"if you take cranberries and stew them in applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does"
By As Scott predicted and Dave shows, the updated Lancet study is going to make for some good hack-watching. Over at the Corner, Pod the younger announces he’s about to make an ass of himself, and then does so:
I am not a demographer nor a statistician nor a medical person, but isn’t “cluster sampling” a means of extrapolating phenomena occurring in nature like disease patterns and the like?
Iain Murray then patiently explains that what was fairly obvious–Podhoretz doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
But Murray must have felt a bit guilty about spoiling Podhoretz’ fun, because what he unleashes next is a sight to behold:
More on the Iraq Figures [Iain Murray]
The US death rate is 8 per 1,000 population (see here). The UK is 10 per 1,000. According to the study, Iraq’s post-invasion death rate is 13.2 per 1,000. A whole host of countries have death rates way higher than that – see here. Now a lot of this is to do with age of population, but given that the death rate of, say, Cameroon, which has a similar birth rate to Iraq is also around 13, this suggests that the humanitarian crisis in Iraq is no worse than that of many other countries. Different in character, certainly, but it suggests that the epidemic of violence in Iraq is less debilitating to that country than the AIDS epidemic is to Botswana, for instance.
Posted at 2:18 PM
Yes, you read that right. Unless they’ve shown that Iraq is the worst place in the world, Murray can’t get himself too worried about it.
Time for a peek into the crystal ball. A year from now, the violence has increased and much of Baghdad is in flames:
Iraq Violence [Iain Murray]
Let’s not carried away reading too much into the big Baghdad fire. Sure, much of the city is in flames, but really, compared to the great Chicago fire of 1871. And to those alarmists who keep focusing on the rising level of violence, torture, and executions, I ask you: would you rather be in Baghdad today, or a Tutsi in downtown Kigali, April 1994?