Rosie O'Donnell quits show, "The View" last day, her Girlfriends Birthday.

I'm sure she will be back. I think she was showing her softer side, in a way. and in turn, the girl who was arguing with her turned into the bit*h. very nice!

oh, I am sorry. 650,000.
you see, the US military did not feel that the Iraqi people they were going there to "protect" were worth doing a body count on.
therefore, the trumped up 30,000 is completely wrong. get a better source if you are gonna play hardball.

its actually 30,000-60,000.

And the US army aren't the ones killing innocent people, those are the insurgents. It is their goal, they win if civilians die. The US military tries as hard as possible, putting themselves in more danger because of it, to protect civilians under rules of engagement (which insurgents make a point to break).

I think I'll stick with realistic body counts instead of fabricated guesses, which is what that 655,000 number is.

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Say what you want, but my facts about the Lancet report are true, and by my estimation, a terrible form of "math" as far as studying statistics goes.

As for the oreos, I guess thats where all those civilian deaths come from, people breaking into dumps, not all those suicide bombs....
pfffft.

Lets see, who would I care to believe, MIT professionals, where you have to have an IQ of 160 just to break in, or Mr. Nice Guy. hmmmmmm.I'll have to think about that one.
I doubt that MIT would base their beautiful reputation over a lie, you think?

I'm not arguing that they are lying, I'm saying their methodology is exaggerated. First off, the report said between 92,000 and 655,000. Which tells you right out that its unreliable, since the range is so large.

They surveyed 1800 people, I just looked it up again, about how many people around them were dying. It isn't a number, its an ESTIMATE. Based on what its based on, I simply don't believe it can be accurate.


But go ahead and choose to trust the "media" on this one, pick and choose, I don't suppose you've actually been educated about statistics have you?

Here's some stuff I think you should check out:

Dr Richard Garfield, an American academic who had collaborated with the authors on an earlier study, declined to join this one because he did not think that the risk to the interviewers was justifiable. Together with Professor Hans Rosling and Dr Johan Von Schreeb at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Dr Garfield wrote to The Lancet to insist there must be a “substantial reporting error” because Burnham et al suggest that child deaths had dropped by two thirds since the invasion. The idea that war prevents children dying, Dr Garfield implies, points to something amiss....

Dr Garfield also queries the high availability of death certificates. [Ed note: The Lancet study claims that more than 90 percent of interviewees were able to produce death certificates.] Why, he asks, did the team not simply approach whoever was issuing them to estimate mortality, instead of sending interviewers into a war zone?

AND THIS ONE SPECIFICALLY!

http://www.slate.com/id/2108887/



BTW, the reports was purposely released before the 2004 election and included on the research team was a democratic political hopeful...

you have a weird way of contributing to a story, that has been circulating in the media, you know? I see that you only agree to things you can swallow. your math is grossly inaccurate. take a math class.

My math is perfect. I laid it out step by step. Show me where I'm wrong.


The question here is the source of the numbers, where the number 655,000 came from. It was the upper end of the 100,000-655,000 range. That range is ridiculously large, had you ever been educated about stats (you haven't answered that question yet) you would know that that range is too large. You chose the upper limit of the range on purpose, because it makes a political point you wanted to make.

Read the slate article, slate is a liberal site. It picks apart the methodology of the study and explains why estimating and extrapolating (since I can assume you haven't taken a class in stats, extrapolation is when you take one set of data, observe a pattern and use that pattern over the larger range of data, which at long stretches is not usually accurate) isn't a reliable way to pull that number out of mid air.

I'll post the relevant parts of the article since I know you are too biased to read the link yourself.

The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:

We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.

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.)

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.

Here's how the Johns Hopkins team—which, for the record, was led by Dr. Les Roberts of the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health—went about its work. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods across Iraq—equal-sized population "clusters"—and, this past September, set out to interview 30 households in each. They asked how many people in each household died, of what causes, during the 14 months before the U.S. invasion—and how many died, of what, in the 17 months since the war began. They then took the results of their random sample and extrapolated them to the entire country, assuming that their 33 clusters were perfectly representative of all Iraq.

There is one group out there counting civilian casualties in a way that's tangible, specific, and very useful—a team of mainly British researchers, led by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda, called Iraq Body Count. They have kept a running total of civilian deaths, derived entirely from press reports. Their count is triple fact-checked; their database is itemized and fastidiously sourced; and they take great pains to separate civilian from combatant casualties (for instance, last Tuesday, the group released a report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 308 of them women and children).




Follow?

I am not buying into the Republican garbage, ok? In the beginning, they didn't even do a body count, so of course, their numbers (meaning Republican propaganda)are grossly inaccurate.
the only one spewing right now, is not Rosie, but you.
the fact that you want to go against a report just because it does not support your agenda, or embarrasses you is just too bad, isn't it?
and, let me see, who am I going to believe, the highly regarded students who bothered to run this report, and dedicated themselves to it, or, Mr. Nice Guy who hasn't.
hmmmmm!
Am I going to listen to the factthat they actually recieved death certificates? hmmmm,(thinking)
or, am I going to believe the Republican Administration, who are mainly war criminals in this matter?
hmmmmmm!
well, the fact that only 37% of the American public even support the war, according to surveys done by CNN,
I am sure that this one indeed has an error margin of + or - 3%.

If I'm biased, what do you call your ignoring my points, my sources, and my valid mathematical (do you understand the math, or are you ignorant to everything I'm saying as well?), because its quite clear that this report, which is liberal propaganda (hah, I can take the easy way out too), isn't statistically sound.


If there are over half a million dead Iraqis, where are their bodies? Why do body counts and reliable numbers differ so much from that number? Are those bodies invisible?

and, where are the bodies of the holocaust victims? your reasoning is illogical. However, maybe I will put word out that they should drop the bodies off at your door, for a body count. ok?

You still won't answer the criticism of their statistical methods?

Do you want the bodies at the front door, or the back?

Hahha, how many? 60,000 or 655,000? You still didn't answer the questions....

Did you read my link?

No, I didn't read your link. I don't even 'care' to read your link! Why? was MIT retracting their statements? then I might read it. Why would I read your source, when I have my own? Why don't you convince MIT that they were wrong, have them retract their statements, then I might be interested in changing my view. Until then, I don't think so. that is as crazy as watching 'fox news' in my opinion, the disinformation source.

Read the link... Its a liberal site with mathematical debunking of how MIT (actually they didn't do the survey, Johns Hopkins did, MIT just gave the grant money) did the study.

But I guess that would be too much to ask, you wouldn't want to leave that bubble would you? Too lazy to even peak at it since you don't want to be wrong. Yet you sit there and degenerate into name calling... Good debate... pffft




I'd just like to point out how ironic it is that you are calling me biased...

as you were insulting me, and falling back into your own degeneration, I have to laugh at your hypothesis, and call you one word. "hypocrite".

Except I never fell to simple, "Yeah, well thats just propaganda" because I didn't understand the debate or wasn't willing to read any evidence.


This is a joke...