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How about yet another different look at inflation? Here is inflation in goods (top) and inflation in services (bottom):

As you can see, inflation in goods has been right around zero for a full year.  Inflation in services has been more stubborn: it's come down from its peak but has remained about 1% above its long-term average for the past six months.

This is what you'd expect from inflation induced by supply chain problems. It would (a) hit goods harder, (b) come down quickly when things ease up, and (c) take a little while longer to come down for services.

That said, back to average for goods and one point above average for services isn't bad. There's only a little more inflation to be squeezed out of the economy.

According to FBI data through September, violent crime is down 15% in big cities and down 8% overall:

Murder is down 25% in big cities and down 16% overall.

Property crime is down 6% so far this year. Burglary is down 12%.

Both property crime and violent crime are on track to be at their lowest levels in more than 50 years.

This is the Eglise Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris and it's one of the great things about a city like Paris. It isn't a cathedral. It isn't a basilica. It's just a parish church that happens to have been built in the 13th century and is about the size of Notre Dame. Just your ordinary old parish church.

June 5, 2022 — Paris, France

So here I am this morning, reading an LA Times piece about people migrating out of California to places like Texas. This is old news, but the twist this time is that affluent people are moving away at higher rates than before. This is chalked up to California's high tax rates, but I'm thinking: hold on, isn't it more the housing market than taxes? So I head over to FRED to check things out:

It turns out that home prices in LA and San Francisco have gone up less than home prices in Dallas.¹ Did you know that? I didn't. Whatever happened to Texas's famously reasonable housing market, thanks to wide-open plains and lax zoning rules? Gone, I guess. This is why it's good to check your assumptions every once in a while. Things change.

¹Although keep in mind that while home prices may be rising in Dallas, they're still way lower than LA ($400,000 vs. $1 million). Taxes in Texas aren't really as low as they like to claim, but homes really are a lot cheaper.

If you're a young lefty who supports the Palestinian cause, it's natural that you'd be critical of Joe Biden. But Summer Jennings is a young Republican who supports Israel:

Though Mr. Biden’s policies may favor Israel, she said she believed that Mr. Trump would take the same approach, but with more muscle: “As much of a jerk as Trump was, I feel like Biden is very weak,” Ms. Jennings said.

I wonder what that even means? It's a little hard to imagine a more muscular support of Israel than Biden's. But then again, Trump blames Iran for starting the whole thing; doesn't whinge on about civilian deaths; and says he'd ban Muslim immigrants and Gaza refugees from the US. So, not just endless bloodshed, but endless bloodshed with no hint of remorse. That's muscular, I guess.

NBC News has yet another story out today about young voters who supported Biden in 2020 but aren't sure they will again. They all have their reasons, some more sensible than others, and sure. Whatever. It probably doesn't matter much because most of them will come back home once the campaign starts.

But there's one complaint that continues to boggle me. I get that lots of people don't follow all the ins and outs of who did what to whom, and lots of people also don't seem to understand that a president isn't a king. But in the particular case of student loans, it's something that got a lot of attention and there were no subtleties involved: Biden kept his campaign promise and the Supreme Court killed it. End of story.

But even kids who know this don't care. They really wanted it to happen and it didn't, so they're mad at Joe. End of story.

I just don't get this.

ProPublica continues its investigation of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas today. It unearthed some records from around 2000 suggesting that, following his appearance at a "conservative thought weekend" on Sea Island, Thomas had threatened to quit the court unless he got a pay raise:

After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.

....He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress [Cliff Stearns] on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign. Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.

....Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”

“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.”

Needless to say, conservatives didn't want to risk the departure of either Thomas or Antonin Scalia (the other justice who was unhappy), and thus began decades of big donors making sure that Thomas remained "comfortable" despite his pittance of a salary. He only made the equivalent of $300,000, you see, and now he had a child to raise. How could he possibly make ends meet?

I get that law is a lucrative profession at the top, and $300,000 is nothing compared to, say, being partner at a top firm. Still, it's $300,000! That's a lot of money.

But not enough to support a lifestyle of constant travel to five-star resorts, which is apparently what Thomas wanted. In the end, he had to get that another way.

Republicans are split in half these days. On one side you have the MAGA crowd. They cheer Donald Trump for saying that no will dare give us trouble if he's president—and if they do he'll rain down hellfire like no one has ever seen before. But in real life they're effectively antiwar because Joe Biden is president and they're against anything he's for.

Then you have the more conventional Republicans, whose bloodthirstiness is seemingly unlimited. Biden has put together a remarkable international coalition that's been resolutely on Ukraine's side for two years, but they're vitriolic over the fact that he didn't deliver a thousand F-16s the day after Russia invaded.  Biden has been all but adamantine in his support of Israel, but their ears start smoking if he so much as mentions that it's a shame so many people are dying. Houthi rebels are attacking shipping in the Red Sea and this is a huge black eye for the US, which should—

Well, something. It's never quite clear what.

I understand being on Israel's side. But as usual, Israel drives everyone nuts. I've read multiple times from conventional conservatives that—literally—Palestinians ought to be grateful that Netanyahu has gone so easy on them. It's just beyond belief. Their bloodlust is so all-consuming that they object to the mere idea of feeling any remorse over 20,000 civilian deaths and millions of displacements.

I'm 65 years old. None of this should surprise me. But it still does.

Stop it, stop it, stop it:

First off, it's not true that everyone expected a recession. What everyone expected was that inflation wouldn't go down unless we had a recession. And that was only because "everyone" is apparently an idiot who forgot all about the pandemic of [checks notes] two years previously.

Second, the Fed and the White House had nothing to do with anything. As usual, I invite you to take a look at economic growth:

The Fed began raising rates in the spring of 2022. Following that, nothing happened. Economic growth continued on its normal path.

So either the Fed hikes were small enough that they didn't really do anything or else they were big enough but the economy hasn't responded yet. You can't have it both ways.

Folks, this is just the most rudimentary common sense. You can't say the Fed got inflation down but had no effect on GDP. This is not how things work. Come on.

Last night I went out to the desert to take a picture of the Crab Nebula. My telescope is not really up to the task, but I've always wanted to do it anyway.

But I have no pictures of the Crab for you. I tried it two ways: with my narrowband filter and without. The filtered image was far superior. However, it was also out of focus due to some bad frames. But even with the bad frames removed the focus was still bad. Maybe I need to focus with the filter in, although I can't figure out why that would change things. Or maybe the focus was OK and, as suspected, the Crab is just too small for my telescope to capture well.

Anyway, I'll try again next month. In the meantime, here is the Pacman Nebula, aka NGC 281, which gets its name from the fact that it sorta looks like a Pacman muncher.

December 11, 2023 — Desert Center, California