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Issue 18 Fact-Checking

As always, these are actual fact-checking queries from our actual fact-checker.

NSA

“Last year, seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the US were clustered in the parts of Maryland and Virginia closest to the capital.”

— Only 5 of the 10 richest counties were in Virginia and Maryland, 3 were in New Jersey

— In 2011, however, 7 of them were in the Washington D.C. region

“the top secret government software they’ve been trained on: Anchory, Nucleon, TrafficThief, Arcmap, Signav Coastline, Dishfire, Pimwale, Marina.”

— not all of them are software, some are databases, others are protocols. Maybe replace “software” with “tools” or “tools and resources”

— Signav and Coastline are two different things, add comma.

— Pimwale –> Pinwale

— TrafficThief is a proprietary suite of tools for improving SEO that any website can use, not that crazy, I wouldn’t include it in the list.

— I can’t find any info about Signav, other than mystifying posts about the scandal of secret NSA programs.

“Only God knows …”

— this quote seems wrong, unless it’s taken from another version of this report. It is “‘There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God,’ said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.”

Russia

“He was 16 when the Soviet Union collapsed” – he was born June 4 1976, which means that he was 15 in December 1991.

I can’t confirm that there are coffee places in Moscow spelled Kofee Haus and Shokoladnitsya. I can find two chains spelled Kofe Khauz and Shokoladnitsa

“excess mortality” of 1.5 million between 1990 and 1998

— where is this from? I find lots of stats on Russian mortality but it would probably be easier to fact-check this if we know the source Keith is referring to.

Oy! Can we ask Hanna to figure out 1990s excess mortality in Russia? It’s a lot, but that’s just the number I have in my head from I don’t know where.

— I found a source — the excess mortality rate was 1.3 million between 1990 and 1994 [Lincoln C. Chen, Friederike Wittgenstein and Elizabeth McKeon. “The Upsurge of Mortality in Russia: Causes and Policy Implications.” Population and Development Review. Vol. 22, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 517-530.]

“Lenin’s remarks” — where is this quote from?

The Friedmans

“It walks through four separate issues raised by the Circuit Court, and it finds that the available evidence renders all of them, not just insufficient for overturning the convictions, but absolutely baseless.”

— Can you point me to the pages in the Conviction Integrity Review where I can find evidence of this?

It’s Section III, “Findings of Fact,” and the four principal claims are: inappropriate police questioning, the use of hypnosis, improper judicial coercion, and similarity to other “moral panic cases.” These are the A, B, C, and D sub-heads in Section III.

Elephants

I can find tons of references to the story where one man rescued a large group of refugees and an elephant convoy, but not where an elephant convoy rescued a group of refugees.

I can’t find any sources for the passage starting “sent a secret mission …” to “…ruling regime in continuous trouble.”

Bed-Stuy

First full §: “Ft. Greene Park” — why not “Fort Greene Park”?

“the worlds of Crooklyn and Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, forty and thirty years gone respectively,”

Crooklyn takes place in 1973 but was made in 1994 — still ok to refer to it in this way? (Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop came out in 1983 so that’s fine.)

“The brownstone on Arlington Place that Spike and Co. shot Crooklyn in recently sold for $1.4 million. ”

— it sold for $1.7 million.

“He has long since decamped for Queens, although early each month he’d sail by in his Lexus SUV”

— Not sure if this needs to be fact checked, but I can’t confirm that he lives in Queens or drives a Lexus SUV.

Subaltern Historians

“drain” theory — I don’t think this needs to be in quotation marks, especially since dependency theory isn’t.

“everything solid melts into air” —> “all that is solid melts into air”

Labor and Monopoly Capital —> italicize.


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