Here's Silas with his Christmas present. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers. Blogging is likely to be light to non-existent this week because I'll be in Perisher on holidays. It's a National Park so...
After seeing yet another ignorant column about how banning DDT killed millions and millions and millions of people. I've been inspired to create DDT Ban Myth Bingo to make reading these stupid articles more interesting. Just tick the box...
The Washington Post continues its sorry record on the Lancet study with this piece by Sarah Sewall: The Lancet study relied on a door-to-door survey of Iraqi households in 33 neighborhoods. The surveyors asked for details of deaths in the...
In his latest op-ed Lott continues his misrepresentations about crime in Australia and England: The British government banned handguns in January 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the seven years from 1996...
I wrote earlier about a particularly dumb argument against global warming--the argument that an unusually cold day shows that global warming just isn't happening. Well, there doesn't seem to be an argument dumb enough that someone can't make it dumber....
Stephen Dubner reports that Freakonomics is the 7th best-selling book for 2005. According to Nielsen BookScan, it is has sold 584,000 copies so far this year. Freakonomics discusses the survey that Lott claims to have conducted in 1997, but that...
It is frequently claimed that the World Health Organization opposes the use of DDT against malaria. Even if we just confine ourselves to articles at Tech Central Station, the claim has been made by Paul Driessen, Nick Schulz, Roger Bate,...
Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts about his survey. Roberts comments on Bush answering a question about Iraqi deaths: I guess, politically, he has to downplay this issue, but for him to say a number, that of the...
Peter Baker in the Washington Post writes: The Iraqi death toll has been the subject of considerable debate. A group of British researchers and antiwar activists called Iraq Body Count estimates civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892, not counting Iraqi...
The Sydney Morning Herald reports Asked about the Iraqi death toll, Bush said about 30,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It was the first time Bush has publicly offered such an estimate....
Fumento has now made three posts on his blog and a whole pile of comments on other blogs in response to my revealing his use of a sock puppet. He has called me a liar, claimed that I am insane...
Steve Levitt has a post with a detailed response to Foote and Goetz's paper. They construct a new, better, measure of abortions under which more abortions are associated with less crime. They conclude: The results we show in this new...
We last saw Fumento blundering around in a field of rakes. Now read on. John Fleck commented on the situation: The thing is, Fumento is, at times, a quite talented journalist. But then, over and over again, he shows himself...
After accidentally proving that he was using a sock on Wikipedia, Fumento is back for more. I think that putting a "(sic)" after misspellings is rather petty, but since Fumento does it when he quotes others, I've yielded to temptation...
Hello! And welcome to SMAI: Stupidest Man Alive Idol. Here's how it works: our contestants perform for you, the audience. And then you, the audience, judge them and you can be as unfair as you like in your comments. Our...
Back in 2003, Ayres and Donohue found some coding errors in Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" data. They found that if you corrected his errors, Lott's results went away. Lott's reaction to this? Well, for four months he refused to...