Author: Kevin Drum

Here are two pictures of Karlskirche in Vienna. The top image is the usual panoramic view from ground level. But you're allowed to walk up and see the organ, and from there you get a different perspective, shown in the bottom photo. You can also see the illuminated glass installation hanging from the ceiling. I don't know if it's permanent or temporary.

Apparently it's becoming a thing on the right to claim that North Carolina is being ignored and Biden/Harris are slow rolling federal aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. This is nuts even from a cynical political perspective, since Democrats desperately want to win NC in November and this a great opportunity to show how much they care.

In any case, the reason you haven't yet seen huge convoys of trucks rolling into Asheville isn't because the trucks aren't ready. They're ready. But they can't get in until the water recedes and the roads are passable. Which will be soon.

The Army has been handling debris management and is gearing up to establish temporary power supplies near Asheville. FEMA is working with the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild washed out roads and bridges and connect cut-off communities. They are also working with the US Department of Defense to set up air bridge locations to airlift supplies into storm-damaged areas not accessible by roads. Initial staging has been set up at Ft. Liberty, and airplanes and helicopters will be used to bring supplies in by air.

FEMA officials say supplies for those stranded in western North Carolina have already been staged for delivery. According to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, those supplies have begun to be airlifted into place.

Three tractor-trailers full of water arrived in the county early Monday morning, enough to provide one day’s water supply for each resident.

Etc. etc. Private aid organizations are also starting to arrive in Asheville and elsewhere in western North Carolina. Before long, Asheville will be inundated with food, water, ice, blankets, tents, and insurance adjusters. It's all going perfectly normally.

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, here's a map of every county in the US that relies on federal aid for more than 25% of its income:

The Journal's numbers show that over the past 20 years the number of Democratic counties feeding heavily at the federal trough has increased about 80%.

The number of Republican counties has increased more than 800%.

Note that this includes Social Security and Medicare, as well as all other federal aid programs. So part of the divergence is because Republican counties have generally aged more than Democratic ones.

I don't know. Do I care about this or not?

Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.” The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.

I happen to be reading Max Boot's biography of Ronald Reagan right now, and Trump's outburst reminds me of Reagan's hardline attitude toward protesters at Berkeley while he was governor of California: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with." Echoing Trump, he said afterward that this was "just a figure of speech." In the end, the only major crackdown he initiated was the People's Park fiasco, which he mishandled badly, but he never backed down: "It should be obvious to every Californian that there are those in our midst who are bent on destroying our society," he said.

His poll numbers soared. People might not have approved of what he did, but they loved the tough rhetoric. It showed whose side he was on, and most people took it as little more than venting.

Both Trump and Reagan gave voice to one of the oldest and deepest conservative tropes: Show 'em who's boss and they'll back down. There's shockingly little evidence for this—just the opposite, in fact—but it retains an almost talismanic hold on the conservative mind. Lots of people love this kind of talk, even if they know it's mostly just talk.

Of course, there are two big differences between Reagan and Trump. In 1969 crime really was increasing and there really was a lot of campus unrest. Today crime is down and campuses are generally quiet.

Second, Reagan, for all his faults, wasn't insane. With Trump I'm not so sure.

From Donald Trump:

14,000 CONVICTED thugs and slimeballs who have committed MURDER have been allowed to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, and roam free to KILL AGAIN…And they will kill again, over and over.

ZOMG. The thing is, he seems to have the receipts. This number comes directly from a letter written by the acting director of ICE, which lays things out in a table:

There's the number in black-and-white: 13,099 noncitizen convicted murderers who aren't detained by ICE. But you might be interested to know a couple of things:

• This number isn't for the past three years. It's for all time and goes back more than 40 years.
• "Non-detained" means they aren't detained by ICE. Many or most of them are instead detained in prison. ICE has no idea how many.
• The total non-detained docket for all crimes increased 10% under Trump and 5% under Joe Biden.
• Murderers who have served their sentences and been released—an unknown number—are generally deported. But some countries won't take them, and the Supreme Court says they have to be allowed out.

That puts things in a whole different perspective, doesn't it? The actual number for the Biden administration might be in the dozens or even zero. But I hardly even blame Trump for this. I blame Patrick Lechleitner, acting director of ICE, who very deliberately omitted this context in his letter. It's hard to believe he didn't know perfectly well what he was doing.

The Wall Street Journal today has yet another entry in the seemingly endless series of articles about the problems with young men in America. I've taken this on in great detail before (here and here), so I won't do it again. But I will say that at the simplest level I always come back to this:

Young men did take a hit during the aughts, most likely due to the China shock, but for more than a decade since then they've been doing pretty well. Today's 20-year-olds were in sixth grade the last time you could say they were doing poorly. Every one of them has grown up in a world where young men were doing quite well.

But then something occurred to me: the anecdotes in the Journal story all focus on a particular type, men who went to college but left after a semester or two. How are they doing?

Oddly enough, the BLS has a category just for this: "some college, no degree." It only goes back a few years and it's not broken down by age, but it might still tell us something. Maybe this demographic in particular is doing poorly? Let's look:

To my great surprise, "some college" is the highest performing group. I wouldn't take this too seriously since the growth rates are small and the data is limited. Still, it suggests at least that this particular group of men, who don't have their act together enough to figure out what to do in college, aren't doing any worse than anyone else.

The same is true of lots of other things too. When you dig into employment; living arrangements; education; loss of friends; drug use; and other things, it mostly turns out either that young men are doing OK or that their problems are generic ones that affect all age groups and both sexes. It's really hard to tease out any data pointing to serious problems.

The last three out of four nights I've gotten about two hours of sleep. I'm tired. So, so tired.

But the Evil Dex™ keeps my eyes wide open and my brain spinning. Fuck cancer? No, fuck dexamethasone.¹

But then a miracle! I was talking to my latest nurse last night and it turned out she has the same problem. In her case it's prednisone for asthma, and the first night she takes it she's buzzing around all night cleaning the house and so forth. So she took pity on me and came back at 11:30 pm with an Ambien. I don't know if she got a doctor's authorization for this or just did it on her own, but I don't care. I got about 4-5 hours of sleep last night, which is pretty glorious under the circumstances.

Anyway, it's a ray of sunshine. I have now survived the 1 mg shot and the 6 mg shot of Talvey with nothing more than minor reactions. Tomorrow we jump up to a 40 mg shot. On Thursday we'll do the final 80 mg dose. If I survive, I'll get 80 grams of this stuff every two weeks for as long as it keeps working.

¹Though it does keep me alive, so I suppose I should show a little respect.

Here's a random thought for the weekend. Over the last decade or two there have been a lot of prominent opinion-havers moving from right to left. Here's a tiny sampling:

• Max Boot
• Bruce Bartlett
• John Cole
• Bill Kristol
• David Frum
• Jennifer Rubin
• Michael Steele
• Stuart Stevens
• George Conway
• Charlie Sykes
• etc.

Some of this was a reaction to George Bush. Some to Donald Trump. Some have become generally more liberal, others are just opposed to the current state of conservatism under Donald Trump. I'm not trying here to characterize them in any detail.

But what about the other direction?

• Dave Rubin
• Dennis Miller (remember him?)
• Glenn Greenwald (not conservative, but certainly anti-liberal these days)
• Elon Musk (never really liberal, but definitely hard conservative now)
• Russell Brand

Even this list is obviously a stretch, but it's the best I can do. Is my memory just completely failing me? Are there other, more serious folks in the pundit space that have moved recently from liberal to conservative?

POSTSCRIPT: And what do we call the people in the first group? In the '60s, liberals who became conservatives were eventually called neocons. Unfortunately, neoliberal is already taken so we can't use that. Maybe anti-cons? Non-cons?

Huh. This hadn't even occurred to me:

The whole $100,000 watch scam had me puzzled. It's way too expensive for Trump's usual MAGA crowd, and it's almost laughably obvious that it's barely even a luxury watch, let alone a high-end luxury watch. No rich person would wear it.

So what's the deal? The most obvious one is that it's just a way for rich donors to exceed campaign finance limits. The money goes to Trump, who then turns around and makes a $100,000 donation to his campaign. This is legal because you're allowed to contribute any amount to your own campaign. Just be careful to space things out a little randomly and you won't get caught.

Or maybe it's for his legal defense fund? Or he just figured it was worth a flyer? Ideas?

POSTSCRIPT: The watches are sold in a limited edition of 147. Why 147? Well, that's the number of Trump allies who voted against certifying the election for Joe Biden on January 6. Coincidence?

Globally, Tesla has built about 60,000 EV charging stalls at 6,500 stations. How much did this cost? I asked seven different AI models:

• ChatGPT: $5 billion
• Perplexity: $2 billion
• Meta: no answer
• Google Gemini: "billions of dollars"
• Microsoft Copilot: $8 billion
• Claude: "in the billions of dollars range over the past decade"
• Grok: "likely ranging into the billions when considering the global scale"

So if I had to extract an estimate from this, I'd put it at.......$3 billion? I wonder if this is a reasonable guess?

The prompt in all cases was "How much has Tesla spent to build its charging network?"