Kevin Drum

The Public Religion Research Institute has released its latest survey of religion in the United States and it continues the string of bad news for white evangelical churches:

The number of white people who identify as evangelical has declined by more than a third since 2006, and this is a big part of the reason that white evangelicals were so eager to jump on the Trump bandwagon in 2016. After spending the '80s and '90s as a potent political force, white evangelicals spent the next two decades losing both membership and influence. By 2016 they were in panic and despair, so when Trump showed up sounding like an old time tent preacher they were ready to swoon. And they did.

But it's done them no good. Since 2016 the number of white evangelicals has continued to drop while mainstream protestant churches have regained more than a quarter of the followers they had lost.

White evangelicals made a deal with the devil when they decided to become an arm of the Republican Party during the Reagan era, and reviving that deal with an obvious charlatan like Trump hasn't worked. Perhaps the answer is for them to try acting like a church, not a PAC. You never know. It might work.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 8. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I have a question. It's a serious question, though I doubt anyone has an answer. Here it is:

What do we actually teach in our public school classrooms these days?

Obviously I'm talking about history classes and racism here, not auto shop. And just as obviously, this is going to vary from school to school and teacher to teacher.

But do we know anything concrete about this, even as some kind of rough observational average? Has anyone toured the country, sitting in on classes, to find out first hand what's going on?

I'm not really concerned about diversity training for teachers or anything else that happens outside the classroom. That's a topic for another day. I want to know what our kids are being taught in public schools. Does anyone have even the slightest idea?

Are you curious enough about inflation to dive into some of the details? Of course you are! Here's a breakdown of which categories are up a lot and which ones aren't:

The first thing to notice is the enormous inflation in used cars. All by itself, this category boosts the overall inflation rate by about 1.5 points. If you're in the market for a used car this is bad news, but for the rest of us it means the overall inflation rate is closer to 3.5% than the official rate of 5%.

The next thing that should grab your eye is that food, the perennial favorite of B-roll footage on nightly news shows, is up only 0.7%. In other words, barely at all.

Ditto for just about everything else aside from household furnishings and apparel. I assume furnishings are up due to the shortage of lumber, and apparel is up because . . . um, I have no idea.

Bottom line: There are a few specific things that have shot up temporarily since last year, most famously lumber and used cars. This is obviously due to spot shortages that will go away pretty soon. Then there are things like gasoline that go up and down at the whim of OPEC and have nothing to do with overall inflation. Aside from that, most goods and services have gone up only a little bit, and even that little bit is exaggerated thanks to base effects from last year.

I don't have a crystal ball. Maybe inflation is about to bust wide open and we'll soon be withdrawing thousand-dollar bills from our local ATMs. But I doubt it. Most categories are under control; used cars are skewing everything; the base effect will go away shortly; and inflationary expectations remain well anchored at around 2%. At the moment, inflation doesn't even make a top ten list of things to be worried about.

It's summer, so how about a nice, big sunflower lit by the setting sun? This picture was taken at Hana Field, a commercial flower growing operation run by Tanaka Farms, one of the few local farms still in operation here in Orange County. They mostly grow zinnias, which I will show you someday, but off in a corner they also have an acre or two of sunflowers.

It's the silly season, which means there's not much hard news to write about. So I thought I'd check in on the Republican Party instead. What are they up to these days? This:

• Refusing to investigate the deadly insurrection of January 6 because it might make Donald Trump look bad.
• Refusing to increase funding for the IRS because that might force rich people to pay the taxes they actually owe.
• Claiming without evidence that the NSA is spying on Tucker Carlson.
• Whining that Facebook hates them, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary.
• Declining to persuade their fellow conservatives to get vaccinated.
• Passing laws that allow Republicans to replace election officials who are insufficiently loyal to the party.
• Complaining endlessly about critical race theory, despite the fact that they still haven't produced much evidence about how racism is actually taught in American classrooms.
• Pretending to negotiate over infrastructure funding.

Missing from this list is anything aimed at actually making the country any better off than it is now. It's all just political theater. I hope they're proud of themselves.

The Washington Post reports that about 160,000 families received rental assistance in May:

Experts say those numbers pale in comparison to the number of people who risk losing their homes when the CDC eviction moratorium expires after July 31. According to the Census Household Pulse Survey from June, 1.2 million households reported being very likely to face eviction in the next two months. “With the federal eviction moratorium set to expire in four weeks, these data are a five-alarm fire,” said Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The Household Pulse Survey is released every two weeks, so it's easy to look at the trend over time of those fearing eviction:

It's a tragedy when even a single family gets evicted, but the most recent figure of 1.2 million households fearing eviction is actually close to a low point over the past year. That strikes me as useful context here.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Climate scientists say that our recent heat wave was almost certainly a result of global warming:

Temperatures were so extreme — including readings of 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Ore., and a Canadian record of 121 in British Columbia — that the researchers had difficulty saying just how rare the heat wave was. But they estimated that in any given year there was only a 0.1 percent chance of such an intense heat wave occurring.

“Although it was a rare event, it would have been virtually impossible without climate change,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who conducted the study with 26 other scientists, part of a collaborative group called World Weather Attribution.

Climate change is a lot like loading the dice in a game of chance. If you throw a die 60 times, you'd expect each number to come up about ten times. But what if you got this result instead?

This result isn't impossible. But it's so unlikely that anybody with a lick of common sense would demand a fresh set of dice.

This is what climate change does. It loads the weather dice to make extreme events not just possible, but common. We need a fresh set of dice if we want to avoid a future of extreme weather events that leave thousands of dead bodies in their wake.

With all of the Sheephole mountains to choose from, why did I decide to take this rather undistinguished sunset picture? I didn't, actually. But as I was driving to where I wanted to go, I ran into a police barricade that halted traffic. I waited and waited, but finally had to figure out a picture to take right there. And this was it.

The activity causing the barricade was finished a few minutes later, but by then the sun was down. So for better or worse, this is my Sheephole sunset picture.