Kevin Drum

What's the leading cause of death in the United States? Heart disease. But what's the fastest growing cause of death? Both accidental poisoning and alcoholic liver disease are up a lot, but the winner—by a mile—turns out to be "other infectious and parasitic diseases," which have gone up an astonishing 1500% since 2000. Malnutrition deaths have nearly doubled.

Here are the top 20 growth diseases in the US. It's drawn from the CDC's list of 113 causes of death, and I included only diseases with at least one death per 100,000 in 2000.

Below that is the top 20 list of biggest decliners. Atherosclerosis—blocked arteries—is the big winner, down 71% since 2000. Hooray for statins and bypass surgery! Also among the big decliners are HIV, ulcers, and smoke inhalation.

Here is Hilbert waiting patiently in the bushes for me to come home. Don't worry, my little meatloaf! I'll be back tomorrow.

Here is the growth of the labor force participation rate since Joe Biden took office. This is for prime-age workers (age 25-54).

Both men and women are now working at higher rates than at any time since the end of the Great Recession.

The American economy gained a brisk 254,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 164,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate dropped yet again to 4.1%.

Weekly earnings were up a meager 0.9%. Adjusted for inflation that's about -1.5%.

The past few years have seen quite a few teeth being gnashed on the topic of the First Amendment being in trouble. Most of the gnashing involves social media, and it all started around 2020, when several big platforms tried to rein in election lies and COVID misinformation. Some thoughts:

• During this initial period, the president was Donald Trump. His administration was Republican.
• Despite a fair amount of hysteria, the government never came close to doing anything coercive regarding speech. It was mostly worried about foreign election interference and COVID misinformation, and passed along its findings to social media companies. They responded to some and not to others.
• In the case of COVID in particular, conservatives have been mostly up in arms about the government suppressing theories related to a lab leak origin for the virus. But that barely ever came up. Public health officials were almost solely concerned about things like vaccine myths, mask wearing, hydroxychloroquine, and so forth.
• There have been some cases of speech suppression: for example, Twitter suppressed tweets about Hunter Biden's laptop for a few hours and banned President Trump after January 6. But those were purely private actions that don't implicate the First Amendment at all.
• More broadly, there's a widely held right-wing view that social media companies are biased against conservatives. This also doesn't implicate the First Amendment, and it's mostly pure paranoia anyway. There's virtually no evidence to back it up.
• The most egregious cases that involve government interference in speech have involved private entities that are in the business of flagging misinformation. They have been routinely hounded out of business by threats from congressional Republicans.
• There is an ongoing battle over Section 230, which allows online platforms a great deal of latitude to decide what content to allow and what content to take down. Republicans generally want tighter limits on what can be removed. Democrats want tighter limits on what's allowed. It's hard to take sides on this since both parties are being anti-free speech here. On the other hand, Congress has been flapping its gums about this for several years and nothing has been done yet, so it's also fair to say that both parties remain reluctant to meddle with free speech.¹
• Tim Walz recently said hate speech wasn't protected by the First Amendment. With a few minor exceptions, he was wrong about that.
• By far, most "free speech" controversy concerns people yelling at each other and trying to get the other side to shut up. This is not remotely anti-First Amendment unless a public body is involved (a state university, for example, or a federal agency), and not always then. In fact, it is gloriously, chaotically pro-First Amendment. It is precisely what the First Amendment is designed to protect. Please carry on with your yelling.

Conclusion: The First Amendment is embedded pretty deeply into America's DNA. There are always people who want to make exceptions for some allegedly worthy cause or another, but they almost always get fought down. That's still the case today, and so far we're still fighting them down. Free speech remains as strong now as it's ever been in our history.

¹Or reluctant to annoy Big Tech donors, depending on how cynical you choose to be about it.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I've ramped up to the final dosage and Talvey has not produced any serious neurological side effects. I'm probably out of the woods on that.

And some more good news: unless I'm badly mistaken, Talvey doesn't require dexamethasone after the ramp-up period. In fact, it's specifically prohibited. I need to confirm this, but it would be good news indeed.

And now the bad news: Talvey almost instantly knocked out my sense of taste. It's now all but gone, though I can still sense sugary things. Can I live on a diet of just cookies?

The official cautions about taste are, as usual, worthless. Is it permanent? Does it come and go just on dosage days (once every two weeks)? No one gives a hint. I managed to find a few personal comments and they were bad: it's permanent, severe, and kills your appetite. But maybe the folks with the worst reactions are just more likely to write about it?

Stay tuned. Like most of us, I wouldn't mind losing a few pounds. I'm just not sure this is a great way to do it.

I've been crashed out all day and woke up a while ago to eat dinner and watch Jeopardy! The room TV has no guide, so afterward I just surfed a bit and ended up on Fox News. I lasted a minute.

The hospital TV must be on satellite or something, because I was getting the East Coast feed, which I never see. It was Trace Gallagher—I think?— and he was diving straight into the outrage of the day: federal aid to North Carolina being diverted to illegal aliens or something.¹ He threw to a guest I didn't recognize (bald, British accent) who immediately started ranting that he didn't care about different "streams" of money being allocated by law for different things, or whatever. Fuck your "allocations." The feds should just reallocate the cash and get things done.

I think I'm too jaded to even have a reaction. Obviously this is a very convenient opinion for angry conservatives to have since it's Republicans who have refused to increase the stream of money for natural disasters. But that's bygones. We need to look forward. Just pull some money from, oh, maybe a vault in the State Department? And dump it onto Asheville from a helicopter. Right? Amirite?

Sigh. Then there was the usual nonsense about $750, which Fox pulls out of its hat for every natural disaster when a Democrat is president. Only $750 in aid per person?!? What a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats and pencil pushers. It's a joke.

Of course, this is just the amount of FEMA aid being distributed immediately to help folks out until more substantial aid money starts getting disbursed—which the Foxies know perfectly well.² In the meantime, metric tons of food, water, shelter and so forth are being trucked and airlifted in steadily. Roads have been reopened and private aid organizations are helping out. Every local official has agreed that everything is going well under difficult and unforeseen circumstances.

Like I said, this was all in less than a minute. I switched off just as they were displaying a graphic about how FEMA these days is all DEI this and equity that with no one caring about actual disaster relief. Just imagine if you watched this stuff for hours. It doesn't sound like a lie, does it? And if you believed it, would you have anything other than seething contempt for the out-of-touch coastal liberals who run our country?

¹It's not.

²Ironically, this is part of a program FEMA set up precisely to address the problem the Fox pundits were complaining about. In the past, FEMA distributed $500 in housing assistance immediately but required receipts to show it was really being used for housing. This led to complaints when extensions were denied because some of the money had been spent on food, diapers, gasoline, etc. So FEMA raised the amount to $750 and slashed the red tape, allowing the money to be used for anything without receipts. This new rule was adopted earlier this year under the Biden/Harris administration.

I happened to see a local political ad a few minutes ago for some people I've never really heard of, but the gist was that one of them supported the allegedly odious George Gascón and was therefore unfit for office. For you non-natives, Gascón is an ex-LA cop who eventually became San Francisco district attorney and then returned south to run for LA district attorney on a reformist platform (end of cash bail, trying juveniles as juveniles, etc.). He won, and he's been in the crosshairs of crime hawks ever since.

I have some friends who are up in arms over Gascón, which is a little odd since my friends all live in Orange County. For that reason I've never paid any attention to Gascón, so I figured I should at least take a quick look at how things are going up in LA:

Meh. What's the fuss? Whatever Gascón is or isn't doing, violent crime in LA seems to follow the overall California trend almost perfectly. It's hard to see anything here to get bent out of shape about.

Suppose you are walking through an airport at a steady 2 mph. You get onto a slideway that's also moving 2 mph. You're now moving 4 mph.

Nope. Your speed is 3.999999999999999964 mph. That's about 4 minus one-quadrillionth of a mile per hour.

Welcome to our universe.

We live in the United States, so it's only natural that we're mostly concerned about American public opinion. But in the case of the Gaza War, Israeli public opinion is obviously more important. And among Israeli Jews, it's hawkish:

90% of Israeli Jews approved of last week's assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon. And what's the endgame?

There is no appetite for diplomacy. The vast majority of Israeli Jews simply want to destroy Hezbollah and be done with it.

Keep this in mind. Israeli Jews long ago gave up on the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Is it any wonder that Joe Biden's efforts toward a ceasefire have gone nowhere?