In his debate with George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens said:
If you really believe the crazed fabrication of the figures of 100,00 deaths in Iraq ...
you can simply go to my colleague Fred Kaplan's space on slate.com.
He's a very stern and strong critic of the war, a great opponent of mine.
We've…
The tsunami and Katrina both left behind pools of stagnant water in which things have swarmed and multiplied and emerged to infect humanity. I'm referring, of cause, to clueless articles extolling the virtues of DDT.
The latest is by Henry Miller in the National Review Online.
The six-year old U.S…
Tim Blair's blog is notorious because commenters are banned merely for disagreeing with him. However, in this post, Blair accuses Antony Loewenstein of cowardice because Loewenstein would not debate with an abusive phone caller. Blair refuses to accept Loewenstein's stated reason ("He wants to…
MediaLens has a two part article (part 1 part 2) on the shoddy press coverage of the Lancet study. They describe how Mary Dejevsky, senior leader writer on foreign affairs for the Independent dismissed the study because:
personally, i think there was a problem with the extrapolation technique,…
David Hardy writes:
USA Today reports, with customary horror, that 1,700,000 children are in homes with unsecured guns, and that one-third of American homes have firearms in them. It goes on to say 1,400 "children and teens" are shot to death each year, and pumps for laws on gun storage (i.e., to…
One of the few things that Andrew Bolt got correct in his original criticism of the Lancet study was the sample size, 988 households:
Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14…
The ancestor of this blog was my archive of Usenet and mail list postings about gun control. I created it in 1996 and updated it fitfully until I started this blog. Now I've folded it into this blog, so you can visit my archives from September 1993 and follow the raging debate about the frequency…
Tim Blair has a post where he has over seventy links to posts by John Quiggin that mention Kyoto. We can conclude that Quiggin is a very careful writer because it looks like Blair didn't find any typos in all those posts. Stripped of his usual I-found-a-typo-therefore-you-are-wrong argument,…
Mark Steyn gets this email :
ARE YOU A CREATIONIST?
I enjoy your various articles in the Speccie, torygraph etc and agree with most of what you say and your support for Right views. But I am concerned with your right-wing mates in the US and UK who seem to be on the intelligent-design rubbish…
Thanks to everyone who sent congratulations on my 20th wedding anniversary. The traditional gift is china, but Tim Blair sent a flame:
Look up "Oh my God I've married an obsessive shrieking hypocrite!" and you'll see a picture of Lambert's wife.
The Wall Street Journal has a reputation for publishing excellent news pages and mendacious editorial pages. Now, an investigation by Environmental Science and Technology on an WSJ front page article on McIntyre and McKitrick makes you wonder if the editorial pages are influencing the news…
After falling for an obvious hoax, Mark Steyn has refused to correct
his error. Instead he just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper
into a hole. (My previous posts on this topic:
1
2
3).
In his latest effort Steyn complains about how the meanies at Media Watch asked him what checks he made to…
Lott and Dabney have an op-ed in the Washington Times on concealed handguns in the workplace. As usual, Lott misrepresents the state of current research on firearms. Lott and Dabney write:
Indeed, international data as well as data from across the United States indicate that criminals are much…
There have been a few people who have used
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet">sock
puppets on this blog. Note that a sock puppet differs from a
pseudonym in that sock puppets are used to deceitfully make it appear
that there is more support for you postion than there…
Over the past few years crime rates in Australia, Canada and England have fallen dramatically.
For example, in NSW crime plunged to the
lowest level in 20 years, in Canada, the 2003 homicide rate was the lowest in 36 years, while in England the crime rate was the lowest since the BCS started in…
"Dave Curry", the fellow who sent me a very nasty email and then a nice apology is back, using another sockpuppet to attack me:
Lambert was toasted on the Climate Audit website. Lambert is very quick to impugn the motives of others, criticise them for not having good enough credentials (according…
In the discussion on
this post, per posted an abusive comment, violating my comment policy.
I've had to ban him twice before (see here and
here), so I simply banned him again, deleting the offending comment and the few that he posted after that.
That should have been the end of it, but the folks at…
James Annan finally has takers for his bet on global warming. The news was published in Nature, but for those without a subscription, here is the gist of it:
James Annan, who is based at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, has agreed a US$10,000 bet with Galina…
By now everyone knows that last June the UAH (University of Alabama
Huntsville) team led by Roy Spencer and John Christy released updates to
their satellite derived lower troposphere temperature trends. These
trends, which come from their "TLT" dataset use data from the Microwave
Sounding Unit (…
Some of the readers of this Mark Steyn column might have wondered why he seems oddly determined to dispute one date in the 9/11 Commission's time line:
they seemed oddly determined to fix June 3, 2000, as the official date of Atta's first landing on American soil
Of course, those people who heard…
Last week the gullible Mark Steyn was
busted by
Media Watch for basing a column on Johnelle Bryant's crazy story about
being visited by Mohammed Atta in early May 2000. She said that Atta
threatened to cut her throat and wanted a loan to buy a crop duster.
Unfortunately for her story, Atta wasn't…
(Via Irant). Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson launched the Australian Science Festival with this:
Intelligent design, which is damned by critics as a front for biblical Creationism, argues that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved purely through Darwin's theory of natural…
Tina Rosenberg's article, What the World Needs Now Is
DDT,
published in the New York Times last year contains many factual
errors about DDT. The errors combine to present a false picture of a world where DDT is a magic bullet that could end malaria if only dogmatic environmentalists would allow it…
Long time readers will be aware of what I think of the appalling quality of the writing about science in Tech Central Station. (Examples: Statistics, Fumento, epidemiology
physics, economics, more statistics, and more epidemiology. )
Well, they've destroyed any remaining credibility they might have…
In a comment to post on the Barton letters, Ed Snack claimed that
Michael Mann made an error in MBH98, he confused the square root of the cosine of the latitude with the cosine
Now if you look at MBH98, cosine latitude is only mentioned here:
Northern Hemisphere (NH) and global (GLB) mean…
Barista has more on the history of Spiked. It seems that they have set up another astroturf operation called "Sense about Science", chaired by Dick Taverne.