Headline of the Day

Romanian Villagers Decry Police Investigation into Vampire Slaying

—McClatchy DC

This story is profoundly weird, but the hed is probably a dead give away.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Another Myth Disproven

The FBI has now made official statements (as opposed to the leaks that they have been feeding the press) regarding the San Bernardino shooters, and there was no proclamation of support for ISIS or any other terrorist group on social media:

There is no evidence a married couple who killed 14 people in California this month were part of a terrorist cell, the head of the FBI said on Wednesday, echoing investigators' views that the pair were inspired by, rather than organized by, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

………

However, he said that while the perpetrators of the Dec. 2 shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. — Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29 — had expressed support for "jihad and martyrdom" in private communications, they never did so on social media.

Just days after the attack, authorities said they were looking into an apparent Facebook post in which Malik had pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Multiple U.S. media outlets reported Malik had expressed "admiration" for al-Baghdadi, but it was under an account that used a different name. The messages were reportedly deleted before the attack, and Facebook quickly removed the account in the wake of the shooting.

Seriously, why does the press continue acting as the FBI's stenographer when the senior officials who leak this crap could not be trusted if they said the sky was blue?

When you get repeatedly burned by a source, they are no longer a source, they are just a random asshole for whom you refuse to take off the record statements.

The British Have Their Own Version of the Cadillac Driving Welfare Queen

One of the oft repeated claims in UK politics, are that there are families for whom three generations that have never worked. The quotes have been made by any number of politicians, most commonly Tories, but also Tony "Bush's Poodle" Blaire.

It turns out that no one can find any evidence that even one such family ever existed:

This month I ran a workshop with a group of first year undergraduate sociology students at Teesside University (in the North East of England). Our students tend to be from working-class or lower-middle class backgrounds and often the first in their families to go to university. I’d been invited to give an insight into a ‘real life’ research project, and I began by asking for responses and thoughts about some quotations:

‘Behind the statistics lie households where three generations have never had a job’ (ex-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, 1997).

‘…on some deprived estates…often three generations of the same family have never worked’ (Iain Duncan Smith, 2009; now British government Minister for Work and Pensions).

‘To reintroduce the culture of work in households where it may have been absent for generations’ (Universal Credit, Department of Work and Pensions, 2010; this is a document that introduces a very major overhaul of UK welfare payments).

‘…there are four generations of families where no-one has ever had a job’ (Chris Grayling, ex-Minister for Work and Pensions, 2011).

The idea that there are families in the UK with three (or four, or five and even six have been claimed) generations where no one has ever had a job is a particularly powerful orthodoxy. It is often repeated, rarely questioned, becoming part of a taken for granted vernacular. I was struck by the students’ comments. One said, ‘well, it must be true if all these [people] are saying it’. Another felt the same because ‘they wouldn’t say it unless there was loads of data to back it up’. Simple ideas boldly spoken (and repeated) by people in authority can carry real weight.

………

But my colleagues and I are social scientists, so instead of relying on ‘personal observations’, Tracy Shildrick, Andy Furlong, Johann Roden, Rob Crow, and I began rigorous research to see if there really were families like this. We have continued thinking, analysing, writing about, and presenting the complexities of the research material that we gathered since then. The research generated other questions, but, unusually for a sociological study, we found a clear and unequivocal answer to this first question: the existence of families where ‘no one had worked for three generations’ is highly unlikely.

We searched very hard to find such families. We chose two extremely deprived working-class neighbourhoods – in Glasgow and Middlesbrough, because we assumed that they were the sorts of places most likely to reveal this phenomenon. Despite deploying all the strategies and tactics we could think of (including financial inducements), we were unable to find any. This does not mean that they do not exist. Some people believe in fairies or Yetis, and one cannot prove they do not exist. We can say, however, that it is highly improbable that they do. Or, if they do, their numbers are infinitesimally small. Other research drew upon the best available secondary statistics and concluded that less than half of one per cent of all workless households in the UK might have two generations where no one had ever had a job. Households with three generations that have never worked are, logically, going to be far, far fewer in number than even this tiny fraction.

This was, actually, a quite predictable conclusion. A little socio-economic history helps. How long is ‘three generations’? Maybe sixty years, so back to the 1950s, or earlier. The proposition is that there are families where no one has had a job since the 1950s. The UK welfare state has become tougher and tougher over this period, particularly in the last few years. We have very tight ‘conditionality rules’ and ‘activation tests’; recipients of unemployment benefits must provide evidence of their worthiness for these on a weekly basis. It is difficult to imagine a person being able to defraud the state for the whole of his/ her working life – and then his/ her son or daughter doing the same and then his/ her son or daughter after them, for sixty years.

So this family appears to never have existed, but that didn't stop various people, including the Smiler (Blair) from using it on the stump.

To be fair to Ronald Reagan, (I f%$#ing cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just said that) in his case, he was referring to one individual, Linda Taylor ((AKA Connie Walker, AKA Linda Bennett, AKA Linda Jones, AKA Connie Jarvis, AKA Martha Louise Miller, AKA Martha Louise White), who did use a number of aliases to defraud social welfare programs, though it appears this was only one of many criminal endeavors.

Ms. Taylor appeared to be a veritable criminality, with allegations of a lot of other crimes, including kidnapping, baby trafficking, and murder.

Achilles Emerges from His Tent

Russ Feingold will run for his old seat in 2016:

Saying his "desire to serve is stronger than ever," Democrat Russ Feingold announced Thursday a bid for his old U.S. Senate seat against the Republican who defeated him four and a half years ago — Ron Johnson.

A Johnson-Feingold race would be a rare rematch of Senate opponents, offer voters a stark ideological contrast and easily rank as one of the top Senate races in the country in 2016, fiercely contested by both parties.

Feingold made the announcement in a short video shot at his Middleton home, saying he wanted to "bring back to the U.S. Senate strong independence, bipartisanship and honesty."

He did not mention Johnson in the video or lay out his campaign message in any detail. He said he was focused on the worries people in Wisconsin have about "their economic well-being." He also raised a familiar Feingold theme — the role of money in the political process.

"People tell me all the time that our politics in Washington are broken and that multimillionaires, billionaires and big corporations are calling all the shots. They especially say this about the U.S. Senate. And it's hard not to agree," Feingold said.

I would expect a Democratic pickup here.

Ron Johnson won in a Republican wave year, and he was to some degree an unknown quantity.

Now, he is known as one of the stupidest guys in the Senate, as well as being a teabagger.

Feingold should have run against Walker in the recall, but he was brooding in his tent at the time.