Lancet Study Proves: We're Killing Terrorist Zombies In Iraq
And if there's anything worse than a terrorist, it's a terrorist zombie, by gum.
Andy the Squirrel throws some math at me. I have no idea what he's talking about, but he concludes that we're killing zombies, so it has the air of legitimacy to me.
Just deconstructing these numbers:
We've been @ war in Iraq for 3.58 years.
The latest "report" claims 655,000 deaths.
655,000/3.58= on average 182,960 deaths per year.
Iraq has a population of 26,074,900.
This would be a death rate of 70 basis points, or 0.70%.
The CIA FactBook states that the projected death rate, from ALL causes, in Iraq is 5.37 deaths per 1000 population.
(Also note this chart- Death rate has COME DOWN since 2000.)
5.37/1000 = 54 basis points, or 0.54%.
Somehow, the War in Iraq is causing a rate of death that is higher than ALL causes of death, INCLUDING THE WAR ON IRAQ!
Somehow, it appears that "Death by Causes Other Than The War On Iraq" is somehow RESURRECTING PEOPLE! I guess the United States kills them, and then they get raised from the dead to fight on.
Make any sense? It doesn't have to. Just know that there are 2 per 1000 zombies running around in Iraq. That's all you need to know.
He adds the original '03 "study" was discredited even by very liberal, anti-war amateur webzine Slate. They just took their old numbers, he says, and multiplied by the "Finageler's Constant" of 6.
Analog Kid also knocks down the study as being preposterous, but gets docked three points for failing to consider the Zombie Gap.
He does note that the "random" areas surveyers were sent to included Baghdad and Fallujah.
No problem extrapolating whole-country death numbers from anecdotal evidence gathered from jihadi propagandists in such "random" cities, huh?
posted by Ace at 04:22 PM
ace.mu.nu
One of the comments to the post.
Yet the results are completely unbelievable.
Let's try this: the death certificates the interviewers asked to see (in the study they saw them 80% of the time) had to be be issued by a medical authority, who are supposed to pass a copy on to the Health Ministry. Alternatively the morgue provides a death certificate. The LA Times totalled the death certificates from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue and found:
The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from "military clashes" and "terrorist attacks" from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137.
The point being, that no summation of death certificates issued by Iraqi agencies is likely to reach anything close to 500,000 (80% of 601,000). If the Lancet study can't match their projected number of certificates in circulation with the certificates issued, they have no case.
Posted by: geoff on October 11, 2006 08:32 PM |
