tlambert | January 16, 2005 Not only are arguments not allowed in the comments on Tim Blair's blog, it is one of the most uncivil places in Australian blogspace. The rest of this post is below the fold because it contains quotes from his comment section. Please do not read if you are offended by obscenities.
Some examples of the sort of comments you find there are:
"pimply pus-sucking facist-licking Saddam defending son of a syphallitic cock-sucking whore"
"You are a fuckwit lying scumbucket."
And directed at me:
Do you jack off at the thought of 100,000 Iraqi deaths caused by…
tlambert | January 15, 2005Today is a day of mourning in Australia for tsunami victims and John Quiggin is donating $1 to Australian Red Cross tsunami appeal for each comment left at this post on his blog. I know we have some redoubtable commenters here---go and do your stuff!
tlambert | January 14, 2005 Lott has some more comments on the NAS panel report on firearms research. (Also posted at the Volokh Conspiracy.)
Lott adds to his earlier claims that the panel was biased with this:
In fact, the panel apparently originated with the desire from some to respond to the debate on that issue and to respond specifically to my research that concludes that allowing law abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons reduces crime. I originally overheard Phil Cook and Dan Nagin discussing the need for a panel to "deal with" me in the same way that an earlier panel…
tlambert | January 12, 2005It's now two years since I started this web log. Here is my first post. Originally it was just a page for me to join the discussion about Lott's fabricated survey, but the focus seems to have expanded beyond that.
To get an idea how much blog traffic has increaased, my first post got linked by Glenn Reynolds and several others commenting on the Lott affair. As a result I had almost 1000 visits after three days. Now I get almost that much traffic every day.
tlambert | January 9, 2005 According to my logs, about half of the visitors here are using Internet Explorer. There is a critical security hole in Internet Explorer that allows a web site you visit to take over your computer. Secunia has the details and a test to see if you are vulnerable. If you are, the best solution is to switch to another browser. I recommend Firefox. It's free, has many more useful features than Internet Explorer, and you can have it installed and running in a few minutes. (Via Slashdot. PC World has more details.)
tlambert | January 8, 2005 Welcome to the 2004 Deltoid awards. Today we are giving out the Golden Rake Award, named in honour of Sideshow Bob and the rakes in the Simpsons Cape Feare episode:
How many other series would waste valuable prime-time real estate by showing a man whacking himself in the face with a garden rake not once, not twice, but NINE TIMES?!? If ever there was a gag genius in its repetitive stupidity (progressing from funny to not so funny to the funniest thing ever), this is it---merely the sharpest cut in an entire episode that just plain kills.
The award…
tlambert | January 7, 2005 I've been nominated for a Koufax award best single issue blog over at Wampum. They have me listed under the issue "Australian politics", which isn't close to being correct. I want to correct them, but how would you describe the issue that this blog is mainly about? "Junk science" would sort of cover it if the term hadn't been stolen by Steve Milloy. Any ideas?
Oh, and go over there, check out the fine blogs, and vote.
tlambert | January 6, 2005 William Connolley at RealClimate provides a useful summary of the scientific consensus on global warming. He notes
That the increase in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic is so obvious that few people question it
Of course, Louis Hissink is one of those few people, insisting that the evidence isn't just wrong, but is fraudulent. (I've added the green and red lines to the graph he presents---I'll explain what they are below.)
So far not one scintilla of evidence has been produced to counter the scientific evidence graphed in Figure 2 from Jaworowski's…
tlambert | January 5, 2005 Now I thought that Australians were being extremely generous with $110 million in private donations (that's over $5 per capita) and $1 billion from the Australian government but over at Tech Central Station Jackson Kuhl and Nick Schulz have come up with a measure that they call Amazonian Compassion where Australia comes dead last. They calculate per capita donations via Amazon to each country's Red Cross. By this measure, the US is the highest with $0.0475 per capita, way ahead of France with a mere $0.0005. They don't list Australia, but on their measure Australia gets $0.0000…
tlambert | January 4, 2005 John Lott and Michael Bellesiles are both mentioned in a new book, Historians in Trouble by Jon Wiener. Wiener argues that the reason why Lott still has his job but Bellesiles doesn't is power:
The answer briefly is power---especially power wielded by groups outside the history profession. Historians targeted by powerful outside groups can face intense media scrutiny and severe sanctions for transgressions, while historians connected to powerful outside groups can be shielded from the media spotlight as well as from the consequences of malfeasance;…
tlambert | January 2, 2005 Tim Blair posted this accusation that the UN was lying about the tsunami relief effort:
Via Diplomad, some comments from the UN's Jan Egeland:
In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an "air-freight handling centre" in Aceh.
Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers - 90 of them - which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food,…
tlambert | January 1, 2005 Lott has published an op-ed in the New York Post on the NAS panel. Lott once again claims that the panel was stacked:
The panel was set up during the Clinton administration, and all but one of its members (whose views on guns were publicly known before their appointments) favored gun control.
In his op-ed he doesn't tell us who the members are who were publicly known to be "entirely pro-gun control", but in his book The Bias Against Guns he gives three names:
Richard Rosenfeld,
who wrote an editorial in JAMA saying "current knowledge does not warrant relaxing or abandoning any of the…
tlambert | December 31, 2004 Via Jim Henley comes a test to see how nerdy you are. Like my previous quiz pages, you can post your score here and a link to your blog here.
[Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/nerd.html)
tlambert | December 29, 2004 The Sydney Morning Herald has an informative page with news and links for donations. I donated to The Australian Red Cross, who have already raised $3 million. You have to look hard to find any good aspect to such a terrible catastrophe but the generosity of my fellow human beings certainly qualifies.
tlambert | December 28, 2004 Jim Lindgren thinks the panel was too generous to Lott:
From the portions that I have read, I found the report sober, impressive, and fair, though there are substantial parts of this literature that I am unfamiliar with. As to Lott's work, I actually thought that the Council's report was too generous to his research in spots. In particular, I thought that it failed to point out just how much Lott's results are driven by poorly executed demographic controls, a point that Ayres and Donohue make effectively in their Stanford exchange. While the Council's report raises a lot of questions about…
tlambert | December 25, 2004 Here are my kids at the beach on Christmas day. Best wishes to all my readers.
Of course, to get to the beach we went through a long dark scary tunnel. Our only light source was the camera's flash.
Also on the way we walked along the top of a high cliff.
Justin was worried that Silas would fall off the cliff, so he put him on leash.
tlambert | December 23, 2004 Boffo blog tells the story of a Lott presentation at a workshop about a decade ago:
I was not prepared for how truly awful the paper was. His argument concerned how expensive elections have become in this country. ... His evidence consisted of a correlation between growth in federal spending and growth in campaign spending, and from that he concluded that Big Government caused expensive campaigns. Two lines trending upwards, and he claims with perfect seriousness---and without performing any of the necessary tests---that the one causes the…
tlambert | December 22, 2004 Louis Hissink has responded to my post on the worst argument against global warming, ever:
Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.
And you didn't think he would be able to top his argument about climate change that was inconsistent with the existence of seasons. This is an argument about astronomy that assumes that you can't see stars without a telescope.
Wait, there's more:
What has not occurred to Quiggin,…
tlambert | December 19, 2004 As I predicted, Lott claims that the panel was stacked:
My piece in the LA Times is still accurate today. While I will write up a more substantive discussion, James Q. Wilson's very unusual dissent in the first appendix says a lot. Wilson concluded that all the research provided "confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate . . . ." The NAS won't tell me how many panels have had dissents previously, though they admit that they are very rare. It is disappointing that the panel refused to let me ask questions during…
tlambert | December 18, 2004 Not content with printing op-eds by John Lott, the LA Times has published a piece of disinformation by Nick Schultz. The LA Times fails to disclose that Schultz works for a public relations company that has ExxonMobil as a client. The central message of Schultz's piece is that science will never resolve the question of climate change:
At some level, science probably will never resolve what to do about global warming. Climate change is complex, with scores of variables and time-frame considerations of decades and even centuries. Both sides have substantial data…