tlambert | November 1, 2004 Earlier, I wrote how Joyce Lee Malcolm had doctored a quote from the Textbook of Criminal Law to make it appear that self-defence was illegal in Britain. She wrote:
Now everything turns on what seems to be "reasonable" force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As Glanville Williams notes in his Textbook of Criminal Law, that requirement is "now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defense] still forms part of the law."
The word "it" does not refer to self-defence as Malcolm's addition to the quote indicates, but to…
tlambert | October 31, 2004 Sometimes I think that there must be a qualifying exam in order to write for Tech Central Station. Fail the exam and you're in. They seem to have exams in at least physics, economics, statistics, and epidemiology. Tim Worstall, the author of today's article seems to have failed both the statistics and epidemiology exams.
Worstall is criticizing a recent study published in the Lancet that found very roughly 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq after the invasion, almost all of which were violent. He writes:
At the very least one would have to add The Lancet to that list of mainstream…
tlambert | October 27, 2004 Lott has responded to Media Matters criticism of his comments on Florida 2000. Lott writes:
Media matters makes it look like I was talking about "voter disenfranchisement" (which I assume includes the non-voted ballot issue) by adding into what I said the broader statement "[on voter disenfranchisement]," and misconstrued what I was saying. I have written extensively on the myths regarding the Florida vote here, and would have been happy to get into the issue of non-voted ballots, but the amount of time available was just so limited we barely got to talk about the intimidation part of Dobb…
tlambert | October 27, 2004 Via Ralph Luker I find Andrew Ackerman's correction of a Boston Globe article that downplayed Michael Bellesiles' misconduct. The Emory panel rightly found Bellesiles guilty of falsification and other academic misconduct. It is disgraceful that the American Enterprise Institute refuses to conduct a similar investigation into John Lott's conduct.
tlambert | October 26, 2004
Baseball's World Series is played over the best of seven games. The first
two games are played at the home field of one team (we will call
this one team A), the next three at the home field of team
B, and the last two at the home field of team A. Given that
teams are more likely to win games on their home fields, does
this give team A an advantage?
Keith Burgess-Jackson
href="http://analphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004/07/myth-of-home-field-advantage-if-youre.html">argues that neither team has an advantage:
Every Series goes either four, five, six, or…
tlambert | October 25, 2004 Media Matters for America details Lott's latest bizarre claim about the 2000 election in Florida---on CNN Lott claimed:
I think a lot of the discussion about disenfranchising African-American voters, in particular I think it's been fairly sad, because I think there have been a lot of myths in Florida, for example. I mean, you have the Commission on Civil Rights did an extensive set of hearings, they weren't able to identify even one person.
Media Matters for America has the links to the Commission on Civil Rights report that puts the lie to…
tlambert | October 22, 2004 Via Pandagon I find an appallingly innumerate article on polls by Michael Barone:
Blogger Steven Den Beste has prepared an interesting chart. Den Beste charges that pollsters "deliberately gimmicked" the results, "in hopes of helping Kerry." I don't agree with that at all. But he has made another interesting observation. Eliminating some of the peaks and valleys of the Bush and Kerry percentages in realclearpolitics.com's average of recent polls, Den Beste shows that Bush's percentages have tended to rise over time while Kerry's have risen much less if at all.
He draws the Bush long-…
tlambert | October 21, 2004 Orin Kerr writes writes about Wikipedia
My very tentative conclusion, based on a just few sample queries, is that I hope no one relies on Wikipedia for anything very important. Its entries seem to be a strange mix of accurate statements and egregious errors.
My own experience is that Wikipedia is quite accurate and errors get corrected. An erroneous description of the Patriot Act that Kerr pointed to was quickly corrected. It seems counterintuitive that letting anyone edit any page would result in quality information, but that seems to be what has happened.
Kerr argues:…
tlambert | October 21, 2004 There seems to be some confusion about McKitrick's latest attempt to refute global warming. For instance, Andrew Sullivan thinks that McKitrick's famous degrees-radians screw up is part of this latest attempt. However, McKitrick claims to have refuted global warming in several different ways and the degrees-radians screw up was a in a different paper to his latest one. I decided to draw up a table to help folks sort them out.
Authors
Summary
Consequences if he is right
Status
Essex and McKitrick
There is no physical basis to average temperature.
No global…
tlambert | October 18, 2004 In this column, Richard Muller claims that McKitrick and McIntyre have shown that the hockey stick graph is an "artifact of poor mathematics". If you have been following the global warming debate this claim should look familiar, because McKitrick and McIntyre made the same claim last year as well. So what's new? Well, last year they claimed that the hockey stick was the product "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal…
tlambert | October 17, 2004 Steven den Beste has looked at a graph of polls of voting intentions and decided:
In September, I think there was a deliberate attempt to depress Kerry's numbers, so as to set up an "October comeback". Of course, the goal was to engineer a bandwagon.
This seems rather implausible to me. There are very many organizations do the polling. If all the polls are rigged, a huge number of people would have to know about it, and surely one of them would have leaked the information by now. It also seems unlikely that every single poller (including, for example,…
tlambert | October 14, 2004 Earlier, Glenn Reynolds accused me of spinning because I wrote that "the [Australian] election was not about Iraq---it was hardly an issue.". Now he approvingly links to a piece by Greg Sheridan
Labor did not buy a single ad on Iraq. Nor did Latham mention his troops-home-by-Christmas pledge in his policy speech. Indeed Iraq only figured in the last line on page 13 of a 16-page speech by Latham. ... It was rather strange that we have troops at war and they were hardly mentioned in the campaign.
Why, that's what I was saying! Do you think Reynolds…
tlambert | October 13, 2004 The grandly named EnviroTruth web site has section that purports to debunk "myths" about climate change. The "myths" include the usual false claims such as satellite measurements don't show warming, but "myth" number 11 is pretty funny.
Here's "myth" 11:
Those Who Question Whether Human Activity Contributes in Any Significant Fashion to Climate Change are Secretly Funded by Coal, Oil, Gas and Other "Smokestack" Industries.'
Brandon MacGillis of Ozone Action, a Washington DC-based public interest group, refers to global warming doubters as "part of a handful of skeptics, mostly coal…
tlambert | October 13, 2004 Glenn Reynolds, in a heroic leap, has apparently concluded that the election in Australia really was a referendum on Iraq and folks who don't think so must just be spinning.
One of those spinning must be Prime Minister John Howard, who told CNN that Iraq "wasn't the dominant factor" in the election victory.
Also spinning must be The Bulletin, which has eighteen pages on the election this week (including a whole page by Tim Blair). In what can only be part of a massive conspiracy by the Main Stream Media, Iraq is mentioned by name a grand total of zero…
tlambert | October 12, 2004 Tim Blair continues to insist that the election was about Iraq. I'll look at his arguments in a moment, but first let's look at what everybody else says about this.
Tom Allard and Mark Metherell in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Iraq flared briefly after the Jakarta bombings---most notably in the leaders' debate---but was mostly left alone by the Opposition, even though Mr Howard refused to talk about the issue, betraying his fears the missing weapons of mass destruction and increased terrorist threat could hurt this chances.
A "Labor Insider" in…
tlambert | October 11, 2004 The relentless spinning of the result of the election in Australia continues. In the New York Post John O'Sullivan's headline is "Bush wins again". I didn't even know Bush was running in the election here. O'Sullivan also writes:
Al Qaeda has received a serious setback, Kofi Annan a rebuke, France and Germany a disappointment---and the media elites a slap in the face so stinging that outside Australia Howard's victory has been a non-story.
This is just bizarre. Labor is very keen on wiping out Al Qaeda---the only difference with the government seems to be…
tlambert | October 10, 2004 The warbloggers have been attempting to spin the result of the election here to their advantage. Cori Dauber claims that the election "was a referendum on Australia's participation in Iraq", and Glenn Reynolds claims that it was "in no small part as a referendum on the war". They link to stories that provide no support for their claims and indeed undercut them by reporting that Howard did not even mention Iraq in his victory speech. No, the election was not about Iraq---it was hardly an issue.
They also continue to make hysterical attacks on…
tlambert | October 8, 2004 For reasons similar to those given by Tim Dunlop, Jason Soon and John Quiggin, I'll be voting Labor in the election today. Not that it makes a difference, since I live in Kingsford Smith, a safe Labor seat.
I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think that Labor will manage to win the election. I expect that there will be a small swing against the government, but that their vote will hold up in the marginal seats where the government has been raining money down, and they will hold onto to enough seats to stay in power.
Update: Howard has been returned, as I…
tlambert | October 4, 2004 Readers may remember Pat Michaels, who authored a paper one that "disproved" global warming by deliberately removing almost one-third of the satellite data from his analysis and co-operated with Ross McKitrick on another paper that managed to "prove" that global warming wasn't happening by mixing up degrees with radians. Alan Anderson has responded to my criticism of his claim that Kyoto was a dastardly EU plot to cripple the US economy by offering up an article by ... Pat Michaels.
I'm afraid that this article is up to Michael's usual standards. He constructs a measure of carbon…
tlambert | October 1, 2004 I see that the Sydney Morning Herald is now publishing funky conspiracy theories. Alan Anderson informs us that Kyoto is nothing but a Euro-commie plot:
Of course, everyone who is familiar with the Kyoto Protocol knows what it really is: a brazen attempt by the EU to compensate for its competitive disadvantage (the result of socialist economic policies) by hobbling the United States economy.
I like the way Anderson uses the "everyone who is familiar with X knows" locution to avoid offering any actual arguments or evidence in support of his…