk turning the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz into wastelands.

In other words, my best amateur guess is that a full-scale war with Iran isn't really possible short of a provocation that provoked a truly massive commitment from the US—something on the order of the Gulf War or Vietnam. That's hugely unlikely, and short of that Israel and Iran are just too far apart to do much damage to each other. So there's really no prospective war for the discourse to obsess about.

POSTSCRIPT: This is all unrelated to the possibility of a sustained American campaign to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities. That would be hard but probably doable if we put our minds to it. Israel, on the other hand, doesn't have the military resources to pull this off. It's the US or nobody.

But I have no taste buds and no interest in food. I eat a couple of small meals a day because I have to, and I snack a little bit during the day. I'd put my intake at about 800 calories or so, which is fine in the short run but obviously not sustainable in the long run.

I also have dry mouth, trouble swallowing, and shortness of breath. At this point I doubt I'm going to continue the Talvey, and definitely not until my taste comes back—which I'm optimistically assuming it will eventually. All of this is officially Not Good since there are very few multiple myeloma treatments left to me and I'm ineligible for clinical trials of new drugs thanks to my prostate cancer.

We'll see. The best possibility is that I'll recover from the Talvey side effects and then continue the treatment, which will affect me for a few days every two weeks but nothing more. Nobody knows how likely that is, so all I can do is try it and see what happens.

Man do I miss food. Pizza. Chocolate. Hamburgers. Spaghetti. Tacos. I don't care. Anything. A bag of Fritos. A can of peanuts. A pork chop. An apple. A BLTA. Kung pao chicken. A donut. Carnitas. A baked potato. You name it.

Hey, look! It's comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS:

I couldn't see it on Saturday with the naked eye, and most of my test pictures didn't show it either. The exposure had to be just right. But it will be a little higher tonight—and therefore in darker skies—which makes it more visible. Tomorrow will probably be even better. Then it's a race against time as it gets higher in the sky but also farther from the sun.

To see it, look due west about 50 minutes to an hour after sunset.

Is MAGA Nation still obsessing over weather control? Here's an update:

It looks like MAGA is moving on to newer and better conspiracy theories. Weather control isn't holding up compared to Al Pacino, although it's doing better than poor Geoffrey Hinton, who got a day or two in the sun and then plunged back into oblivion. Another few days and the hurricane creation machines will all be forgotten.

As time goes by, it becomes ever clearer why we suffered our recent bout of inflation. It's pretty straightforward:

• The pandemic caused supply to decline.
• The CARES Act, passed immediately after the pandemic started, kept demand high.

That's it. If supply goes down and demand goes up, you get inflation. When supply recovers, inflation goes down. This explains about 90% of what happened.

Here's a more detailed look at what happened. First, supply chains got snarled. After a brief recovery, they remained snarled all the way through the end of 2021:

Industrial production declined. By the end of 2020 it was 6% below its pre-pandemic level, and even by the end of 2021 it was still down 2%:

But consumer demand remained strong. By the end of 2020 nominal spending was 8% higher than its pre-pandemic level:

The result was exactly the kind of inflation you'd expect:

Inflation in goods, especially in durable goods that were in short supply, began to rise almost immediately and was already nearing 5% by the end of 2020. Conversely, inflation in services, which depends more on wages than on shortages, took longer to appear because wage increases generally follow price increases.

Is there more to the story? A little bit. Housing inflation appeared late and was affected by interest rate hikes. The Ukraine war raised oil prices for a while. Ukraine and some other factors affected food prices. The Biden stimulus kept demand high. But none of these things were the source of inflation. At most they extended it a bit.

So that's it: Inflation = Pandemic + CARES Act. Those two things started it, and when they faded out they ended it. Neither Joe Biden nor the Fed played more than a minor role.

Here's a story you probably never expected to see:

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday announced charges against three young people who they say robbed a string of banks across Northern California last year by using Instagram to recruit women to walk into financial institutions and pass the tellers notes demanding money.

....The indictment says Jones and Millett, both of Northern California, “actively sought and groomed recruits” to go into banks with notes demanding money. Millett posted videos of herself on Instagram holding large amounts of cash, according to the indictment. “Happy Money Makin’ Mondays,” she allegedly said in one post. “I got one spot left in a car tap in.” In another post, the indictment quotes her as saying: “I don’t need mfs that’s scared to get money around me so if it’s not even for you please don’t vote.”

Look, I know the world is crazy these days, but what kind of moron responds to an Instagram appeal for bank robbers? I mean.

OTOH, count this as a win for the folks who think social media is ruining our mental health.

Beginning around 2000, universities began to consistently add more women than men to their ranks of new assistant professorships:

As a result, in 2013 women began to outnumber men:

As of 2022, women held 54.4% of all assistant professorships.

Note that is an average. The numbers obviously vary tremendously among different academic fields.

This is remarkable. Four-star generals are not typically ones to lob around the word fascist. But Milley did.

Here's a weird story. You may recall that a few months ago someone—we don't know for sure who—leaked a hacked dossier of information about JD Vance. The dossier had been compiled by the Trump campaign while they were vetting Vance and was relatively uninteresting. We know that because every single news outlet that received the dossier declined to publish it or even write about it, and lack of newsworthiness was the stated reason.

This unanimity struck a lot of people as a bit odd coming from a press corps that had reported a few years earlier on John Podesta's hacked risotto recipe. Yes, really. But finally Ken Klippenstein broke ranks and posted the entire thing. He made it available via Twitter, which blocked the link and then closed Klippenstein's account because, allegedly, publishing hacked material violated Twitter's rules.

But that turned out not to be the real reason. Today the New York Times reported what actually happened:

After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.

Twitter suspended Klippenstein's account because Donald Trump asked them to. Shortly after this was made public they tacitly admitted the story was true by reinstating Klippenstein's account. Here is Klippenstein's take on what happened:

The media’s decision not to report on the dossier’s contents — and what it says about Vance — is the result of government pressure and interference. The media blackout laid the groundwork for X to actively suppress my story when I decided to publish the dossier in full, empowering the Trump campaign to successfully push for having links to my article taken down not just from X but also from Instagram, Facebook, and Google Docs. Even the major media, which are plenty critical of Trump, would not cover the clearly newsworthy document. Why? Because they are reluctant to break from the position taken by the Intelligence Community, the White House, the political campaigns, and the social media and Internet companies. These virtual censors have profound influence over what the public can and cannot see.

I'm not sure I've seen any evidence of government pressure here. In fact, I'm not sure I've seen any evidence that any agency of the government cared one way or the other if the dossier was published. Obviously there was interest in finding out who hacked the documents, since that's illegal, but nobody cared much about the contents themselves.

This is really the oddest part of the whole story. Why hack such a worthless batch of documents in the first place? Why refuse to publish them if they contained nothing defamatory or legally questionable? Why pressure Twitter to take down links to something that wasn't harmful to the Trump campaign?

I suppose we may never know. But there's one thing we do know: Elon Musk's dedication to free speech apparently has its limits. When Trump calls, it turns out his principles become suddenly and distinctly malleable.