The Problem With Ketchup Leather The Atlantic. Solutionism.
COP21: everything you need to know Politico Europe. Draft of agreement included. Not a treaty, but that might make it easier to get through Contress (exactly like TPP).
Is the 2°C world a fantasy? Nature
The latest forecasts on climate change FT
Obama takes his reckless energy plan to the United Nations Mitch McConnell, WaPo
Utility plans to mask awful odor from uncontrolled gas leak Sacramento Bee. No, the awful odor isn’t coming from CalPERS; the Bee doesn’t cover that story.
Measurement Errors and Monetary Policy: Then and Now (PDF). Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Sounds like the Fed can be a fool in the shower, too.
Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Bloomberg. Top 50. I’m putting this list on the fridge.
Black Friday crowds thin in subdued start to U.S. holiday shopping Reuters but Early Black Friday Sales Numbers Are Bunk The Atlantic
Brian Eno meets Yanis Varoufakis: ‘Economists are more showbiz than pop stars now’ Guardian. The conclusion:
BE Look at the time: it’s been two hours. … You can stay if you want, but I have to work.
YV No, I must get on. I have to meet Slavoj Žižek.
BE I’ll see you out. See you soon.
Can we define terror, or should we let terrorism define us? International Observatory on Stability & Conflict
Syraqistan
ISIS EXPORT GATEWAY TO GLOBAL CRUDE OIL MARKETS (pdf) Martime Security Review
Raqqa’s Rockefellers: How Islamic State oil flows to Israel Al Araby (about).
Corbyn appeals to grassroots as shadow cabinet anger mounts Guardian. Pesky voters. Rank outsiders, if you ask me.
DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Mr Cameron hasn’t yet made the case for bombing Syria Daily Mail. So, Corbyn and the Daily Mail are agreed on policy, and Labour frontbenchers are weeing themselves for no reason.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin Places Sanctions Against Ankara Over Downing of Fighter Plane WSJ
“Turkish Air Force F-16s ambushed the Su-24 Fencer”: here’s Russia’s version of the controversial shootdown Aviationist
After shooting down Russian jet, what’s next for Turkey? Al-Monitor (about).
U.S. Urges Turkey to Seal Border WSJ. It wasn’t already?
Tehran Presents New Model for Oil-Development Contracts WSJ
Grant Shapps resigns: International development minister steps down amid Tory bullying scandal Independent
Grexit?
Leaders of 5 Greek political parties fail to agree on pension reforms US News
Young Greek women selling sex for the price of a sandwich, new study shows WaPo. An edge case of the principle that so long as the 1% don’t have a servant problem, everything’s jake.
AP analysis: Is Portugal about to go down the same road as Greece? AP
China?
Inside China’s Memefacturing Factories, Where The Hottest New Gadgets Are Made Buzzfeed. Very interesting.
Detecting vote buying in monetary aggregates: New evidence on monetary political cycles VoxEU
Antiabortion Sentiment Emerges as Possible Motive for Colorado Shooting WSJ
2016
Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path Orcinus. Must read.
How Donald Trump courted the right-wing fringe to conquer the GOP WaPo
Bernie Sanders Hearkens Back to Old-Time Socialist Presidential Candidate Eugene Debs WSJ
What to know about ‘BernieCare,’ Sanders’ health overhaul AP
Hillary Clinton Wins Union Endorsements, But Not Enthusiasm Reuters
Reasons to be cheerful, parts one and two FT
The problem with Obamacare’s mental-health ‘parity’ measure WaPo
Tighter Lid on Records Threatens to Weaken Government Watchdogs NYT
When children are breached – inside the massive VTech hack Troy Hunt. Nasty.
The Internet of Things is a safety issue, and therefore a business risk ZDNet
Class Warfare
Student Debt in America: Lend With a Smile, Collect With a Fist NYT
How Sharing Economy Harms Workers Robert Reich, LA Progressive
I Don’t Shop Fast Fashion. Here’s Why … The Fashion Law. From over the summer, but worth remembering when holiday shopping.
The Wandering Academic, or How No One Seems to Notice that I Am an Economic Migrant. Superfluous Answers to Necessary Questions
The Demands The Demands. Campus and national demands.
The Incredible Shrinking Incomes of Young Americans The Atlantic
Binge drinking in the United States, in seven simple charts WaPo. Let’s hope your state university, unlike mine, doesn’t leverage party culture as part of its business model. “Consumers,” ya know, not students.
How Demographics Rule the Global Economy WSJ
Mathematical proof for hot hand shooting in basketball Science Daily. Hmm. Readers?
Ink Flowed Like Blood WSJ. Karl Kraus.
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
re 2016: One of the leading articles in the NYT today covers the ISIS success in parts of Libya, after Cameron’s, Sarkozy’s, and Hillary’s Big Adventure there… that famous “smart use of power” as HRC claims:
ISIS’ Grip on Libyan City Gives It a Fallback Option
I’m unsurprised to see that Hillary isn’t getting much love in the comments, e.g.:
And:
There are several others along the same lines. Why the frick isn’t Bernie pushing this harder? Among the Repubs, Rand has made this an issue but not many of the others, presumably because most of them are just as or more interventionist than Hillary.
Jeez what a massive fuck up that Libyan action was. For HRC to have erred once on Iraq then made almost exactly the same mistake in Libya — what on earth qualification does she have for being President, exactly?
Her ability to double down on #FAIL?
“Things held stable until Obama and Clinton withdrew all of our troops” Oh right! Now I remember, Iraq was a magic fairy land the whole time Bush the lesser was in power with unicorns, puppies and magical candy given to all the children by pixies because it was packed to the brim with U.S. troops doing the Lord’s work NONE of whom were withdrawn during his reign.
“The Incredible Shrinking Incomes of Young Americans” – The Atlantic
The article refers to “millennial” and used that term repeatedly.
Here’s a better term for millennials – THE OBAMA GENERATION.
Much better way to drive home a point and it gets you unfriended on FB by your Obama supporting friends (if you’re on FB).
Analytically, neither term is superior to be other and both buy into terrible, disempowering framing.
I have to agree with Lambert. Its not like Obama did this on his own, and its not even like it was his idea. It was the idea of his puppet masters, and both parties of congress also helped out.
“The evaporation of real wages for young Americans is a real mystery because it’s coinciding with what is otherwise a real recovery. The economy has been growing steadily since 2009.”
The economy from what standpoint exactly? Everything’s down but the market, due to QE and foreign investments (dollar is strong).
The Atlantic, as clueless as ever.
remembered a song so Trump Perfect:
The Mirror is a Trigger and Your Mouth’s a Gun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_c8MY7pnOQ
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/protesting-the-corrupt-system-that-killed-laquan-mcdonald/417723/
Yet that dash-cam footage was suppressed for more than a year by authorities citing an investigation. “There was no mystery, no dead-end leads to pursue, no ambiguity about who fired the shots,” Eric Zorn wrote in The Chicago Tribune. “Who was pursuing justice and the truth? What were they doing? Who were they talking to? With whom were they meeting? What were they trying to figure out for 400 days?”
….
Protestors want accountability for investigators whose inexplicable slowness allowed Van Dyke to remain on desk detail and to collect a paycheck from taxpayers. And the civic derelictions of duty run even deeper. They implicate Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city council, Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, rank-and-file cops, Pat Camden, who speaks for Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, and members of the press who credulously report police-union talking points.
……
In 18 years with the Chicago Police Department, the nation’s second-largest, Jerome Finnigan had never been disciplined — although 68 citizen complaints had been lodged against him, including accusations that he used excessive force and regularly conducted illegal searches.
Then, in 2011, he admitted to robbing criminal suspects while serving in an elite police unit and ordering a hit on a fellow police officer he thought intended to turn him in. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison. “My bosses knew what I was doing out there, and it went on and on,” he said in court when he pleaded guilty. “And this wasn’t the exception to the rule. This was the rule.”
==============================================
The thing most amazing is the hubris – obviously, Chicago’s power structure has been getting away with these outrages for so long that they thought that they were even immune to irrefutable video evidence.
I expect Chicago video recorders to start having massive and inexplicable malfunctions…except when they exonerate police, in which case they will work fine…
The thing about the US system that just doesn’t follow is the absolute and unbalanced power of prosecutors. Basically one person can decide if you have to register as a sex offender if your caught peeing outside, and decide if you can get away with murder by simply deciding not to charge you. And it is a rare, rare, rare event that evil prosecutors are held to account.
The number of Chicago government officials who should lose their jobs is great, as well as a goodly number who should be prosecuted for dereliction of duty.
And I think the blind eye judges display in this and similar situations means a good many Chicago judges should be impeached.
and Hillary should be asked if she thinks Rahm handled this well….
“…they thought that they were even immune”
In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.
Noam Chomsky
There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.
Noam Chomsky
…soon.
Yes, the prosecutors are a big part of the problem. One possible approach: most DAs are elected. In Oregon, that means they’re also subject to recall (yes, I asked a local judge about that). Yet it never happens, no matter how egregious they are.
The next step, if recall isn’t available, is contesting their next election. A complaint to the Bar would also be appropriate. Probably in the bag, but worth a try. And lawyers depend heavily on reputation: a negative campaign could make their life really unpleasant.
Have any DAs ever done something so illegal or lawyers-codefully anti-ethical as to expose themselves to citizen efforts to get them disbarred?
The Incredible Shrinking Incomes of Young Americans The Atlantic
“Instead it suggests that wage growth is failing to keep up with inflation, and that, as twentysomethings pass into their thirties, they are earning less than their older peers did before the recession.”
================================================
If I have said it once, I have said it a million times. The problem isn’t that there is no inflation, (according to our illustrious FED) its that there is deflation in wages. Oh, and there is plenty of inflation in health insurance premiums and deductibles…
But our illustrious economists only know how to look at aggregate data, and see old rich, rich, rich people doing well, well, well, and put all that data in the blender and say, “HEY, the recession is over and there is GROWTH!!!!”
Inflation at 2%, wage increases at 1% (if even). Not hard to figure that.
OTOH, all the corporate leaders bemoaning the lack of “talent” want to maintain the control over labor costs. Don’t raise pay, then don’t complain about not finding people to work ( hiring people at some jobs / sectors might require training above 5 days, granted).
Anyone have stats on what real price increases are for the necessities that make up that bottom tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy, what those actually come to? CPI and effing Obama’s “CPI IN CHAINS” are patent, arrant, egregious nonsense. 2%? Really?
And I’ve finally had to stop working, and my last wage increase, 25¢ an hour, was six years ago, and no bump in Social (In)Security again. Might one also ask just what the data set is that is used to claim that “real wages” have gone up 1% YOY or whatever?
I do see that global temperature inflation is at 1.5°C and trending upward, so at least something is increasing beside the “share” (I guess Economists and pols actually debase the lingo with that referent) of all wealth that a tiny few humans tickle their pleasure buttons and debase the rest of us with…
You’ll need less money for heating.
Look on the bright side, for heaven sake!
For a more realistic measure of inflation trends, see the “Average cost of raising a child hits $245,000” link/comment I sent to Yves in August of last year. This and similar metrics all point to long-term inflation averaging between 4-5% per year, much higher than wage growth. Of course for the looter elite that divergence is a feature, not a bug.
Thanks for that! Putting it in the library.
Appreciate the supplied link. My reference earlier (2.0%, 1.0%) and above was simply a “generically rounded figure”…not mathematical but only a rhetorical one.
Thanks !
2%?
Please look at what millenials spend money on, that is, people who don’t have much or any disposable income: food, rent, medical, car. That’s it.
Medical’s up about 18% from LAST YEAR.
Food up 8-10%.
Rent up 6% (avg)
Cars/gas might be the only thing that hasn’t increased much.
meanwhile Clinton receives 10 million endorsements from a dozen+ national unions to Sanders’ 385,000 !!!………..words fail………yeah unions
Unfortunately, their decrepit state is in large part their own doing.
Some have theorized that if the status quo continues—wages, especially those for younger workers, failing to keep up with inflation—it will eventually result in a major correction (if not outright crash) in the housing prices.
While this is a plausible scenario and could come to fruition, I’m somewhat skeptical. My skepticism comes mostly from how much of the growth in housing prices in recent years has been driven by investors, rather than people looking for a place to live over the long-term.
If housing prices were purely a function of people looking for a place to live, then yes, things would eventually even out. However, a sizable amount of the real-estate market, including housing, seems to be essentially a financial shell-game. Unless this changes, and I don’t see a reason to believe it will, housing prices will continue to be out of whack with reality.
I’m wondering if a menage a trois between private equity, housing, and the so-called “sharing economy” is in the cards.
Building management is the hard part, good management firms are very hard to find, and PE isn’t equipped to do either. But if they can outsource it… Both the management and the skills… On a project basis… To people desperate for work… Heck, they could give people living space and get the work for free. The privatized dorms in my town are already doing that for security guards, why not for everything? Sure, it seems a little feudal…*
* Note that I’ve deprecated the term neo-feudalism for a long time because the social relations are not the same. The above idea could be used to argue against that position.
On a small scale, it’s standard practice: if you have 10 units, one goes to the manager, free or cheap. I’ve known people who were doing that.
However, this is still property management, so it has to be supervised by the investor/owner. If PE is having trouble doing that, paying in kind doesn’t help a whole lot.
Thanks to QE and the bailouts, the things we need are growing more expensive and the things they don’t need are growing cheaper or losing value, ie.. skilled and unskilled labor, savings account interest as examples. If your money isn’t being used to be a part of the asset buying class (homes, rentals etc), then your going to lose money and the value of your money faster – guaranteed by inflation of the prices of what we need. Rigged for the elites. Period.
uh, did you mean asset stripping class instead, perhaps?…….to which i would include most of congress….. the treasonous insider-trading trade traitors…..
Most certainly
Mathematical proof for hot hand shooting in basketball Science Daily. Hmm. Readers?
The researchers began their paper with a basic example to illustrate their findings: an experiment in which a person throws a coin in the air four times. “We noted the results of each throw, and calculated the percentage of heads tossed immediately after another head for all possible throw sequences. The results were unexpected: the proportion is not 50%, as we intuitively believe, but actually around 40%,” Sanjurjo tells us, adding that “these results suggest the existence of a bias.”
===============================
I think they need a new quarter…
they need to try shooting baskets with the quarter and see if the results still hold.
you have to be scientiific if you want to do science rite.
The expected values are being dictated by the length of the sequence.
By their method, two coin tosses would give a proportion of 50% after discarding half the trials.
I think they need a new quarter…
for each toss, a calibrated thumb and a method to randomize whether a head or tail is initially up when the toss is made.
In any case a 60/40 bias is so huge it pretty much discounts the credibility of the experimental method.
It is not a lucky streak…it is a focus streak…at least in sports…in high school i could outrun anyone on a soccer field…a track coach saw me and basically forced the school management to make me join the track team…since running in a circle didnt motivate me…there was no focus…last every time…
“We shall encounter theoretical conclusions which not only are unexpected but actually come as a shock to intuition and common sense. They will reveal that commonly accepted notions concerning chance fluctuations are without foundation and that the implications of the law of large numbers are widely misconstrued. (Feller 1968)”
It’s not ‘experimental method’ that’s underlying their assertion, it’s mathematics. (btw, using a random coin flip generator for 500 coin tosses, I got a frequency of 41.6% heads following heads).
Here a link to the original paper:
http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=806101124029026117095001010076027077058008019084044001109004115007113072072071098075009122054031122120108118002094066098097007008085046038081099121087070123125120075091060073085115084010064001085110021081083079000007091069082091095088100069003085125004&EXT=pdf
It’s not very well written that for sure.
it didnt read it that carefully but it seems to me they’re not saying the true odds arent ‘ 50/50 but just that basing human judgement on observable trials conditioned on a prior result leads to a mathematically valid bias when it’s based only on the specific predefined sample data — but one that is not valid if based on the real population data, which itself is the universe of future potential realizations after all outcomes and not the empirical past realizations restricted to those subsequent to the realization of one type of outcome.
WTF is up with this link by the way. This is a headache on a Sunday made a migraine by bad academic writing. They could have said the same dam thing in 9 pages of well crafted prose and not too many of lines of mathematical probability.
of course I may have misconstrued their point since I skimmed it real fast
Yes, I think that’s right. It’s about selection bias, not a change in probabilities.
Yep. Here is the flaw Lambert is looking for. Reliance on a sample of four? Extrapolating to claim that the results are not random? Ignoring the long run? The coin has a bias so basketball players have hot hands now and then?
Sure.
It figures that I wouldn’t, as a math-clueless person..but I can’t see how you’d square the hot streak being illusory with skill acquisition in general being possible – isn’t someone’s becoming a good shooter over years just an extended and wildly implausible hot streak?
The article is also very misleading as to the (very long) prior research on the hot-hand. Most previous studies have not “proven” that the hot hand does or does not exist, they have shown that IF it exists, it is and extremely weak effect that can’t be captured in the noise of randomness and the other factors that contribute to a make/miss (defense, fatigue, scheme, shot clock, etc). These things account for most of what determines a shot going in or not, relative to the baseline value of how good a shooter is taking the shot. This study is…something. A lot of the writing barely makes sense.
Physical systems, short of radioactive decay, are never truly random. Whether coins or dice, skill, unconscious repetition as in this case, or irregularities in the object all can tweak the results. They’re only a rough approximation of randomness, and there are people who can control the fall of dice. In the coin case, doing the same thing a second time is quite likely to have the same result.
Hmm. I thought a lava lamp was truly random. At least, lava lamps have been used as random number generators.
Turbulence is chaotic, in the technical sense, and very hard to predict, so it’s probably a good model.
Random number generators are a major technical challenge, for the reasons I stated before. Most are “good enough.”
How Donald Trump courted the right-wing fringe to conquer the GOP WaPo
======================================================
After conducting two focus groups of Trump supporters this fall, GOP consultant Frank Luntz said he has concluded that there is no political issue or stance that will turn off his supporters.
“They came to him because he is unlike any other politician,” Luntz said. “That allows him to do and say things others could not and get away with it.”
One party strategist privy to recent research on Trump voters said that none of the messages tested swayed them — including his past support for universal health care or fond words about Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“They’re incredibly angry, and he’s the first guy in their mind who speaks to that anger in a visceral way,” said the strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the findings. “They have a deep longing for that.”
——————————————————————–
But all of this is simply a mix of denial, willful ignorance and aggressive flimflam. My first thought when I started writing this post was that Trump is nothing so much as the Frankenstein’s monster of the contemporary Republican party.
Is Trump really too anti-immigrant for the 21st century GOP? Or too hostile to Muslims in the US and abroad? Or has he broken with the party in pushing caricatures of black criminals either threatening the safety of ordinary Americans or mobilizing through voter fraud to take away the stuff earned by middle class white people? It’s not too much to say that there’s nothing Trump has said in recent weeks that you couldn’t hear any given Monday on the Rush Limbaugh Show, from various backbench House conservatives or a million other places in conservative media. If you pay attention to any of these three fronts, you know this. These are the same themes, enemies, and swear lines that have run right at the water line of conservative politics for years. What Trump has done – I suspect more intuitively than with a conscious strategy or plan – is to package them all together and strip away the window dressing which has allowed this menu of resentment to both stoke base conservative anger and appeal to more respectable conservative elites without creating channel conflict between the two. This is no more than the monster which Republican elites created and used to marvelous effect. Only now it appears to be in the process of slipping its leash and devouring its creators rather than uneasily or crankily serving it.
=================================
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/it-s-alive-it-s-alive
The republicans have assiduously used the issues of immigration, terrorism, etcetera to court what is really the most incurious and stubborn people in America. These are people that are ignorant, illiberal, simple minded and gullible – – and so ill read as to not know that the greatest scoundrels are the greatest self styled patriots. They KNOW that they are right and everybody else is wrong. But they are also people who have been ruthlessly taken advantage of by their so called republican representatives, and have suffered serious harm for their support of republicans.
Now Trump comes along and speaks straight forwardly the narrative they hear from talk radio, and the internet – so much for how the internet would only be used for GOOD. The republican establishment’s problem is not that they would have to refute Trump, but they would have to REFUTE Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reily, Savage, Coulter, …the list is extensive. And going against the talkers would lose them I bet about 40 – 60% of their base.
The republicans don’t do NUANCE!!!!! (the caps and exclamation points are irony….)
So how can the republicans possibly be tougher on Muslims, immigrants, crime, or more PATRIOTIC on any issue than Trump??? For a long time, republicans made promises that they KNEW were not (repealing Obama care) in the realm of reality. Why not???? The republican scheme was to name call opponents (they hate America!!!) Get the rubes riled up, get the votes, collect paychecks and benefits….and when they failed blame Obama.
Now that republicans face someone who has the fame, temperament, mental defects, and drive (regarding funds I think there is a paradigm shift, and Trump is like Carson – money doesn’t have much to do with his success) who is willing to YELL longer and louder that he (Trump) loves American more, his (Trump’s) opponents are lying communist immigrant terrorist lovers that HATE, HATE, and HATE America, and his supports will simply believe whatever comes out of Trump’s mouth, because the media ALWAYS lies!!!! And republicans are in a DELICIOUS quandary, because Trump even TRUMPS the Fox blonde bombshell Megyn Kelly (Kelly is I think the most intelligent of the FOX commentators, which in my view just makes her more despicable – as she has enough intelligence to know about asking leading questions, lying by omission, taking words out of context, etcetera).
Fox is media* whether FOX admits it or not.
I would say Trump is invulnerable as long as the talk radio commentators stand behind him.
‘I am a member of the media and the media NEVER tells the truth. so am I telling the truth when I say that?’
Last I read it was the Obama administration who deported considerably more ‘illegals’ in his first term than Bush Jr. in his entire eight years. I wonder if that pace has been maintained while all the left is gasping over Trumpublicans or fascism?
This is why the observations made in Ornicus link today and the lefty commentary mentioned/linked within the Ornicus article ring hypocritically hollow on so many levels. Seriously, just considering the evidence in links today – wageless pressures on youth and others (at least the 80 percent of Americans, imo), Chicago, the police state, our MIC madness, Banksters fomenting U.S. war with Russia over the last hundred years, the corruption grades by State and tell me where each and every problem isn’t exacerbated in deed if not words by the entire system today.
The false premise is do we want Authoritarian corporate nanny State or just Authoritarian? What’s worse Trump NIMBYism, or Liberal Assad, Qaddafi etc. must go… which always means bomb and terrorize tens of millions of innocent people creating more immigrants. And let us not forget O’Clintons Honduras nightmare which prompted so many desperate refugees, mostly children. ***crickets***
I abhor racism, I chose as friendly and open small community as I could find in my country in which to live, but I also think it is more than reasonable to hear people out who say we want no more people right now, whatever their reason. Maybe they are confused, mislead, misinformed, but that doesn’t always mean they are wrong. Few among us would like an influx of new people in our neighborhoods truth be told. While I wouldn’t advocate deporting anyone, I would definitely stop importing and work on getting our affairs in order… As a nation, we are failing, on that many sides agree… we should work from there for quite some time.
Does Trump make it worse or does he simply rip the facade off a bit more than those NPR Digby liberals in denial want?
Maybe we need a Trump Sanders Stein debate… why wait?
Yep. Orcinus went really wrong on Obama (to be fair, like many others, not all bots). But I think this piece is interesting on the merits. And it’s a topic he’s done a lot of work on.
Agreed, Neiwert is a true gem.
Well, he’s a flawed gem. But who isn’t?
What Trump has done – I suspect more intuitively than with a conscious strategy or plan – is to package them all together and strip away the window dressing ….The republican establishment’s problem is not that they would have to refute Trump, but they would have to REFUTE Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reily, Savage, Coulter, ….”
I agree. I think Trump is having a great time hoisting the current GOP leadership – the neocons and the religious far right – on their own petard.
Quite a NUANCED opinion of Megyn Kelly!!!!
The Orcinus article was a good read. Thanks for linking it.
It’s important to remember that Fascism has nothing to do with welfare, social mobility or reducing inequality. Socially, Fascism is essentially mediaeval – it offers a regulated, even disciplined society where everybody “fits in” somewhere but it makes no promises of wealth or growth. There is a place for everybody and everybody must stay in their place. Marcuse had a good phrase for this aspect of Fascism: “heroic pauperism”.
The AP article is a hit piece on Meficare for All, from the name change to the unwillingness to articulate actual savings to voters. Yet somehow they managrd to mention 2.2 in taxes. I know the American people are stupid, but the question, and will buy such spin, but I have to ask whether the left will fight back
RE: Ketchup Leather
This is just more “Yuppie-nerd” gibberish posing as intelligent dialogue, just like “Artificial Intelligence” or even “Self-driving cars”.
Discussing Sanders ability to predict bad outcomes from Clinton legislation and makes the case for sanders
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/1453742
Needs to be in an ad
Is there now or has there ever been Clinton legislation? Clinton’s sponsors legislation ™ is more like it.
Hillarystan: ISIS’ Grip on Libyan City Gives It a Fallback Option
Huh. So it turns out that weaponized humanitarianism can have negative consequences.
Something to remember when the phone rings at 3 a.m.
Interesting read from NYT on Illinois Governor and the type of society our Wall Street overlords want.
(They’re not going to be happy until the people have no bread.)
Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state’s balance of power. Last year, the families helped elect as governor Bruce Rauner, a Griffin friend and former private equity executive from the Chicago suburbs, who estimates his own fortune at more than $500 million. Now they are rallying behind Mr. Rauner’s agenda: to cut spending and overhaul the state’s pension system, impose term limits and weaken public employee unions.
“It was clear that they wanted to change the power structure, change the way business was conducted and change the status quo,” said Andy Shaw, an acquaintance of Mr. Rauner’s and the president of the Better Government Association, a nonpartisan state watchdog group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/us/politics/illinois-campaign-money-bruce-rauner.html?
if taxes are too high, how’d they accumulate so much???..hmmm
Mmmm hmmm. Camel, needle’s eye.
That parable stuff only works if one is a “believer,” and then only if one fears punishment in the Hereafter, and then only if one does not appear before the Seat of Judgment with a fistful of absolutions, they call them “indulgences,” surprisingly, that are still being “granted,” “ex gratia” of course, by the Holy “Did You See That?” Curia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninety-Five_Theses , and http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1881152,00.html
I’m guessing the malefactors have learned there is little to fear from the God of The Meek Shall Inherit Whatever Is Left Of The Earth…
The families remaking Illinois are among a small group around the country who have channeled their extraordinary wealth into political power, taking advantage of regulatory, legal and cultural shifts that have carved new paths for infusing money into campaigns. Economic winners in an age of rising inequality, operating largely out of public view, they are reshaping government with fortunes so large as to defy the ordinary financial scale of politics. In the 2016 presidential race, a New York Times analysis found last month, just 158 families had provided nearly half of the early campaign money.
A Wealthy Governor and His Friends Are Remaking IllinoisNOV. 29, 2015
Many of those giving, like Mr. Griffin, come from the world of finance, an industry that has yielded more of the new political wealth than any other. The Florida-based leveraged-buyout pioneer John Childs, the private equity investor Sam Zell and Paul Singer, a prominent New York hedge fund manager, all helped elect Mr. Rauner, as did Richard Uihlein, a conservative businessman from the Chicago suburbs.
Most of them lean Republican; some are Democrats. But to a remarkable degree, their philosophies are becoming part of a widely adopted blueprint for public officials around the country: Critical of the power of unions, many are also determined to reduce spending and taxation, and are skeptical of government-led efforts to mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else.
======================================
“But to a remarkable degree, their philosophies are becoming part of a widely adopted blueprint for public officials around the country: Critical of the power of unions, many are also determined to reduce spending and taxation, and are skeptical of government-led efforts to mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else.”
Well, I have been researching the price of polo pony feed, as well as fancy hats worn to polo matches, and its hard to see how mere billionaires can keep a polo pony herd well fed and trophy mistresses well hatted nowadays….Obviously, unless America wants to lose its primacy in the global polo pony market, a necessity in this competitive global economy, we must institute a program of tax incentives, as well as a program of increased H1b visas to assure a continuous supply of horse sh*t shovelers at competitive wages…
“and are skeptical of government-led efforts to mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else.”
Plutocrat translation: “The Class War isn’t happening from the top down to the simpletons who go to work everyday as long as we dress it up in nice words.”
Food stamp benefits continue to decline while anti-hunger charities face ‘more drastic’ situation http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/11/26/a-grim-holiday-season-awaits-americas-hungry.html
for a through timeline: http://america.aljazeera.com/search.html?q=American+Hunger
“Times are gone for honest men
And sometimes far too long for snakes”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltc5EsuyBh4
“The Day I Tried To Live” seems more relevant today than when it was released, too…
Re hillary and unions
When I heard SEIU endosed hillary I wondered if they were angling to represent uber drivers in the sense of look it’s a riot I think I’ll jump in front and call it a parade. This am in the seattle times (I’ve used up my free access or I’d send it to lambert to check out) an article about unionizing uber drivers. Personally I’m cynical so view it as a way to lock in the gains uber has made, as well as dealing a PR messaging blow in the standard democratic party view that all is great it’s just a messaging problem. The article itself is decent reading and doesn’t lend itself to paraphrasing so I’d just wonder what others thought about it
“Unionize ride-app drivers? Eyes turn to Seattle” Seattle times 11/29/15
Here’s a thought….why not just refer to the unions as gilds….that seems, to my mind,a more honest branding. At least gilds lobbied & protected their membership without any pretense of populism.
Any union member not voting for Sanders might as well envision themselves as passengers in Thelma and Louise’s last ride.
Hear, hear !
Atlantic head scratching gee whiz
“The evaporation of real wages for young Americans is a real mystery because it’s coinciding with what is otherwise a real recovery. The economy has been growing steadily since 2009. We’re adding 200,000 jobs a month in 2014. That’s what a recovery looks like. And yet, overall U.S. wages are barely growing”
Its a good thing we have so many Nobel laureates in economics unable to understand it, for no common man could be so stupid…
And the anger of the under-40 set grows and grows…
In World’s Best-Run Economy, House Prices Keep Falling — Because That’s What House Prices Are Supposed To Do
RE: “Is the 2°C world a fantasy?” in Nature:
I don’t know whether David Wasdell’s science (see below) will hold up, but if it does, we’ll find that we’ve already overshot the 2% target, so — according to him — we’ve already spent the “carbon budget.”
“Facing the Harsh Realities of Now“
See also:
Apollo-Gaia Project
EXCERPT:
It is with the utmost concern that we draw your attention to the fundamental methodological flaw in the determination of the value of Climate Sensitivity that is embedded in the Summary for Policymakers of the Scientific Workgroup of the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC. The error was replicated in the Reports of Workgroups 2 and 3 and carried forward into the Synthesis Report. It has been used as the given basis for every subsequent publication. Our radical analysis of Climate Dynamics has generated a new and robust value of “Earth System Sensitivity” which has profound implications for:
• The relationship between temperature change and cumulative carbon emissions.
• The calculation of “available carbon budget”.
• The evaluation of the INDCs.
• The terms of reference of COP21 in Paris (30 November – 11 December 2015).
• The future global strategy for climate stabilisation.
> U.S. Urges Turkey to Seal Border WSJ. It wasn’t already?
But doing that would make it a lot harder to buy oil from them and get them weapons and recruits!
Interesting that a corrupt Israelite or two seem to have a big hand in this part of the world’s “free trade”… And that Israel’s economy seems to benefit from ISIS business activity…
Shrinking Incomes
I am one of the middle-aged displaced workers from The Greatest Depression: just got a job after three years of unemployment. I am a former 6-figure earner. I now am happy to be employed at $14/hr.
I have a friend in the Midwest who is also a middle-aged displaced worker from The Greatest Depression. She was a top salesperson for Glaxo-Smith-Kline. She is now happy to be employed. She is making $10/hr.
Lower taxes on billionaires is obviously the answer.
Bet you guys will still keep voting Demorat. Can’t say I cry too much for you. America is haunted by the ghosts of the Indians. A land built on hustling has no future. The best that the rest of the world can hope for is that you guys have another civil war. Thanksgiving – the Indians “gave” their land and the white gave thanks.
Well . . . thank you for sending over your best and brightest to get the party started . . eh?
A fantastic waste of human talent, skill, and experience. And we wonder why the real economy is in the crapper.
Indeed, salesing for Big Pharma is a fantastic waste of human talent, skill and experience. Glad she’s doing something now that can’t help but be more useful.
The market found her true “worth”. It took a while, but it got there. Capitalism, bitches. I love the middle class angst here. They didn’t give a flying fuck for the rest of humanity for, like, ever. Reap the whirlwind or chickens or whatever. Let’s get this nuclear war on. Yeah, I hate your “freedoms”.
http://truezodiacfact.tumblr.com/post/117841320094/stone-cold-ice-face
how am I going to get my Zoloft-Ritalin-Benzedrine Gentlemen’s Lunch cocktail if they layoff the “value chain” Pharma bitchz hustling drug samples to my GPs practice??
I am sorry to hear about you & your friend’s Underemployment of the Type 1 aka “Overqualified” variety. Hopefully both of you are getting 40 hours if you desire them, & thus are not also simultaneously Type 2 “Involuntary part-time” Underemployed.
I would like to see Bernie Sanders & other $15 Min Wage advocates, stress that everyone should support the $15 Min Wage, if nothing else due for selfish reasons that they may need it personally someday, due to Type 1 Underemployment. I have never seen BigMedia or a BigPolitician mention the issue of Type 1 Underemployment. I have seen right-wingers like Rubio/Faux”News”Models/etc paint some caricature of how every min wage (or near min wage) worker is a teenager who highest education credential is a HS diploma, & that should work/study hard/procure bootstraps & shut up about it. The irony is that Type 1 Underemployed individuals tend to be much higher skilled than said rightwing propaganda spewer No Talent Ass Clowns (NTACs) like Rubio. Any or at least many NTACs can “look pretty on TV” & repeat Low Wage industries’ lobbyist garbage propaganda talking points, like Rubio.
Best wishes to you & your friend
Ketchup leather. Still further proof of the unlimited experiments being done to wake up the jaded U.S. palate. Not enough fat? Not enough salt? How about a new weird texture?
Also, given that ketchup already is a dubious substance, the article is emblematic of just how bad the U.S. diet is. Recently, there was a lot of discussion on this site of the death spiral among 45-55 year olds in the white population. Yet hamburgers and ketchup are the kind of crap that they have eaten for years, and I’m wondering how long a body can withstand such bad food.
We canned our own ketchup last year……mucho tasty..more like cocktail sauce …. above & beyond anything kerrys’ brand produces.
Compliments. I have seen old ketchup recipes (or catsup), and they are amazing. I should track down and try out a walnut ketchup. Now that sounds tempting.
that’s ….interesting….. might just have a winner!……then you could market it to the whole foods crowd and make a mint. We can every year, growing raspberries, huckleberries, cherries, grapes, & vegies, along w/ raising laying hens and honey bees…all on a single sized city lot! It’s enjoyable but requires constant work throughout most of the year.
If the experiences of the 1950s and 1960s are any guide, about the same as any other food, as long as that body burns it promptly rather than leaving it to molder in the corners of arteries and such.
The “article” on ketchup leather is just an ad. Sorting out actual trends from product promotion is part of the game.
From “Is the 2°C world a fantasy? Nature”: “Nearly 8.8 billion people now crowd the planet” – in 2100.
I keep seeing this alarming projection, but I don’t believe it for a moment, and it’s a terrible basis for policy. The truth is that the world’s life support systems are ALREADY collapsing; climate is only one example among many. Nature will intervene long before we reach 8.8 billion. The only real question is how it happens.
The danger is that efforts to reach that number, or to provide for that many people, will only make our problems worse. We’ve already overshot the carrying capacity of the world; that causes damage that reduces the later carrying capacity. Every time someone blithely says that we will reach that number, they make the problem worse.
It’s also an example of projectionism (yeah, I just made that up): the bizarre assumption that whatever’s happening now will continue indefinitely. That applies only (probably) to the laws of physics; actual processes cause their own end. In this case, the process causes an especially ugly end that we should be going to great lengths to prevent. Complacency is the road to ruin.
it’s projection of a Meme by taking heads, crony intra-governmental elitists (UN, IMF,etc.) fecklessly big enviro orgs, to scare the public into accepting carbon credit schemes and other enforced dreck to bleed people dry of their constantly diminishing assets, while the above jet everywhere,eating the finest gmo-hormone free meals, and residing in the finest digs, all at the greater publics’ expense!
The culture, economy and the natural environment have been falling apart for over 75 years. Since quantitative measures of the quality of life are almost impossible the only acceptable measure is decline of live births in the United States; Our Rank = 12th Best in 1960 and 31st Best in 2006.
But in looking around can anyone say the rest of the world is a better place today than it was in 1960? Or 1940? Would that we could spin back the hands of time to 1940 on the Amazon Rain Forest, acidity in the Oceans, CO2 in the atmosphere, industrial pollutants everywhere. The list is legion in regards to environmental deterioration and habitat destruction. We as humans now live in a seething cesspool of carcinogens.
But nobody wants to hear this much bad news. So people crank up the ball game, or the concert or devote time and energy to the divertissment of the latest techno cultural craze.
We are in the midst of increasing chaos everywhere and every how on this planet; culturally, socially, economically, ecologically and environmentally. The question is not what do we do about it (since there seems to be no remedy) but how do we adjust?
What moral prerogatives are there for individuals and nations on a world spinning into a black hole of destruction?
We exist in a situation that places us in a moral vacuum.
How do we list the moral imperatives for existence in a lifeboat that may never reach anywhere except the middle of oblivion?
How do we treat one another in this new era?
How do we talk to those who are in denial that we are past the point of no return?
Maybe “inertialism” would be a good word for it. Or maybe “trend foreverism”.
Re- Pop Stars and Economists
Respectfully, I think Yannis Varoufakis is missing a big clue when he says
“So far with capitalism, every labour-saving technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. The car destroyed jobs for horsemen and stage coach people, but then auto workers and those building the motorways and petrol stations brought more jobs than they destroyed.”
This is off on several levels, but most salient to me is that automobiles and trains weren’t invented specifically to put people out of work. Robots *are*. The only reason for all this automation is to churn out more plastic and metal crap we don’t really need and can’t afford (the whole thing is fuelled by credit, after all) at a higher slightly higher margin than the other guy. And when monopolies and cartels are achieved, they automate anyway. They really just don’t want to have to deal with humans.
This is off on several levels, but most salient to me is that automobiles and trains weren’t invented specifically to put people out of work. Robots *are*
Good insight.
well…..robots operate just fine……until there’s no electricity to run them……something about diminishing resources and all that.
Just slap a solar panel and some Li-ion batteries on ’em and all is well…
So, the republican excuse to do nothing on climate change is their “worry” for american jobs.
They don’t CARE about american jobs…. just like their counterparts across the isle.
How LSD Microdosing Became the Hot New Business Trip
Turn on, Drop in… to being a productive badass at work, woop, woop! The Doors of Perception for this generation apparently open up new vistas of work.
Has anyone noticed how “innovative” is now used to justify anything?
I wish I had a link to an article that traces “innovation,” “disruption,” “start-up,” “unicorn,” “Series A”, and all that mish-mash of froth-justifying Silicon Valley propaganda for moar rental extraction. Who started pumping that stuff out? Sounds like something Mark Ames would have written, but AFAIK he hasn’t.
“Innovative.” heh. The word used to be “liberate.”
ISIS is a start-up and it is both innovative and disruptive, but is it a unicorn?
Sure have. Just about any marketing or product development action can be validly (and emptily) described as innovative (in other words, now with more newness), and just about any is. Innovation (in other words, putting novelty into) is As Seen On TV’s only product: a floor wax, a dessert topping, super-absorbent chamois cloth, or whatever else you need this year.
Invention, on the other hand, carries an air of observation and substance, and a rather different kind of cunning than innovation: against the forces of nature, rather than against value itself.
(flora, so too did “liberation” mean “theft as recourse” in the cracking scene before there were valuations on all this.)
Pretty much.
Who started pumping that stuff out?
Are you reaching out for an answer? gawd, I hate reach out
Whenever appropriate I will stop a monologue pitch with any of these empty calorie buzz word phrases and advise the person politely to not use them if there is an expectation/desire for me to listen further.
As well, like when used as like an informal adverb. It is conversational diarrhea w/like Gen Whateva
Ha! Pussies..
See how long your glib ego lasts on a real dose.. see how “productive” you are then.
Haha…a requirement to hold office should be a forced,full dose to help sharpen their empathy.
Measurement Errors and Monetary Policy: Then and Now (PDF). Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Sounds like the Fed can be a fool in the shower, too.
Conclusion
Measurement errors are pervasive in real-time macroeconomic data. We extend the
insights of Aruoba (2008) to incorporate time varying dynamics and document that
these measurement errors feature substantial time-varying volatility, can be correlated
with a time-varying correlation, and are not centered around zero. Thus,
modeling real-time data as the sum of the final data and a simple independent noise
process can miss important features of the data.
We show that these facts are not a curiosity, but have policy implications: (i) These
differences between real-time data and final data manifest themselves in the substantially
different ways that real-time and final data respond to monetary policy
shocks, and (ii) the real-time responses can be substantially biased. As such, the
responses of various measures of real activity are larger in magnitude for final data.
=========================
Well, I’m glad they cleared that all up…
fw: https://youtu.be/2ns8ErdaJoQ?t=1h15m6s
economist Richard Wolff “monthly economic update” talk, ~22 minute section of it where Wolff opines on Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism, which Wolff noted could be labeled “social democracy” synonymously. Wolff gives a history of how starting in the 1800s, what was then understood as capitalism vs. socialism/communism were seen as competing systems, & social democracy like the 1930s New Deal was seen as mix of the 2 systems. Wolff opines social democracy is temporary, ala seen in the US in crapifying/reducing the New Deal since the 1970s, insofar as the 0.01%er capitalists will use their extremely high economic & political economic power to reduce social democracy.
I found it interesting, & thought fellow NC readers might also enjoy it. It is possible that those with strong/broad (stronger than my level at least) political economy & history knowledge may find it “review” of ideas they’ve previously encountered.
According to Orcinus Trump is not a fascist but a authoritarian right-wing populist.
This Ocricnus perspective on Trump keeps us securely in the evil/bad populist right versus the implicitly good/enlightened progressive/managerial left.
But what should be of real interest to the many social democrats on Naked Capitalism is the commonality of assumptions guiding Italian fascism, German national socialism and the social democracy of FDR and the New Deal.
All three theoretical perspectives are united in their belief in the primacy of the political over the economic.
Social Democracy, at its origins, as developed by Eduard Bernstein in the late 19th century represented the severing of social democracy from orthodox Marxism and the advocacy of using the democratic State to protect society from the excesses of capitalism.
Both Italian fascists and German National Socialists advocated the creation of a more authoritarian/tyrannical State to control capitalism/markets and to preserve the hegemony of the State itself.
On the other hand, both the libertarian and orthodox Marxist perspectives deny the primacy of the political (the focus on some form of State regulation of capitalism) and instead emphasize the primacy of the purely economic realm.
Is it conceivable that in 2015 the democratic state no longer exists and that the progressive advocacy of a state-centered political solution becomes simply another channel to a largely totalitarian outcome?
Is it conceivable that in 2015 a left populist turn advocating radical state decentralization, local control and a real federalist political structure offers the only viable democratic political solution?
“All three theoretical perspectives are united in their belief in the primacy of the political over the economic.”
Yes, it’s part of our “money isn’t speech” thing.
Except the Social Democracy of the FDR New Deal was devoted to upholding democratic methods and values even at the cost of never achieving many things which the New Dealers could have tried achieving by authoritarian force. They might have failed trying, but the important thing is they had the decency not to try. So there is that difference.
Radical state decentralization to me sounds like deliberately creating a governmental power-vacuum in which vast corporations, super-rich money-dynasty families, etc. can run amok even more than now. And certainly more than they could before the deliberate repeal of all the legacy New-Deal restraints. In fact, it smells like a economic-royalist propertarian pig wearing some left-populist perfume to me.
Re the Colorado Springs abortion clinic shooting, it’s ironic, maybe not so ironic in the case of Obama, that a pro-lifer such as Huckabee made a stronger statement condemning the shooting than the President: While Obama used the opportunity to attack continuing gun violence in America, Huckabee called it straight up terrorism
The President also could have done the right thing in making a statement upholding the right to choose and the right for those who exercise the right to choose as well as those who help provide it to be free from the threat of violence. But no, we get some mealy mouth broad based attack on gun violence. Don’t get me wrong for I’m all against gun violence, however, the target of the gunman’s violence and his statement afterwards would have been a “well duh” giveaway.
What’s Huckabee’s policy views on droning, preemptive war, US militarization of the planet, regime change, climate change, other stuff that kills a shutload of people, etc? “Horrific” too?
Seems to me this little except is just more Huckasterism…
My statement was more of a comment on Obama’s mealy mouthed centrism with his unwillingness to take an issue such as abortion head on in public. The fact that it was so evasive with respect to what the shooting was about and that even a right winger could speak much more strongly against the shooting and the purpose of it than Obama could. He may intellectually support the right to choose, but he should also have the backbone to make statements and take actions that defend the right to choose rather than allowing its enemies to define the zeitgeist.
I understand that the President is, in all likelihood, mailing it in and thinking more about his golf game, the Presidential library, and whatever booty he expects to get from his benefactors from leaving the banks alone and promoting TPP.
I stopped reading Obama takes his reckless energy plan to the United Nations when I came to this: “President Obama assumed office with smashing majorities in both houses of Congress. Democrats used the opportunity to pass one left-wing policy after the next.”
Har!
Har harty har har.
Har har.
Smashing Majorities? Almost but not quite.
One Left-Wing Policy after the next. Oh My God, were that it were true.
How does the Post get away with printing this trish trash?
I’ve got a side ache now from laughing so hard.
You did notice the author’s name, didn’t you?
Hunh. Interesting discussion between Eno and Varoufakis…and I got quite the jolt at the end when Eno brings up ‘Paris’ and V says:
YV Look, I hate to do this, but I try to get into their heads. If you look at the bare facts of the last two months it is tit-for-tat. That is how they see it. So the Russian air force bomb Syria; they bomb a Russian plane off Sharm el-Sheikh. The French air force bombs Syria; they do what they do in Paris. The Hezbollah people join Assad against them; they bomb Beirut. For them, this is what war is about. And we have to learn to see this, because if we think that a stray US air force bomb killing 150 people in Syria is acceptable collateral damage but we go crazy about Paris, then our moral compass is problematic.
BE Look at the time: it’s been two hours…
Wow. Eno really surprised me there. I would have thought he’d be less apt to just shut down that conversation. Disappointing, as he’s one of my heroes.
Rhondda, thanks for that quote and comment. I’m a long time Eno fan as well… if he did indeed shut down the chat just because of that “inconvenient truth” that is disappointing.
Tit for tat… as you reap so shall you sow… do unto others… a common theme/ethic there often proclaimed but rarely followed alas!
One would have thought the French at least would have learned from the “Battle of Algiers” and asymmetric warfare, and the US from Vietnam… sigh…
To Peter Schitt:
Considering the responses to my post on this blog today, I’d say your last name is apropo. Indeed you are a sh*t.
I’m sorry that you find reality unpleasant. Is there a hive mind here that I’m supposed to give a schitt about? The USA is a gigantic social failure. The sooner it falls apart, the better off the rest of the world will be. The problem is in the very ethos, the raison d’etre of America: to hustle and exploit, to get one over on the next fellow. There is no fix, the barbarians are not at the gates; the people inside ARE the barbarians.
The only way to seal the Turkish border is to seal it by violent force from the Syrian side. And that can only be accomplished by all out support by and for the R + 6 to physically exterminate all traces of rebels and rebellion from Syria. And that will be hard to do as long as Obama and the EU leaders keep supporting Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the rest of the Axis of Jihad in trying to overthrow the legitimate Assad government.
“Young Greek women selling sex for the price of a sandwich, new study shows WaPo.”
It seems that this was misinformation. Sorry about that, I really thought WaPo could perform basic fact check.
http://www.tovima.gr/society/article/?aid=757758