stupid word games

i did not accuse Steven Mosher of being a fraud.

US elections

well, long time, no posts.

i have been busy, with work, the kid and following discussions about climate change, that don t fit here.
and over the last few weeks, i ve been following elections mostly.

now we all know, that Palin is a disaster. but this one really left me shocked. i ll quote it here, as i have no other place to post it:

PALIN: Well, I think that people can ... can read the comments and hear the comments that he made, because again, the, the refreshing thing about that tape being revealed ... from 2001... it's candidness there. It's not ... it didn't seem to be his typical scripted, kinda ... rhetorical message read off a TelePrompter

this is insane. Palin, who never got beyond repeating scripted talking points accusing OBAMA of doing this? simply insane.

read the whole interview. it is really nice to see, how she is backpedaling on what she said about his judges comment...

Spagat and Kane

i wrote an answer to Kane and took a closer look at some analysis of Spagat of the Lancet study of iraqi violent deaths over at Deltoid.

i ll post it here again:

1) I think that the underlying data that L2 relies on is fraudulent. That is, I think that the interviewers made (some) stuff up.

why accuse Burnham of making false statement then?

why bother with the main street bias at all?

and why don t you simply present sonme evidence of this "fraud"?!?

sorry David, but among the few persons making stuff up here, you are quite a special one!

===

the other rather "special" person is Spagat. while follwing some links about the "main street bias", i hit this presentation given by him in december 2007:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Households%20in%20Conflict%202007.pdf

my eyes got caught by page 7, showing a Baghdag map:

This map seems to suggest that large attacks
in Baghdad could be biased toward residential cross-streets to main streets ... Attacks since May 2003 in which more than 10 people were
killed.

now obviously a rather big color point on an arial map of a city will end up somewhere around a "main street".
notice how he is playing with the word "residential", without again knowing ANYTHING about te palces the attacks occur in. (am i the only one who got familiar to the term "MARKET BOMBING" by watching news in iraq?!?)

this is a pretty lame attempt to establish a link between the location of the bombings and people living CLOSE to the place where it occured.

but this sentence is even more absurd:

Note that incidents of this size almost certainly cover over half of all deaths.

note that this sentence obviously is total NONSENSE, as a simple look at any list of violent deaths in iraq will show you:

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/page1

http://icasualties.org/oif/(qb52ieexlryn5f45zlljy0e4)/IraqiDeaths.aspx

actually you willstruggle hard to find a single day, on which events with 10+ casualties cover 50% percents of the daily deathtoll.

Spagat could have known this, by simply taking a look at his map: if the Spagat map did really represent over 50% of the deaths in Baghdad since 2003, the place would be a paradise!!!

watch the SPIN!

i have little time only for this posts, so i am just giving a short warning:

take a VERY CLOSE look at news from Iraq these days.

there are plenty of signs, that the "iraqi offensive", which is nothing but inter-shii fighting is faltering. the extension on the deadline to surrender, was a very sure sign. as is the slow (NONE?) progress of the offensive and counter strikes by the sadrists. (they shouldn t be able to take over small towns)

the US can not allow Maliki to fail (especially if we agree with Juan Coles assessment, that Cheney gave the advice to attack..) so US forces wll continue to get involved MORE and MORE.

they are going to give air support (pretty bad, as it often hits the false targets in cities) use special forces (this is a lead element. if US special forces and iraqi troops achieve an objective together, teh iraqis did VERY LITTLE work...) and simply suppor with combat troops, as we see already in sadr city, Baghdad.

always remember: in combat operations, most iraqi units will rely MASSIVELY on US "advisors". (yup, tehse are the guys that were start into the vietnam war...)
calling in airstrikes is a difficult task, that will usually be performed by an ALO (air liassion officer) who will be added to iraqi units to cooperate with teh US air force.
most significant battles will be decided by these guys, who are not part of the iraqi force..

Bush did veto torture bill

well, looks like he did it. Bush told the public in a radio address that he vetoed a bill that would ban torture like water boarding and restrict secret services to the same interrogation techniques used by the army and described in their field manual:

President George W. Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

in contradiction to army research results that show that torture is not only evil but NOT working as well, Bush continues to make false claims about americans being safer because of the torture laws. i would call that a lie:

Senator John Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, disputed that assertion on Saturday. "As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack," he said in a statement.

turks fight kurds in iraq

i wonder if this is still part of the plan to "stabilise" the region:

ARBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Turkish troops inside northern Iraq fought gunbattles with Iraqi Kurdish security forces on Thursday, a senior Iraqi Kurdish official said.

governments continue deceive

it is official. the UK government deceived its people to get their support for the war.

We have also learned how raw intelligence was pumped up to make a strongly worded "executive summary". Thus, a draft report from the JIC which claimed that Iraq had "sought to develop" mobile facilities to produce a biological agent becomes, in Williams's draft, "has developed transportable laboratories".

and this does continue. it turns out that the story about the mentally handicapt "forced" female suicide bombers has some holes as well.

Psychiatric case files of two female suicide bombers who killed nearly 100 people in Baghdad this month indicate that they suffered from depression and schizophrenia but do not contain information suggesting they had Down Syndrome, U.S. officials said.

sometimes it feels as if they don t want anyone to thrust them at all....