Rhinocrisy

One of the harms of innumeracy is that people hear statistics and just believe them. Sometimes this causes people to do badly on the GRE. Other times it convinces them to sign up to kill and die:

Recruiter: “It’s dangerous. But it’s dangerous walking down the street downtown Cincinnati too. You see what I’m saying? You have just as much chance of getting shot downtown as you would over there.”

The truth is, even if you combine downtown Cincinnati and the surrounding communities, fewer than 200 people have been shot over the past three years. In Iraq during that time, 1,373 U.S. servicemen and women have been shot — 346 have died.

This is definitely the most amusing and distressing piece of investigative reporting I’ve heard out of U.S. commercial television in quite a while. And note: The recruiters quoted in this story were all speaking after the scandal six months ago when the same station caught recruiters lying to get kids to enlist. So are they still lying? Let’s do something I would not normally do — let the TV station be the judge:^*

Recruiter: “You’re going to have people getting killed. You have more people murdered in Cincinnati in a day than you have in Iraq killed in a day. OK, I don’t like to throw out statistics though, you know what I mean? But it’s true.”

According to statistics from the Cincinnati Police Department and Department of Defense, that comment is not true. Since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March of 2003, 192 people have been murdered in Cincinnati — an average of one person every five days.

In Iraq, nearly two U.S. troops are killed every day. Over the past 2 1/2 years, 2,000 U.S. servicemen and women have died — 15,000 more have been wounded.

A friend of mine who is a teacher says the underfunding of education is just an effort to create more cannon-fodder for the endless wars. I want to tell her she’s exaggerating. But if she’s wrong, why do these recruiters do such a good job making her look right?

---

^* That will teach me a damn lesson about trusting the TV people. While they properly debunk the idea that Cinci is as dangerous as Baghdad, they don’t go nearly far enough. There are two ways in which the numbers are deceptive. First, talking just about Americans, there are 150,000 troops in Iraq. At about 75 killings a month, that’s about a 1/2,000 chance of getting killed this month. There were 317,000 residents (never mind visitors and commuters) in Cincinnati in 2000. At about 6.5 killings a month, assuming they are all residents, that’s about a 1/50,000 chance of getting killed this month. A big difference.

But why talk about only Americans in Iraq? The recruiter was talking about the number of “people” who are “killed in a day.” The most comprehensive study of the issue had 100,000 Iraqis dead after 18 months of conflict — about 6,000 per month in a population of about 25 million. That means Iraqis have about a 1 in 4,000 chance of being killed each month.

This all reminds us of why we don’t look to TV for careful analysis. This sort of number-play makes bad enough Internet. It’s awful TV.

Ski resorts suffering the results of climate change. Not that their die-hard resistance to mass transit could have anything to do with that.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees says Iraq war created few refugees.

The war in Iraq caused no massive displacement… But despite the many difficulties facing Iraq’s 25 million residents in the immediate aftermath of the war, most people appear ready to wait out this phase and look towards a new, vibrant post-war Iraq.

Washington Post says Syrian officials disagree:

Syrian officials say 700,000 Iraqis from various ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds have arrived since the U.S.-led invasion, far more than in any other country in the region. The flow has spiked in the past four months.

If any readers happen to be in Syria, could you please explain this discrepancy?

By the time you read this, every blog on earth will be quoting this story. But anyway: LA Times says the war is over. Bush is “cutting and running,” to paraphrase Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio). The timing was almost precisely predictable. Actually he’s a month late.

In July, the generals briefed Congress on the military’s status in Iraq. While no members would tell me what the generals said in closed session I had multiple conversations with them and I listened carefully to their questions in open session. It was clear that the generals had warned them that “the wheels will start coming off” of the effort in October, as the number of American troops available to serve and amount of materiel in working order in the battlefield dropped below the numbers that the Executive Branch had ordered. They saw that enough troops were retiring, getting injured, dying, and at least taking time back home with the kids, that there wouldn’t be enough to keep 160,000 in the field. Sure enough:

President Bush will give a major speech Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in which aides say he is expected to herald the improved readiness of Iraqi troops, which he has identified as the key condition for pulling out U.S. forces…

The developments seemed to lay the groundwork for potentially large withdrawals in 2006 and 2007, consistent with scenarios outlined by Pentagon planners…

Some analysts say the emerging consensus might have less to do with conditions in Iraq than the deployment’s long-term strain on the U.S. military…”

The midterm elections are apparently a worry, as well.

A former top Pentagon official who served during Bush’s first term said he believed there was a “growing consensus” on withdrawing about 40,000 troops before next year’s congressional election. That would be followed by further substantial pullouts in 2007 if it became clear that Iraqi forces could contain the insurgency.

If this is true, it will be the first time since at least 1990 that midterms serve as an excuse to end a war, rather than starting one. Then again, the withdrawal could be tactical — maybe they just need the manpower for another invasion.

Machines are useful. Political machines can make you money.

During that same period of Dick Cheney’s reign at Halliburton, Donald Rumsfeld served as chairman of Gilead Sciences Inc. Coming onboard in 1997, a year after this California biotech firm developed and patented the Tamiflu vaccine, the former salesman of nuclear reactors to North Korea remained at his lucrative post until joining the Bush coup in 2001.

Today, Tamiflu is the most sought-after drug on the planet. Said to protect against a flu bug that annihilates chickens, along with a handful of Asian handlers sharing foul, windowless warehouses even worse than Abu Ghraib, the unproven vaccine has made America’s Secretary of Permanent War and Torture even richer. Still holding Gilead shares valued in Fortune magazine as high as $25 million, Rumsfeld’s dividends have reportedly made him more than a million dollars over the past six months of White House flumongering. 2005 sales for Tamiflu are forecast at $1 billion—up from $258 million in 2004.

And editing machines can make you giggle. (Always good to see a linguistics education getting used for something more than programming humanoid voices to say, “Hmm, I didn’t get that.”)

The truth lies at the Uncyclopedia.

Evolution is a process that allows dinosaurs to lay chicken eggs and monkeys to give birth to humans. Usually evolution is seen to be a sign of progress, but this doesn’t explain George W. Bush. Evolution was a popular pseudoscience in the late twentieth century, before scientists finally proved the truth of Creationism.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t end there.

In other speciation news, Pharyngula was featured in the City Pages and some Aussie at Cal documented high-speed frog speciation, caught in midstream. A new species, yours in just 8,000 years. In the middle of the ID “debate,” this might be big enough news to make the papers, but so far that pleasure has not been its.

And most importantly of all, some clever jerks have remembered the most basic response to the Intelligent Design folks. Point out such pleasures as the human appendix, which serves no purpose except to kill off otherwise healthy kids. Or my frickin back, which has left me for three days in the kind of pain that drives me to addle my mind with intelligently designed distillates of the opium poppy. If God designed us in His image, He must have a few seriously herniated discs. Or maybe just a sick sense of humor. Which can not be said for these guys.

Happy Thanksgiving. I deeply appreciate your coming here to read our random thoughts and musings. And I feel lucky to get to write on this blargh. And I’m thankful that no one is pressuring me to eat turkey today. I feel lucky to be alive in this time and place, no matter how much I make fun of it. Hooray.

I am glad that there will be inquiries and that some more facts will come out about how several countries were conned into a war. But it’s pretty annoying that so many of us saw through the lies in the first place — not just about Iraq but about Afghanistan — and that the Iraq lies are now being treated as though they were anything close to convincing. It looks to me like a lot of people were fooled because they wanted to be fooled, and now they are looking for someone to blame. But most of them have no one to blame but themselves.

The part that really worries me is that the current round of inquiries seem intended to protect the mindset that assumes that America is basically right in all things, that military force is value-neutral at worst, and that we are only the victims, not the perpetrators, of evil.

This type of denial of responsibility reminds me of the ongoing failure to take responsibility for the genocide of the First Nations and slavery. I think these traumas, which peaked in their intensity long ago, continue to haunt the USA by forming dangerous habits of mind.

More on how the changing zeitgeist isn’t much of a change at all: go read Josh and Bob.

Intrepid commenter Saheli wrote something really really smart about myths and facts of “well-rounded educations.” Go read it. The crux of her argument in case you’re not in the mood to click: Liberal arts types like to complain that math and science folks just do math and science, while we liberal artsies are well-rounded and learn everything. Back in reality, artsies (myself included) squeak through our undergraduate years without anyone requiring us to take a college-level math class; many of us don’t even know statistics. We “gleefully” take “dumbed-down” classes. Scientists, meanwhile, often have to take full-strength humanities courses. So who is really the well-rounded thinker?

Meanwhile, Daniel Gross points us to a Wall St Journal article in which white parents complain that majority-Asian-immigrant schools “are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.” It sounds like these parents need to have a nice sit-down conversation with Saheli. But they might not do that, as her ancestry on the Asian land mass apparently makes her one of those “majority-Asian-immigrant”s who are “too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science.” Whatever.

Just as we all get used to the idea that Saudi Arabia might not have as much oil as promised, Kuwait announces it’s cutting back its oil production because of water intrusion into the reservoirs. And look forward to revelations on Iraq in the next month or two.

Updated midnight 23 November: The Bloomberg story is here. The basic gist of its implications on peak oil are well spelled out at The Booman Tribune, The Oil Drum, and elsewhere.

In comments, Saheli asked if I was sure this was from water. I passed the question along to Greg Croft, who wrote:

Yes, the problems are due to water incursion. The water cut information is a state secret (!) in Kuwait, so it isn’t good to quote Kuwait Oil Company workers. The Burgan Field has a strong natural water drive in all of the four main sands. The production rates of all the fields in that geologic group are limited by water incursion, but I also have some specific information on Burgan.

I haven’t got a second source or anything, but I tend to believe people who have done geology in the region. He concluded, “This one will decline like a North Sea field - watch.”