tlambert | 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 Settlement Agreement Philip Morris (PM) agreed to release millions of documents about their operations. These detail how ADTI was hired by PM to conduct a public relations campaign against the Clinton health plan in 1994. ADTI provided PM with regular progress reports to prove…
tlambert | 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 archive. ADTI's summary of their activities is here.
Doc id
Date
Description
Extract
2073011705
Feb 4
Note from Derek Crawford to David Nicoli about meetings with anti-tax groups on Feb 7
Mac Carey -- Alexis de Tocqueville Foundation 11 a.m. (their place)
2073011706
Feb 9
Cover note from…
tlambert | 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 remember the days when Instantman would have linked it within seconds of it being posted.
John Ray boasts that he quoted Lott in an attempt to bait me. He also offers an explanation for his earlier conduct in refusing to link to my post that he was responding to. Apparently it was "too…
tlambert | 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 Lott is
here
link
Washingtonian
John R Lott Jr
How wonderful John Lott is
here
Washingtonienne
Jessica Cutler
Her sex life
here
link
In completely unrelated John Lott news, Kieran Healy is promoting Lott as a commencement speaker.
tlambert | 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 was 24 percent higher; murders 27 percent higher. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to their 1993 levels.
Australia has also seen its violent crime rates soar after its Port…
tlambert | 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 a briefing on their book, and while Georgia mangles the physics even worse than them, they do indeed claim that there is no physical basis to average temperature. They present two graphs of temperature trends that purport to show that you can get either a cooling trend or a warming trend…
tlambert | 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.
At the OISM site she linked it says:
This is the website that completely knocks the wind out of the enviro's sails. See over 17,000 scientists declare that global warming is a lie with no scientific basis whatsoever.
The global warming hypothesis has failed every relevant…
tlambert | 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 else?) Tech Central Station, by Paul Georgia. If you look at Georgia's biographical details, you will see that he has studied political economy and economics and there is no evidence that he ever studied physics and it certainly shows in his review.
Before I examine what Georgia wrote in his review…
tlambert | 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 that the killing was not in self-defence since the killer had stabbed the robber in the back after he fled from the killer's home. In the comments to that post and this follow-up post, Kevin Baker argued that restrictions on weapons in the UK made it essentially impossible to defend yourself. Now…
tlambert | 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 from a review of More Guns, Less Crime by Thomas Jackson: "How strange it must be to be a liberal. Driven by slogans, blinded by superstitions, dazzled by fantasies, the liberal stumbles through life oblivious to facts. There is almost nothing the liberal thinks he…
tlambert | 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 fooling around with correlating per capita income with the observed temperature changes. He concluded that the warming was a figment of climatologists imaginations, as there was a correlation between money and warming. 'Obviously' this had to be due to wealth creating the warming in the dataset,…
tlambert | 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 communism (see graph)"
comes from this paper by Ross McKitrick. McKitrick recently was in the news for publishing a controversial paper that claimed that an "audit" of the commonly accepted reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1000 years was incorrect, so I thought it would be…
tlambert | 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 sample. I can see 2 problems with it. First, there was a change post-1990 in the quality of data in stations still operating, as well as the number of stations. Especially in the former Soviet countries after 1990, the rate of missing monthly records rose dramatically. So you need a subset of stations…
tlambert | 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
Left to Right: Pte Moore, Lance Corporal Cook, Pte Ingram, Private Ferguson in foreground watching the bathers. Excuse my grin, Fergy was tickling my leg as you can see by photo.
I reckon I can pass the M.Ps. in that disguise. All the "Beetlecrushers" send their kindest regards to you all in…
tlambert | 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 graph on the left, saying that it is one of the most important elements in the debate, and writing:"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…
tlambert | 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 sites like TCS. Nothing they say can be trusted. Even if you can check their factual claims (by no means always the case) it's a safe bet that they've failed to mention relevant information that would undermine their case. So unless you have expert knowledge of the topic in…
tlambert | 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. That wasn't the only time Murray had tried advancing the tobacco company's risk-factor-of-two principle. He also did it in this Tech Central Station article, which prompted an actual epidemiologist to send him the following email:
Thank you for your thoughtful article "…
tlambert | 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 bogus murder rate. The whole discussion is here.
The New York Times has updated its figures:
April
July
October
January
Annualized Murder Rate in Baghdad per 100,000 (DC rate 43)
70
130
100
100
The authors also explain how they worked out the murder rate:Our best estimates on murder rates in…
tlambert | 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 my previous quiz pages, this one lets you post your score on the LGF quiz.
[Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/lgfquiz.html)
tlambert | 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 result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect.
Milloy repeats this…