Deltoid

Tech Central Station has published Tim Worstall’s admission that his critique of the Lancet Iraq study was completely wrong:

Further to my article of Friday on this subject. I’m afraid I mangled the statistical argument. My inadequate knowledge of the subject led me to make an argument that is incorrect. I stand by my contention that there is something fishy about this study (leaving aside the politically motivated timing of its publication, something the author has been clear about himself) yet have to admit that I have not found it, leaving me with nothing but personal prejudice upon which to stand my argument. I would also like to make clear that this subject was not “assigned” to me, the idea, research, argument and errors were all my own, as was my request for this clarification. Just in case you are wondering, being fact checked by the Pajamahaddin and being found in error does hurt and I hope that future writings will be, where necessary, so corrected.”

On his blog Worstall thanks Daniel Davies and me for the correction. Such decent behaviour is unfortunately not common at Tech Central Station. Authors like John Lott and Iain Murray just repeat their false claims, while Glenn Reynolds posts a correction but does not acknowledge the source.

Tech Central Station didn’t just post Worstall’s correction by itself. They have had a second attempt at debunking the Lancet study, posting an article by Michael Fumento. Fumento argues:

the researchers didn’t feel themselves bound by anything official, like death certificates. Interviews were just fine. “In the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths,” they wrote.

Unfortunately, Fumento seems to have missed the immediately preceding sentences in the Lancet paper, where they noted that, when asked, 81% confirmed with death certificates:

In 63 of 78 (81%) households where confirmations were attempted, respondents were able to produce the death certificate for the decedent. When households could not produce the death certificate, interviewers felt in all cases that the explanation offered was reasonable eg, the death had been very recent, the certificate was locked away and only the husband who was not home had the key. We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded.

Fumento’s “killer” argument is:

Cluster sampling can be valid if it uses reliable data, rather than on inherently unreliable self-reporting. But it can also be easily skewed by picking out hotspots — like determining how much of a nation’s population wears dentures by surveying only nursing homes.

In fact, intentionally or otherwise, that’s pretty much what The Lancet did. Most of the clusters had no deaths whatsoever. But here’s the real bombshell: “Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja,” the journal reported. That’s it; game over; report worthless.

Trouble is, Fumento has once more been extraordinarily careless in his reading of the study. Here are the two sentences in the report that follow the one he quoted:

If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1-2.3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000-194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.

That’s right, they properly excluded the outlier Falluja in their estimate of 98,000 and Fumento didn’t notice this fact. That’s it; game over; Fumento article worthless.

I’m starting to feel embarrassed for Tech Central Station. Do you think they’ll have a third go at the Lancet?

Also of interest is Chris Lightfoot’s demolition of more lame critiques of the study.

I wrote earlier how it seems that you must fail a qualifying exam before you can write on a topic at Tech Central Station. Now the errors in Fumento’s critique of the Lancet study.aren’t errors in epidemiology—they seem to result from not having read the study. Indeed, in comments at TCS, Fumento seems to be asking for help to find out what it said:

You imply rather strongly that you’ve read the report. If so, please inform us of what the extrapolation was that DID NOT rely on the Falluja cluster. I’m waiting.

and then:

I asked the wrong question. I meant to say how many were in the extrapolation that DID include the Falluja cluster?

and also:

We also know there is absolutely no way to randomly select 33 clusters.

Again, if he had read the study, he would have known that they did randomly select 33 clusters, and that they explained the randomization procedure in great detail.

But now, in a comment on my blog, Fumento has proved that he meets the TCS requirement to write about epidemiology—he demonstrates ignorance of a basic epidemiological principle:

The alleged 100,000 deaths were those above the pre-war baseline. That baseline was predicated on a figure of 5.0 deaths per 1,000. BUT the figure for the US at the time was 8.3 deaths per 1,000. Obviously Iraq was one of the safest countries on the face of earth prior to the Yankee imperialist invasion. In fairness, the CIA Worldbook uses a 5.6 per 1,000 figure for Iraq but what was it’s source? Saddam’s ultra-trustworthy government, of course. Thus The Lancet is using figures even lower than the Land of Baghdad Bob was putting out.

OK, some basic epidemiology:

Comparing Mortality in Different Populations: an important use of the rates—recall that the populations may differ in regard to many factors which affect mortality, of which age distribution is the most important—so to compare, we hold the factor (age) constant.

Consider:

Death Rates by Age and Race, Baltimore City, 1965
	All	<1yr	1-4yr	5-17yr	18-44yr	45-64yr	>65yr
White	14.3	23.9	0.7	0.4	2.5	15.2	69.3
Black	10.2	31.3	1.6	0.6	4.8	22.6	75.9

Overall [this is called CRUDE or UNADJUSTED mortality], the death rate for blacks is LOWER than it is for whites. This is unexpected given the conditions at the time for blacks with respect to health care access and living situations. Why would this happen? Well, if we look at the stratified rates by age, we see that the rate for blacks is HIGHER at every age level. This seeming conundrum is explained by the fact that, while the rates increase markedly for both races in the over 65 bracket, there are more whites left in that age group. So many, in fact, that the overall mortality for whites overwhelmingly occurs in the over 65 age group, while the same is NOT the case for blacks.

Hmmm, so do you think Iraq and the US have the same age distribution? From the CIA Factbook—the very source that Fumento cited—we find that the US has a very different age structure with a much larger proportion of old people. And notice that neighbouring Syria has a similar age structure to Iraq and a death rate of 4.96, consistent with the Lancet study.

Country	US	Iraq	Syria
Death Rate	8.34	5.66	4.96
Median Age	36 years	19.2 years	20 years
Age Structure	0–14 years: 20.8% 15–64 years: 66.9% 65 years and over: 12.4%	0-14 years: 40.3% 15-64 years: 56.7% 65 years and over: 3%	0-14 years: 38% 15-64 years: 58.7% 65 years and over: 3.3%

Fumento’s argument that the 5.66 number for Iraq was falsified by Saddam’s regime makes no sense. If Saddam was cooking the numbers he would have made them higher and claimed that the sanctions were killing vast numbers of people.

And his claim that the Lancet number of 5.0 is inconsistent with the CIA Factbook number of 5.66 is also wrong, since he ignores the fact that the 95% confidence interval for the Lancet study was 3.7–6.3, and 5.66 lies in that interval.

Also of interest might be this Chris Mooney post on Fumento’s book on biotechnology.

Update: Fumento replies:

Much of what you write is simply idiotic, as in saying the clusters were “randomly sampled.” How is that even possible, aside from throwing darts at a dartboard? It also implies you can read the researchers’ minds. Ah, The Amazing Lambert. But at least I’ve found one person who really does believe we’ve been violently killing civilians at a rate of over 180 per day. I was afraid the Lancet propagandists weren’t going to get away with that. You can blog all you want, but my next column is also on this. It goes out to over 350 newspapers and lots of websites that each have more traffic than yours. You occupy the pitiful place of the harmless blogger who blogs because nobody in his right mind would punish him. Rant, rant, rant. The world careth not.

Looks like Fumento flunks statistics as well as epidemiology. Random sampling is a fundamental concept in statistics and despite Fumento’s incredulity it is actually possible to carry it out. I didn’t have to read the researchers’ minds to find out how they randomized the clusters; I just had to read their paper, something that Fumento still has not done. And no, I don’t believe that we are killing civilians at over 180 a day—that isn’t what the paper found. I do believe that Fumento’s critiques of it are worthless, if that is any help.

Update 2: Fumento replies again:

You cannot randomly choose physical households in a place like Iraq. Those data are not in a computer. Do you think it’s like campaign polling in the States?

Here is the methodology that is beyond Fumento’s comprehension:

We assigned clusters to individual communities within the Governorates by creating cumulative population lists for the Governorate and picking a random number between one and the Governorate population. Once a town, village, or urban neighbourhood was selected, the team drove to the edges of the area and stored the site coordinates in a global positioning system (GPS) unit. We assumed the population was living within a rectangle, with the dimensions corresponding to the distances spanned between the site coordinates stored in the GPS unit. The area was drawn as a map subdivided by increments of 100 m. A pair of random numbers was selected between zero and the number of 100 m increments on each axis, corresponding to some point in the village. The GPS unit was used to guide interviewers to the selected point. Once at that point, the nearest 30 households were visited.

And if you are interested in more of the Fumento follies, look here and here.

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 tacitly admits his error by quietly dropping his false claim. Of course, he hasn’t corrected his TCS article. He also aware that they did look at death certificates, so it is dishonest for him to repeat his claim that “the researchers didn’t feel bound by anything official like death certificates”.

Unfortunately he has replaced his bogus claim about Falluja with something worse—his ridiculous comparison of crude death rates between the US and Iraq. (I have explained what is wrong with that here.)

It is disgraceful that someone so wilfully ignorant of basic science has published a column on a scientific question in a newspaper. You can send a letter to the editor at the Anchorage Daily News here. (Leave a comment if you do write a letter.) Contact information for Scripps Howard News Service is here. I think it would be particularly helpful if any epidemiologists in my readership contacted SHNS.

Update: Fumento replies:

Actually, the major changes were additions — including quite legitimately pointing out that The Lancet insisted on using as its baseline pre-war mortality a number far lower than Saddam had used. That gave a range in the paper is inconsequential; the figure they used for their all-important 100,000 figure was five per 1,000.

5.0 is not “far lower” than 5.66. The post-war mortality rate was 7.9 (that’s excluding Falluja—if you include Falluja it was 12.3), so whether the pre-war rate was 5.0 or 5.66, it is still a substantial increase. I notice you offered no defence of your ridiculous comparison of crude death rates between the US and Iraq.

Fumento continues:

I pulled the section about Falluja being included because it confused people — like you. Find in the paper where they provide an equivalent to the 100,000 figure but exclude Falluja deaths. You can’t, because it’s not there. The Lancet has lied and you support it because you happen to like its conclusions, not because those conclusions where arrived at scientifically.

I already gave the exact quote from the paper—it was from the same paragraph that Fumento quoted in his TCS piece. Here it is again, with extra emphasis:

We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000 194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.

And no, I do not like the conclusions. I find them most unpalatable. But rather than inventing specious grounds for dismissing the study, I think it is better to face up to reality.

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 from Fumento:

Subject: Ah, another worthless observation from somebody that can’t get published so he blogs.

Earth to Inkstain and Lambert: Other than Inkstain caring what Lambert says and Lambert caring about what Inkstain says (perhaps), nobody cares what either of you says. Not only are you fully contained in the blogosphere, you’re actually in a much tinier realm than that. Meanwhile of the many places my piece on the Lancet trash appeared is today’s Daily News, weekend population above 500,000. You attack not out of a sense that injustice has been done regarding the Lancet report, but out of jealousy. But if you cleaned up your act, you might just find that somebody somewhere, even with a circulation of ten, would occassionally print you. Alas, you will not. You are a lost cause.

Which is pretty funny, since if Fumento had bothered to click on Fleck’s About me link he would have discovered that Fleck is the science writer for the Albuquerque Journal.

Fumento then sent Fleck another abusive email:

First, it seems to me that any nationally syndicated columnist, including those I can’t stand, is a journalist — whether John Fleck acknowledges it or not. Second, I dropped one of my arguments from the TCS piece only because it confused people with simple minds. Like you. As it happens, I also had to cut 200 words even as I added in new information. So we are faced with two possibilities here, neither pleasant. A) You’re not particularly bright; B) You’re not particularly bright.

I wonder if Fumento has managed to read the Lancet paper yet?

On a slightly more serious note: Fumento has managed to get his attack on the Lancet paper published in the Sacramento Bee, the Arizona Daily Star and the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune. Just think how much it would bug him if you wrote a Letter to the Editor about his column.

Oh, and my humble blog is now the second site returned by a Google search for “Fumento”.

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.

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 than expected (8,000–194,000)happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.”

It would be one thing if Fumento simply misspoke in his original TCS piece when he said the inclusion of the Falluja cluster biased the study and made it worthless. But in the face of Lambert and others repeatedly quoting the precise, clear and unambiguous wording with which the study did exactly the opposite, excluding the Falluja data as an outlier, Fumento continues to misrepresent it

Jonathan Dursi:

There is nothing in Fumento’s analysis which even comes close to disputing the Lancet article—indeed, it’s not even clear he read the abstract.

Michael Fumento:

Lambert, Fleck, and Dursi (an epidemiologica expert because his field is astronomy) just won’t let go. The study did not present numbers that included Falluja, either in the abstract or text. Yet they accuse ME of not reading it.

Mark Tyrrell Frank:

Michael Fumento is quite extraordinary. How can he continue to say this? The text in the abstract and in the body quite clearly gives figures both with and without Falluja. E.g. maximum likelihood estimate of death risk is increased 2.5 times including Falluja and only 1.5 times without. This is not so much deception as sheer madness. Or maybe he has a different copy of the paper?

Sheer madness or deception? I report, you decide.

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 members, that’s worth five death certificates. For all we know, half the deaths reported came from recall. Second, apparently Lambert has never seen a death certificate and thinks coroners or medical examiners are psychics. A death certificate will indicate death by violence, but it won’t say something like “500 lb. JDAM dropped by U.S. F-18.” Every day we see pictures of Iraqis blown up by Iraqis and other Arabs. Yes, the people were blown up but no we didn’t do it and the death certificate isn’t going to say one way or another. Finally, he ignores evidence outside of the paper that I presented, including two anti-war groups that said the Lancet figures were far too high and a certain individual who pegged them too high by 85,000. His name? Osama bin Laden.

Note that after his apparent flip-flop on the question of whether the study reported an estimate excluding Falluja, Fumento is silent on that question. Anyway, let me address the points that Fumento does raise. First, hardly any households had multiple deaths, so his notion that half the deaths were not confirmed is wrong. Second, yes, the death certificate will just say that the cause of the death was an explosion without saying who was responsible. For that we must rely on the word of the family. But the person is still dead as a result of the invasion, no matter who did the killing. Third, the numbers from groups like Iraq Body Count are measuring something different from the Lancet survey–the number of confirmed civilian deaths directly caused by the war. The IBC number is certainly an underestimate since not all deaths will be reported. Not does it count indirect effects like increase in disease because of breakdowns in medical infrastructure. The IBC does not say that the Lancet estimate is too high:

Others have asked us to comment on whether the Lancet report’s headline figure of 100,000 is a credible estimate. At present our resources are focused on our own ongoing work, not assessing the work of others.

Fumento, of course, claims otherwise.

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 in addition to automatically going onto the website of the Sacramento Bee (not the Sacremento Bee) it goes to about a dozen other newspaper websites as well.

Lambert

Instead of discussing the Lancet article, he boasted how his column had been published in the Lake Wylie Pilot, which is a free weekly newspaper serving a town of 3,000 people.

Fumento:

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 McClatchey News Service which posts it automatically to the sites of over a dozen papers. You chose the smallest, ignoring such as the Sacramento Bee and the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune.

Dear me, how naughty of me to say that he was boasting about the Lake Wylie Pilot when he hadn’t mentioned it. Trouble is, if you check what he actually said you find that it was this (my emphasis):

That means that in addition to automatically going onto the website of the Sacramento Bee (not the Sacremento Bee) it goes to: Carolina Newspapers Clover Herald (SC) Fort Mill Times (SC) Lake Wylie Pilot The Bakersfield Californian The Modesto Bee The News & Observer The News Tribune (WA)

So he had mentioned the Lake Wylie Pilot. He just edited it out of the version he posted in an attempt to make me look bad. And of course Fumento does not link, making sure that any readers cannot check his version against the original sources.

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 goes to Michael Fumento for claiming over and over again that the Lancet study on excess deaths in Iraq included deaths in Falluja in their estimate, despite being repeatedly shown the clear language of the report, which states:

“We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000-194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.”

Notable was the way he would respond to the above quote from the report with a demand that he be shown where the paper gives an estimate that excludes Falluja.

While Sideshow Mike makes his way to the stage to accept his award, read some extracts from his Hate Mail, Volume 33. Sterling Vinson wrote this letter to the Arizona Daily Star

Michael Fumento criticizes a study carried out by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the British medical journal The Lancet (”Numbers on Iraqi deaths questionable,” Nov. 6).

Fumento incorrectly states, “The Lancet (claims) the United States has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the invasion.”

The article makes no such claim. The summary says, “We think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and airstrikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.”

Note the use of the word “most.” That leaves plenty of room for other causes of death and other killers.

The methodology of the Johns Hopkins study was used in Kosovo and is generally regarded as sound. Moreover, the authors of the Lancet article are careful to qualify their results and to recalculate the number of deaths after excluding those in Fallujah, where the worst fighting is taking place.

Please correct Fumento’s misstatements.

Fumento’s reply:

I reply to a letter sent to The Star concerning an opinion by Michael Fumento published in the paper on 6 November 2004. Dr. Vinson criticizes a study carried out by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and published in the British medical journal, The Lancet.

Actually, Vinson is criticizing Fumento, not the study.

I have read the study, which he just as easily could have since it appeared free and full-text online, but he did not. The term “most” applied only to causes of death other than airstrikes, not causes of death other than coalition actions.

Vinson’s quote comes directly from the study and is completely accurate. Fumento is claiming that the study attributed all the excess deaths to coalition actions, which is not what the study claimed at all. It would seem that Vinson read the study while Fumento did not.

Notice from Dr. Vinson’s own words compared to mine that I actually understated what the Lancet propagandists claimed in that I left out there (sic) modifier “or more.” If anything, perhaps I am guilty of understating just what shoddy work they did.

One of the features of Fumento’s replies is the way he inserts a “(sic)” after any spelling mistakes he finds in the text he quotes. I think that is a kind of petty thing to do, but I thought I’d make an exception for Fumento.

Regarding Kosovo, Dr. Vinson has no idea what methodology was used there. He’s simply repeating what he heard, like an old parrot.

Fumento can’t offer any reason why Vinson was wrong about Kosovo, so he insults him instead.

In any case, I explicitly said that the methodology could be correct but only if it were used in a completely unbiased manner, then went on to show how truly biased the researchers and the journal itself are. I also showed in other ways how the 100,000 figure couldn’t possibly be correct, but Mr. Vinson seems to have neglected that.

Uh oh, is that a rake in front of Sideshow Mike?

Moreover, the authors of the Lancet article CLAIMED to have re-calculated the number of deaths after excluding those in Fallujah, except that strangely enough they never bothered to say what those numbers were.

Thwack! Fumento steps on the rake yet again.

Again, had Dr. Vinson looked at the report itself instead of a 300-word summary published by the AP or some other intermediate media he would know that. Instead he simply establishes what I already written (sic), that people are simply accepting this study because they find it convenient not because they find it convincing.

Actually, Vinson, like everybody else who read the study, including all the other critics, managed to find where the study stated what the number of deaths excluding Falluja were.

Please correct Dr. Vinson’s misstatements and forgive him for his support of Hussein’s henchmen.

“support of Hussein’s henchmen.” I wonder if the Arizona Daily Star approves of one of its columnists abusing its readers?

It’s too long to reproduce here but Fumento also has exchange about the Lancet with A. Michlmayr, where Fumento responds to Michlmayr’s attempt to educate Fumento about confidence intervals and age-adjusted death rates with:

I suggest that if you’re as serious about all this as you seem to be, get on a plane to Syria or Iran and volunteer your services to the terrorists. They might saw your head off on camera, or they might accept you into their ranks.

This exchange is short enough to reproduce in full. No comments from me are necessary. Jonathan Dursi wrote:

I’ve read with some interest your analysis of the recent Roberts et al. in Lancet. As a scientist, I believe science journalism to be a very important connection between the research community and society, and I think science journalists have an important role in informing public debate. Speaking as someone who has actually published scientific papers, your written articles and comments on blogs have been really, really weak and intellectually lazy. If you are as concerned about reporting truth as your protestations about this Lancet article claim, I see no evidence of it in your own writing.

[150 words omitted.]

I’m glad you don’t seem to write about astrophysics. If I were to someday write a paper on something you disagreed with, I imagine you would write just as spiteful articles based on just as weak (or absent) arguments about my own papers. It’s a shame; the world needs good science journalism.

Fumento’s reply:

Dear Mr. Dursi:

Fear not, I don’t write about astrophysics because I don’t know anything about the field. Would that you had such humility. But I do know this definition: “There is a vague notion that astrophysics is more rigorous or quantitative than astronomy; all this means in practice is if you’re an astronomer and you’re out to impress you call yourself an astrophysicist, whereas if you want to avoid freaking out people out you say you’re an astronomer.” Well, I’m impressed neither by your field nor your sad attempt at presenting cogent commentary. It’s okay to have your head in space but your brain should remain earthbound. I’ve answered your criticisms on the very blogs you’ve mentioned, yet you ignore them. So guess what? I’m going to do like the rest of the world and ignore you.

Update: Sideshow Mike’s acceptance speech:

As I’ve indicated before, you are a “hit” slut. You will do anything to increase traffic to your worthless site, including what you are trying to do now — bait a person who actually DOES have a readership. As has been the case with your life in general, you have failed.

Watch out for those rakes on the way back to your seat, Mike.

Update 2: John Fleck has found a picture of the Golden Rake Award.

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 diary.

I’m a bit concerned that some of my readers have got Alexa’s spyware on their system. If you do, here are instructions on how to remove it.

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 more tsunamis producing the horrific death toll recently experienced. That’s how many people die every year from malaria alone, and the tsunami may contribute to even higher rates this year. That disaster has created new habitat suitable for the proliferation of malaria and other disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Public health officials can take steps to reduce the impact, one of which involves using the controversial pesticide DDT. Since the 1960s green activists pushed bans of the substance around the world based largely on false claims about its health affects. The result was a public health disaster—contributing to skyrocketing malaria rates.

Junkscience has a death clock, attributing almost 90 million deaths to the EPA’s ban on DDT in 1972. Michael Crichton is a little more conservative, only blaming the ban for 50 million deaths:

“Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.”

OK, first the Junkscience death counter. On this page I have a corrected version that shows that the EPA’s ban on DDT has caused deaths. You see, by 1972 malaria had been eradicated from the US, so there was no need for DDT spraying for malaria control. There have been some small outbreaks since 1972, but these have been eradicated by other insecticides. (From reading JTFCSS you would think that DDT was the only insecticide in existence.) The Junkscience death counter is particularly dishonest, since as the author concedes in a footnote hidden at the bottom of the page, the number it gives is more than the total number of malaria deaths in the entire world since 1972.

What about the ban on using DDT to fight malaria? There is no such ban. DDT is banned from agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. JTFCSS pretends that there is a ban so they can hang malaria deaths around the neck of environmentalists.

So we should be spraying DDT in Sri Lanka to prevent malaria? Well, no. The World Health Organization’s plan for malaria prevention in the wake of the tsunami reports:

Sri Lanka

Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids.

Yes, the mosquitoes in Sri Lanka have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn’t work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn’t because of any ban—it was because it stopped being effective. Steve Milloy, Mr Junkscience, has only a half-hearted belief in evolution. This may explain why he and other right-wing authors have trouble grasping the idea that mosquitoes evolve resistance to DDT. Fortunately, the World Health Organization is not taking advice from JTFCSS and sending DDT to Sri Lanka. They are sending malathion, which will actually be able to kill the mosquitoes there.
Correction: Malathion is not a good idea either, since mosquitoes in Sri Lanka have developed resistance to that as well.

For more information see the WHO Roll Back Malaria Department, Jim Norton on the DDT Ban Myth and John Quiggin giving the facts on DDT.

Update: Check out Africa Fighting Malaria, which pretends to be an organization devoted to fighting malaria, but posts this article which as well as arguing for the use of DDT in Sri Lanka where the mosquitoes are resistant to DDT, (remarkably ill-informed for a supposed anti-malaria organization, don’t you think?) claims that environmentalists are opposed to DDT because they want malaria to kill more people. Sure enough, it’s yet another astroturf operation. Sourcewatch has the details.

Michael Fumento has responded 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 that, the mosquitoes evolve resistance to the higher dosage. Sri Lanka switched from DDT to Malathion in the 70s because DDT was no longer preventing malaria.

Further, because resistance is a drain on an insect’s physiology, after a time that resistance begins to fade. It has certainly been long enough since mosquitoes in those areas were sprayed with DDT that many will have lost resistance.

However, since there are some DDT-resistance genes still on the population, the whole population would quickly become resistant once DDT is sprayed.

Mosquitoes “are almost certainly not going to become immune to DDT’s most valuable attribute: its repellency,” writes DDT expert Paul Driessen. Even in tiny quantities “DDT keeps up to 90% of the mosquitoes from even entering a home. It irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite; and it kills any that land on the walls, before they can infect another person. No other insecticide, at any price, can do that or do it for six months or more with a single application.”

Paul Driessen is not an expert on DDT, entomology, malaria or tropical medicine. His area of expertise is public relations. Nor is his statement relevant—DDT does not kill resistant mosquitoes.

The Journal of Vector Borne Diseases last June concluded: “The overall results of the study revealed that DDT is still a viable insecticide in indoor residual spraying owing to its effectivity in well supervised spray operation and high excito-repellency factor.”

But if you look at the full paper you will find that the study was conducted in India and not Sri Lanka and that the mosquitoes were only partly resistant to DDT. Sri Lanka switched from DDT to Malathion in the 70s because the mosquitoes were fully resistant and DDT was no longer preventing malaria.

In any case, even if DDT was still somewhat effective against partially resistant mosquitoes it would be still not necessarily be a good idea to use it, because other insecticides are more effective in such circumstances. Professor C F Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine wrote:

Deltamethrin and cyfluthrin were found to be much superior to DDT, HCH or malathion in vector control in trials in India (Ansari et al., 1990; Schofield, 1993). However, these data are not entirely relevant to the question under discussion because they were in areas where the vector (An.culicifacies) was resistant to DDT, and it should be recalled that the W.H.O. recommendation of the use of DDT only applies to susceptible populations (W.H.O., 1984).

That’s why the real experts on DDT don’t recommend that it be used where the mosquitoes are resistant. Nor, for that matter, does the World Health Organization or any other expert recommend that be sprayed on people or pools of water as Fumento proposed. Fumento is just out of his depth on this topic.

Last month Tracy Spenser posted this comment 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, Fumento’s post was full of mistakes, so I corrected them here. In the first comment John Cross asked:

Is this the same Fumento who promised:

“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,”

Quick as a flash Tracy replied:

Actually, not writing TO somebody is indeed not the same as not writing ABOUT them. Last I heard those words were not synonymous. As to Lambert’s assertion that those were INDIAN mosquitoes and not SRI LANKAN ones, the expression “any port in a storm does come to mind.” What? DDT checks their passports? It’s the same type of mosquito; that’s all that counts. From what I’ve seen, any time Lambert strays from John Lott he misses the target. As his blog continues to fade into the sunset he needs to learn the meaning of humility and become a single-issue blogger.

Well, that set off my sockdar — a constant theme of Fumento’s was how insignificant my blog was compared to his own towering eminence. Could he be using a sock puppet to pretend that I was too unimportant for him to write to? I looked up the location of Tracy’s IP address: she was posting from Arlington, Virginia. And what do I find in Fumento’s biography?

Michael Fumento lives in Arlington, Virginia

Hmm. So I emailed Fumento, informing him that his Technorati rank was much much lower than mine and offering to provide some pointers on how to improve his ranking. He wrote back with some reason or other why that didn’t count, but the interesting thing was that his IP address was the same as Tracy’s. It’s a Comcast IP address and Comcast provides one IP address per household, so there can be only one conclusion:

Tracy Spenser is a crazed Michael Fumento fan and is posting from the same house as him. Michael: GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. GET OUT OF THE HOUSE NOOOOW!!!

Update: Now Tracy has been scrubbing criticism from Fumento’s wikipedia page.

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.

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 postings. In other words, he uses a human sock puppet!

Yes, SayUncle has to take my word that the IP addresses match… Or rather, he had to take my word until Fumento posted his comment. Now he can check the IP address of Fumento’s comment with that used to edit Wikipedia. Oops.

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. An anti-American Aussie, he regularly displays his ignorance on a wide variety of issues, perhaps in the belief that quantity makes up for quality.

Anti-American? Huh? When have I ever criticised America about anything?

Lambert is perhaps best known for his embarrasing (sic) defense of the pre-election surprise paper in The Lancet that desparately (sic) tried to show that Americans had killed 100,000 civilians in Iraq. (At the time Human Rights Watch was using a figure of about 15,000 as was bin Laden himself!) Ever since I first chided him for thinking his blog had the least ability to support his Jihadist friends, he’s made it one of his missions in life to try to hurt me personally. He has a separate motive in that when I’ve posted responses on his website his traffic shoots up.

Actually, I’ve hardly been paying any attention to Fumento—I didn’t even know that he had started a blog until Tracy Spencer told me. And no, my traffic did not shoot up when when Fumento posted responses on my blog. Fumento seems a bit delusional about his importance.

So instead he merely claims I have posted on his website, using a false name. In blogging terminology, that’s called using a “sockpuppet.” He claims he’s compared my IP address to that of the alleged sockpuppet’s and they’re the same. Problem is, we have no more proof than his word and this is the word of not just anybody but of Tim Lambert. Conversely, when John Lott used his infamous “Mary Roush” (sic) sockpuppet, numerous people were able to confirm that Roush’s (sic) and Lott’s IP address were the same.

Actually, we just had Julian Sanchez’s word about the Lott/Rosh match, but more importantly, notice that Fumento once again has not denied being Tracy Spencer. If he isn’t Spencer, why doesn’t he say so?

At the same time, Lambert has accused me of rewriting my own Wikepedia (sic) entry. Actually he rewrote it; I struck it. Why? I don’t feel encyclopedia entries are the places for vendettas. It’s not appropriate in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (sic) nor is it in Wikipedia.

If you look at the history of the Fumento article you will see that I did not add the link to Deltoid and that while Fumento deleted it twelve times, I only restored it twice—others undid his other deletions. There seems to be a consensus there that the link is appropriate.

OK, that was silly enough but now Fumento really jumps the rails, arguing that I’m using sock puppets because …. oh heck, you can’t summarize his argument:

Among Lambert’s few friends is one named John Fleck whose blog is called inkstain.net. (Another type of stain comes to mind, but whatever.) Fleck writes of my “latest blubbering discussion with Tim Lambert.” But as I’ve said, Lambert’s pathetic efforts to lure me into “discussion” have failed. No discussion; ergo no blubbering discussion. But if Lambert had said that on his site it would have left his few readers scratching their heads, so Fleck posted it instead. Fleck, therefore, is a human sockpuppet.

Is it just me, or did Fumento leave out about 20 steps in his chain of reasoning there? In any event, for the record, I do not and have not told Fleck what to write.

But the next bit is the best. Fumento offers conclusive proof that I’ve used sock puppets: an evidence-free email from Joe Cambria:

Another Aussie who is part of a discussion group to which Lambert belongs e-mailed me the link to a thread in which he charges Lambert with using at least two different false names to post comments on his own website, “Kevin Donahue” and “Robert Johnson.” He directly and repeatedly confronted Lambert with this and Lambert repeatedly refused to respond, though he did respond to other aspects of the discussion.

Ah, so if you respond to other aspects of the discussion without denying the charge, then you have tacitly admitted it. Looks like Fumento has admitted being Tracy Spencer. And Fumento seems to have missed my comment in the thread he linked to:

Gee Joe, for someone who doesn’t take me seriously you sure spend a lot of time following me around and posting comments on various blogs and sending me long rants via email and making wild accusations about me posting under assumed names.

No, I haven’t been posting under assumed names. That’s your scam, not mine.

Update: After I pointed his spelling mistakes Fumento corrected some of them and made several other changes without noting that he had altered the post. I expected him to do this, so I saved a copy of the original post here. My favourite addition is this one:

Turns out when Lott’s IP address was correlated with Roush’s, he immediately admitted he and Roush were the same. This puts him far above Lambert, who when caught red-handed admitted to nothing.

Turns out that when Fumento’s IP address was correlated with Tracy Spenser’s, he admitted to nothing.

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 Reason only ran Taubes’ reply because Taubes threatened to sue them. Nick Gillespie responded

I intend this to be my last few words on this matter. As a journalist and especially as an editor-in-chief, I’m used to being on the receiving end of all manner of wild, odd, and totally false accusations. However, Mike Fumento has set a new standard by calling me–the editor who just published a feature-length article by him and defended that article in a public letter–a liar.

In insisting that Reason ran Gary Taubes’ reply to “Big Fat Fake” because of threatened legal action, Fumento throws together an unconvincing case of conjecture that surely fails to convince anyone of anything other than Fumento’s own rather sad self-absorption. Why he cannot accept the simple truth in this issue is beyond me. On Feb. 20, Taubes contacted me after reading the article and told me he wanted to reply. I told him to go ahead and he sent me his response on Feb. 25. We posted it, along with a final response by Fumento, on Reason Online on March 4. Taubes and I never discussed anything of a legal matter. As I stated previously (quoting from a Feb. 27 email to Fumento), I decided to run Taubes’ reply at the length at which he submitted it because we could do so easily on the Web and because I thought the length and content of the reply helped Fumento’s case substantially.

Fumento’s bizarre behavior does not particularly interest me, even as a pathetic tragicomic spectacle, except insofar as it attempts to slag my reputation and that of Reason’s. We don’t cave in to nuisance writers–even, alas, when they have written for Reason–any more than we cave into “nuisance lawsuits,” real or imagined.

When properly edited and restrained from indulging in the sort of baseless invective he has displayed regarding this matter, Fumento is capable of producing good stuff, including “Big Fat Fake” in the March issue of Reason. Sadly, these days he seems more interested in spinning out e-mail accusations that have no basis in fact and only redound negatively to his own reputation. I wish him well in his new line of work.

Fleck also specifically denies Fumento’s charge that he is my sock puppet:

For the record, Tim Lambert has never told me what to write.

Fumento, meanwhile, has another post where he attempts a different defence against the sock puppet charge:

But a reader also wrote to me to note that, “An IP address isn’t proof of an individual’s accessing a web page. Depending on your ISP’s network configuration, the IP address a web server sees when you visit it might be shared with many other users who use the same ISP. About all a webmaster can do with an IP address is narrow down the ISP or organization from which the requests originated.”

Therefore assuming Lambert got two identical IPs from my name and that of another person, he must take into account the possibility the someone else who shares my address and knows me wants to post in support of me anonymously. That hardly makes me a damned dirty dog, does it? Why doesn’t Lambert think of such things?

Why doesn’t Fumento think of reading my post?

[His IP address is] a Comcast IP address and Comcast provides one IP address per household

Anyway, Fumento now has a sidekick, Xlrq, who we last saw furiously denying that Lott used sock puppets. Over at SayUncle’s Xlrq suggested that John Fleck was my sockpuppet. SayUncle pointed out

His IP is different and originates in New Mexico, like his site says.

For Xrlq, this pretty much clinched it: obviously Fleck must be my sock puppet:

Equally not-bright is maintaining a blog designed to make it look to the naked eye as though you’ve been blogging since March, 2003, when in fact your real entries only go back to October, 2005, and the rest are just dummy entries with bare subject lines. It also doesn’t seem terribly bright to say you are “this John Fleck,” while linking to the Albuquerque Journal home page rather than to the blog of the person you claim to be, which the real John Fleck obviously knows about but a cheap imitator might not.

It seems that Xrlq hasn’t worked out how to click on links to see Fleck’s postings. As for his second argument it seems that he is unaware of the existence of things known as “search engines” that would have enabled a “cheap imitator” to find Fleck’s blog.

Apparently Xlrq’s claim caused great amusement at the Fleck household, with his daughter posting this:

Any sockpuppet with a newspaper circulation of over 100k and a blog that dates back to 3 years ago really deserves at least some recognition. I mean, even if dad–err–Fleck is just Lambert’s dummy, I think by this point he’s developed a fairly distinct and unique personality and therefore has a right to his own opinion. If someone puts so much effort in developing a character, after all, that character tends to develop their own persona, likes, dislikes, etc, and will sometimes even become an alter-ego of that person. (Actually, that’s just me trying to throw more wood on the fire of the whole “Fleck doesn’t exist” argument, which has made for amusing stories at my house)

I suppose I have the same IP address as Fleck so my opinion doesn’t really count, but I can definately verify that he exists. He helped make me born and stuff. (Would this make me, too, a puppet of Lambert’s?)

Does Xrlq make a perfect sidekick for Fumento or what?

Update: Xrlq responds

Lambert has a known history of not only of lying about right wing figures generally, but specifically of the very lie he’s telling about Fumento now. The guy is such a pathological liar, he even tells lies that are easily disproven, such as denying that Fumento ever denied his allegations, in a comment thread to the every entry in which Fumento did in fact deny these allegations Lambert denies he denied. Similarly, if you follow his latest trackback to your “just because” thread, you’ll see he’s lying about me, too, claiming I based my “Fleck may be a sock puppet” comment on other comments that did not exist at the time, and conveniently leaving out the subsequent comment in which I conceded that Fleck clearly was not a sock puppet.

Firstly, anyone can examine Fumento’s post and see that he didn’t deny that posted as Tracy Spenser. Secondly, the comments on SayUncle’s post occured in the order in the listed in my post above. One hour after SayUncle posted fairly conclusive evidence that Fleck was not my sock puppet, Xlrq claimed, using ridiculousl;y flimsy evidence that Fleck was too my sock puppet. Thirdly, I didn’t mention his concession since it wasn’t relevant to my point: that it was beyond stupid to make the charge in the first place.

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 unlikely.

It’s, umm, a little paranoid for Fumento to blame me for any spam his blog gets. And his traffic must be really pathetic if 40 hits a day swamps his site. But the funny bit is this:

trackbacks for non-existent pornographic URLs

How does he know they linked to non-existent porn sites? No wonder Fumento sounds so frustrated.

Update: Fumento’s sidekick Jeff “Xrlq” Bishop claims that Fumento has denied being Spencer. Where? Xrlq is keeping that part a secret. He also falsely claims that I haven’t denied the charge that I forged the Tracy Spencer comment. I have denied it (see second sentence of this post), but again, for the record, I did not forge the comment. It was posted by someone with the same IP address as Fumento.

There are more posts on Fumento at the new site.