Kevin Drum

Here's an update on aid shipments into Gaza:

COGAT hasn't been super reliable about providing daily updates, so it's hard to compare the UN numbers with Israeli numbers. On average, though, the Israeli figures are about 20% higher than the UN figures.

The number of aid trucks getting through is up by about a fifth since the middle of April, and several hundred aid trucks have been allowed into northern Gaza, where the situation is the worst. In addition, World Central Kitchen is once again operating, and the pier being constructed by the US military is a few weeks from completion. The UN secretary general says "incremental progress" has been made in getting more food and medical aid into Gaza.

Santa Catalina island from the air.

Chris Hayes has a question:

Point taken, but you may be surprised to know that it's not quite as true as Chris thinks—not in the US, anyway. Students occupied plenty of buildings during the protests of the '60s, but have done it only sporadically since then—usually ending with police being called in and arrests made.

In 2001 SJP occupied a building at UC Berkeley, interrupting a midterm exam. Police were called. SJP did it again in 2002 and police were called again. In both cases, dozens of protesters were arrested.

In 2008, protesters at New School occupied a faculty building. Police were called but things ended peacefully. A few months later they occupied another building. Riot police were called and the students were arrested.

In 2009 protesters occupied the food court at NYU. Police were called and the protesters were dispersed after a raid by campus security.

Also in 2009, UC students began protests over tuition hikes. Protesters took over buildings on some campuses, and in all cases were forced out by police.

Between 2011 and 2018 there were brief building occupations at CSU East Bay, Occidental College, and Ole Miss. During the same period UC Davis students had a habit of periodically semi-occupying the administration building for various reasons, but it was always very polite and they never closed down the building. Police roamed the hallways, disciplinary action was sometimes taken, and eventually everyone got bored and left.

In 2018 students at Seton Hall overstayed their permit to occupy the administration building but eventually left peacefully.

There may be other examples, but these were all I could find over the past few decades. So it's not really all that common, and police are often called in if things last more than a couple of days. What's happening to today's Gaza protesters is extremely normal.

JOLTS data came out today, and as usual I try to show something different about it each month. Here are hires vs. job openings since the end of the Great Recession:

In the past, there were more hires than job openings. Presumably this means that companies filled lots of jobs from personal recommendations without ever formally opening them.

That changed in 2014 and the number of hires per job opening steadily declined. This trend was interrupted by the pandemic, but afterward the number of job openings skyrocketed while hires remained pretty steady. You remember this period: it was allegedly when COVID had decimated the workforce and businesses were tearing their hair out trying to hire enough people.

But that was never really the case. Now that we have a longer look, it's obvious that hires have been relatively steady for over a decade. What's unusual is that for some reason employers are advertising way more openings than they used to. Why?

There's little evidence that this is because there were genuinely twice as many job openings in 2022 as there were in 2019. The idea is absurd. So why the steady increase in job openings per actual job? And why the huge spike in 2022?

I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with the way companies hire and is unrelated to skills or labor force retrenchment or anything like that. Skills haven't changed much—certainly not over the course of three years—and labor force participation is normal.

Three possibilities occur to me. The first is that it has something to do with the increasing use of online recruitment and hiring. The second is that HR departments have gotten more forceful about insisting on formal job searches. The third is that there really were more job openings and a large number of them were filled off the books with illegal immigrants.

My guess? It's a little bit of the third but mostly the first. But I don't understand the mechanism. If online hiring is the culprit, how did it change things?

It's remarkable how the Gaza demonstrations on college campuses have become almost an exact mirror of the events they're protesting. One side spent a long time provoking, finally went a step too far, and the other, more powerful side, then massively overreacted. Art imitates life, or something like that.

Data for both "felonious killings" and the total number of sworn police officers comes from the FBI. It does not include deaths from illness or accidental deaths.

Here's the definition of fascism, very slightly altered, given by Wikipedia. There's no firm consensus about what makes a regime fascist, but this is as good as any:

Fascism is an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

What country in the world does this most remind you of? Why is it never used to describe them?

It feels like old times again. Donald Trump gave a long interview to Time magazine and it's a bottomless morass of lies, personal grievances, evasions, and word salad. Is it even worth commenting on? Half the country has seen this before and already understands Trump is a sociopathic buffoon. The other half simply doesn't care, no matter what he says.

Here's a typical Trump exchange:

Okay, sir. Violent crime is going down throughout the country. There was a 6% drop in—

Trump: I don't believe it.

You don’t believe that?

Trump: Yeah, they’re fake numbers.

You think so?

Trump: Well it came out last night. The FBI gave fake numbers.... It’s a lie. It’s fake news.

Sir, these numbers are collected by state and local police departments across the country. Most of them support you. Are they wrong?

Trump: Yeah. Last night. Well, maybe, maybe not. The FBI fudged the numbers and other people fudged numbers. There is no way that crime went down over the last year. There's no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?

What does Trump mean, "It came out last night"? He's apparently referring to an interview on Real America's Voice—the news network for people who think even OAN is a little too lefty—with our old friend John Lott.

John Lott! ZOMG! The guy just won't go away. He's presented as president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and his latest schtick is telling anyone who will listen that the FBI's crime figures are bogus. This is accomplished via his usual blizzard of misleading statistics—partly by using incorrect data and partly by ignoring inconvenient facts. At the moment, his primary claim is that the FBI's 2023 figures aren't believable because they don't match figures from the NCVS survey of crime. But NCVS hasn't even released its 2023 figures yet, and they won't for several more months. In any case, as you can see, the FBI is, if anything, more conservative in its reporting than the NCVS:

NCVS figures are quite a bit more volatile than the FBI numbers, but the overall trend is pretty similar.

This has been quite the rabbit hole, hasn't it? But this is the kind of stuff Trump is referring to when he says something is "fake news." It means some right-wing quack has shown him whatever it is he wants to see. That's all.

Yesterday Hunter Biden threatened to sue Fox News for publishing sexually explicit photos and claiming that he took bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch. Much of his letter focused on a six-part fictional series called “The Trial of Hunter Biden”:

“While using certain true information, the series intentionally manipulates the facts, distorts the truth, narrates happenings out of context, and invents dialogue intended to entertain,” says the 14-page letter, signed by Tina Glandian of Geragos & Geragos. “Thus, the viewer of the series cannot decipher what is fact and what is fiction, which is highly damaging to Mr. Biden.”

That actually sounded a little weak to me, but guess what?

Hmm. An "abundance of caution." How about that? This is yet another (small) sign that right-wingers are being put on notice that they can no longer peddle their lies with no fear of being held accountable for them.

In related news, Gateway Pundit has declared bankruptcy. Publisher Jim Hoft tried to put a brave face on it (“a common tool for reorganization and to consolidate litigation when attacks are coming from all sides”) but don't believe it. They're being sued into oblivion for very good reason. Flagrant right-wing lies are no longer cost free.

This is a Grevy's zebra at the Los Angeles Zoo. It's the largest of the three species of zebra.