tlambert | April 27, 2005 This book review by Matt Taibi of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat is brilliantly funny. Go read it.
Taibi's review has been widely linked and praised by bloggers but I have found a blogger who didn't like it---John Ray, who wrote about it:
But reading these diatribes of rage and hate does certainly explain the horrors that happen when Leftists gain unrestricted power (i.e. in Communist regimes).
My guess as to why Ray didn't like it goes like this: Before Ray can fit a piece of writing into his worldview, he needs to decide whether it was written by a Leftist or not. In this case,…
tlambert | April 27, 2005Lott's responses to Michelle Malkin's op-ed are in a fixed-width font, while my comments on his response are in italics like this. Lott's responses were downloaded on 25 April 2005.
Below is Malkin's op-ed with commentary by me (my comments are indented and in italics and start at the bottom of the page with the numbered responses corresponding to the numbers in the supporting document). (Note that two other discussions on this issue have been posted since February 2003 and involve a general discussion of the two other polls that ask about brandishing that have been done…
tlambert | April 24, 2005 Socialist Worker has an interview with Les Roberts about his Lancet survey. There are comments on the interview on Crooked Timber and Shot by Both Sides. Roberts makes the point that a NEJM study that surveyed US soldiers on whether they had killed a non-combatant in Iraq tends to support the findings of his study.
This story also seems to support the Lancet study:
A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces.
Tommy Franks, the former head of US…
tlambert | April 22, 2005 Ken Parish, bored, is asking bloggers to post their scores on the political compass survey. I already have a page where bloggers can do this, but it is a bit unwieldy with 500+ entries. So I thought it would be interesting to do one just for Australian bloggers.
[Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/ozcompass.html)
If you are an Australian blogger and want to add your own result to the table, just take the political compass survey here.
tlambert | April 19, 2005 A new organization Climatechangeissues.com has sprung into existence in Australia to
support solutions to the unresolved issues of climate change which are based on sound science, use market mechanisms and trade liberalisation as a key driver of economic growth and poverty reduction.
They are funded by
organizations, individuals, companies and foundations who support a balanced approach to public policy debate and who encourage reliance on markets to improve public welfare, raise standards of living and achieve sustainable development.
Their website contains the usual collection of…
tlambert | April 18, 2005 Via Chris Mooney I find this comprehensive Mother Jones feature on the science and politics of global warming. I found it interesting to compare this handy chart of forty think tanks that have received scads of money from ExxonMobil and have denied the existence of global warming with my own table of think tanks that have received money from Microsoft and have attacked Open Source Software.
tlambert | April 16, 2005I got some spam from David Horowitz asking for donations to fund his lifestyle or something. Brad R. at Sadly, No, got the same spam. (Except that where his had "Brad" mine had "Tim".)
So who is this Horowitz fellow? Via Ralph Luker I found a discussion he had with Tim Burke. Burke began with:
On DiscoverTheNetwork, some of my objections have already been ably described by my colleagues. Let me mention a few of my greatest concerns.
First, I think the entire project has an almost non-existent sense of what represents a "linkage" between two separate individuals. This is the bread and…
tlambert | April 15, 2005 Reading and listening to global warming sceptics can get a little
tedious because they keep trotting out the same discredited arguments.
So I've come up with a little game you can play to make it more
interesting. I call it Global Warming Sceptic Bingo! Just tick the
box when they use the argument next to it. Get four in a row and you
win! A good talk to try it on is Bob Carter's (At 37:00 on the 11
April 2005 Counterpoint
href="http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/counterpoint/default.htm">here.)
In the 70s
scientists were predicting an ice age #
There is no
such thing as…
tlambert | April 14, 2005 Michael Duffy has followed up his radio show that misrepresented the science of global warming with more of the same. He had Bob Carter on this time and Carter trotted out all the favourite falsehoods of the global warming sceptics. Actually, Carter complains about being called a sceptic:
Such persons, and myself as you introduced me, are often termed 'sceptics' and that's meant to be a term of denigration, but I'm a scientist...it's my job to be a sceptic, Michael, and those who are not sceptical towards human-caused global warming or, indeed, towards any other fashionable environmental…
tlambert | April 11, 2005 We bought a house a few years ago. It was our first entry into the real estate market and it was quite scary. Most houses in Sydney are sold by auction, and this seemed to be a way to coax buyers into paying more than they could afford. We saw a house that my wife really wanted, and while talking to the sellers' agent she blurted out the maximum price we would be willing to pay for it. We had sort of resigned ourselves to paying that much, but when the auction came around, we got the house for $10,000 less than that. That was my bid in the auction, and nobody was willing to bid more, so…
tlambert | April 11, 2005 Australia's own version of Baghdad Bob offers the following comments on the Lancet study (slightly paraphrased):
"The Lancet, they always depend on a method what I call ... stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies."
The Lancet is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!"
Update: After dismissing the Lancet study because it was based on a "Survey of a Thousand Households", Blair declares a Conservative victory in Canada based on a survey of 1,125 Canadians. Odd.
tlambert | April 9, 2005 Chris Mooney has posted a transcript of a talk he gave at Rutgers on way that a misguided balance in science reporting between mainstream science and fringe beliefs misleads people.
Michael Duffy has presented a radio program on climate change that doesn't have that problem. He has a range of panellists whose opinions on anthropogenic global warming range all the way from "it isn't happening" to "it doesn't matter". Where can you get panellists like that? The Lavoisier group, of course.
Duffy opened the program with this howler:
"Few people, for instance, are aware that 99% of…
tlambert | April 8, 2005I've added gravatars to the comments. You can have a little icon (your gravatar) that represents you next to each comment you post. All you have to do is upload your icon at the Gravatar site and enter your email when you leave your comment. I don't display your email---it is just used to look up which gravatar to use. There is now a separate entry for email and url when you leave a comment so that you can have a gravatar as well as a link to your web page when you leave a comment.
Look at the comments to this post for an example of what it looks like.
tlambert | April 6, 2005 Via William Sjostrom I find that Mike Adams has distilled Lancet denialism down to its essence. He quotes from the New Scientist's description of the Lancet study:
"The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by coalition forces has lead to the death of at least 100,000 civilians, reveals the first scientific study...of almost 1000 households scattered across Iraq."
You read that correctly. A scientific study "of almost 1000 households" determined that we killed 100,000 civilians in Iraq before the November election.
Believe it or not, Adams is a criminology professor and he can't conceive how…
tlambert | April 2, 2005 Via commenter JoT we have an interview with Les Roberts about his study. Roberts mentions how surprised he was that was a such a large increase in violent deaths. From his previous studies in other war situations he expected that there would be an increase in deaths, but mainly from indirect causes like disease.
The interview was prompted by a report to the UN Human Rights Commission by Jean Ziegler about the increase in malnutrition in Iraq after the invasion. (It seems to based on last year's UNDP study discussed here.) Needless to say, any report that the invasion might have made…
tlambert | April 1, 2005 The Fifth Skeptics Circle is here. The link to Mike Huben's pre-blogging blog brought back memories with this eulogy for Steve Kangas. Before there was the Lancet study there was Kellermann et al's NEJM study that found that owning a gun was associated with a three-fold increase in the risk of being murdered. This prompted many furious and ill-informed "debunkings" on Usenet. Kangas put together a nice document rebutting all of them.
tlambert | March 31, 2005The Lancet has published two letters on the Iraqi Mortality Study. In the first letter, Stephen Apfelroth claims that cluster sampling is an invalid methodology. This criticism was dealt with way back in November. Apfelroth is wrong. Cluster sampling is a widely used methodology and all the experts in the area consulted agreed that Lancet study used it appropriately. Apfelroth also raises some other objections that are mostly just speculations that the sampling was not done correctly. Roberts et al sort him out in their reply. One thing in their reply that is worth noting is that they…
tlambert | March 30, 2005 Alastair Mackay (AMac in comments) has posted his criticism of the Lancet study at Winds of Change. Unlike many of the critics, Mackay actually knows some statistics, so he cannot find fault with the methodology. All he can do is try to make a mountain of a molehill by criticising the way the study was written up, claiming that the report is "misleading" in the description of the results with and without Falluja. Now, as I have noted before, there was one sentence that was unclear about the treatment of Falluja, but this is nowhere near sufficient to support Mackay's claim that a correctly…
tlambert | March 29, 2005 The latest folks to spread the DDT hoax are Kopel, Gallant and Eisen. They claim:
[Malaria] is a disaster manufactured by First World political correctness; DDT prohibition is scientifically indefensible, and is responsible for millions of deaths every year.
However, as explained in my posts on DDT, DDT is not banned from use against malaria, and while it is still helps against malaria in some places, it is not the panacea that Kopel et al make it out to be.
They also write
But rather than limiting DDT use, the United Nations is actively encouraging a worldwide ban on DDT.63
But…