NORTH KOREA CONDUCTS NUCLEAR TEST

Hmmm... the troll thread was locked.

Ticomaya wrote:

parados wrote:

I never said the man wasn't a monster.

Since the man is a monster why the hell do you have to make up stuff about him? Isn't the truth bad enough?

I'm curious why you are defending him, if you think he's a monster and all.

Let me posit the following....

Hitler raped GWBush as a young boy and warped his mind so that he now thinks it is OK to kill children.


Would you be willing to defend Hitler after that statement Tico? Or is disagreeing with the statement not a defense of the man?

That's interesting Tico.

Explain this then since it isn't defending Foley who was accused of being a child molester.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2295112#2295112

Kim is responsible for at least a couple million, if not as many as many as ten million dead North Koreans.

Quote:

Kim is responsible for at least a couple million, if not as many as many as ten million dead North Koreans.

I guess if this wasn't meant to be factual then it must have been intended as hyperbole.

I didn't make up your statement Occum Bill. I only pointed out it couldn't be true.

Would you accept this statement OB as merely a statement of a possibility? Bush and his invasion of Iraq has been responsible for 200,000 Iraqi deaths, if not as many as 10 million.

ROFLMAO Tico..

So if something is not accurate in describing Foley then you must be defending him. After all you claimed if I said something wasn't accurate concerning Kim Jung Il I was defending him. Don't you use the same standard for yourself?

You defended Foley in a thread in which he was accused of molesting children. (A sex act was described in a very graphic manner at one point. Try page 2 of the thread you posted in defending Foley.)

So now you not only defended Foley, you are now denying you defended him and denying he was ever even accused of what you defended him for.

Case closed. Thanks for playing Tico.

But why go out of your way to try and make a case that the facts might be in question, unless the intent was to defend him? I'm not sure if your intent was to defend the monster, but that is what you're doing, and I'm just curious why.

It seems the act creates the intent in your mind Tico. So live up to your standard.

I didn't try and make a case that any of the facts alleged against Foley might be in question.

I think the main point being made is that one term means one thing and is apparently accurate in this case, while the other is not.

I understand that. But why go out of your way to try and make a case that the facts might be in question, unless the intent was to defend him? I'm not sure if his intent was to defend the monster, but that is what he's doing, and I'm just curious why. I'm sure he has a reason ... I'm just curious as to what it is, that's all. I'm not trying to indict him as a Foley supporter or anything like that.

I don't defend accused child molesters as a matter of principle.

I see no difference between you saying pedophelia is innacurate in describing Foley and my saying 10 million is innaccurate in describing the deaths caused by Kim Jung Il.

parados wrote:

I see no difference between you saying pedophelia is innacurate in describing Foley and my saying 10 million is innaccurate in describing the deaths caused by Kim Jung Il.

That is simply because you lack the ability to reason. You seem to have convinced yourself that you actually know what goes on in North Korea... though no one outside of North Korea really could. What you consider, at best, "hyperbole"; is actually a distinct possibility. But God forbid Parados actually examine a point without some predisposition to mount some idiotic argument for the sake of argument. ZZZZZZzzzzzzzz

...Bush and his invasion of Iraq has been responsible for 200,000 Iraqi deaths, if not as many as 10 million.

parados wrote:

I see no difference between you saying pedophelia is innacurate in describing Foley and my saying 10 million is innaccurate in describing the deaths caused by Kim Jung Il.

That is simply because you lack the ability to reason. You seem to have convinced yourself that you actually know what goes on in North Korea... though no one outside of North Korea really could. What you consider, at best, "hyperbole"; is actually a distinct possibility. But God forbid Parados actually examine a point without some predisposition to mount some idiotic argument for the sake of argument. ZZZZZZzzzzzzzz

I'd like to know where you guys stand on the 600,000 dead in Iraq being bandied about from the lancet study... I haven't seen your vigorous denial of those numbers yet.

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial.

Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called "cluster sampling," is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods. The great majority of deaths were also substantiated by death certificates.

"We're very confident with the results," said Gilbert Burnham, a Johns Hopkins physician and epidemiologist.

A Defense Department spokesman did not comment directly on the estimate.

"The Department of Defense always regrets the loss of any innocent life in Iraq or anywhere else," said Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros. "The coalition takes enormous precautions to prevent civilian deaths and injuries."

He added that "it would be difficult for the U.S. to precisely determine the number of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of insurgent activity. The Iraqi Ministry of Health would be in a better position, with all of its records, to provide more accurate information on deaths in Iraq."

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."


This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, who said, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the survey.

"I expect that people will be surprised by these figures," she said. "I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them, people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq."

The survey was conducted between May 20 and July 10 by eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

According to the survey results, Iraq's mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate "excess deaths."

Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

Burnham said that the estimate of Iraq's pre-invasion death rate -- 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people -- found in both of the Hopkins surveys was roughly the same estimate used by the CIA and the U.S. Census Bureau. He said he believes that attests to the accuracy of his team's results.

He thinks further evidence of the survey's robustness is that the steepness of the upward trend it found in excess deaths in the last two years is roughly the same tendency found by other groups -- even though the actual numbers differ greatly.

An independent group of researchers and biostatisticians based in England produces the Iraq Body Count. It estimates that there have been 44,000 to 49,000 civilian deaths since the invasion. An Iraqi nongovernmental organization estimated 128,000 deaths between the invasion and July 2005.

The survey cost about $50,000 and was paid for by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies.

Instead of extrapolating the death toll from police reports or media coverage, Iraqi scientists fanned out over the country and asked Iraqis how many members of their households had died since 2003.

Public health scientist Cervantes explains the methodology behind the Lancet study. As he notes, the scientists observed standard protocols for investigating questions of this type:

So, the researchers set out to estimate deaths by means of a household survey using area probability sampling methods. This is a method used all the time in health surveys. It's a method I have used myself, in fact. To begin, you just need census data -- it actually doesn't even have to be highly accurate as long as any errors are essentially random, or unrelated to your study questions. Then, you pick geographic areas based on probability proportionate to the population they contain. This is usually done in stages. In the Iraq study, they first determined the number of clusters they would select in each province based on population size (Baghdad, with its population of over 6 million, got 12; Muthanna, with a population of 570,000, happened to get none.) Then, towns, blocks, and starting households were selected at random. For each household selected, the 39 nearest houses were also included. This survey had a total of 47 clusters, including 12,801 persons.

The researchers interiewed adult household members between May and June, 2006, to learn about births, deaths, and migration since January 1, 2002. They also asked people to report if an entire neighboring household had been wiped out, to account for households with no-one left to speak for them. They report that for 92% of reported deaths, the respondents were able to produce a death certificate. A substantial omission in the report, I must say, is the failure to state the response rate. The investigators also refer to procedures for substituting areas which were too unsafe to visit. They do not say how often this happened, but if anything, it would tend to bias the results downward.

To arrive at an estimate of total deaths for the country, they simply multiply the deaths in the study population by the appopriate weights for the number of people each cluster represents (i.e., the inverse of the probability that a person living in that province would have been selected). The clustering does not directly affect the estimates, but it does affect the so-called confidence interval. Since people living in a specific area are at greater or lesser risk of violent death than average, the statistical power of the study is less than it would be for a single stage probability sample of 12,801 persons, because of the possibility that the selection of clusters introduced sampling error. Although the manuscript does not discuss the specific calculations that were done to adjust for this, I am willing to give investigators from these institutions the benefit of the doubt that they did it correctly.

To recap: The investigators conducted interviews in 14 of Iraq's 16 districts. Regions were assigned interview sites (clusters) according to their populations. Households within each cluster were selected at random.

Why did the epidemiologists use the cluster technique of a purely random sample? It would have been impractical to conduct a truly random survey in a country the size of Iraq. Instead, the investigators decided how many clusters they were going to have in each region and then picked people at random within their zones. If one person was selected at random, the investigators interviewed all his neighbors to complete the cluster.


The investigators interviewed about 12,800 people out of a population of nearly 30 million. So, of course the 655,000 figure is an estimate. The fundamental question is whether one can meaningfully extrapolate excess death rates for the entire country based on a sample of 12,800. Based on the numbers they observed and the statistical limitations of their methods, the authors estimate that the true number of excess deaths would fall between 426,369 and 793,663 nineteen times out of twenty.

This study estimates the number of excess deaths since the invasion. The investigators compared the death rate shortly before the invasion to the death rate for the years following. The 665,000 is the number of deaths over and above what would have occurred if the pre-invasion death rate held steady over that three-year period.

Of course, there's every reason to believe that the vast majority of deaths go unrreported by the press. After all, most of the country is off-limits to journalists. The authorities who run the morgues keep journalists out, except by special invitation. Thousands of unidentified bodies are being pulled from the Tigris alone.

We can expect a bumper crop of straw men in the right wing blogosphere. Some wingnuts are complaining that the authors didn't differentiate between civilians, military personnel, and police. No, they didn't. But you see, they didn't claim to, either. The investigators just wanted to estimate how many Iraqis have died since the invasion and compare that number to what we would have expected to see if pre-invasion death rates had continued. I know it's hard for right wingers to wrap their heads around this but: all those dead people were people. Scientists don't keep separate sets of books for the "good guys" and the "bad guys."

Then there's the correlation/causation thing. The wingnuts will emphasize that just because the death rate shot up dramatically after the US invaded doesn't mean that the US invasion actually caused all those extra deaths. No, it doesn't. However, I'll be curious to see what alternative hypotheses they have for the soaring death rate after the invasion.