Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
May 28, 2004
Last year I wrote about how Tech Central Station was an astroturf operation, drafted by a public relations company to provide supposedly independent support for the PR companies clients. The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute (ADTI) is another astroturf operation.
As part of the Tobacco…
May 28, 2004
This is a list of the documents that detail the astroturf campaign conducted by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute (ADTI) on behalf of Philip Morris (PM) against the Clinton health plan in 1994. They were obtained by a search for "fname: anti-tax" in the Philip Morris documents…
May 26, 2004
Hunt Stilwell asks:
since the gun lobby's statistical claims have been debunked so thoroughly and so often, why do they continue to use them, and why do people continue to buy them?
Brian Linse thinks there has been some progress, since not many progun bloggers linked to Lott's piece, whereas
I…
May 26, 2004
To all the people arriving here via a search for "Washingtonian blog": The following table is provided as a public service so that you can keep your pseudonymous posters straight:
Pseudonym
Real name
Writes about
Blog link
News story
Mary Rosh
John R Lott Jr
How wonderful John…
May 23, 2004
Lott has a new article at Fox News where he claims that gun control is unravelling:
Crime did not fall in England after handguns were banned in January 1997. Quite the contrary, crime rose sharply. Yet, serious violent crime rates from 1997 to 2002 averaged 29 percent higher than 1996; robbery…
May 20, 2004
Last week I wrote about Paul Georgia's review of Essex and McKitrick's Taken by Storm. Based on their book, Georgia made multiple incorrect statements about the physics of temperature. Of course, it might have just been that Georgia misunderstood their book. Fortunately Essex and McKitrick have…
May 16, 2004
In comments to my previous post on Paul Georgia's nonsense about temperature, Sarah wrote:
Yes, bad physics, but that was an easy target. I'd like to see you take on a hard target, like the petition signed by 17,000 scientists who declared that global warming is a sham. The research review is here…
May 10, 2004
I wrote earlier correcting Ross McKitrick's false claim that there is no such thing as Global Temperature. Unfortunately McKitrick's claim has been adopted and spread by people ignorant of basic physics. For example, consider this review of Essex and McKitrick's book Taken by Storm at (where…
May 3, 2004
Back in March I wrote about the way pro-gun bloggers leapt to the conclusion that self-defence in the UK was illegal, based on story about a man who defended himself against some robbers with a sword, killed one and ended up being jailed for eight years. Unfortunately, the story left out the fact…
May 2, 2004
Last December I examined a posting by John Ray who dismissed ozone depletion as a "Greenie scare" using facts he seemed to have just made up by himself. Now he's back, attacking gun control. This time he's not using facts that he made up---he's using facts that Lott made up. He quotes…
April 28, 2004
Chris Mooney notes that McKitrick defended Inhofe's claim that "manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated"
I'm not the only one who has found problems with McKitrick's writings on climate. Robert Grumbine has some comments on another McKitrick paper:
He was…
April 27, 2004
The graph above, which Iain Murray claimed showed that
"The fact that the ten hottest years happened since 1991 may well be an artifact of the collapse in the number of weather monitoring stations contributing to the global temperature calculations following the fall of…
April 27, 2004
[This correspondence started with an email from McKitrick commenting on this post. I've edited it to remove most of the quoted text from previous emails. Further discussion is here.]
I saw your suggestion about how to test whether the increase in average T was an artifact of the changed…
April 25, 2004
Mrs M. Ingram Old Dubbo Dubbo N.S.W. Australia
To Dear Mother from Bob with best wishes. I hope you will like my beautiful costume. It is not a very costly robe. Send in your order without delay we are nearly sold out.
May 18, 1918 MIXED BATHING PHOTO TAKEN AT BRIGTON ENGLAND…
April 21, 2004
John Quiggin has another post on the right wing attack on science, this time describing the Australian front. Chris Mooney has great article in the The American Prospect about James Inhofe's part in the attack on science.
And Iain Murray is at it again. He has a post where he refers to…
April 18, 2004
John Quiggin has an interesting post putting the disinformation peddled by folks like Steve Milloy and Iain Murray in a broader context:
But at some point, it must be necessary to abandon the case-by-case approach and adopt a summary judgement about people like Milloy and…
April 16, 2004
A couple of days ago, I told the story of GEP, how a tobacco company tried to get epidemiologists to adopt a bogus principle that risk factors of less than 2should be ignored. I noted that Iain Murray was still peddling this bogus principle in a Tech Central Station article.…
April 15, 2004
In July last year, Lott, armed with no evidence at all, claimed that Washington DC had a higher murder rate than Baghdad. Faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Lott stuck to his guns, even demanding that the New York Times "correct" an article and use Lott's…
April 14, 2004
The latest quiz to sweep blogspace is this quiz, which tests your ability to distinguish between quotes from comments at Little Green Footballs and quotes from Late German Fascists. Matt Yglesias' post on the quiz triggered an extremely ill-tempered comment thread. In the spirit of…
April 13, 2004
When I wrote earlier about Steve Milloy, I commented on his attack on a study that found that the introduction safe-storage laws was followed by a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children. Milloy claimed:
The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak…
April 5, 2004
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) attempts to classify each pesonality into one of 16 types described by the four letter codes in the table below. TypeLogic has descriptions of all the types, as well as a FAQ. You can find your out own type in this on-line test. If you have a…
April 3, 2004
Kevin Baker was one of the bloggers who posted on the story about Lindsay's sword killing, claiming that it showed that for all intents and purposes self-defence in the UK was illegal. Despite learning that Lindsay had chased the robber out of his home and stabbed him in the back four times,…
March 31, 2004
A couple of weeks ago Xrlq wrote about me:
He's the Australian blogger who aspires to do to John Lott what Clayton Cramer did to Michael Bellesiles. Unfortunately, he doesn't do a very good job; while Cramer uncovered overwhelming evidence Bellesiles's fundamental research was…
March 27, 2004
I wrote earlier about the Tony Martin case. Martin shot a fleeing burglar in the back and left him to die. He was convicted of murder (reduced to manslaughter on appeal). Pro-gunners such as John Lott, Glenn Reynolds and John Derbyshire have written about the Martin case, apparently…
March 27, 2004
The Panda's Thumb is an excellent new blog devoted to defending the integrity of science against attacks from creationists. I put it straight into my blog roll. Mark Perakh has a post where he tells a story that should be very familiar to those who know about Lott's antics at Amazon.…
March 26, 2004
The Australian published a letter to the editor the day after Lott's piece on laser pointers:
John Lott (Opinion, 24/3) claims an Australian academic with a laser pointer would cause panic. I'm an Australian academic and when I use a laser pointer it does not cause a panic. Lott…
March 24, 2004
Lott has an opinion piece on page 15 of today's Australian. Lott writes:
Americans may feel safe when an academic addresses a conference using a laser pointer. In the hands of an Australian, however, there is understandable fear that these devices could do untold harm. An…
March 18, 2004
When I was looking in the Philip Morris Documents Archive for information on their astroturf operations, I noticed some familiar names: The American Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute and the Cato Institute. All have been involved in employing and/or promoting John Lott…
March 18, 2004
Via David Bernstein I learn that the finalists for the Lysander Spooner award are:
James Bovard, Terrorism and Tyranny;John Lott, Bias Against Guns;Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment; and[his] own, You Can't Say That!
My congratulations to all the finalists. To get into the…
March 16, 2004
I have posted some of my emails to the firearmsreg mailing list from September and October 2002. This shows some of the initial discussion of Lott's mysterious survey. Read them here.