Fumento

In 1987 Zhang JianDong published a study linking chromium-6 in drinking water to cancer. In 1997 he published a new study retracting his findings --- further analysis showed that chromium-6 wasn't to blame. All part of the normal progress of science you would think. Except for a few small things. 1. Zhang did not write the 1997 retraction published under his name. 2. Zhang did not agree with the conclusions of the 1997 study. 3. The 1997 study was actually written by consultants from ChemRisk hired by PG&E. And PG&E was being sued for…
Fumento has written a reply to Cathy Seipp's article. Mostly he whines about how mean Seipp was. The only substantive bit is this: Read the Business Week piece. It takes three whole minutes. Nowhere does it say I took money for any column or story. It says I solicited a grant from Monsanto for a biotechnology book I was working on. (It doesn't say, but should, that such solicitations from philanthropies and corporations are the general rule for writers of policy books.) It says my think-tank employer accepted the grant and paid me a salary while I worked on the book. Using a bizarre set…
I don't know about you, but I've been waiting with delicious anticipation to see what Fumento's defence would be after he got fired by Scripps-Howard. Fumento does not disappoint. Why did he not disclose that Monsanto had paid him $60,000 to write a book about biotechnology? Fumento says: I had called numerous scientists who had helped me to ask how they would like to be acknowledged and one at Monsanto said he'd prefer that both he and the company be left out. I could have ignored his wishes. But notwithstanding that I live in the backstabbing capital of the world, I kept my knife…
When I criticised Michael Fumento's innumerate writing about the Lancet study he responded with this: You can blog all you want, but my next column is also on this. It goes out to over 350 newspapers Not any more: Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) announced Friday that it severed its relationship with Michael Fumento -- a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute -- for not disclosing he had taken payments in 1999 from agribusiness giant Monsanto. The payments were revealed by BusinessWeek Online, which also broke a similar story revealing columnist Doug Bandow receiving payments…
Fumento has now made three posts on his blog and a whole pile of comments on other blogs in response to my revealing his use of a sock puppet. He has called me a liar, claimed that I am insane and falsely accused me of using sock puppets myself. What he hasn't done is deny that Tracy Spenser was his sock puppet. I wonder why not? This comment from Fumento is pretty funny: Meanwhile, since I made my first post on Lambert's Vendetta.com my site has been swamped with vile fake trackbacks for non-existent pornographic URLs. None before that posting; about 40 a day now. Coincidence? I find it…
We last saw Fumento blundering around in a field of rakes. Now read on. John Fleck commented on the situation: The thing is, Fumento is, at times, a quite talented journalist. But then, over and over again, he shows himself to be a complete tool. My first encounter with his work was a solid take-down in Reason of Gary Taubes' New York Times Magazine piece on the wonders of the Atkins diet. I probably liked the piece because it fit my biases, but whatever. It was a solid piece of work. And true to form Fumento managed to make a complete fool of himself with an evidence-free claim that…
After accidentally proving that he was using a sock on Wikipedia, Fumento is back for more. I think that putting a "(sic)" after misspellings is rather petty, but since Fumento does it when he quotes others, I've yielded to temptation and sicced all over his many spelling mistakes. Fumento begins: There are lots of reasons people blog. One may be that nobody else would ever publish their material. Some of these people nevertheless fill a valuable nitch (sic) that just doesn't appeal to outside publications; others are simply inept. The latter describes Tim Lambert and his Deltoid blogsite.…
SayUncle blogged on Fumento's use of sock puppets: Mike Fumento, who I've talked about before, poked fun at us insignificant blogs before starting his own. He also acted like a prick in an exchange between himself and Rich Hailey. Now, he's using sockpuppets in comments at other blogs and to change his Wikipedia entry. Fumento left this comment: And the reason we know the IP addresses match is . . . because we have Tim Lambert's word on it! And never mind that Lambert has long been on a vendetta against me, nor that he uses his friend over at urinestain.com, er, inkstain.com, to do HIS…
Somebody with IP address 69.143.188.141 has been doing John Lott style edits to Michael Fumento's Wikipedia page. For instance, this person removed the link to my criticism of Fumento. By a strange coincidence 69.143.188.141 just happens to be the IP address used by Tracy Spenser.
Last month Tracy Spenser posted [this comment](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/10/crime-of-the-century.php#commen…) on my blog: Looks like Fumento has made a fool of you again? When are you ever going to learn? www.fumento.com/weblog/ar www.townhall.com/blogs/c- And when are you going to stop encouraging a policy of genocide against people who just happen to have darker skin than yours? Tracy Spencer was a pop singer in the 80s but our Tracy might be a different person. Anyway, [as usual](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/category/fumento/), Fumento's post was full of mistakes, so I…
Michael Fumento hasresponded to my post way back in January demolishing his foolish proposal that after the tsunami: DDT should be sprayed on water pools, tents, and on people themselves---as indeed was once common in Sri Lanka and throughout most of the world. Unfortunately, mosquitoes in Sri Lanka are resistant to DDT, so DDT spraying would be a waste of time and money. Fumento insists that DDT spraying would be effective despite resistance because Resistance doesn't mean "immunity." Often it simply means using more insecticide in the spray than you would otherwise. And then when you do…
Following the tsunami, the folks at Junk Tech Fumento Central Science Station (JTFCSS) have been calling for DDT spraying. Here's Michael Fumento: The best answer would be spraying with DDT. Unfortunately, environmentalists have demonized DDT based essentially on unfounded accusations in a 1962 book, Silent Spring. ... DDT should be sprayed on water pools, tents, and on people themselves---as indeed was once common in Sri Lanka and throughout most of the world. And Tech Central Station: Imagine that every year the world suffered from six or…
After Fumento promised me: Now I am going to do the worst possible thing you can do to somebody who measures his life by "hits." I'm not going to write to you again, what do I find in my inbox from Michael Fumento? Goodness! Even on the Web you're a pitiful pissant! I just went to www.alexa.com and ranked your site. Not even in the top million! I don't even have a blog and I'm under 300,000. You have GOT to start training some monkeys to click on your site all day long. That or simply reconcile yourself to reality and save yourself some IP fees by simply writing in a paper…
Welcome to the 2004 Deltoid awards. Today we are giving out the Golden Rake Award, named in honour of Sideshow Bob and the rakes in the Simpsons Cape Feare episode: How many other series would waste valuable prime-time real estate by showing a man whacking himself in the face with a garden rake not once, not twice, but NINE TIMES?!? If ever there was a gag genius in its repetitive stupidity (progressing from funny to not so funny to the funniest thing ever), this is it---merely the sharpest cut in an entire episode that just plain kills. The award…
Yes, he's back! Over at his website Fumento has posted Hate Mail, Volume 32, which contains his creatively edited version of our exchange. According to Fumento, it went like this: Fumento: And no, the Lancet column I wrote didn't just appear in the four papers you mentioned. It appears in places you don't even know about because, unlike your blog, it isn't confined to the web but also appears in print. Yesterday it was in the Washington Times print edition. But if only the web interests you, you should know it was picked up by the entire McClatchy News Service. That means that…
For someone who holds blogs in contempt, Michael Fumento sure spends a lot of time posting comments to blogs. Here he is again: (Hat tip: John Fleck, now the third site on a Google search for "Michael Fumento") My writing on the Lancet article has been Fleck's obsession for over a week, and everything he says is wrong including this latest posting. First, simple subtraction tells you in 19 percent of the households death certificates were NOT used. But that's not the equivalent of 19 percent of the deaths. If a household said a bomb killed five family…
The fun continues in this comment thread. Highlights: Michael Fumento: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. John Fleck: A quick refresher on where the Lancet study's authors included the "without Falluja" numbers. It's in the paper's abstract. That's the thing that comes right at the beginning: "We estimate that 98,000 more deaths…
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…
John Fleck commented on my exchange with Fumento here and here. He responded to Fumento's silly charge that I "occupy the pitiful place of the harmless blogger who blogs because nobody in his right mind would punish (sic) him" with: That's of course ad hominem, something of a poor refuge in any argument. But it's worse than that. It's plain dumb in this age of Dan Rather and Little Green Footballs for a writer of Fumento's stature to expect us to think he wins the argument because his work is published in mainstream media. Sure enough, Fleck got an email…
The Anchorage Daily News has published a new version of Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the Lancet study on deaths in Iraq. How does it differ from his previous attempt? Well his key argument was that their estimate was skewed by the inclusion of the Falluja cluster. But it is perfectly clear from the report that Falluja was excluded from their estimate. Fumento knows this because he responded to my post with a comment, and he specifically asked questions about the inclusion of Falluja in the comments to his TCS article. In his new version he…