Published by The Lancet, a venerable British medical journal, the study [PDF] used previously accepted methods for calculating death rates to estimate the number of “excess” Iraqi deaths after the 2003 invasion at 426,369 to 793,663; the study said the most likely figure was near the middle of that range: 654,965. Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs, or U.S. air strikes. This stunning toll was more than 10 times the number of deaths estimated by the Iraqi or U.S. governments, or by any human-rights group.
[…]
How to explain the enormous discrepancy between The Lancet’s estimation of Iraqi war deaths and those from studies that used other methodologies? For starters, the authors of the Lancet study followed a model that ensured that even minor components of the data, when extrapolated over the whole population, would yield huge differences in the death toll. Skeptical commentators have highlighted questionable assumptions, implausible data, and ideological leanings among the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts.
Some critics go so far as to suggest that the field research on which the study is based may have been performed improperly — or not at all. The key person involved in collecting the data — Lafta, the researcher who assembled the survey teams, deployed them throughout Iraq, and assembled the results — has refused to answer questions about his methods.
[…]
When it comes to the question of peer review, the study’s defenders sometimes seem to want it both ways. On the one hand, Roberts talks about the need “to step beyond peer review.” Yet the authors insist that their study was peer-reviewed extensively (if rapidly, in order to be published before the election). The authors also maintain that one of the reasons they went to The Lancet with these studies is its quick turnaround time.
Surprisingly, not one of the peer reviewers seems to have thought to ask a basic question: Are the data in the two studies even true? The possibility of fakery, editor Horton told NJ, “did not come up in peer review.” Medical journals can’t afford to repeat every scientific study, he said, because “if for every paper we published we had to think, ‘Is this fraud?’ … honestly, we would fold tomorrow.”
They’ve had a lot of practice with this kind of “estimating” with the gun control “debate” and a few other things they had no business sticking their big medical noses into. No surprise to see them caught with their hand in the cookie jar. To the shoulder. Again.
BTW, the Lancet is not in any way unique in this regard. Everybody feeling much safer about your drugs, vaccines and surgical procedures now?
… honestly, we would fold tomorrow.”
Well, then maybe you should!
John hopkins university also came up with this number.
Just because an answer isnt what you want it to be, doesnt mean it is not right.
You war mongers will have a tough time justifying that number of dead so you’ll just deny it.
Not so much an off-topic link dump as a notice!
http://thestar.blogs.com/broadsides/
“… has refused to answer questions about his methods.”
The only people who hide things are people with something to hide.
Lets say, just for arguments sake, that the estimate of close to 800,000 dead civilians suggested by Lancet is accurate – and it’s not even close with the real death toll likely less than 50,000 – 800,000 dead Iraqi’s is still far less than what Sadaam would have accomplished over a long weekend….
The surge is working and al quaida is on the run… go USA
“You war mongers will have a tough time justifying that number of dead so you’ll just deny it.”
Posted by: morningstar at January 4, 2008 1:50 PM
I knew this was coming, we will now be known as ADD…Anthropogenic Death Deniers
Peer review is a limited tool. Reviewers are in a poor position to assess the truthiness of the original data – that is, whether what was reported to have been done or happen actually did.
Generally reviewers must assess the paper as given. They do not have the resources to go out into the field and check the data. If you wanted to deceive reviewers, it’s not that difficult to do.
morningstar is indiscriminate in his idiocy.
Here’s the logic: If we wish it, or feel it, that makes it true. But if the Right feels it or wishes it true, it is NOT true. It is especially not true if the Right uses reason, logic and FACTS to prove something that we FEEL is not the case.
Ready for the Rubber Room yet?
If I remember correctly, the margin of error on that study was something ridiculuous, like plus or minus hundreds of thousands. Of course, when presenting the results, most news outfits reported the high estimates without reporting the error margin. All in all, it was more of a propaganda piece than an actual report worthy of consideration.
I remember from my school daze that we got extra marks for displaying our method of obtaining the right answer. This shows that the message is more important than the methods used reach our conclusions.
This just sounds like more Taliban sympathiser news reporting. We saw lots of it with Reuters, why not Lancet?
Finally, someone is getting down to the nub of the argument against the study. While the methodology may have been suitable, but even that I would suggest is questionable. The old standby “garbage in, garbage out” has nothing to do with the kind of statistical analytics chosen to do the study. When the minions out in the field collecting the data are feeding back mounds and mounds of BS you will not have a legitimate result, even if the mechanics – the framework into which the data must be injected – of the research is 100% valid.
Rabbit, I must in this case beg to differ.
An even faintly skeptical reviewer would have laughed this off as a joke. Leaving aside all political and funding improprieties, of which there are many mentioned, the authors have refused to release their raw data.
That’s a no brainer. No data, no publish.
Unfortunately medical journal reviewers are used to not getting the data on request. That’s one of the reasons why gun control stayed alive as a medical issue as long as it did. In the non-political arena, anybody remember Vioxx? Or hormone replacement therapy?
Another thing not well covered is that you don’t get to be a reviewer by asking awkward questions all the time. You only ask awkward questions the editors/publishers want asked. That way you get brownie points and everyone loves you.
How else to account for the huge number of total garbage studies like this one that see print in “venerable” medical journals?
Rabbit, you wanna see some jaw dropping failures of peer review, go read -anything- about gun control in the New England Journal of Medicine. Any year. It’ll amaze you.
Pete:
And remember that the true margin of error (the “confidence interval”) is often greater than reported.
The confidence interval is determined through statistics, which must always make idealized assumptions (e.g., “the sampling was random”, “the dice are unbiased”, “the people interviewed did not lie”).
It is remarkably easy for systemic bias to creep into a study without anyone being aware, and without it being accounted for in the margin of error.
This is why polls during elections often turn out to be egregiously wrong, far outside their margin of error. This is why medical studies are often repeated and improved on. It seems redundant, but is absolutely necessary.
Don’t use these threads for off topic link dumps. That’s what reader tips is for.
I wonder if too many here are missing the point.
Since this is supposed to be a medical journal,we should be demanding to know if these hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were either shot….blown up….or just hit their heads on their sunroofs.
Phantom:
I’ve peer reviewed a number of papers. Researchers don’t fight for the privilege of doing peer review – it’s an onerous task with little reward. It’s done mostly out of a sense of responsibility to the science, a desire to maintain and improve the quality of work. And it’s generally unpaid overtime.
Thus your statement “You only ask awkward questions the editors/publishers want asked.” makes no sense. I’ve never been pressured to ask or not ask certain questions, and most reviewers would be glad to tell the editors to piss off if it happened. They would have little to lose by doing so.
Whether reviewers should demand to inspect the original data is an interesting question, and probably depends on the situation. But if the original data is itself fraudulent or incomplete, the reviewer might have no way of telling.
My guess is that the vast majority of scientific papers are reasonably well done. This doesn’t mean that they are actually right – the truth is notoriously tricky to pin down – but that they are a competent and honest attempt to find the truth.
Cherry picking a few bad examples doesn’t change that.
The John Hopkins team was the one published by Lancet, morningstar. So, there aren’t TWO different studies. Just one. A bad ‘study’. Dr. Les Roberts is a member of John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
There were several really serious problems with the methodology. The first one is that the number is pure speculation. That’s because their CI, or Confidence Interval was too large, so large as to be meaningless. Their 2004 CI was a number between 8,000 and 194,000. Heh. That’s not an estimate; that’s an open field. There’s no way that can be an accurate estimate. Equally, the CI in these Lancet studies – is too large.
And that’s got nothing to do with the problems of data gathering, the problems of accuracy of reports (a very big problem), and so on. Peer review is not relevant in this type of study because the data is not open to validation.
Oh, and this report also implies that up to 1,000 Iraqi were killed every single day in the past year or two – most unnoticed by any media, by any hospital reports, most without death certificates, and without the international world noticing this massive decimation of the population. Oh – and that the Islamic insurgent fighting between Muslim tribes – caused no or insignificant death numbers.
These guys have an open agenda. Scientific validity isn’t one of them.
There was no sound evidence that Iraqi kids were starving because of the sanctions, he tried to throw that one out earlier with no success which alone should have set off alarms about his integrity. He is typical of the agents that the Left seeks out and rallies around. As always, the deadbeats in the MSM never vetted his study.
Scientific studies are often wrong.
Interesting, but, no surprise that the reptilian George Soros, a creep who has enriched himself on the financial misery of others, was involved on the sidelines. We have agenda driven liars politicising Global Warming in the name of science, you bet Lafta is a liar with an agenda.
A medical journal that’s this careless ought to be out of business.
Ok Rabbit, allow me to rephrase.
Find -any- paper on gun control in NEJM that -doesn’t- represent a failure of peer review. I couldn’t, and fair warning, I’ve read them all up to about 1998. After that I gave up.
Medical journals in the last twenty years have become riddled with this stuff. I agree that actual science does get done, but anything with political overtones (or big money behind it) needs to be taken with a box of salt. Maybe a 100lb bag in some cases.
Whether it’s state sanctioned infanticide (abortion) euthanasia, eugenics, gun control, population control, pandemic fear mongering, Climate fear mongering, social medicine pandering or any other agenda of transnational “progressivism”…the medical aristocracy (another “brotherhood”” much like the bar) is front and center pimping every new notion for their technocratic brethren.
Any of you here ever heard of vietnam?
Was the us right then?
It was a blundering FAILURE!
Hundreds of thousands died.
Iraq is an ILLEGAL war.I doubt any of you relize the implications of this.
Most amercians want out.
Hundreds of thousands have died.
Have fun explaining your position to god when your standing at the pearly gates.
Can anybody answer the question:
WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?
“Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs, or U.S. air strikes.”
Just for clarification, are they stating the bullets and bombs also belonged to the U.S? I’m not sure; the wording of this sentence isn’t clear.
What is the purpose of stating the Americans are responsible for approximately 650,000 Iraqi civilian deaths? Is the purpose of this number to cause us to hate the Americans for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis? Bad, bad Americans?
It has been very clear from the beginning of the Iraqi war that the Iraqis themselves have not been documenting their deaths. Deaths in Iraq must take into account who is dead and how they died. If 40 bodies arrive at the morque after a suicide bomber has blown up a market place, who gets the blame….the Americans or the suicide bomber? Are these civilians documented into the count of the American killed? What about the people who have died of natural causes, diseases, and accidents, etc.? Oh wait, nobody is writing this down anyhow. There are just too many variables to take into consideration to arrive at reasonable estimate. If there is no documentation determining Lancet’s numbers, which can be publicly scrutinized, then they might as well just shut the hell up.
And to Morningstar – show me the bodies; otherwise, at least show me the facts. I just love how if you question what someone says and want to see the facts, you are somehow denying the truth. I’ll believe what I don’t want to hear when I know that it is true and not a moment before, not like some dimwits that suck up whatever fits their agenda.
WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?
I’m guessing that the same man who threw the moneychangers hands on, physically, out of the temple would have approved the same short list of bombed historic rogues that have gotten their asses bombed for being unwanted warts on the backside of humanity. Question answered.
When the Lancet figure first came out I was utterly confident it was garbage. Fewer than 61,000 British civilians were killed in WWII, during which time many cities suffered area bombing. Ten times that number is a huge quantity of civilians, requiring a more efficient and sustained kind of effort than anything brought to bear in Iraq.
hey morningstar, why don’t you ask the millions of south vietnamese who spent decades in “reeducation camps” being tortured how they feel about the US abandoning them because the sentiment at home was that most Americans wanted out? By the way, please define what an “illegal” war is, this stupid peacenik phrase has always confused me. What document defines the laws of war? Also please define for me what the cutoff is for body count at which point we should abandon the cause. I’m pretty sure we screwed that up in WWI and WWII, since the body count surpassed millions long before the war ended.
yoo hoo, morning star. Facts are important. The Lancet/John Hopkins paper isn’t factual; it’s made up garbage. Bad, bad methodology; gross errors in statistics.
Just out of curiousity, morning star – why do you accept false data sets? And false conclusions? Why?
Illegal war? You must be kidding. Please explain the difference between a legal and illegal war. That’s fascinating. Please explain.
Pearly gates? I’m sorry, but as an atheist, I don’t believe in any gates, steel or pearl. But I do believe in scientific integrity, proper methodology and conclusions that are based on reliable evidence. None of this (scientific integrity, proper methods, valid conclusions) are found in the Lancet/Hopkins paper. None. Weird that you accept it. Oh well.
Again – what’s a legal vs illegal war? Hmmm?
morningstar – Jesus doesn’t use bombs when he has nature and the angels at his disposal, but if you think he is a candy-ass wussie, you will be sorrily disappointed to read what he has in store for the wicked before they are thrown into hell.
There is no such thing as an ILLEGAL war! There is no worldly governing body that has the right over any nation to determine whether a war is legal or illegal. Countries usually declare war as a form of formality, but after that, the game is on.
If the Iraq war is ILLEGAL, I’d like to know who is going to do something about it. Yah, thought so.
question is not whether the “study” is flawed ( it’s garbage), but why a medical jurnal is pulishing a questionable study that is POLITICAL in nature!!!!
and rabbit, I don’t care how many peer reviews you have done, it is quite possible to conclued whether a study is solid enough to publish by a honest review, not even a “peer” review is necessary. This perticular study should never have made it past file 13 for reasons pointed out by ET, and because it is very obvious that it is agenda driven.
Peer review can be easily accomplished by sending the draft out to your colleagues whom you know will agree and presto!! It’s peer reviewed.
During the 1980s a number of new departments suchs as Native Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, etc. were created in North American universities. Most of them started up new “academic” (cough * sputter *) journals.
The faculty in those departments are pretty much of one mind on the topics they study and teach and they all scratch each other’s backs by reviewing each other’s papers. That’s how it’s done.
108 people die every minute, 257 are born. carry on.
I saw this earlier at Little Green Footballs. anyone that reads the National Journal’s critique of the Lancet piece will be hard pressed not see the Lancet for what it is, a political publication not a respected medical journal. This sort of bias has permeated the information coming out of Iraq and Afganistan since these conflicts began. In spite of this, both conflicts are achieving their stated objectives; defeat of militant jihadists and establishing a stable democracy in the ME.
What’s the definition of ‘”illegal” war’?
Let’s look at that empirically. The Afghanistan War is multilateral in the truest sense. The Western forces fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan have UN sanction; it it being fought under the banner of NATO, with NATO leadership.
All these are supposedly benchmarks for “progressive” approval for a war.
Yet, we STILL see most of The Usual Twerps (the morningstar types; the glib know-nothings who write Toronto Star columns; etc. among others) gushing their verbal diarrhea against it. The Western armies should be handing out Kumbayah recordings, not killing Islamofascist terrorists! The truth is, these types are idiots, appeasers and cowards. It’s not even worth the time to try to debate logically with them. As Lincoln said, “Never argue with a fool. Somebody else might not be able to tell the difference.”
I stand in awe of all of you peoples infinite wisdom and forward thinking.
When china becomes the worlds greatest economic and military power(this is going to happen).
Will it be good when it acts unilaterally?
Just like the precsedence the us is know setting.
Or,would it be better if acted in accordance with international laws and treaties laid out by the un decades earlier?
Or is it better that the laws of the jungle rule humanity?
China,russia,us,india,pakistan and everyone else can just do what ever,when ever, and then turn around and claim moral high ground for their actions.
The method the john hopkins studie used to collect the data has been used before in other conflics and the only problem is-this time we dont like the numbers.
As far as the “surge” sucsess,try reading a little sun tzu.
Warfare is also economic,and we are being bled.
Quite succesfully.
Louise:
In any respectable journal, selecting people to perform peer review is done by the editors, not the authors. Indeed, the authors are often not even told the names of the reviewers.
In a small research community, of course, reviewing becomes rather incestuous. Presumably, however, The Lancet has a large number of qualified reviewers to draw on.
Rabbit, in the current case it would seem the Lancet either does NOT have reviewers qualified to read this paper, or they didn’t use the qualified ones and picked guys they knew would pass anything at all.
Morningstar, the method Johns Hopkins used to collect this data is crap. That it has been used before is relevant only in that it demonstrates there are other journal editors who are either incompetent or politically motivated to lie.
Because that’s what we are talking about here, guys using The Lancet’s reputation to prop up their lies.
So you, ducky, are shilling for guys who lie on purpose. Wrap your loving, peaceful feelings around that cactus. Mmm, prickly!
no, morning star – let’s try for a little light in the darkness of your mind.
The ‘method’ that the John Hopkins people used to collect the data has most certainly been tried before, but only in failed exams. That is, if you use a CI (confidence interval) with as wide a range as the JH guys did, you’ll fail your exam. I’ll bet you don’t even know what a CI is, morning star.
If you attempt to gather your data with as seriously flawed a sample population as the JH guys did, you’ll fail your exam. If you attempt to define your terms (killed, dead) with as open and vague values as the JH guys did, you’ll fail your exam. And if you come up with the type of strange results that these guys did, which no-one is able to validate, then, since these are unreliable results, you’ll fail your exam. Did you know, morning star, that the results have to be reliable? That means that they have to be able to be reasonably proven. As I noted above, since the Lancet/JH numbers don’t match the records of death certificates, or hospital records, or any records whatsoever..then….
So, yes, morning star, a lot of us have seen methods like those used by the JH guys. We put a big zero on their tests when we see them.
Your statement that ‘the methods’ have been done before isn’t a validation of the method. Because those ‘methods’ are flawed; they are incorrect; the statistical tactics used are incorrect. How’s that for a little light in the darkness? And that’s why we don’t like the numbers. We, who know something about methods and statistics, don’t like garbage being passed off as valid.
Now, if I understand you correctly, are you seriously suggesting that a war is ‘legal’ IFF (if and only if) the UN approves it? You must be joking. Are you seriously stating that the UN has abrogated the sovereignty of all nations on thish planet and no nation can do a thing with the prior approval of the most undemocratic institution on this earth, namely, the UN? Are you serious?
Are you seriously stating that a democratic nation, eg the USA or the UK or Australia etc, cannot democratically make a decision but instead must do only what an undemocratic institution, the UN, says? (made up of unelected appointees, primarily from non-democratic totalitarian and dictatorships of the world). Sheesh – what juice are you drinking?
That’s right, morning star, a sovereign nation acts unilaterally. A democratic sovereign nation makes its decisions democratically; that means that it reviews the data and makes reasoned and debated judgments. Got a problem with that?
You’d prefer the unreasoned, partisan views of the UN? How’d they do in Rwanda? In Somalia? In Ethiopia? How are they doing in Darfur? How about Bosnia- did the UN stop the massacres or did the US finally say – F*K you, and went in and stopped them? Hmmm? And do you know what? The US was morally right!
Do you prefer the regime of Saddam Hussein? Morally? Hmmm?
Now, morning star, instead of swallowing the junk you’ve heard in your Sociology 101 undergrad leftis class, how about doing a little thinking?
In related news, the Dakar Rally has been canceled this year due to Morningstar’s noble freedom fighters machine-gunning a French family having a picnic and blowing up 37 people at a UN office in Algiers.
http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2008/01/of-course-you-realise-this-means-war.html
So Morningstar, I guess you’re not a race fan eh? I am, and I think it would be worth changing the Dakar Rally over to the Dakar Rat Patrol Memorial Rally just to whack a few of these desert rodents.
Robby Gordon’s trophy truck would look better with twin .50’s on the roof, IMHO.
One of the benefits I’ve experienced from no longer reading actual medical journals and instead looking up specific topics that I’m interested in in online full-text journal article repositories is that I no longer have rage attacks when I run into a piece of garbage junk-science such as the Lancet article in question. It used to be that objects in my office would get broken when a copy of the CMAJ or NEJM would get hurled violently at the garbage after I’d run into one of their “scientific studies” regarding firearms.
The Lancet study just reeks of selection bias. One could chose families that live near a main street in Vancouver (Main and Hastings would be a good starting point) and ask them if they have have any family members die of drug overdoses or vanish at the hands of homicidal pig farmers. A simple extrapolation of this “representative” sample to the whole Vancouver population would be scientific proof that there are uncounted thousands of missing women whose remains must be somewhere on the Picton property as well as thousands of people who have overdosed, died and vanished in Vancouver. I’ve peer reviewed papers in the past when I used to be a researcher and I used to tear papers apart and demand explanations where things didn’t fit. In turn, I got my papers savaged by reviewers who brought up things I had never considered and it sometimes required doing a few more experiments to tie up these loose ends. This was in non-medical electrophysiology and what I’ve noticed in medicine is that reviewing papers is not treated as the same blood sport that I was used to.
There’s an excellent paper on the failure of peer review in medicine by Dr. Edgar Suter. “Guns in the Medical Literature — A Failure of Peer Review” which can be accessed at: http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Suter/med-lit.html
I quess i should give the simpler minds of this site some background on john hopkins university because apparently some people have never heard of it.
It is a world leader.It is huge.It is the top hospital in the us.Most people on the planet have heard of it.It has probably cured you our someone you know of,of some disease.It is where great minds go.Not small dead ones.
Do you guys believe the people of iraq are prospering?
Get with reality-its a f#cking war zone.
People die.600,000 get use to it.
Maybe chinese troops will be walking around canada someday kicking our asses under the pretence that we oppress our native population.
Then what?
You peoples logic fits like a glove with that paradigm.
The un was created to stop the chaos.
To bad you war mongers destoyed it.
Actually, there can be such a thing as an illegal war – provided that the declaration and/or execution of it violates a statute or article in a Constitution that bars it.
Example: Assume that a whacked-out Parliament passes a statute that makes it illegal for the Government of Canada to invoke the War Powers Act. Unlike a mere resolution, this particular whack-a-law does see the Senate and receives Royal Assent. The Sovereign wonders about the sanity of our ensainted leaders, but does not step in to disallow it. So, it passes on to the statute books and becomes a real gosh-darn law.
Then, thirty or so years later, Canada is attacked. A less zoned-out Parliament congregates to declare war. Its members enact the War Powers Act, as would be the obvious thing to do, and the declaration quickly passes the Senate and receives the Royal Assent.
Only…the Government of Canada cannot legally follow through on the authorization because doing so would violate the stop-war act passed thirty years prior. In this admittedly fantastical scenario, we would be entering into an illegal war.
Morningstar; Regarding your take on the legality of the present war in Iraq, you’re forgetting a little history.
Bush took the issue to the UN. They authorized the war by issuing resolutions directly referencing UN resolutions brought into force at the cessation of hostilities in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, which Saddam was in violation of.
In short, the war in 1991 never ended, and by doing no more than firing on coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, kicking weapons inspectors out in 1998, and causing Hans Blix to cut short his inspections due to lack of UN ordered co-operation on Saddam’s part, the legal door was kicked wide open.
What really surprises me is how people like yourself who love the UN so much apparently know so little about what they do. It was about going to war for God’s sake! Weren’t you folks paying attention?
By the way, where is it again that the UN has brought order to chaos? Are we about to get the news that they’ve sorted out Darfur soon? Sure hope they do a little better than they did in Rwanda.
Last time I checked, they were siphoning off billions in Oil for Food money that was supposed to go to Iraqi women and kids for food and medicine, while their peacekeeping troops weren’t content to sc*ew the kids they were sent to protect, they then turned the kids out on the stroll so they could make some money too.
If you like the UN, you’ve got a stronger stomach than I do.
Morningstar, your comments about the quality of people at Johns Hopkins have no relevence to the matter at hand. Just because an individual has expertise in one area of medicine doesn’t imply automatic expertise in other areas. “Public health” is a classic area where physicians assume they are qualified to pass off their personal views as medical fact. I work with physicians every day and can rate the mathematical and statistical knowledge of the average physician as dismal. One amusing test I’ve done is to give physicians a simple first order differential equation and ask them to solve it. Maybe 1 doctor in 10 is able to do this despite first year calculus being a pre-requisite for medicine.
Doctors don’t have a feel for data like statisticians do and are unaware of how incompetent they are in areas of epidemiology. You won’t find an internist performing a cholycystectomy as the internist is clearly aware that this is not in his area of expertise and will leave such procedures to surgeons. If only physicians would be as circumspect when it came to matters of public health where they generally have no expertise.
reeks of selection bias
Dat is not fair!
morningstar – again, you aren’t thinking. You are just spouting nonsense.
First, the Lancet study is methodologically invalid. We’ve outlined a few of its problems; I suspect that you don’t know anything about data gathering, methods and statistics and therefore, you don’t understand valid criticisms of work claiming to be reliable. The JH/Lancet paper is, methodologically, pure empty garbabe.
Second, your informing us that SINCE JH is a top university, THEN, anything produced by any one of its members, MUST be top quality – is an invalid conclusion. You are making several factual and logical errors. Logically, your error is ‘appeal to authority’.
That’s always an error, morning star. You have a tendency to bow down to authority, eg, the UN and a University. Rather than thinking critically.
And ‘generalization’. There’s no way that anyone can claim that because Mercedes is a top quality car, THEN it is impossible that there’s anything wrong with your Mercedes.
The JH paper is filled, not merely with bias, with invalid definitions of terms, with invalid data gathering tactics, with invalid samples, but also, with bad, bad, bad statistics.
Again, morningstar, your tendency to bow down before what you assume is Authority, means that you come to invalid conclusions. The UN is a corrupt morass of unelected representatives of various dictatorships and totalitarian states. It is totally unaccountable; its record of work over the past generation is abyssmal. It has done more harm in its lifetime than can be imagined. This harm includes its refusal to assist genocides in various countries; its open money laundering and theft of UN monies diverted to individual UN delegate pockets.
And, morningstar, you haven’t a clue about sovereignty. Or war.
By the way, the Iraqi people are a lot better now than in the era of Saddam Hussein. And a lot better than during the way. Of course, you aren’t interested in the truth, are you? You prefer to stick to your bad science, bad reporting, and mythic love-in with the UN. Enjoy it, Cloud Dweller.
ET, I think it is highly unfair of you to use logic and facts to beat up on poor morningstar. You’re engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed man/woman/whatsit, which just isn’t cricket.
It just feeeeels right to morningstar, therefore it must -be- right.
Right?
This has been an interesting read this morning. It appears to this reader the following:
Morningstar offers her biased non-factual talking points.
Others offer facts and challenges to Morningstar to try and educate her.
To the Others- stop wasting your time trying to educate Moronstar. She will never let facts get in the way of her opinion. In her world, the US is the criminal. Look back to her comments on Viet Nam. She has no understanding or compassion for the millions of innocents that died when we left. She has no understanding or compassion for the innocents that were killed in Rawanda, or fill in the blank. All she knows is what she learned in the university. She has no critical thinking skills, so why waste your time.
It would be like trying to educate one trained in the Madrassa that Islam does not want you to kill the unbelievers.
Better to write a note to one of those that are keeping the evil at bay. She is a lost cause, a parasite that feeds at the public trough and cares not what price is paid to insure her freedom.
Help the 3rd world 1 micro-loan at a time- http://www.kiva.org
PS:
I stumbled across this “Final Blog” of a “rough man”. Sleep peaceably tonight Morningstar.
http://www.andrewolmsted.com/
“Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”