Fumento left a comment on my earlier post. Instead of discussing the Lancet article, he boasted how his column had been published in the on the web site of the Lake Wylie Pilot, which is a free weekly newspaper serving a town of 3,000 people. Hey, my little blog has a greater circulation than that.
Eye Doc linked to Fumento's attack on the Lancet, so I left a comment explaining what was wrong. Fumento replied:
Tim Lambert is on a personal Jihad to debunk my debunking. I did not say death certificates were not used, they were. But so was alleged personal recall. That means that if a family recalled ten deaths of people who were alive and well, they went straight into the pot.
Nowhere in his piece did Fumento say that they used death certificates, instead he implies they did not with this: "the researchers didn't feel themselves bound by anything official, like death certificates."
Fumento continues:
The authors claimed to have come up with one set of numbers including Falluja, another without. But strangely, they never present the "without numbers." Lambert knows this because I told him directly. Anyway, it's in the study -- or rather, it's NOT in the study.
Who are you going to believe, Fumento, or your lying eyes?
And David Mason piles on here and here, opining: "Michael Fumento is a bitter, bitter man.".
Correction: In comments, Fumento complains:
you are now lying about what I wrote to you. I didn't say I appeared in the Lake Wylie Pilot, I said my column is picked up by the McLatchey News Service that posts it automatically to the sites of about a dozen papers.
My apologies. When he wrote that "it goes to" the Lake Wylie Pilot he meant that it appeared on their web site, which is apparently different from appearing in the Lake Wylie Pilot. I apologize unreservedly to Mr Fumento for stating that his column had appeared in the Lake Wylie Pilot when it had merely appeared on the Lake Wylie Pilot web site. I hope that Mr Fumento's reputation has not been harmed by my erroneous statement.
Also contrary to Fumento's claims, the paper does provide separate numbers for Falluja cluster:
And another one:
[emphasis added]
In other words, if they include Falluja, the number of excess deaths triples. Instead of 1 + 0.5 relative risk, they get 1 + 1.5 relative risk. Instead of 100,000 excess deaths, they get 100,000 deaths outside Falluja and 200,000 inside Falluja, for a total of 300,000.
However, the paper properly disemphasizes these numbers, and excludes Fallujah from all of its main results, because it is an outlier and introduces high uncertainty.
The thing that I find most amusing about Fumento's defensive posturing is that he has such disdain for bloggers yet he cannot help himself in finding them, mailing them, and responding to their comments.
His stints at the neo-con breeding lab, American Enterprise Institute and the Dr. Moon's Unification Church newspaper, the Washington Times must have put him in such a defensive mode that this is simply "normal" to him.
Fumento's repeated assertions that the Lancet failed to exclude Fallujah, despite being reminded (how many times now?) that it did, have taken on a slightly surreal quality. What does this remind me of? Ah, yes.
<bad_taste>
<⁄bad_taste>
And so on. Perhaps Fumento reckons that the rest of the world will just give up before this exchange descends much deeper into farce.
One of the things which fascinates me the most about this whole issue is that there seem to be a large number of people who take written-in-one-evening posts on Tech Central Station as or more seriously than peer-reviewed articles in Lancet. Who are these people, and how can we fix the education system so that the next generation has somewhat better critical thinking skills?
Jonathon, that's the problem, right there in your post. Vonnegut had a funny comment about that in his last 'conversation' with Kilgore Trout - he called our schools 'purposely lousy'. I'm not sure how to fix this, however - I guess if I did know how to do it, I wouldn't be here, I'd be in Washington, DC. :o)
D
The Guardian, no less, has cited the bugger now, although they did have the decency to misspell his name "Fumenton".
Fumento seems to be an extremly bitter man. On his site any disagrement is labed "hate mail." The latest batch comes with pictures of beheadings:
http://www.fumento.com/hatemail/hatemail30.html
Jonathan, they are writing plenty of letters to The Australian.
Tim,
Apart from the ad hominem directed at Emeritus Prof. J. Brignell in your previous post, describing him as a crank, enough comment over the Lancet Paper here suggests that a cynical study by a mining type might clarify things.
A small problem is that other more important things take up my time, something which you seem to have an abundance of, (time to craft these cheeky blogs, as an example).
But this Lancet study seems not to have activated the radar of the usual media outlets, so one suspects it might be a medical version of the Mann et al Hockey Stick which, after sound scientific analysis, has been falsified.
Louis:
I am surprised that a man of your limited time would be able to devote the resources to falsifying Mann et. al. After all, M&M spent considerable time trying this but in the end failed. After hounding Nature to review their analysis of Mann's work, all the reviewers came back and though that Mann was more correct than M&M.
Anyway, your analysis is always of interest.
Regards,
Yelling
Louis is it an impossibility for anyone on that side of things to admit that Fumento is playing fast and lose with the truth? If someone wants to come along and critically examine the Lancet, fine; but that is not what Fumento and the TCS clowns are doing, as is abundantly clear to anyone. As an aside, to the AEI run a class in this type of thing?
Louis,
What "usual media outlets" are you referring to? The same "usual media outlets" that printed accredited lies about the reasons for aggression against Iraq? The same "usual media outlets" that abandoned all objectivity in its attempt to legitimize the invasion? The Lancet study has gained a lot of attention but not in the establishment media. I find it remarkable that you can so flippantly dismiss the study or that by Mann with such superficial reasoning.
See, Louis is just building anticipation for his next blockbuster scientific paper, everyone! Workin' the crowd.
We all know if he turns his prodigious analytical talent to the task, truth will be revealed.
By God, just let Louis clear his desk of these pesky papers and that Lancet study will be shredded forthwith!
Ahhh, you just can't make up stuff like this. Priceless. As we say over here in the country where people who think torture is bad are in the minority: yer a hoot, Louis.
D
Sigh. You are so obsessed you are now lying about what I wrote to you. I didn't say I appeared in the Lake Wylie Pilot, I said my column is picked up by the McLatchey News Service that posts it automatically to the sites of about a dozen papers. You chose the smallest, ignoring such as the Sacramento Bee and the Minnesota Herald Tribune. Yet even the Lake Wylie Pilot gives me more readers than you have. My God, I must have really stuck a pin in that over-inflated ego of yours -- not that it was difficult.
Okay, it's actually the Minnesota Star Tribune and I even spelled "McClatchey wrong." But this is from the McClatchey website concerning its papers. "Headquartered in Sacramento, Ca., the company has 12 daily and 18 community newspapers with a combined average circulation of 1.4 million daily and 1.9 million Sunday." Out of all those, Lambert chose to tell you only about the smallest. What does that say about him? What does it say that he didn't tell you my column goes out to 350 newspapers via Scripps Howard and was carried in the weekend New York Post (circulation over 500,000) and the influential Washington Times (circulation 200,000). What does it say that he's been tracking down every single blog that mentioned my Lancet piece favorably (including the highly-trafficked "Jihad Watch" and called me a liar. This is one pathetic person. Trust anything he says at your own risk.
Mike:
Not that it means that much but you forgot a bracket in your third last sentence. They may not care about things like that in the Lake Wylie Pilot but Mr. Lambert's readers do.
Regards,
Yelling
(PS Nice to see you posting back here again).
What does it say about Tim Lambert? Not much, except perhaps that he was canny enough to know that he could rely upon Michael Fumento to immediately start trumpeting about how mis-represented he's been and how huge a readership he really has. Talk about over-inflated egos. First induced to blow out choking clouds of statistical ignorance, and then baited into a ludicrous rodomontade on how many different lines of fish-wrap carry your ramblings. Nice work, Tim - you got him to show how he has neither skill nor shame.
This Fumento fellow can't even get his citations right - it's iraqbodycount dot net, not dot com.
Michael: Actually, as I noted above, I have more readers than the Lake Wylie Pilot.
I didn't tell everybody how your column "goes out to" 350 newspapers because you have taken the opportunity to mention this Very Important Piece of information several times now. Please feel free to mention it again as many times as you think necessary to prove that your comments about the Lancet study are correct.
People can trust what I say because if I find out that something I wrote is incorrect, I post a correction. It's a policy you might like to try.
Michael, I see that you're still carrying on the same line of reasoning that you did in the post "Fumento Follies" - where you appear to be arguing that your popularity on the internet and/or in newspaper articles is somehow a measure of the credibility of your arguments and your relevance. You seem to have dropped out of that post and therefore you probably did not see the comments I made there. So I will copy them again here as they are, I see from your continuing remarks, no less relevant.
First, Google searches. In regards to your Internet popularity, I searched on your name not only in Google, but also in Altavista, Hotbot, Go.com, MSN, Yahoo, and Webcrawler. In every case, Deltoid and Tim's remarks came up on the first page relatively near the top if not at it. Also, in virtually every case, at least two thirds of the hits I got were from credible sites debunking your work on a wide range of scientific issues. Of the links that were positive to you, other than your own site, nearly every one was from Right Wing front groups and hack organizations like the Reason Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the National Review, Tech Central Station, and the like. There were virtually no links or references to you from any mainstream scientific body that weren't critical. In the scientific community, the value of a work is rated largely by the number of times it is cited for support in other credible, reviewed works. Internet search popularity does not pass that test, and neither does being carried by lots of newspapers. By the peer-review test, your popularity seems quite low.
By the way, in case anyone doubts that Internet search and/or popularity has little to do with credibility, consider the following...
1) After searching for "Fumento" in the above search engines, I tried searching on "Pamela Anderson" and "centerfold". I got back an order of magnitude more hits from countless sources that were no less credible than the Right Wing front groups that love Fumento's stuff.
2) I am a Data Center Sys Admin for Getty Images, the world's largest stock photography house (the center of our AsiaPac operations is based in Sydney, not far from where Tim is a professor). We control over 85 percent of the world's stock and editorial imagery - for ALL those newspapers Michael rates his popularity by, including the 350 newspapers via Scripps Howard that he is so enamored with. WE supply all those people with most of their editorial imagery, and what's at our Editorial customer facing editorial web site is what they need most. A search of that site (editorial.gettyimages.com) for "Michael Fumento" returns zero results. A similar search for "Pamela Anderson" returns 4834 images in 63 editorial events, tied to 74 keywords, and from 110 photographers.
Hey Michael, maybe if you posed for Playboy or Penthouse, you could build up your credibility even more...
BTW - I see Michael is still pushing his appearances in "the influential Washington Times (circulation 200,000)" and "the highly-trafficked Jihad Watch". The Washington Times, like the UPI Newswire, is owned and controlled by the Unification Church - the "Moonies". You know, the people who believe that Rev. Sun Myung Moon is a Messiah and that the work of God is spread through the world via the "Divine Principle", which coincidently, according to Moon, is spread through sex. Moon believes that Jesus Christ failed to save the human race from its sins because he never got laid (And thus, never spread the Divine Principle). No kidding - I'm not nearly creative enough to make this kind of stuff up! Naturally, Moon, whose followers refer to him as "the Lord of the Second Advent" and to his wife and he as "True Parents" (for 50 points, guess how they got THAT title....) believes himself to be a Messiah who will save the human race.... guess how?
HE controls the content of the Washington Times and the UPI Newswire. No wonder it has one of the worst science reporting records in the business. This is Fumento's glowing citation, and the paper he is so proud of being published in! And Jihad Watch? You're kidding right? These are his alternatives to a peer-reviewed scientific journal like the Lancet?
And finally, no matter how popular the Washington Times, Jihad Watch, and all those 350 newspapers Michaels is so proud of really are, I guarantee you - none of them are even remotely as popular as Playboy.
So Michael, how about that centerfold deal?....