Aug
2
2023

Checking… Nope, Just My Fruit of the Looms

The NYT checks out the state of political discourse in Somersworth:

Somersworth is just one town up from where I live. I don't know David Green, though. Sounds like he'd be fun to grab a beer with.

The quote is from an article using David as an example of the "surly mood of the Republican electorate". Surly, you must be joking!

Also of note:

  • From Chapter Five in How to Lie With Statistics… David Henderson encourages us to Check Your Axes before gasping in horror. At issue is this graph, published in the Lancet, comparing death rates from heat and cold in European countries:

    [Figure 3]

    But as David urges: check the axes for the left and right sides. Hm.

    Somebody smart and honest fixed it:

    [Figure 3 Fixed]

    If that's what makes it into the Lancet, you can only imagine the quality of papers they reject.

    As indicated, you can find this sort of thing in Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How to Lie with Statistics

  • Mostly, it stokes the fires of hysteria. Bjørn Lomborg takes to the WSJ op-ed page for a similar debunking. Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire

    One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t. For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

    In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.

    Instead, the media acts as if the world is ablaze. In late 2021, the New York Times employed more than 40 staff on a project called “Postcards from a World on Fire,” headed by a photorealistic animation of the world in flames. Its explicit goal was to convince readers of the climate crisis’ immediacy through a series of stories of climate-change-related devastation across the world, including the 2019-20 wildfires in Australia.

    Lomborg also tweeted the NASA data:

    We might gripe that Bjørn should have set his y-axis origin at zero on the left graph, but…

  • Can we just stipulate that Trump's a liar? Dan McLaughlin takes on the latest legal problem: Indicting Trump for political schemes overshadows the actual bad things in politics

    Not everything that’s bad in politics is illegal – especially in a country that has the First Amendment. Joe Biden’s Department of Justice seems to have forgotten that. At least, that’s the conclusion to be drawn from the latest federal indictment of Donald Trump.

    Among other things Dan mentions about the indictment:

    It charges that Trump promoted ridiculous theories of how the Constitution works. Joe Biden better hope you can’t go to jail for that.

  • The zoo also said the bear was seen near Wuhan in late 2019. This actually was the top story on my Google News page at some point yesterday: China zoo denies allegations that star attraction is a man in a sun bear costume

    In a video that has gone viral, a black-coloured bear at a zoo in China can be seen standing on its two hind legs on the precipice of a rock feature, and interacting with tourists by waving its paws. […]

    The netizen who posted the video is convinced that the “talented” bear is actually a human in a costume, reported Hangzhou Daily.

    In related news, Joe Biden's Department of Justice has indicted Wally the Green Monster and the entire Red Sox management, alleging that "Wally's just a human in a costume, not a real monster. Also, Wally's not his real name."


Last Modified 2024-01-28 2:25 AM EDT