It’s The Same Lie
Only in Latin.
Every so often I post a variation of this:
Remember: whenever you hear “average” in a discussion of money in politics, the person using it is lying about something. Honest people use “median”, which is the point in the middle, with half the group above and half below.
In Lambert’s Live Cairo blogging, they had people talking about the economic situation in Egypt that included:
Howard Pack, Wharton professor of business and public policy, is co-author of a book entitled, The Arab Economies in a Changing World, written with Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at The Peterson Institute for International Economics
These two clowns used a variation on the “average” scam, they talked about per capita, and how great things have been in Tunisia and Egypt, so there can’t really be an economic issue… except for the fact that the people at the top got all the money and those at the bottom got increases in food prices. Median – it is the only measure that counts.
Lambert also caught Google doing a non-evil thing: a Twitter to Voice / Voice to Twitter system that uses regular telephones.
Egypt will probably cut off cell phone service tomorrow to mess up the big march that is planned. People already figured it out, and have made their plans. Mubarak and his crowd are way behind the curve on this.
2 comments
Thanks for keeping us up to the minute.
Now, how’s that CIA/torture expert replacement for Mubarek coming along?
S
Suleiman was in charge of keeping the US happy so it would continue to give the Egyptian military a lot of money, but he is tied to Mubarak, and the protesters are not going to accept him in any major position in a new government.
He functioned as Mubarak’s National Security Advisor and account executive for Mubarak’s most important client – the US.
I doubt he will prominent after the first open elections, but he will still be lurking in the background.