Deltoid

Last December I examined a posting by John Ray who dismissed ozone depletion as a “Greenie scare” using facts he seemed to have just made up by himself. Now he’s back, attacking gun control. This time he’s not using facts that he made up—he’s using facts that Lott made up. He quotes from a review of More Guns, Less Crime by Thomas Jackson:

“How strange it must be to be a liberal. Driven by slogans, blinded by superstitions, dazzled by fantasies, the liberal stumbles through life oblivious to facts. There is almost nothing the liberal thinks he knows about race, social policy, sex roles, individual differences, and even history that is not some combination of slogan, superstition, and fantasy. John Lott’s soberly brilliant More Guns, Less Crime could not possibly be a more convincing demonstration that what liberals think they know about guns is fantasy, too. The liberal view, of course, is that private citizens should not have guns and that gun control will stop violence. Prof. Lott, who teaches law and economics at the University of Chicago, makes an air-tight case for the opposite view”

And according to Jackson, one element of that “air-tight” case is:

Prof. Lott points out that it is partly due to the quiet, undramatic way in which civilian gun ownership works that makes it easy for liberals to ignore its benefits. He explains that the best survey data suggest that 98 percent of the time, when someone uses a gun to deter crime he doesn’t even have to fire it. All he has to do is show it.

Of course, the best survey data doesn’t say that brandishing a gun is sufficient 98% of the time. When Lott found this fact out, rather than admit to making an error, he fabricated a survey. And the rest of Lott’s “air-tight” case was completely deflated when more data showed that, if anything, carry laws increase crime.

To be fair, Jackson’s was reviewing the 1st edition of More Guns, Less Crime which Lott wrote before he starting claiming to have done a survey. (Though even then, if Jackson had checked the literature on defensive gun use he would have known that the 98% claim was wrong.) John Ray has no such excuse.

Update: I emailed a link to this post to John Ray. He replied:

Will link to your site probably tomorrow.

Instead of linking to my criticism, he has now posted a highly misleading defence of Lott:

John Lott has of course been much criticized by Leftists because he could not produce the original data behind one of the surveys he quoted — a fact originally brought to light by a libertarian blogger. Lott says he lost the data in a computer disk crash. As I have myself lost stuff that way despite being generally very careful about backups, I sympathize with such problems. Conservatives are divided over Lott’s claim but I note that The person who knew Lott’s work best at that time has testified in Lott’s favour and that even the Leftist Mother Jones says that the particular survey concerned “isn’t central to the argument”.

1. Lott has not just been criticized by “Leftists”.
2. It isn’t just that he can’t produce the data (though that’s bad enough, since even if you buy Lott’s story he continued to cite the number for years even though he knew he had no data to support it). He his being criticized for fabrication of research.
3. The fact that he could not produce the data was not brought to light by a libertarian blogger, but by Otis Dudley Duncan, an eminent sociologist from UCSB.
4. Mustard has not testified that Lott did a survey, but that Lott told him that he had done a survey.
5. The full quote from Mother Jones is

   Lott’s defenders rightly point out that the missing survey — which was completely lost in a computer crash, Lott says — isn’t central to the argument of “More Guns, Less Crime”. But as Harvard economist David Hemenway wrote in a recent critique of Lott’s latest book, “The Bias Against Guns”, one must have “faith in Lott’s integrity” before accepting his statistical results. That is because in the dauntingly complex subfield of econometrics, statistical manipulation is a constant concern. In a recent attempt to rescue his beleaguered “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis from criticism, Lott has been caught massaging his data to favor his argument. In subsequent exchanges with Mother Jones, he changed his story several times about a key data table that was misleadingly labeled — and then surreptitiously amended — on his website. Nevertheless, most pro-gun scholars and political conservatives have yet to call Lott to account.

   Notice how Ray dismisses the survey as not central, but ducks the question of Lott’s cooking his “More Guns, Less Crime” results.

Back in March I wrote about the way pro-gun bloggers leapt to the conclusion that self-defence in the UK was illegal, based on story about a man who defended himself against some robbers with a sword, killed one and ended up being jailed for eight years. Unfortunately, the story left out the fact that the killing was not in self-defence since the killer had stabbed the robber in the back after he fled from the killer’s home. In the comments to that post and this follow-up post, Kevin Baker argued that restrictions on weapons in the UK made it essentially impossible to defend yourself. Now he has a new posting where he continues the argument.

He says that he stands by this statement (emphasis added by me):

(T)here have been numerous cases of the British courts charging people for defending themselves. The law there seems to be one based on “proportional response” - e.g., stabbing someone who isn’t armed with a weapon is “excessive force.” So is bashing them over the head with a brick. There are many of these cases, and they’ve lead us to the conclusion that private citizens in Britain had best not resist attack, or face prosecution for usurping the authority of the State in its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. My primary objection to the news story was that it reinforces that conclusion. If you are a reader of that story, ignorant as to the details, in combination with all the other similar stories of people prosecuted after defending themselves, the message is “don’t resist, you’ll go to jail.”

He has “spent a considerable amount of time trying to do archive research through UK online newspapers for stories on self defense”, and found not one story where someone was prosecuted for defending themselves. So where do we stand here? Despite strenous efforts, we have not one case where the British courts have charged someone for defending themselves. All we have is two cases (Lindsay and Martin) where the killing was not self-defence, but were presented by pro-gunners to make it look like it was.

Next, Baker seems to think there is some contradiction between Kleck’s description of Baker’s belief that gun control does not disarm any criminals as a fallacy, and Kleck’s statement that general gun availability has no net positive effect on crime. That’s net effect. He’s not saying that there are no negative effects. He’s arguing that the positive effects cancel them out.

Next, Baker once more misrepresents my position by claiming that my “philosophy” is

Violence is wrong.

Of course, it is quite obvious from what I have written in this discussion that I don’t think that violence used in self-defence is wrong. It is disappointing that Baker has chosen to argue against a straw man rather than my position.

Baker then claims:

It doesn’t matter to Tim that taking firearms away from the law abiding makes them nearly powerless against those willing to use violence against them. Women, the elderly, the physically disabled are all at a disadvantage against the youthful, strong, and predatory. They don’t NEED a gun.

If the law disarms attackers, then it can make self defence possible where it would have been impossible if the attacker was armed.

But the law doesn’t disarm attackers. It disarms their victims. The attackers have the choice to be armed or not. The State denies that choice to the victims, and so doing makes their victimization easier.

Even after I point out that a gun is not the only way to defend yourself Baker is back to claim that it basically is, with only a weaselly “nearly” to qualify his claim. He once more asserts that “the law doesn’t disarm attackers”, even though I called him on this claim before and pointed out that pro-gun scholar Gary Kleck calls it a fallacy. In our discussion, I’ve provided evidence that his claim is false, while he has not provided any evidence that it is true. Finally, it is utterly wrong to start his paragraph with “It doesn’t matter to Tim” when what follows are not facts that I have expressed indifference towards, but “facts” that I have strenuously pointed out are false.

And just to prove that Baker is still gullible, we have the latest crime figures from England. Here’s what Baker reported:

Violent crime rose 11% in the final three months of 2003 compared with the same period in 2002, Home Office figures revealed today. Latest figures show 271,500 incidents of violent crime were recorded by police in England and Wales from October to December 2003. More serious violent crimes such as murder and serious wounding rose by 13%, while “less serious” violent crime such as assaults increased 21% period-on-period to 106,000 incidents. The number of sexual offences rose 6% to 12,600 while robberies fell 7% to 23,900.

Quick, based on what Baker reported, did violent crime go up or down? Guess what, the British Crime Survey showed that violent crime decreased by 5%. The 11% increase that the newspaper used for its headline was just because the police were recording more of the smaller number of violent crimes. Of course, “crime up” makes for a better story than “crime down”, so that’s the way the paper reported it and Baker fell for it. And note that in another post he specifically acknowledges that the survey figures are more accurate than the police recorded figures.

After criticizing Iain Murray for his misleading writing about epidemiology and global warming, I should acknowledge when he gets something right, correctly stating that violent crime has been falling in Britain for years.

I wrote earlier correcting Ross McKitrick’s false claim that there is no such thing as Global Temperature. Unfortunately McKitrick’s claim has been adopted and spread by people ignorant of basic physics. For example, consider this review of Essex and McKitrick’s book Taken by Storm at (where else?) Tech Central Station, by Paul Georgia. If you look at Georgia’s biographical details, you will see that he has studied political economy and economics and there is no evidence that he ever studied physics and it certainly shows in his review.

Before I examine what Georgia wrote in his review, I’d like to give Wikipedia a plug. I thought I’d have to quote passages from basics physics texts, but Wikipedia has accurate and careful explanations that I can link to.

Georgia writes:

No Physical Meaning

Essex, who studies the underlying mathematics, physics and computation of complex dynamic processes, raises some very fundamental scientific issues with regard to global warming. Take, for instance, the “average global temperature,” which is the primary statistic offered as evidence of global warming. The problem with this statistic is that it has no physical meaning. Temperature is not a thermodynamic variable that lends itself to statistical analysis, nor does it measure a physical quantity.

If you read the Wikipedia page on temperature you will discover that it does have a physical meaning and also that it is a physical quantity. And that there is the whole field of statistical mechanics based on the application of statistics to temperature. Go figure.

Georgia continues:

Thermodynamic variables are of two types, says Essex, extensive and intensive. Extensive variables, like energy or mass, occur in amounts. Intensive variables, such as temperature, refer to conditions of a system. A cup of hot coffee, for example, contains an amount of energy and has a temperature. If you add an equal amount of coffee with the same amount of energy and the same temperature to the cup, the amount of energy doubles, but not the temperature. The temperature remains the same. Thus, while you can add up the energy from two separate systems and get total energy, it is physically meaningless to add up the two systems’ temperatures. And dividing that number by two doesn’t give you the average temperature either. Such an exercise results in a statistic that has no physical meaning. Yet that is exactly what occurs when the average global temperature is computed.

So let’s see. We have some coffee at 60 degrees and add an equal amount also at 60 degrees. Georgia tells us that the mixture will have a temperature of 60 degrees. So far so good. And that adding the two temperatures doesn’t give the right answer. Let’s see: 60+60 = 120, which is not the right answer. OK. And that “dividing that number by two doesn’t give you the average temperature either”. Let’s see: 120/2 = 60, which, err, is the right answer. I don’t want to be too harsh here, but I think your average eight year old could figure out that if you add a number to itself and divide by two you get the original number back again. But this was too much for Georgia.

In fact, adding the temperatures and dividing by two also works if you add an equal quantity at a different temperature. the Wikipedia page on intensive variables has the formula if the quantities are different—it’s a weighted mean of the two temperatures.

Georgia continues:

Moreover, temperature and energy aren’t the same thing. The internal energy of a system can change without changing the temperature and the temperature can change while the internal energy of the system remains the same. In fact, this occurs all the time in the climate because the two variables are fundamentally different classes of thermodynamic variables and there is no physical law that requires that they move together.

Wow. I guess we’ll just have to ditch the entire field of thermodynamics then. In fact, Temperature T and internal energy U are related by the formula

ΔU=ΔTmc

where m is the mass and c the specific heat. It is true that it is possible for internal energy to change without affecting the temperature if there is a phase change, but the atmosphere stays way above the temperature of liquid nitrogen, so this makes almost no difference to temperatures.

Georgia continues:

The next time somebody informs you that the planet’s “average temperature” has increased, you can rest assured that they have told you exactly nothing.

It’s clear that Georgia does not understand the basic physics of temperature, but he is willing confidently make false claims about temperature. Furthermore, the fact that Tech Central Station published his nonsense demonstrates that the editors there know nothing about physics either, which is a rather sad state of affairs for a site that publishes commentry on scientific matters.

Update: Chris Mooney has another example of pseudoscience from Paul Georgia, while David Appell concludes that Georgia is “unfit to be writing about any scientific concept”.

Update 2: Comments from Sadly No!, Atrios, Brad DeLong, The Editors and Tim Dunlop.

In comments to my previous post on Paul Georgia’s nonsense about temperature, Sarah wrote:

Yes, bad physics, but that was an easy target. I’d like to see you take on a hard target, like the petition signed by 17,000 scientists who declared that global warming is a sham. The research review is here.

At the OISM site she linked it says:

This is the website that completely knocks the wind out of the enviro’s sails. See over 17,000 scientists declare that global warming is a lie with no scientific basis whatsoever.

The global warming hypothesis has failed every relevant experimental test.

Did 17,000 scientists really say that global warming is a “lie”? I looked further and found the actual words of the petition. What they actually agreed with was this:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.

So they weren’t saying that it was a lie or wasn’t happening, just that there wasn’t good evidence that it would be a catastrophe. The OISM people have misrepresented their own petition.

Still, why would 17,000 scientists agree with the far weaker statement above? Well, it looks like that involved misrepresentation by the OISM as well. It seems they were mailed this letter from Frederick Seitz which said:

Research Review of Global Warming Evidence

Below is an eight page review of information on the subject of “global warming,” and a petition in the form of a reply card. Please consider these materials carefully.

The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds.

This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.

Unfortunately, the “research review” they were sent is not a research review of global warming evidence, but just a review of the evidence against global warming. According to the “review“, the earth isn’t warming, it’s cooling:

Predictions of global warming are based on computer climate modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy. The empirical evidence actual measurements of Earth’s temperature shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, over the past two decades, when CO2 levels have been at their highest, global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly.

How was the “review” able to claim cooling? Simple. The authors presented the satellite data (which at the time showed slight cooling, but now shows significant warming) but dismissed the more extensive surface data because it had “substantial uncertainties”. The only uncertainty that they mention is the urban heat island effect and what they fail to mention is that the surface temperature estimated by GISS corrects for the urban heat island effect. The “review” is not honest.

As a researcher, when I see a “research review” I expect that it will cover all the relevant research. I can certainly understand how a scientist who was under the impression that it was a genuine review might be persuaded that there was no good evidence for global warming, especially because the vast majority of scientists who signed were not climate scientists. Furthermore, in his cover letter Seitz identified himself as a past president of the NAS and the typeface and format of the “review” matched that used by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This report from PR Watch explains how the NAS was forced to correct the impression that it endorsed the “review”:

“The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review,” complained Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Chicago. NAS foreign secretary F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist, said researchers “are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.” NAS council member Ralph J. Cicerone, dean of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, was particularly offended that Seitz described himself in the cover letter as a “past president” of the NAS. Although Seitz had indeed held that title in the 1960s, Cicerone hoped that scientists who received the petition mailing would not be misled into believing that he “still has a role in governing the organization.”

The NAS issued an unusually blunt formal response to the petition drive. “The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal,” it stated in a news release. “The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.” In fact, it pointed out, its own prior published study had shown that “even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses. Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises.”

Of course, some of the signatories might have signed it even if they were better informed about global warming research. The Scientific American did a check:

Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers—a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community.

And I can’t help but share the Tech Central Station take on Scientific American’s check:

SciAm reported on the Oregon Petition against Kyoto back in October 2001, but rather than being encouraged by the extent of professional opinion supporting an optimistic reading of the evidence, the publication sniffed through the names until the editors found six (unnamed) signatories who apparently have since changed their minds.

Gee, that makes it sound like they had to search through the entire 17,000 to find the six. And who wrote that highly misleading account of the Scientific American’s check? None other than Ross “no such thing as a Global Temperature” McKitrick.

Wikipedia has the scoop on the Liepzig declaration, another dodgy petition touted by global warming sceptics.

Update: Scott Church’s page on the petition has some more links.

 

Last week I wrote about Paul Georgia’s review of Essex and McKitrick’s Taken by Storm. Based on their book, Georgia made multiple incorrect statements about the physics of temperature. Of course, it might have just been that Georgia misunderstood their book. Fortunately Essex and McKitrick have a briefing on their book, and while Georgia mangles the physics even worse than them, they do indeed claim that there is no physical basis to average temperature. They present two graphs of temperature trends that purport to show that you can get either a cooling trend or a warming trend depending on how you compute the average. McKitrick recently was in the news for publishing a controversial paper that claimed that an audit of the commonly accepted reconstruction of temperatures over the past 1000 years was incorrect, so it only seems fair to audit Essex and McKitrick’s graphs. As we will see, both of their graphs are wrong, and their results go away when the errors are corrected.

In their briefing, Essex and McKitrick claim that physics provides no basis for defining average temperature and:

“In the absence of physical guidance, any rule for averaging temperature is as good as any other. The folks who do the averaging happen to use the arithmetic mean over the field with specific sets of weights, rather than, say, the geometric mean or any other. But this is mere convention.”

Physics does, in fact, provide a basis for defining average temperature. Just connect the two systems that you want to average by a conductor. Heat will flow from the hotter system to the colder one until the temperatures are equalized. The final temperature is the average. That average will be a weighted arithmetic mean of the original temperatures. Which is why the folks doing the averaging use weighted arithmetic means rather than the geometric mean.

Of course, even if they were right and there were other equally valid ways to calulate the average temperature, they still need to show that it actually makes a difference, so Essex and McKitrick present an example the purports to show that whether you use the arithmetic or some other mean can affect whether or not you find a warming trend. They constructed the graph on the left by taking monthly observations from ten weather stations and averaging them with the arithmetic mean. They found an overall warming trend of +0.17 degree Celsius per decade.

They next present a graph where they

“treat each month as a vector of 10 observed temperatures, and define the aggregate as the norm of the vector (with temperatures in Kelvins). This is a perfectly standard way in algebra to take the magnitude of a multidimensional array. Converted to an average it implies a root mean square rule.”

Note that nobody, but nobody, averages temperatures this way. Anyway, when they calculated the trend they found an overall cooling trend of +0.17 degree Celsius per decade.

They triumphantly conclude:

“The same data can’t imply global warming and cooling can they? No they can’t. The data don’t imply global anything. That interpretation is forced on the data by a choice of statistical cookery. The data themselves only refer to an underlying temperature field that is not reducible to a single measure in a way that has physical meaning. You can invent a statistic to summarize the field in some way, but your statistic is not a physical rule and has no claim to primacy over any other rule.”

I looked at their graphs and something seemed wrong to me. Their root mean square average gives almost the same answer as the arithmetic mean. For example, it gives the mean of 0 and 20 degrees Celsius as 10.2 instead of 10 degrees. It didn’t make sense to me that it could make as big a difference to the trend as what they found.

McKitrick kindly sent me a spreadsheet containing the data they used and I almost immediately saw where they had gone wrong. You see, some stations had missing values, months where no temperature had been recorded. When calculating the root mean square they treated the missing values as if they were measurements of 0 degrees. This is incorrect, since the temperature was not actually zero degrees. Because the overall average temperature was positive this meant that the root mean square was biased downwards when there were missing observations. And since there were more missing values in the second half of the time series, this produced a spurious cooling trend.

When calculating the arithmetic mean they treated missing values differently. If only eight stations had observations in a given month, they just used the average of those stations. This isn’t as obviously wrong as the other method they used, but the stations in colder climates were more likely to have missing observations, so this biased the average upwards and produced a spurious warming trend.

I filled in the missing values by using the observation for that station from the same month in the previous year and recalculated the trends. Now both mean and root mean square averaging produced the same trend of -0.03, which is basically flat. When analysed correctly, their data shows neither warming or cooling, regardless of which average is used. The different trends they found were not because of the different averaging methods, but because of inconsistent treatment of missing data.

I also calculated the trend with their root mean square average and ignoring missing values, and with the arithmetic mean and replacing missing values with zero (spreadsheet is here). As the table below shows, the averaging method made almost no difference, but treating missing values incorrectly does.

Trend
Missing values	Mean	Root Mean Square
Ignored	0.16	0.15
Treated as 0 degrees	-0.15	-0.17
Previous year used	-0.03	-0.03

I emailed McKitrick to point out that arithmetic mean and root mean square did not give different results. He replied:

Thanks for pointing this out. It implies there are now 4 averages to choose from, depending on the formula used and how missing data are treated, and there are no laws of nature to guide the choice. The underlying point is that there are an infinite number of averages to choose from, quite apart from the practical problem of missing data.

Incredible isn’t it? He still doesn’t understand basic thermodynamics. And he seems to think that are no laws of nature to guide us in estimating the missing values so that it is just as valid to treat them as zero as any other method, even for places where the temperature never gets that low.

Lott has a new article at Fox News where he claims that gun control is unravelling:

Crime did not fall in England after handguns were banned in January 1997. Quite the contrary, crime rose sharply. Yet, serious violent crime rates from 1997 to 2002 averaged 29 percent higher than 1996; robbery was 24 percent higher; murders 27 percent higher. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to their 1993 levels.

Australia has also seen its violent crime rates soar after its Port Arthur gun control measures (search) in late 1996. Violent crime rates averaged 32 per cent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did the year before the law in 1996. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed increases of 45 percent.

The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the most recent survey done, shows that the violent crime rate in England and Australia was twice the rate in the US.

Lott as usual, has cherry picked his statistics. There are lots of different crime statistics to choose from and some show increases while other show decreases. Lott just tells his readers about the ones that show increases. Violent crime in England has actually decreased significantly since the gun ban. See the graph here. It looks like Lott chose to use the figures for police recorded crimes rather than the more accurate ones from the British Crime Survey. The police figures have gone up because of changes in recording practices and increases in the reporting rate, not because the actual number of violent crimes have increased. Of course he uses figures from the International Crime Victimization Survey in the last paragraph when it suits his purpose. These also show a violent crime decrease in England.

In any case, the advocates of the gun laws did not claim that they would reduce crimes committed without guns. Lott somehow forgot to mention what happened to the with-gun robbery rate. (The “armed robbery” rates he quotes include robberies committed with other weapons.) Here is a table containing the crime figures for Australia. (I also have them in a spreadsheet.) In the last column of my table I compare the average for 1993–1996 with the average for 1997–2002. The with-gun robbery rate has declined by 10%. Don’t expect Lott to ever admit this. Now, it is true that some rates have increased—for example the assault-with-firearm rate has increased, but the total gun crime rate has decreased. Certainly, Lott’s claim that gun control is “unravelling” is not supportable.

To all the people arriving here via a search for “Washingtonian blog”: The following table is provided as a public service so that you can keep your pseudonymous posters straight:

Pseudonym	Real name	Writes about	Blog link	News story
Mary Rosh	John R Lott Jr	How wonderful John Lott is	here	link
Washingtonian	John R Lott Jr	How wonderful John Lott is	here
Washingtonienne	Jessica Cutler	Her sex life	here	link

In completely unrelated John Lott news, Kieran Healy is promoting Lott as a commencement speaker.

Hunt Stilwell asks:

since the gun lobby’s statistical claims have been debunked so thoroughly and so often, why do they continue to use them, and why do people continue to buy them?

Brian Linse thinks there has been some progress, since not many progun bloggers linked to Lott’s piece, whereas

I remember the days when Instantman would have linked it within seconds of it being posted.

John Ray boasts that he quoted Lott in an attempt to bait me. He also offers an explanation for his earlier conduct in refusing to link to my post that he was responding to. Apparently it was “too intemperate” and “rage-filled”. Ray conveniently forgets to link or quote from this “rage-filled” posting so his readers aren’t able to see if his characterization is accurate: judge for yourself. Ray then attempts to side step the whole cherry-picking issue by asserting “almost any use of statistics has to be selective”. Well, yes, but if you do as Lott does and just select the statistics favourable to your position, then that’s cherry picking.

This is a list of the documents that detail the astroturf campaign conducted by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute (ADTI) on behalf of Philip Morris (PM) against the Clinton health plan in 1994. They were obtained by a search for “fname: anti-tax” in the Philip Morris documents archive. ADTI’s summary of their activities is here.

(more…)

Last year I wrote about how Tech Central Station was an astroturf operation, published by a public relations company to provide supposedly independant support for the PR companies clients. The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute (ADTI) is another astroturf operation.

As part of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement Philip Morris (PM) agreed to release millions of documents about their operations. These detail how ADTI was hired by PM to conduct a public relations campaign against the Clinton health plan in 1994. ADTI provided PM with regular progress reports to prove that PM was getting value for its money, so they also let us see how these campaigns are conducted.

The Clinton plan included an increase in taxes on cigarettes from 24c per pack to 99c. Understandably, PM was not in favour of this, so a Philip Morris executive suggested an astroturf campaign, writing to one of his people:

Having just read the Washington Post with a series of provocative articles about Canada cutting taxes, CBO estimating higher costs AND job loss from the Clinton plan and then our old favourite, former president current homebuilder, Jimmy Carter explaining why higher taxes will help tobacco farmers, it occurred to me that we ought to turn a few of our better letter writers loose to blitz the targeted states with letters to the editor about Clinton, Carter and Canada…

If you want some astroturfing done, who you gonna call? The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute:

David N & I think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute is perfect for this kind of thing. We are working with them on a proposal.

And here is their proposal:

Our three key executives, Cesar Conda, Bruce Bartlett and myself, will run this campaign and we will devote the full energies of our operation and its consultants to this task. We plan to activate our key Advisory Board Members, including Jack Kemp, Robert Kasten, Dick Armey, Michael Boskin and others to mount a public awareness campaign immediately (see enclosed list of Center on Regulation and Economic Growth participants).

As you can see from our press in recent months, we are in a position to deliver. We would like to request $60,000, or $30,000 a month, to implement this program.

And over the next two months ADTI ran a PR campaign against the Clinton plan. For the benefit of PM they documented all their activities. You can see all the documents here, but some of the highlights are:

ADTI fellow Bruce Bartlett wrote an issue memorandum that formed the basis of their campaign, writing “the effect of the plan would be to increase federal taxes by over 27 percent”. ADTI arranged for this claim to repeated over and over again on radio and in print. Now the cigarette tax increase that PM was trying to prevent was only an increase in federal taxes of 0.5%. Since the Clinton plan made health insurance compulsory Bartlett counted all health insurance payments as tax increases. The plan was also expected to reduce insurance costs and hence increase wages (since employers could afford to pay more). Bartlett counted the additional tax revenue from the increased wages as a tax increase. I think the average worker who heard about this 27% tax increase would feel that it meant they would be paying 27% more taxes rather than that their wages would go up and their employer would have to provide health insurance for them.

ADTI arranged for their “27% tax increase” message to be sent to hundreds of radio talk shows, to appear in a Washington Times news story and to be sent by a Congressman to all other members of Congress. The Washington Times published a Bartlett op-ed but apparently “27% tax increase” wasn’t enough of a headline for them, so they gave it the headline “How to quadruple federal revenue”. (Bartlett’s op-ed actually says “Federal revenues, however, would not quadruple”.)

Look at this letter from ADTI to Robert Caldwell, the Editorial Page Editor at the San Diego Union Tribune and an ADTI operative advisory board member:

Congresswoman Lynn Schenk is one of 5 key swing Democratic health care votes in the Energy and Commerce Committee. There is reason to believe she is looking for reasons to vote against Clinton, and there is reason to believe that she can be spooked on the tax issue, especially after her 1993 Budget vote.
An editorial from the most important paper in her district urging her to do the right thing for the right reason would obviously have a huge impact, and could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Nowhere in their campaign did ADTI mention that they were hired by PM to oppose the tobacco tax increase. Instead they presented themselves as a “bipartisan” economic think tank that was merely presenting an analysis of the Clinton plan. “Bipartisan” here would seem to mean that they are for sale to either side.

ADTI has been in the news this week because their president, Ken Brown has published a book where he claims that Linus Torvalds created Linux by copying from Minix. Stephen Shankland writes:

According to the study, it’s safe to argue that Tanenbaum, who had years of OS experience and who had seen the Unix source code, could create Minix in three years. “However, it is highly questionable that Linus, still just a student, with virtually no operating systems development experience, could do the same, especially in one-sixth of the time,” says the study, which was written by Ken Brown, president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

“Why are the most brilliant business minds in the history of PC technology, with hundreds of millions of dollars in capital, licensing Unix source code, if it is as simple as writing it from scratch with little help or experience?” the study asks. “Is it possible that building a Unix operating system really only takes a few months–and, oh by the way, you don’t even need the source code to do it?”

Brown’s argument works by ignoring the difference between version 0.01 of Linux which was only 10,000 lines of code and current versions of Linux which contain millions of lines of code. Linux version 0.01 was well within the capabilities of a good programmer in six months, but was by no stretch of the imagination something that could replace a Unix system. Current versions of Linux can replace Unix systems, but have taken a decade to develop with contributions from thousands of people.

Could Brown have made an honest mistake? Well, he actually talked to Tanenbaum, who Brown claimed Torvalds copied Linux from, and Tanenbaum told him in no uncertain terms that Linux was not copied from Minix. And Brown hired someone to compare Linux with Minix, who found no evidence of copying. It is clear that Brown’s mistake was not an honest one.

So why would Brown do such a thing? Well, ADTI gets funding from Microsoft:

Several tank officials and analysts, who spoke to UPI on the condition of anonymity, said that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a small Arlington, Va.- based think tank that promotes free-market principles, receives a significant portion of its funding from the Microsoft Corp. The sources said that the think tank essentially lobbies in favor of issues important to Microsoft through op-ed pieces and policy briefs by tank officials.

It seems likely that, just as their attack on the Clinton health plan was commisioned by Philip Morris, their attack on Linux was commisioned by Microsoft.

More links on Brown’s book: Eric S Raymond’s review:

I haven’t seen a book quite so egregiously shoddy and dishonest since Michael Bellesisles’s Arming America.

Martin Pool’s review

• Nearly every paragraph makes an unsubstantiated assertion. Brown seems to feel that just inserting “it is clear that”, “ironically”, “clearly”, or “it is widely known” is an adequate substitute for cited evidence. Ironically, it clearly is not.
• Experts are asked misleading or hypothetical questions to elicit quotes that are used out of context. I think ADTI is not honest enough to ask straight questions because the answers would not suit them.
• Brown says he can’t believe that Linus wrote Linux, because… well, he just can’t believe it. Nothing more. He does not cite even a single line of Linux source that was copied from any other system, despite that all the data needed to check this is available to him. If he found even one line, his paper might be credible. But he does not.

Pamela Jones’ Groklaw has more on the story here, here, here and here. ADTI promise a response here, but it’s still “under construction”.