BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.
The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.
But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.
Yep, this is the same team as before so people who hated the Johns Hopkins study the first time around will find more of the same to get outraged about. I will only add that an absolutely thorough survey of mortality in Iraq will guarantee that a large number of surveyors will get killed. In a Sarajevo-like environment of total, chaotic violence you can either sample and extrapolate or else you can throw up your hands Rumsfeld-style and declare that stuff happens. Like most sensible people I find the Rumsfeld approach repulsive and cavalier. Naturally any study like this has undeniable limitations so take any specific number as a somewhat fuzzified estimate. However, given that the alternative is nothing at all it strikes me as heartless in the extreme to choose nothing.
In related news, via Subcommandante Markos, NBC correspondent Jane Arraf grows almost perceptibly shrill over the knuckle-chewing idiots who claim that Baghdad is Detroit with better falafel:
I am very, very lucky. I am alive in a war zone. Most of the time I have running water and when I turn on the lights, a series of generators ensures that they come on. I don’t have to worry about saying goodbye to my family here in the morning and not knowing whether I’ll see them in the evening. I know I’m lucky because almost everyone I know in Baghdad has to worry constantly about those things.
Some readers and viewers think we journalists are exaggerating about the situation in Iraq. I can almost understand that because who would want to believe that things are this bad? Particularly when so many people here started out with such good intentions.
I’m more puzzled by comments that the violence isn’t any worse than any American city. Really? In which American city do 60 bullet-riddled bodies turn up on a given day? In which city do the headless bodies of ordinary citizens turn up every single day? In which city would it not be news if neighborhood school children were blown up? In which neighborhood would you look the other way if gunmen came into restaurants and shot dead the customers?
Almost unimaginable
Day-to-day life here for Iraqis is so far removed from the comfortable existence we live in the United States that it is almost literally unimaginable.
It’s almost impossible to describe what it feels like being stalled in traffic, your heart pounding, wondering if the vehicle in front of you is one of the three or four car bombs that will go off that day. Or seeing your husband show up at the door covered in blood after he was kidnapped and beaten.
I don’t know a single family here that hasn’t had a relative, neighbor or friend die violently. In places where there’s been all-out fighting going on, I’ve interviewed parents who buried their dead child in the yard because it was too dangerous to go to the morgue.
Imagine the worst day you’ve ever had in your life, add a regular dose of terror and you’ll begin to get an idea of what it’s like every day for a lot of people here.
Lifting any more would break the law, so head on over and read the whole thing. I would say more if Col. Pete Devlin had not already put it better:
Biggest Outrage – Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted.
Biggest offender – Bill O’Reilly – what a buffoon.
Word.
Mac Buckets
Funny how the left doesn’t mind ideology-based partisan pseudoscience when it’s designed to help them win elections.
I’ll bet the Lancet doesn’t touch it with a twenty foot pole this time (“fool them once…won’t get fooled again”). This study would have slightly more credibility had it been published by Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Gold Star for Robot Boy
You know how Instapundit constantly accuses just about everyone to his left of downplaying good news about Bush?
Just now, to confirm a suspicion, on his site I did a word search: Iraq.
Not once does he discuss The War That Shall Not Speak Its Name, and the only time it’s mentioned in a post is in a book title.
Speaking of hiding news. Fucking hack.
scarshapedstar
Democracy, whiskey, and dead!
srv
Funny how the right doesn’t mind ignoring the issue completely. How about we all take up a collection to send Mac to do his own survey?
scarshapedstar
And, yes, Instahack is really getting quite sickening. I love his recent spate of posts about low gas prices. WTF is that supposed to prove, exactly? Might as well shout out “Bread! Circuses!”
BruceR
Buckets: the story does in fact say that the Lancet is publishing this new study on their website this weekend.
Thomas
MacBuckets,
You had me at ‘ideology’, you lost me at ‘psuedoscience’.
Thomas
Oh, and running down the Instapundit page is frightening as shit. What goes on in the man’s mind? It’s like Volga-Volga, but with blogs, and third-tier law professors. Guy yells at Code Pink! Yay! Iran represses! Boo! Steven Den Beste!!
craigie
Ok, you win! Let’s say “only” 250,000 innocent people died so George could wear the codpiece. Happy now?
r€nato
people like mac buckets remind me exactly of holocaust deniers, who love to say, “oh, it was only a few hundred thousand jews! Not six million!”
As if an order of magnitude less makes it OK.
Thank goodness someone is trying to count at least. To just throw up one’s hands like mac buckets or Donald Rumsfeld, has always been grotesque to me. Iraqis are humans too, and to act like US/coalition deaths are the only ones that really count (although the Bush regime would prefer we forget them too), demonstrates a cruelty, callousness and inhumanity of the first order.
I bet mac buckets has the temerity to call himself ‘pro-life’ as well.
Pb
And in that vein… I’m sure you’ve already seen this, r€nato, but I found Glenn Greenwald’s post on Padilla’s torture to be absolutely horrifying. Just remember, kids, Jose Padilla is an American citizen who was not charged or convicted with a crime for years and years–and tortured in the meantime! If it could happen to him, it could happen to you.
But really, even the fact that it happened to him is appalling–in fact, it’s exactly the sort of evil that our country was founded to *prevent*. And as an American with a conscience, I cannot condone such actions, nor will I ever support anyone who does. Either The GOP–The Party of Torture–is no longer an American political party, or this is no longer America.
scs
And this doesn’t happen in the US in certain neighborhoods? I remember we tried the math about the stats here a few months ago. They didn’t come out that differently. Maybe Jane needs to spend more time in bad neighborhoods in Detroit.
Dustbin Of History
scs didn’t even read Tim’s sample, let alone the article:
I think I’ll head out to the county morgue tomorrow and see where they stash today’s litter of 60 bullet-riddled bodies.
Richard 23
scs, where would you rather be, Bagdad or Detroit?
Shall we take up a collection and send you there?
The Other Steve
Please, don’t accuse scs of being dishonest.
She is, afterall, arguing in good faith.
The Other Steve
I’ve got $500 right here for a plane ticket.
What do you say scs? Are you ready for your all expense paid vacation to Baghdad?
The Other Steve
By my calculations we still have about 3 million people to kill before we hit the 15% target mark we left behind in Veitnam.
[15% is the percentage of the population who died in Vietnam total from both sides in the civil war.]
Rusty Shackleford
Andrew
Science, science, science.
Test post.
cd6
Remember back in our first crack at the Constitution where brown people were equal to white people in a 3/5 ratio? I think that still applies to new democracies like Iraq. So really, only like 360,000 people have died. And that’s not so bad, that’s like the same number of people killed by bumble bees each year.
You defeatocrats and your wacky sensationalistic news. Get over yourselves.
Jill
Just keep burying your heads in the sand and it will be alright.
r€nato
Just remember, kids, Jose Padilla is an American citizen who was not charged or convicted with a crime for years and years—and tortured in the meantime!
and we now know that whatever Padilla actually did, he is far, far, far, far from the terrorist mastermind the government originally and hysterically painted him as.
So this guy was tossed in a hole and tortured and really he was a very minor player. Some guy who went to an al-Qaeda training camp but never really did anything and certainly was not about to set off a ‘dirty bomb’.
DougJ
Six hundred thousand deaths is just a comma, to my way of thinking.
And what about all the people in Iraq who haven’t died? How come we never hear about them? You hear about the 60 bullet-riddled bodies that turn up in the streets every morning, but not about the teacher giving her class a lesson the fundamentals of democracy, not about the 50 new recruits at Baghdad’s first fire station. Sure, maybe 600,000 people died violent horrible deaths because of the invasion but that leaves millions of Iraqis leading happy, productive lives.
DougJ
And that’s not so bad, that’s like the same number of people killed by
bumble beessting rays each year.cd6
Thanks for bringing home what I was trying to say DougJ.
Right to the heart.
Just like a stingray barb… too soon?
ThymeZone
test
ThymeZone
I think what this thread proves is that DougJ is quality spoof, and scs really needs to find another hobby. That “Detroit” reference was about as lame as anything we’ve ever seen here.
The Other Steve
Just curious, but who does this remind you of?
Interesting…
Pb
They’ve got Republicans running Russia now? Well hopefully they’ll do a better job over there than the Trotskyites have over here…
ThymeZone
We’ve looked into Putin’s soul.
It’s murky, like borscht.
Mac Buckets
“Innocent?” Really — hmmmmm, you’ll have to show me where the Johns Hopkins study only counted the “innocent.” I’ll wait.
And 250,000 would still be a totally made-up number. It’s 5X higher than the documented deaths at Iraq Body Count or the estimates from the UN. Face it, guys, this is a partisan October-surprise re-run of 2004 (and see how successful that was!), not a scientific study. And funny — I don’t see any of our self-proclaimed Guardians Of The Purity And Nonpartisanship Of Science complaining a bit. Hypocrites.
neil
Man, Buckets, you’re really slipping lately.
DougJ
Better that 60 bullet-riddled bodies turn up on the streets of Baghdad than in the streets of our cities. Although at least that many people die violently in Detroit each day, unless I’m mistaken.
chopper
i love how the right acts like they actually give a damn about the average iraqi, but when people try to count the number of dead ones they can all go to hell.
DougJ
Mac, you’re free to disagree with the study. Some experts do as well. But it’s not junk, it uses a widely accepted method, although the sample size is a bit small to make it that reliable. The thing is this: it’s very hard to estimate the number of people dying violently throughout Iraq. The Baghdad morgues give a good count for Baghdad, but there doesn’t seem to be a very reliable way of estimating the number of deaths in places like Anbar province.
chopper
baghdad isn’t a neighborhood. all of the cities in iraq where such violence is rampant do not add up to ‘certain neighborhoods’. if you think baghdad can be compared to the south side of chicago or south central LA, you’re more unhinged than i previously thought.
and no, i don’t think thousands of people are killed every month in detroit.
DougJ
That’s silly. You think Al Qaeda wants people to know it helped foment the violence that has led to the deaths of 600,000 people, mostly Muslims? You can agree or disagree, but it’s not “Al Qaeda propaganda.”
ThymeZone
Mac, Defense Guy, Darrell and a few other righty spambot sockputppets were saying the same things last year when we were estimating Iraqi casualties at 300k based on pretty decent data.
Why doesn’t the right have a plan for counting the dead in Iraq?
chopper
even within baghdad the morgue and hospital numbers will end up being on the absolute low side. many people don’t bring their dead relatives to the hospital or the morgue. and its not like kidnappers dump dead bodies off at the local hospital either.
Mac Buckets
Strawman for sale!
Pb
I don’t mind if Mac disagrees with the study–actually I expect that from him–but it’d be nice to see him try to actually refute it for once, with something besides hand-waving and blustering outrage at Liberals for their nefarious statistical ways…
DougJ
Fair enough, but some of your rhetoric took you precariously close to the position occupied by that particular strawman.
Want to take back your comment about it being pro-Al Qaeda?
Pharniel
re – the detroit thing.
This came up in a vampire larp (don’t laugh, you learn something form everywhere)
detroit has like, 300 murders a YEAR. Greater metropolitan area. and it’s close to one of the most violent places in the us.
And this is in a place where people answer the door with shotguns (true story. City club is right near the cass corridor, freind broke down. guy answered the door with a shotgun. ‘course he also let him use the phone once he realized he was drunk and lost white boy and not someone there to rob him)
ThymeZone
Sure he does. Mac wants nothing more than reasonable conversation. Mac cares deeply about Iraqi casualties. And he care even more deeply about what goes on here.
neil
By the way, the Iraq Body Count thing is a total non sequitir. IBC keeps track of reported deaths. Surely Mac is not so naive as to believe that every violent death in Iraq (or anywhere else) gets reported. Surely Mac is not so naive as to believe there have been no new mass graves dug in the Iraqi countryside since the invasion. What, then?
By the way, IBC is overtly partisan and the UN, well, I don’t think I need to mention. So why is the Johns Hopkins study, published in a British medical journal, the one that’s intolerably partisan and designed to influence the elections?
Mac Buckets
It’s hard work. Counting is hard. Hard work. But they do it because they love it — if you define “it” as “being shills for Teh Donk right before an election.” You simply can’t reasonably ignore that these same guys put out a similar fiasco in October 2004. The timing should tip you guys off as to what the real agenda is.
The UN samples 20X this size in their similar studies, and they have been in the same ballpark with the Iraq Body Count number. So these JH guys publish a number 12 TIMES HIGHER, based on basically the same debunked, small-sample methodology as last time, the real scientists cringe, while the Enlightened Left sucks up this result like a Hoover Deluxe because it fits their agenda (some of the less-bright ones even think this study measured the deaths of “innocent” Iraqis!).
Lots of questions are hard. Global warming, stem cells, evolution, counting…you guys just need to decide whether partisan fake-science is allowed or not.
Mac Buckets
Two strawmen for sale!
Mac Buckets
You should, because I’m smart, and I remember 2004. Funny thing is, I expect the same from you. Why are you not disagreeing with the study, also? Oh, riiiiight, partisan shilling. Gotcha.
If you need to hear it from me, just apply all my arguments against their last October-surprise bogus survey, OK? They still apply.
I think the real statisticians do a nice enough job refuting this mess:
That’s an awesome last quote — wish I’d have written it.
neil
Yep, those nefarious Johns Hopkins researchers headed out to Iraq in May of 2005 with nothing in mind except the submission date to get published in the October Lancet. Those fiends!
ThymeZone
So Mac, what is your best estimate of Iraqi casualties so far in this war?
ThymeZone
{ voice of Hank Hill }
I tell you what ….
Nothing builds confidence more than watching the little drunk of a president up there (a) taking time to pimp his great economic successes first in today’s news conference, and only then (b) telling us about the situation in North Korea. Especially when he uses the word nu-cu-lurr about twenty five times.
I feel really …. safe now.
neil
Here’s a hint, Mac: ‘Real statisticians’ are not primarily worried about the ‘tone’ of a study. Sheesh. Or perhaps I missed your appointment as Spokesman for All Real Scientists Everywhere.
Tsulagi
He’s got that right. O’Reilly should stick with the war he’s most qualified to fight, the WotWoC, War on the War on Christmas. Dobson needs him to keep his Field Marshall commission for that seasonal war.
Let’s see, a MOE of 350k or so on deaths. We’re just talking about a little more or a little less pepper in Anytown, USA. No whoop.
So if Baghdad is Detroit and Iraq Michigan, fine. Mission Accomplished. Put up the banners and light up the fireworks in that $20m party. No need to keep 150,000 troops around Detroit and constant air patrols. Call this comma printed. Time to come home from New Detroit.
neil
By the way, the sample size of this study was slightly more than twice as large as that of the 2004 study. It’s likely that the previous study was artificially low because of the smaller sample size.
Here’s the actual paper for anybody who hasn’t been fully satisfied by the comments of Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, about the ‘tone’ of the paper.
DougJ
Come on, Mac. You can do better than this.
First, explain to me how your comment about Al Qaeda didn’t imply that the study was pro-Al Qaeda. Not the motives of the people who did it, but the content of the study. Explain how that isn’t what the comment “This study would have slightly more credibility had it been published by Al Qaeda in Iraq” means.
ThymeZone
Still calculating that answer?
Punchy
Better to have spent bullets over there so they cannot shoot them over here.
John S.
Why do lefty pseudo-scientists keep trying to politicize statistics? I find it all too convenient that these numbers came out just weeks before an election.
I’m outraged, I tell you, OUTRAGED!
Mac and scs are right on the money again with their observations.
/wingnut
ThymeZone
There’s no Bush presser thread up yet … but whatever you do, be sure to catch in its entirety and on video, not in print, the president’s full answer to the the first question in this conference.
If there was ever any doubt as to how profoundly this guy is fighting above his weight class … this might be the thing that erases that doubt forever.
Try to parse the words, if you can … but especially, listen to the voice and see the body language. This is a petulant kid called into the principal’s office and making an excuse, not a president leading the strongest nation on earth.
God, what an embarassment this asshole is.
Punchy
Hoooooleeeeeey shit….are you calling evolution “fake-science”??
Talk about credibility SHOT in one post. Thanks, Mac, for confirming what I already suspected.
Pb
On moonbats and wingnuts…
ThymeZone
He had a lot to lose.
ThymeZone
I think we should give Mac credit for taking plenty of time to try to get the most accurate possible answer.
Steve
I guess this is why you publish findings in a peer-reviewed journal, so they can be openly critiqued. As we’ve seen on the climate change issue, though, the Right doesn’t believe in peer review. They’d rather trust whatever they read on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. “Someone says climate change is bunk? Good enough for me!”
This casualty figure is scary and I’d really prefer to think it’s not true. But I haven’t seen a single substantive critique yet, just Mac’s partisan knee-jerk reaction. I’d love to see someone weigh in with an actual argument of substance, but I know better than to hold my breath waiting for that.
Mac Buckets
Naive as newborn kittens. That’s why I just can’t stay mad at you guys! So cute.
Let me answer your question with questions.
When did the two JH studies come out? Why do you suppose that was?
As to accuracy, how big was the UN sample compared to the JH sample?
Do you know what a Confidence Interval is? Do you know what the respective CIs of the JH study and the UN Development Council’s study were?
Which study took as a cluster sample site a typical Iraqi town (assuming that all Iraqi towns took about the same number of casualties — keep reminding yourself that this is supposed to be science) called Fallujah, a town which claimed a full 2/3 of the violent deaths reported (deaths which were then — scientifically — extrapolated to the rest of the Iraq population — scientifically).
Partisan toward the Coalition? Wow, that will come as a great shock to almost everybody in the entire world.
Mac Buckets
Three strawmen for sale!
ThymeZone
Whoa. George Bush doesn’t really have any idea, either, as of two minutes ago.
So obviously, both Bush and Mac are taking this very seriously since they are still working on their own estimates of the casualty figures. It’s important that we get this right.
ThymeZone
Hmm.
{ chirping of crickets }
Proud Liberal
Dead Ender Bucketboy:
Care to tell us how you have determined that their survey was biased by ideology? Or why this is pseudoscience? Just because you dont’ like the results? ahhhh…. State of Denial not only applies to the Moron in chief.. but to his ass kissing nitwit lackies as well.
ThymeZone
G. Bush, 10/11/06
Your president thinks you should take your GWOT advice from Al Qaeda. He thinks we should let terrorists tell us what to do.
Tim F.
To be fair, until the study becomes publicly available we don’t have much more than a synopsis to go on. Asking Mac to exhaustively debunk an abstract strikes me as unreasonable. That said, preemptively dismissing an abstract before the paper is hardly any more credible. Mac particularly weakens his case with loaded phrases like ‘pseudoscience.’
Celestial drops are pseudoscience. While I have my beefs with medical research in general (MDs often bave a hard time with basic experimental design) this study passed peer review at a stringent journal. We are talking about The Lancet, not the Wisconsin Journal of Psychology. Love it or hate it, fine, but calling this work anything other than science is simple hackery.
demimondian
What Mac is happy to ignore is that his story’s been refuted before. The UN study was not designed to measure total casualties, and was performed long before the original Lancet study. It did not cover the country, and it didn’t attempt to measure total deaths.
Yes, Mac’s been told that before, so he knows his claims are false. Where I come from, we call knowingly repeating false claims “lying”.
scs
Casualties- about 50 a day, and that is a fairly large number I’d say – so in 3 years – 54,750. I’d say that is a more realistic number – not 700 dead a day. That stat is just voodoo.
ThymeZone
Asking Mac, and the Potemkin government he supports, to make an educated estimate of Iraqi casualties is not unreasonable. What’s unreasonable is that we have nearly five years of war and neither the government nor its defenders apparently have any idea how many casualties there have been, how to tally them, or how to react to their own number, or how to present a face to the Iraqi nation itself that deals with the number.
Reasonable? How is that even possible? How is that even concievable?
Mac Buckets
Oh, I’m entirely sure that Al Qaeda in Iraq is delighted with a study that overreports deaths in Iraq by 12X. It’s a PR boon to them, I’m sure.
But that’s not what I posted. I was just thinking of the only other group who would have less credibility than the JH pseudo-scientists after their last study got destroyed. I mean, the only people who bought that tripe were the Guardians Of The Purity and Nonpartisanship Of Science. You know, the hypocrites.
cd6
Here’s why you can’t spoof the unspoofable
The “spoof” reaction to this story is to attempt to minimize the number of deaths by saying the same number die from Stingrays or in the streets in Detroit. And its such a ridiculous position that even hardcore right wing nutjobs would never advance the argument, in theory.
But wait.
Here comes RedState, where a poster says this:
Winguts = unspoofable
I concede defeat
ThymeZone
Or for that matter, conceivable?
scs
And in terms of Detroit – we DID do the math here a few months ago. Don’t make me look it up again. But if you take the high crime neighborhoods (ie Detroit) from the high crime years and compare it to the death rate in Iraq, minus the death rate that went on before the war from all of Saddam’s killings, it was very close – now that was a fact.
Of course I agree it’s not a totally fair comparison, as you are taking a neighborhood compared to a whole area, and the type of violence is different in quality, as anyone in Iraq is vulnerable as compared to gang members, and the type of violence is more horrific (chopped off heads vs. bullets), but the stat is just one tool to put it into another perpective.
The Other Steve
It’s interesting how much more shrill Mac Buckets has been sounding lately.
It used to be he’d just disagree. Now it’s all shouts of psuedoscience, and accusing everybody of being stupid.
ThymeZone
John, Tim? People are going to think that you are writing this stuff as spoof to humiliate and embarass the Right.
And assuming that you are (since I can’t think of any other rational explanation for this nonsense) … you need to get DougJ or somebody who really knows how to spoof to consult with you and do it right.
DougJ
Look on the bright side: neither Iraqis nor Detroitis have conducted any nuclear tests recently. That, at least, is an areas where Bush deserves a lot of credit. But you’ll never hear that from the moonbats.
The Other Steve
I have an idea.
the plane for Iraq happens to leave from Detroit International. So here’s your opportunity to do a first person comparison.
I’ve got $500 that says you are too cowardly to go.
ThymeZone
“I believe that the president should apply all diplomatic measures before committing the military.”
G.W. Bush, 10/11/06
Honest, he actually said this.
Steve
How interesting.
I kinda see where this discussion is heading.
Mac Buckets
Their last survey was thoroughly trashed, for obvious reasons. Pseudoscience is a polite term for what that proved to be — or do you wish to defend that one, too, Tim? If so, let’s go!
Anyway, let’s look at this one:
Same guys as last time.
Same timing as last time.
Same small sample as last time.
Same result as last time.
I guess I’m the only person here who ever learned from the hot stove the first time.
No, I’m just kidding. I know that you’re all just shilling for the Donks. You’ll believe anything, no matter how un-scientific, that supports your partisan views. You’re just like the Fundy Christians, just on the opposite side.
scs
I’ve been through many bad neighborhoods, if not Detroit. I can tell you – when everyone on the street stops and stares at your car as you drive by, and not in a friendly way – it is not a comfortable feeling. I guess it’s all about blending in though. If I looked like I belonged in either place, here or in Iraq, I’d take your ticket and go.
ThymeZone
I’m waiting for the Bush presser transcript. He addressed this very question this morning, and if I understood him correctly, he thinks the answer is closer to 30,000 than to 600,000.
Now I suppose I could take that to mean that it could be 250,000.
But the most important thing I got from his answer is that he has no fucking idea what the number is.
I think that is rather remarkable.
Tim F.
SCS, those numbers smell remarkably like colon. Please give one blessed reason why anybody should care about figures that you seem to have pulled out of thin air.
On a given day between twenty and one hundred bodies are found dead in Baghdad alone. Those are just the bodies discovered and offcially tallied. That doesn’t count that large number of Iraqis who do not live in the city of Baghdad.
It would take a staggeringly naive person to think that every single violent death makes it into the official daily tally, or even a majority. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, SCS, but to be taken seriously you have to make a minimal effort to meet reality halfway.
Punchy
You obviously have no friggin clue about how long it takes to get something published. Scientists have NO CONTROL over when their papers are published, as reviewers force changes, publishers miss deadlines, etc. But you just continue to peddle your partisan hackery. It’s amusing, at least.
And THIS:
Ha ha! Does Detroit have multiple car bombings every day? Does Detroit have DOZENS of citizens killed every day? Does DPD find dozens of bullet-ridden bodies in the streets every other day? Just a ridiculous comparison.
DAMN you righties are dishonest.
ThymeZone
I guess that explains why you are still defending the Bush administration after almost six years of this crap.
As for casualties …
Neither you, nor they, seem to have any idea what they think the actual number is.
Is that correct, or is there some other meaning we should take from your silence on the question?
Pb
Ok, so let’s do a fairer comparison–Washington DC vs. Baghdad:
DougJ
Why don’t you try buying your crack in a white neighborhood then?
scs
Okay – if we average 20 and 100 – we get 60. Wow, 10 off – my bad! Thanks for setting my guess straight Tim!
ThymeZone
G.W. Bush, 10/11/06
Yes, he actually said this, just a few minutes ago.
scs
Umm, I would say in cerain high crime areas, in high crime years -yes. 365 days a year x 12 = 4380 murders a year. Not too far off, I don’t think – if you adjust the population of Detroit to the population of much larger Baghdad.
ThymeZone
G.W. Bush, 10/11/2006
How can you comment on something like that?
ThymeZone
Uh huh.
scs
Ha Ha. I think the most noticebale time that happened was when I got lost in the SE side of DC, and this was before a lot of the gentrification happened in DC. The way the people reacted, you’d think I was the only white person to ever drive down their street. I think that gave me a litle taste of how I’d feel in Baghdad.
Proud Liberal
by whom? Evolution theory is thoroughly trashed by some. Global Warming is thoroughly trashed by some. That the earth was not flat was thoroughly trashed by some. Admit it Dead Ender Bucketboy, you only hear what you want to hear. State of Denial. Faith based reality. Whatever you want to call it, you and the rest of the Bush Cult have lost touch with reality and you know what bucketboy? The American public is catching on. They see the wizard behind the curtain.
Tim F.
Let’s go to back to what I said:
Let’s walk through how dumb scs’s response was. First scs claimed that maybe 50 people die in Iraq per day. I respond that between twenty and 100 people are discovered dead in Baghdad alone. That means that only counting thirty percent or less of Iraqis who live in Baghdad, and only counting the names that make the news, you already exceed scs’s fabricated total.
So I say:
I didn’t point out that it would be simply retarded to think that every violent death happens in Baghdad. Some things you just don’t have to say.
scs says:
Either scs cannot read a simple paragraph or else she has committed herself to confirming every single point that I make.
Mac Buckets
You are correct, but that’s not the real issue.
If one sample site so throws off your data that you must scrub it, doesn’t that point out that your sample site was ill-chosen and that your sample size is too small?
Mac Buckets
That was from Kaplan’s debunk in Slate, btw.
ThymeZone
Mac’s estimate of Iraq casualties:
scs
Are you high? Or a spoof?
Proud Liberal
the thread moron:
Think again. TOTAL number of murders in Detroit in 2004 = 385. That is just about 1 per day. A tad off there Einstein.
,
Mac Buckets
If that were true, I’d be saying that no one died in Iraq, our troops are home, and that the Astros are going to the World Series.
I think you’re projecting.
ThymeZone
The city of Detroit is just a piece of the metro area.
The Detroit area and Baghdad have about the same population.
Proud Liberal
why? is ANYBODY saying that?
Mac Buckets
You have no idea how wrong you are. I even know how long it took to get this particular study published.
Davebo
Well I’d say Mac Buckets have nailed it.
Come on people! Obviously we have thousands of democrat operatives running around Iraq drilling holes in people’s heads as part of the October Suprise.
Well let’s see what “not too far off” really means.
Population of Detroit: 951,270
Homocides in Detroit (2004): 384
Population of Baghdad: 5,948,800
What’s that they say about horshoes and hand grenades?
ThymeZone
In case you have no idea what a Metropolitan Statistical Area is …
This will give you an idea. The City of Detroit is not statistically comparable to Baghdad. The Detroit Metro Area, on the other hand, clearly is.
Once freedom has been on the march long enough for Iraqis to properly measure their statistical areas, this will become more understandable to you. At the present rate of progress, this should happen sometime around the year 2088.
Andrew
Did you guys hear about the mortar attack in Detroit that hit the ammo dump and led to 8 hours of explosions?
Proud Liberal
I can now see why dead ender bucketboy is such a fan of Bush. They both live in this alternative universe. A bizarro world of right wing talking poiints. Or, as Woodward calls it, State of Denial
Mac Buckets
Oh, you’re right — it’s complete coincidence that in the Octobers before the last two elections, these same guys have published shocking, out-of-whack casualty counts. How naive do you have to pretend to be to be a Donk?
Mac Buckets
If you don’t accept bogus studies, you love Bush! Ahhhh, the intellectual rigor of the Caveman Left.
scs
Tim – you make a couple of assumptions here that do not pan out. First of all, I did not specify whether my casualty guess was just for Baghdad or all of Iraq. You assummed all, but you know what they say about ‘assume’.
Second of all, you are assuming that between 20 and 100 is closer to the average of 60 bodies a day. Even though I granted that, just to be on the safe side, I would guess that although 60 is the median, it’s not the mean. I would guess the total is closer to 20 than 100 on any given day, as we hear about the larger more sensational findings on larger intervals than we hear about the smaller daily totals.
So of course, I am just guessing, but I am making a guess based on the news reports we hear everyday. And since we hear the majority of casualties are in Baghdad, and we all know how many we hear eveyday, I would say my guess is in line with what the media reports. But if you want to trust a census where the scientifically rigourous question is – do you know anyone killed in Baghdad – then be my guest.
scs
You have to take only the population for the high crime areas only in the high crime years. I guess you’re going to make me look it up again aren’t you…
Crust
Okay – if we average 20 and 100 – we get 60. Wow, 10 off – my bad! Thanks for setting my guess straight Tim!
Nice try, scs. You do realize that Baghdad accounts for roughly 10% of the population of Iraq? So multiplying the 60 estimated for reported violent deaths in Baghdad by 10, we’re already at 600 a day. Sounds like you agree with the study.
(Of course, many — probably most — violent deaths will not be reported, so that would get us to a still higher number. On the other hand, maybe Baghdad is more violent than average in Iraq. Anyway this seems to tie out reasonably well with the study.)
Proud Liberal
Is it me or is bucket boy starting to sound a lot like Captain Queeg? Next he’ll be asking who ate the strawberries.
mrmobi
scs:
When is your “perspective” going to allow you to understand that we have lost Iraq?
I’m calling bullshit on the Detroit thing. It was bullshit when you argued it before and it’s bullshit now. You are dishonest, and you’re enabling a criminal cabal which doesn’t give a shit about our troops. They are simply tools to be used to retain power.
The Detroit statistic is unprovable because the death rate under Saddam is un-knowable. I hope the JH study is incorrect, but the fact is our government doesn’t care how many die in Iraq. We are all just cogs in the great wheel of death and destruction they call “the war on terror.” The perspective you seek can be found simply by opening your eyes and reading a little every day at Juan Cole’s site. Better yet, read “Fiasco.” It is not partisan to want to know the truth about a failed policy. In fact, it’s un-American not to.
As Americans, we need to know about the suffering we cause while we sit comfortably at home. Wake up, your government is perpetrating a great wrong against people who had nothing to do with the people who attacked us on 9/11.
It’s despicable and dishonest of you to compare Detroit to Baghdad, and it’s stupid of you to ignore facts and support a corrupt government.
scs
And what proportion of the daily deaths of Iraq does Baghdad constitute, pray tell? Perhaps the great majority?
Davebo
I can assure you Mac Buckets. The thousands of murdered people in Iraq could care less when the estimate of their numbers was released.
Just as you could obviously care less about their murders.
Despite your psychosis, some people have more concerns than what is politically damaging to Dubya.
Obviously you don’t.
Crust
Oops. It’s West Baghdad that’s roughly 10% of the population not Baghdad as a whole, my bad. (I was misremembering this post by Juan Cole.) Anyway, the basic point stands. And Tim F. did a better job of replying at 11:04 anyway (missed that, otherwise I would have kept my trap shut).
Pb
Wow. Just saw on the news that the army plans to keep current troop levels in Iraq *through 2010*. Now *that’s* staying the course!
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
You still have to throw in all the other cities and provinces, scs. I think they lose more than 10 people a day in, say, Ramadi. Then again, Ramadi’s probably no worse than Camden. Karbala is like north Philly. Kirkuk is like Gary, Indiana. Tikrit is like, I don’t know, East St. Louis. So, if we throw those cities in and factor the death tolls, it’s only fair to throw in the corresponding US cities, too. Then I guess your statistics would work.
Or we could always go by the Redstate commenter, and say we just haven’t killed enough of them yet. When the last Iraqi lies dead, there will be peace. Until then, we’ll fight the dead-enders until the end.
It’s true. I bet Churchill has a lot more books written about him than Neville Chamberlain does, and this is pretty much the same situation.
30 years from now, you moonbats will be very, very embarrassed for opposing this President.
Pb
Yeah, we’re going to make you look it up.
Davebo
Pharniel
Thanks for the backup proud liberal.
Seriously. SCS, multiple people have done the #’s for detroit. it’s Not That Bad.
(it’s just, y’know, mind crushing 1st world poverty, where you are eating out of dumpsters as opposed to 3rd world poverty, where there isn’t any food to be scavanged)
Crust
And what proportion of the daily deaths of Iraq does Baghdad constitute, pray tell? Perhaps the great majority?
Why would you think that? I mean the reporters are in Baghdad for the most part so that’s what we mostly hear about, but sectarian violence is in large parts of the country. (Note most of the violent deaths are Iraqis killing Iraqis.)
Proud Liberal
no… to call a study by a respected University and peer reviewed, to be bogus without any evidence supporting such a claim, makes you to be the one lacking in intellectual rigor.
Lets all remember, that dead ender bucketboy over here was the one that for months and months was using ONE poll taken right after the election in Iraq to support his whole position on Iraq. ONE POLL in a country where people were conditioned to give the interviewer the answers the interviewer wanted. Now.. that wasn’t a bogus poll of course because it supported bucketboys position. It was the holy grail of public opinion in Iraq… that we wre the great beloved liberators of Iraq and that eveyone was happy and singing kumbaya. Yeah, right.
Bucketboy you have zero credibility on Iraq. You were right there with these incompetents that said Iraq would have WMD, that Iraq oil would pay for the war, mission accomplished, that we would be greeted as liberators and the dozens of proclaimations of making “great progess” when, as Woodward’s book now documents, we were doing everything but.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Also, aren’t there tiny communities in Texas and Oregon and, well, everywhere in America, basically, where serial killers operate undetected? And don’t some of those serial killers chop off heads? so, if we take the town of Nowheresville from Anystate, America, population 250 or something, and there’s a serial killer there who’s beheaded, I don’t know, 200 people in the last 10 years, isn’t that town worse off than Baghdad?
I don’t expect an honest answer from you moonbats, but for posterity’s sake I still had to pose the question.
Punchy
WTF? Now you’re adjusting for per capita? Any other statistical manipulations you want to make?
YOU said Detroit was just as deadly as Baghdad. NOW you want to adjust all the perameters and do a per capita measure??? Please, spare us all and STFU.
RSA
Shouldn’t rightwingers, for consistency, argue that the bin Laden video tape released in late October, 2004, was similarly politically motivated? (“Why do you suppose that was–who would al Qaeda vote for?”)
Tim F.
This pretty much sums up why you usually get the responses that you get, scs. I have explained twice that the assumptions behind your “guess” are dumb to the point of being legally dead. A credible person cannot possibly assume that (1) every death happens in Baghdad, and (2) every death, or even a majority, makes it into the news media. Yet you do exactly that.
One more time for the record, to be taken seriously you need to at least meet reality halfway. Give it a try sometime.
Steve
The sample sites weren’t chosen, they were randomly selected.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with disregarding a clear statistical outlier that happened to turn up in the random process. The effect of excluding Fallujah was, of course, to UNDER-report the number of violent deaths in Iraq as a whole, but it still seems like the scientifically correct thing to do.
I really don’t understand your criticism. First you said the study was laughable because it included Fallujah; I responded by pointing out that it actually excluded Fallujah. Now you want to tell me that that’s “not the real issue” (wow, it sure seemed to be when you first brought it up), and that excluding Fallujah isn’t acceptable either.
I found this response to Kaplan (and some of the other critics) to be pretty comprehensive.
neil
Tim, if you didn’t notice, the study as printed in Lancet has been released. But please, be mindful of the tone!
Proud Liberal
yes.. just one more manipulation, she now wants to eliminate Muslim men from that stats since…. well…. she dont’ like Muslim men that much so fuck ’em. so.. if we eliminate Muslim men from the death toll in Iraq and we compare Detroit’s bad neighborhoods, adjust for population, eliminate anything outside of Baghdad, dont’ include sectarian violence or bombings on Mondays we get something something quite quite close.
Pb
Well, John Zogby says he looked at the survey, and that the methodology is sound, and the people involved are reputable–but *critics disagree*! Who is right? We report, you decide!
scs
Okay found this for New Orleans:
So with a population of about 500,000 that equals 4210 dead per year in Baghdad or about 11 dead a day. If you could separate out just the high crime neighborhoods in New Orleans from the stats- probably even closer. Since we know from Katrina that 30% of Nola lives in poverty – if we take 30% of Nola population, 500,000 * .30= 150,000 population of high crime areas, the comparable rate for Baghdad is 14,033 per year. Even closer, to about 38 dead per day.
Anyway, I agree this stat doesn’t really mean much. But it is just interesting to note – that if you lived in a high crime neighborhood in US cities such as Nola in the high crime years – your chance of being violently murdered was not all that small either.
ThymeZone
From a guy who has no idea what the casualty counts actually are.
ThymeZone
Of course, on all other subjects, he is the frigging Oracle of Delphi.
ThymeZone
If the Potemkin Government actually cared about Iraqi casualties, and accuracy in tallying them, wouldn’t it be actually tallying casualties and reporting a figure?
Wouldn’t the president be able to narrow his range down from “30,000 to 600,00” in a press conference?
The question is, do they know, and are covering up the real number, or do they actually have no fucking idea?
Proud Liberal
TZ you have not exactly been Carnac the Magnificent of late either.
scs
Tim you’re really not that bright are you? AGAIN – WHERE did I say my guess for Baghdad was supposed to represent ALL of Iraq. (Hint- I didn’t.)
And 2, where did I say that EVERY death makes it into the media? I didn’t. What I implied if you had comprehended, was that the media gives us as good as guideline that we have. We don’t have the same sort of census we do in other coutries, with neighborhoods and hospitals sending neat little murder rate charts to the central government. We have to go by what we have. Second of of all – did you ever consider the media may EXAGGERATE the death rate? You didn’t, did you. So there may be inaccuracies both ways. We really don’t know what the rate is. But the most reliable way we have so far is the REPORTS of the deaths. If you just want to guess and make up figures beyond the reports, then again, be my guest.
ThymeZone
Funny as hell. Your best of the day. So far.
Oh, and since the blasts were happening somewhere in “South Detroit” nobody really knows or cares about the details. We assume that some shantytowns might have been affected, but we have no good intel on that.
Tim F.
Not only is it not wrong, given the nature of the study it was probably mandatory. Statisticians doing this sort of large-scale data analysis usually perform automatic outlier tests and discard anything that passes.
Of course for the eighteenth or nineteenth time on this thread, keeping that outlier would have made their final number even worse. So if they juked the numbers for partisan purposes they certainly didn’t do a consistent job of it since I can think of several ways to tweak the survey in order to get an outlier back into the total.
ThymeZone
Look out, Tim. Next she’ll (he’ll?) be calling you a criminal and suggesting that you are guilty of sexual harassment.
ThymeZone
The media that said Richard Jewell did the Atlanta bombing, and that Iraq had WMDs?
Or another media?
ThymeZone
Yeah, but I do look good in the hat.
Tim F.
You responded directly to a post talking about all of Iraq without indicating that you had changed the subject to Baghdad. That means that you are either lying now or a very weak communicator.
Oh lord, here come the evil media conspiracies again. Yes I considered it. I considered how silly and unfair that kind of accusation was for the ballsy people who are risking their lives to report this stuff.
First you say that you did not make assumption (2) and now you insist on re-making assumption (2). Please make up your mind before I explain, again, why it is ridiculous to think that even a majority of deaths make it into the media.
neil
From the analysis section of the study:
Proud Liberal
Question: is scs the illigitimit child of Darrell and MacBuckets by any chance?
neil
Tim F.
Or, neil could do it.
ThymeZone
I don’t know of any reporters over there, or any independent agency making an estimate, who think that most Iraqi deaths are reported in the media. Or, at least, any who have said so.
Maybe scs has a secret source of information. A sisterhood that gathers data from Iraq and compiles it for scs. And keeps their numbers hidden from the US Government at the same time.
Yeah, that must be it.
ThymeZone
I think the word is “spawn.”
scs
No, not conspiracies. Just human nature to not get a completely accurate number count of dead and wounded right upon first glance. I would say if you get a witness report of dead and wounded, the witness would be more likely to overreport the casualties due to being emotionally upset by what he’s seen, than to under report. We know this from much initial reporting of many disasters- how the casualty rate is often adjusted down from first reports. But again, we really don’t know either way.
Proud Liberal
hey… how are we going to send our army to Detroit if this keeps up?
Steve
Does “reported” in this context refer to deaths that were reported for the study, or deaths that were reported to the authorities?
Mac Buckets
I used the most recent major poll, not just any one poll, you dishonest cretin. And (here’s the ironic part) you Donks were disputing that poll by using ZERO polls to prove what you were asserting.
One poll to ZERO polls. That’s called a shutout.
Ooooooh, I see now. Loosen the tinfoil, dude. Your point is ridiculously easy to disprove: While the poll was pro-invasion, other parts were definitely anti-occupation.
ThymeZone
I think it means deaths validated by the 700 Club.
ThymeZone
Mac’s trial copy of Excel(tm) has expired. It’s taking longer than expected for him to get this answer together.
ThymeZone
One thing for sure, those Iraqis love their baseball.
chopper
coming from the guy comparing the study to ‘al qaeda propaganda’. that’s rich.
neil
Juan Cole provides some reasons why passive reports don’t come up with the same numbers as an active count:
ThymeZone
Bush presser, today.
So, the president has no actual number in mind when he talks about “a lot of innocent people have lost their life (sic).”
But he’s able to pin it down closer than Mac can. Which is why he is, you know, the president.
John S.
God this thread makes for some great comedy while I’m eating lunch.
Keep up the good work Mac and scs.
Proud Liberal
oh oh… looks like I’m going to have to get a lawyer and take bucketboy to court. I’ll have all your coloring books before I’m done with you.
John S.
HILARIOUS!
I didn’t realize polls had political tendencies. Can we get an analysis of how many polls will be voting Republican this fall?
Proud Liberal
actually the Pole bucketboy was talking about was an exchange student he befriended, Lech Wascoluski.
neil
It’s funny, pp, because the Prez has not always been so reluctant to cite numbers.
Interview of the President by Sir David Frost of BBCTV
The Map Room
November 12, 2003
Perry Como
I bet this John Hopkins guy is selling a book.
Pb
Steve,
To the study, I’d say.
The Other Steve
COALITION OF THE SHRILL
Mac Buckets
scs
Darrell
ThymeZone
Yes.
And he said “you know” six times just in the blurb that I cited from the transcript.
Even a high school kid doing a presentation sounds better than this idiot.
Steve
Okay, so if there’s some central authority handing out death certificates, and if there were death certificates for 90% of the dead people identified in the study… then why not conduct the study by just going down to the Bureau of Death Certificates, or whatever they call it, and counting all the death certificates up?
The Other Steve
ThymeZone, I appreciate your listening to the Presidents little press conference and telling us what wisdom we had to say.
I don’t think I could have held the contents of my stomach down so shortly after breakfast.
Pb
Steve,
Because that makes way too much sense. Also:
Punchy
PoTD. I nearly threw up my lunch laughing as hard as I did at this. This is, by far, some of the best spoof I’ve ever read.
HyperIon
you seem to imply that Iraq is dangerous only for folks who don’t “look like they belong” there.
yet no one disputes that many more Iraqis have died than westerners.
you are a moron.
Krista
Took the words right out of my mouth, TZ. I was reading it through and started wondering if he’s capable of finishing a sentence of more than four words without stammering or losing his train of thought. Mind you, his train of thought is the Little Engine that Couldn’t, so that might explain things.
neil
The purpose of the study was not to count the number of people who have died in Iraq since the invasion. It was to count the number of people who have died in Iraq because of risk factors introduced by the invasion (largely, but not exclusively, violence). It’s not necessary to specify what these factors are; the results were achieved by comparing reports of all deaths pre-invasion with reports of all deaths post-invasion.
The advantage of this methodology is that it counts deaths that were not reported by traditional means. In a war zone, this is a not unsignificant proportion.
ThymeZone
This should be a lesson to George Bush: Never do an interview drunk.
Punchy
All over the blogosphere, many people are/were wondering–many seemingly quite serious–if he was intoxicated. I didn’t see/hear the speech, but apparently he was slurring a fair number of words, not completing sentences (not a new development), and mispronouncing NKs capital, the word “penninsula” (sp?), etc.
Mac Buckets
Now this study makes sense! How could I have claimed political bias in these two Johns Hopkins surveys? It’s not as if the lead researchers were activist Democrats or something!
The lead researcher who took over so Roberts could run was a campaign contributor to Roberts.
Nothing to see here! Totally Nonpartisan Scientists at work!
ThymeZone
So your nonpartisan, objective estimate of Iraq casualties is …. what, again, Mac?
ThymeZone
Oh, you have no idea.
ThymeZone
Holy shit, a “small plane” into a building in Manhattan.
ThymeZone
Correction, it appears to have been a helicopter.
Pb
Stop him before he estimates again!
Faux News
The Republican War on Science (epidemiology) continues here on BJ with its VERY brave Keyboard Kourage Warriors listed above.
I wish the three of them would take out their rulers and measure their courage for all of us. Like a congressional page would.
ThymeZone
According to MSNBC, confirmed, a helicopter, although CNN website still calling it an “airplane.”
Witnesses reported seeing an aircraft “in trouble” fall into the building.
John D.
Wait, running for office makes one an activist and unfit to do the job they trained for prior to running for office?
I guess I really do learn something new every day.
Mac, here’s the thing. When you have a published, peer-reviewed study you disagree with, attacking the people who did the study is usually considered stupid. If the study is biased, IT WILL BE APPARENT IN THE DATA.
Attack the methodology. Attack the sample. Attack the premises. Hell, attack the conclusion.
Just do it in the context of the study. Science doesn’t give a rat’s ass WHO performed the analysis. So, neither do I. If the study is flawed, the data will show it. I have yet to see any argument that doesn’t boil down to “I don’t believe it, therefore it must be false.” Give me the data to support your disbelief and I’ll agree with you.
Steve
There you go. The sheer idiocy of the Right on display. “Whew, this guy is a Democrat! Now we can discount everything he says!” Yes, that’s a great substitute for logic and the scientific method.
Mac, ever since that little episode with Rumsfeld’s vacation home, I have to say the quality of your work has fallen way off.
Pb
On the other hand, all those Republicans coming forward lately on a number of issues are totally right when they agree with Democrats. It’s just the Democrats who are wrong…
ThymeZone
MSNBC now saying “small airplane.”
Wow, why so hard to get these details right?
Mac Buckets
Weak. His partisanship is merely an explanation as to why his study didn’t pass critical muster– it was never a substitute for criticism. Geez, “logic and scientific method” was used all over the intertrons to club that first study into a pulp.
But I’m sure you’re right. If Bill Frist put out a study that showed 25,000 people had been killed in Iraq, and they were all terrorists, I’m sure the Donks here would accept it without reservation. After all, he is a man of science! They are Nonpartisan!
I’ve been on vacation. Still, my C game is still way too good for 99% of the feeble Donks here! ;)
Steve
CNN now saying 72nd and York is “close to Rockefeller Center” (it’s not) and “next to the Hudson River” (that’s the river on the OTHER side of Manhattan). These initial reports are always absurdly bad.
Steve
I’m not asking you to accept it without reservation. Be as skeptical as you like! I’m asking you to make an actual, substantive criticism of the merits, and not just parrot a zillion other right-wingers who are all like “that first study was widely debunked!” which looks more like wishful thinking than anything else.
Your first attempt to criticize the merits (“that study tried to extrapolate FALLUJAH to the rest of Iraq!”) turned out to be 100% false, as you’ve admitted, so you might try to be a little more modest in your claims.
Perry Como
I think we need an immediate investigation into when Nancy Pelosi knew about this aircraft that was “in trouble”. If the Democrats have nothing to hide about this aircraft accident then they should be willing to testify under oath about it.
John D.
Given that the official death reports are higher than that, I’d call that “study” deeply flawed and the conclusions false. That’s attacking the data, Mac. Try it some time.
ThymeZone
It’s a game?
Okay, let’s play. How many casualties did you say there were, again?
neil
If Bill Frist put out a study that showed 25,000 people had been killed in Iraq, and they were all terrorists, I’m sure the Donks here would accept it without reservation.
Mac, this is just a quick note to say I really once thought you were better than this. Not much, but some.
If that study got published in _The Lancet_ then we could talk. Otherwise you’re just.. what did you call it? Making things up?
You didn’t have yourself convinced of the strawman bullshit that we think the data is fake and don’t care, do you?
Proud Liberal
!The Bill Frist that said you could get AIDS from tears? The Bill Frist that said Terry Schiavo could see? That Bill Frist? I wouldn’t believe him if he told me the time. But what does that have to do with scientists doing a study in their lifelong field that is published and peer reviewed again? Oh… wait… he is a Democrat. .I get it. So NOTHING that any Democrat says can be trusted? ahhhh… how convenient. STATE OF DENIAL example 6,425.
Mac Buckets
Of a study that hasn’t been released yet? That would be a good trick!
All I’m saying is that the merits are likely to be the same as they were last time — zero. It’s the same Democrat researchers, the same timing, the same outlying conclusion, for the same purpose — making noise before the election.
If you drink sour milk once, you throw the carton away. You don’t swig it again two years later, assuming that it’s probably OK this time.
Like I said, you guys are just like the Fundy Christians — whatever “science” suits your needs, you swallow.
mrmobi
Mac, let me get this straight. Your view is that any study which has a Democrat involved in it is biased, correct? Because we all take our marching orders from some Rovian figure in central command? Right?
Since the study is being published in a peer-reviewed journal, we’ll get a chance to see whether the rest of the world agrees. The point is, the jury is still out. The fact that you discount it as partisan junk-science without even having read it shows me that your “C Game” as you call it, is the result of very poor reasoning powers.
It is possible to be both partisan and honest, Mac.
John D.
Um, what?
It’s out. Enjoy.
Steve
But WHY were the merits zero last time? You’ve offered exactly one reason – because the last study supposedly tried to extrapolate Fallujah to the whole country, which was false. For all I know, every other criticism you have of the last study is similarly false.
Your position has a basic credibility problem. If the first study really was debunked far and wide within the scientific community, there is no way a widely respected journal would be inviting the same authors to publish a new study with the same methodology. They wouldn’t even get the time of day. You can feel free to show me actual scientific criticisms of the study, but don’t expect everyone to just take the right-wing blogosphere’s word for it.
neil
Of a study that hasn’t been released yet? That would be a good trick!
Now surely you’re trolling. This is the second thing you’ve gotten undisputably, completely wrong so far. You’ve discounted the study based entirely on your perception of the political affiliations of the authors, and haven’t even bothered to _notice_ the paper itself. Now that’s what I call being an uncritical fundamentalist.
The Other Steve
Yes, which is why when staffing up the Iraq Coalition Authority, the primary selector was loyalty to Bush, not loyalty to the country and whether or not you were qualified for the job.
This is how these guys think. They’ve become so indoctrinated by their
CommunistRepublican party that they think everybody who is not one of them is an enemy of the state.YankeeFan
Holy Shit. ESPN is reporting the guy flying that plane was Cory Lidle, Yankee Pitcher extraordinaire. That’s one way to rebuild the pitching staff I guess.
YankeeFan
They’re saying Lidle was a pilot for 7 months. Do they really let any shmuck with a license a few days old fly over Manhattan, in today’s day and age? My God we are insecure.
YankeeFan
unsecure. unsafe. whatever.
RSA
Bill Frist: Man of Science. Hilarious. By the way, I expect that Frist’s scientific reputations lies in these publications:
It’s a wonder he has time to be Senate majority leader, with all the science he’s doing.
HyperIon
i note that you failed to include anti-semitic remarks in this Informed Comment from uCole. ;=)
p.s. can someone explain how to get a yellow smiley in a post?
Engineer
1 dead for every 4 randomly selected home. That’s bad no matter how you look at it. (They interviewed 1,840 random people and found over 500 dead – 92% of those showed the death certificate)
If you think about it we’ve dropped over 240,000 cluster bombs. We’d be fools to think they didn’t kill anyone. Add in gunfire and car bombs and 600,000 dead doesn’t seem that big.
Mac Buckets
Of course, that’s a lie. The Fallujah thing was mentioned in a post with four or five other reasons that the study was bogus, and I also posted quotes from professional statisticians sloughing off the JH survey.
You just conveniently forgot the rest of my post to go after one “gotcha,” and then pretend the rest of the post didn’t exist? That is so weak, I can’t believe you thought you’d get away with it.