Doug Henwood Talks

Michael Pugliese wrote:

http://www.logictimes.com/civilian.htm I’ll forward this around for comments by those far better able to judge the statistical analysis.

Michael, why do you give this bullshit the time of day? Iraq Body Count is based on actual reports of actual deaths. Why, then, this “adjustment”?:

The two top BLUE lines are the results of the gender/age normalization of the casualty data. Using documented gender/age demographic data, the reported female deaths and the reported underage deaths were used to project the actual adult male non-combatants embedded in the total casualty number.

Could it be that women - for religious reasons, for fear of crime, etc. - are less likely to be walking about than men, and that American soldiers are more likely to shoot at men? There’s no reasonable justification for merely assuming that the female death figure is right and that the reported male death rate should be adjusted downwards.

And the swipe at the Lancet study continues in that stupid tradition. It was an “excess death” analysis, that compared an estimate of the actual number of deaths among Iraqis to what might be expected under “normal” (non-war) circumstances. By design, it would include people who die because the electricity’s out, or suffer heart attacks from the stress of war. It’s not a measure of the number of people shot by GIs, and was never intended to be. But if the US hadn’t invaded the country, those dead would probably be alive.

This guy thinks that Ann Coulter and Charles Krauthammer are “brilliant thinkers.” Clearly this man is an idiot on a mission.

Doug

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 10:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.