National Porcine Aviation Festival

Today, the Boston Red Sox had their triumphal parade from Chestnut Hill to City Hall, then over to Charlestown — and into the river. (They were in the amphibious Duck Boats. They covered another mile or so on the water, cruising between two crowded shores, dodging the sailboats, sculls, and kayaks of their aquatic fans.) Over a million people lined the route to celebrate the first World Series win in 86 years. The players were astonished at the turnout, which was two or three times larger than the crowd that greeted the Patriots after their Super Bowl victory.

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The Lancet and the Iraqis

A couple of weeks ago, Reason took a survey of the voting preferences of various libertarian luminaries. One of the most luminous, Pinker, argued with some reasonable (if, I thought, disproportionate) examples of the irrational homeland security policy. He told us he’d vote for Kerry because Bush uses too little reason. Well, maybe. But this weekend I’m struck by examples of how little reason the “scientific” community uses in approaching Bush and, well, how “reasonable” Bush is. Indeed, I wonder if these “reasoning” Bush-haters realize how tattered the public’s respect for such professional judgments is likely to be after these last few months. And how this loss of authority is likely to play out in the future.

As Shannon Love has noted, The Lancet, a respected science journal, wants to affect our votes. I figure we all do (and should) vote from an American perspective. Sure the Brits stood by us (and the Iraqis); they deserve a polite response. They do not deserve the respect a commentator asked for – that by the nature of the journal we should respect its conclusions. But if any other nation has earned our ears about this election it is probably Iraq. If we should vote against Bush for the reasons The Lancet raises, we should hear an amen from the Iraqis. I’m not sure that’s the word they’d choose.

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Scientific Malpractice

I am embarrassed to say that when reading the infamous Lancet Study for my previous post, I was so stuck by the idiocy of using cluster sampling and self-reporting in a population (the Sunni) who have a strong motive to exaggerate that I just flat ignored the actual resulting statistics. Since I knew the methodology was crap I knew the numbers were crap and I didn’t look any farther.

Commentator JohnChris and Fred Kaplan over at Slate (via Instapundit) both pointed out that the confidence interval on the studies results, even with Faluja excluded, is so broad to be utterly useless.

Kaplan nails it so I will except a bit:

“Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I’ll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board.

Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday’s election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It’s a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling.”

Of course, we know what went wrong with the sampling. The study’s basic design was flawed for examining a phenomenon know a priori to be highly asymmetrical.

This raises the obvious question: How did such a seriously flawed study get published in a prestigious (Lancet is the British equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine) medical journal? The only possible explanation is political bias of the authors, the peer reviewers and the publisher.

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Nonsensical criticism of Bush, part…

Oh, Hell, I lost count years ago.

Now we are told that Bush should be turned out of office because his “incompetence” caused us to lose (maybe) a couple of hundred tons of explosives from a warehouse in Iraq. Now keep in mind that these aren’t the dreaded WMD (which didn’t exist, remember?), and these aren’t plain old regular explosives, either (or else this wouldn’t be such a big deal), but a nifty new category of munition, not powerful enough to justify an invasion but just powerful enough for their disappearance to justify Bush’s ouster.

So let’s take the worst case, and see where it leads us.

The absolutely most damning case that could be made is that some soldiers arrived while the stuff was still there, but didn’t stick around to guard it, since they were still rather busy invading Iraq at the time; some time later, our forces went back to the site, found these munitions missing, and the Administration failed to advertise our loss of these munitions to the entire world.

Even granting all that, where’s Bush’s incompetence?

Ah, he didn’t commit enough troops to the operation, so there weren’t enough people on hand to guard this super-critical site, so we left it unguarded and somebody took the stuff away. But if you’ll recall, there was a significantly larger force committed to the operation – half of that force hadn’t shown up yet, being in the process of taking the long way around to Iraq. And that wasn’t due to Bush’s “incompetence” but Turkey’s lack of cooperation. And no, that wasn’t a “failure of diplomacy” either – if Kerry had gone to Turkey and said “pretty please with a cherry on top”, he wouldn’t have gotten any better results, not from Turkey, and not from France or Germany either.

So what we’re left with is that the noncooperation of Turkey, and the general chaos that always accompanies wartime operations, allowed these explosives to fall into the hands of our enemies?

Not quite. That stuff had been in the hands of our enemies for years.

Yes, I’m speaking of none other than Saddam Hussein. And, need I remind you that he was a declared enemy of the United States, not to mention technically still at war with us. And consistently violating the cease fire agreement, by shooting at American planes that had every right to be there under the terms of that agreement. Do you remember the last time a defeated enemy was allowed to violate the terms of a peace treaty with impunity? You know, the nation led by that Austrian corporal with the funny mustache that was just like George W Bush in every way, according to some of our friends on the left?

But Saddam wasn’t much of a threat!

Well, neither was Hitler the first few years he was violating his peace treaty. And if Britain and France invaded when he first moved troops into that part of Germany where they were supposed to be off-limits, and knocked him off his throne, most people would have written it off as a wasteful misadventure and then forgotten the whole thing within a few years, never dreaming of the trouble he’d have caused down the road.

Now we all have a tendency to sort evil whackos into two categories – those that are a threat to us and those that aren’t. And for many years, the jihadis all seemed to be in the second category. They’d set off bombs and hijack planes on the other side of the world, and some of the things they blew up had American flags on them, and of course they’d been calling us The Great Satan all along, but even the crazy jihadis weren’t crazy enough to try that crap over here. Until one day, one terrorist network was crazy enough to try it. They crossed the line, jumped the ocean, and made a determined and nearly successful effort to murder 50,000 people on American soil.

If Al-Queda could cross that line, why not some other group? Why not some Islamic conspiracy, or state, or kinda-sorta-state-sponsored group that had nothing to do with bin-Laden? Obviously, whatever it was that had caused them all to stay in their sandbox and avoid doing something that The Great Satan itself couldn’t possibly ignore doesn’t apply anymore, and any one of those guys could decide to score a big one like bin Laden tried to, impress his fellow jihadis, and scare up a lot of recruits. So when someone over there openly declares his enmity against the United States, we can’t assume it’s all just talk anymore, and if every intelligence service on the planet is unable to figure out whether he’s working on nukes or biding his time until containment collapses, we certainly can’t take any of them at their word that he’s fully contained and absolutely harmless.

Not to mention that he was in the way of us forcibly shutting down Iran’s nuclear program, should that become necessary (and I’ve got a strong feeling it will be necessary, in the not-too-distant future). And he was in a perfect spot for us to launch several other operations as they become necessary, gather better intel, and generally stay on the offensive against all sorts of characters that we can’t trust to blow things up only on their side of the world anymore.

Now the one thing that strikes me about the military efforts to date is just how incredibly successful they’ve been, and how masterfully planned and executed they turned out to be. Not perfect, of course (You mean there’s terrorists setting off explosives? Against Americans and their supporters? In the Middle East, no less? Say it isn’t so!). But a lot of the toys that John Kerry voted against turned out to be damned useful in the War on Terror. I don’t want to even think about how an Afghanistan operation with Vietnam-era technology and tactics would have gone for us – I think in that case we’d have been wishing for another Vietnam. And if you’ve ever cracked a history book, you’ll realize that only 1200 deaths in a year and a half of invading a dictatorship, overthrowing its dictator, and fighting a chronic insurgency is astoundingly good news, especially when added to the fact that the long-predicted flood of refugees never materialized, the terrorists that Saddam’s regime had nothing whatsoever to do with suddenly got extremely interested in the fate of Iraq (and no, we’re not turning peaceful, simple folk into bloodthirsty terrorists – at worst, we’re forcing them to choose their side a little sooner than they would have on their own, and denying them the option of biding their time until the Great Satan looks sufficiently weak to try their hand at terrorism on their chosen terms), and Iraqis are still signing up to take on the battle for their country against these thugs and getting set to vote in their first-ever real election in a couple of months.

And the Commander-in-Chief at the helm during these amazing accomplishments is called incompetent? You’ve got to be kidding me.

C-SPAN 1 & 2 (times e.t.)

This Sunday’s Booknotes on C-SPAN 1, at 8:00 and 11:00 p.m., is an interview with Chris Wallace, discussing his work, Character: Profiles in Presidential Courage.

With the indispensable contributions of Richard E. Neustadt– author of the seminal Presidential Power, former adviser to presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, and founder of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government– Wallace has chosen nearly twenty notable acts of presidential courage in our nation’s history, including: George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion, Theodore Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War, Harry Truman and the Berlin Airlift, and George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. More.

If you haven’t sufficiently od’d yet, this is C-SPAN’s “All Politics Weekend”. You can view speeches from all the main candidates as well as other “election-related” programs on C-SPAN1, while C-SPAN2’s Booktv concentates on “election-themed” books. Given that concentration, the schedule demonstrates variety. For instance, at Saturday at 4:45, Stanley Renshon and Justin Frank discuss their psychological profiles of Bush. Then, Peter Singer critiques Bush’s ethics (Sunday at 5:30). (Well, perhaps these should be taken seriously; what do I know?) A variety of pundits, election analysts, and cultural critics all focus upon the nature of the elections, the nature of our divided country, and the nature of the candidates. For those of you that masochistically want to revisit the last election, on Saturday at 8 in the evening and Sunday at 11 you can catch David Boies discuss his memoir, Courting Justice; despite its Oct. 13, 2004 pub date, it covers more than the Bush/Gore case.

The complete schedule is not yet up. So far, it seems clear that some sessions are likely to illuminate either issues or our current, divided culture. Others, of course, may either reassure you in your choice or lead you to throw things at the tv. Have fun – and watch that blood pressure.

Looking ahead, the next “In-Depth” author, David Hackett Fischer, will submit himself to the 3-hour phone-in monthly session on Nov. 7. That interview will be run throughout Sunday and be repeated early Monday morning. He will be discussing works that deal with issues often discussed on this blog. We can hope the election will be over by then and we can be charmed by his historical perspective as we discover our (at least my) lost proportionality during this political season.