1 million Iraqi deaths based on... an opinion poll?

There are just so many things wrong with this:

More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes.

The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 found 4.05 million households in the country, a figure ORB used to calculate that approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war, the researchers found.

This methodology is just plain bogus.

DEATH TOTALS ARE NOT AN OPINION POLL!!!

1 million people is 3.73% of the Iraqi 2006 population estimate. That's an enormous figure for deaths. Show us the graves of all these people. We won't be holding our breaths.

UPDATE: This is from a fellow member of Conservative Underground:

365 days x 5 years = 365 x 5 = 1825, so we take one million divided by 1825 = 547.94 deaths per day

January 2008 = 547.94 x 7 x 4 = 15342.32 dead in the last four weeks..... and no one noticed?

There are lies, there are damned lies, there are statistics..and then there's this load of droppings.....

In actuality, the study is through August 19, 2007. That means there are 1,613 days between the start of the war (March 20, 2003) and the end of study. That would make the casualty figure an average of about 620 deaths per day, about 4,340 per week, or about 17,360 per month (4 weeks). "And no one noticed?" indeed! Apparently all these deaths are happening well out of the view of the numerous international reporters in the country.

I don't know what's worse: that people think they can get away with phony-baloney figures like this or that a lot of people actually swallow them without question.

UPDATE 2: Unsurprisingly, the kooks at DailyKos and Democrat Underground are lapping this up:

UK Poll Confirms 1 Million Estimate of Iraq Death Toll (DK from last year when the study first came out)

One Million Dead Iraqis (the most recent DK thread)

1.1 MILLION Iraqi Civilian Deaths Confirmed by Brit Poll Firm - WAKE UP CALL (DU)

UPDATE 3: This comment on DailyKos caught my eye:

This could be the same number killed by Saddam's genocides and murder rooms. It's been estimated that it took Saddam Hussein from 1979 to 2003 to kill one million Iraqis. It has taken the US actions only 6 years to equal that tragic abomination.

There is a profound irony in this Kos Klown bringing up Saddam's killings since we've actually been finding the mass graves he filled!!! In fact, I believe the figure for Saddam's killings was derived from the actual physical evidence (i.e. the body count) from these graves, not an opinion poll.

And don't ask me how he gets 6 years out of March 2003 to August 2007. Must be that new math stuff liberals love. Oy.

For fellow Nintendo geeks only: Zelda Reorchestrated

Muzzy's got the scoop on music from the Legend of Zelda series redone in full-on orchestra mode. Pretty cool stuff.

Free the flamingos! Support global warming!

Via my big brother the Impudent One. Hil. Ar. I. Ous.

Check out the Minnesotans for Global Warming website here.

Bigfoot is from Mars! Godzilla, too!

The further adventures of people with too much time on their hands:

British newspapers went crazy Wednesday morning about an image from Mars that appears to show a humanoid figure descending a shallow hillside.

The "alien" is actually a blurry detail in a huge panoramic photograph snapped on the edge of Mars' Gusev crater by NASA's Spirit rover in early November, and posted on NASA's Web site on Jan. 2.

Naturally, it took the Photoshop skills of dedicated bloggers to find the "humanoid."

Here's the "humanoid" in question:


(Click to enlarge.)

Here's the full image from Mars. If you leave the bottom slider alone and scroll about two-thirds of the way down, you'll see the "humanoid" not far from the black area on the left.

I've done some searching myself and have found other figures in the photograph. Use the right-side scroll bar to get the "humanoid" to the bottom of the screen, then scroll over about two-thirds of the way and you'll see Godzilla. He's at the center of this screen shot:


(Click to enlarge.)

Spooky, no? I thought so.

Atheistic, "kill God" movie trilogy is dead in the water

Excuse the Schadenfreude, but I'm very gleeful about this:

The movie tanked so badly that the second and third installments are not going to be made

And Christian-hater extraordinaire PZ Myers is pee-zeed (so much so he froths incoherently about the Chronicles of Narnia and Christians in general):

I have to compare it to the Narnia movie, though. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a great gilded turd, an awful piece of poor storytelling and suspension-of-disbelief shattering illogic

...

[The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe] had a guaranteed undiscerning and credulous audience.

Poor baby.

Oh, and notice how it's the filmmakers' fault that the film did so poorly. It wasn't the fault of Pullman, who shot himself in the foot when he admitted what the books were about and what his goal was. And, of course, it had nothing to do with the Christian (Catholic and Protestant) opposition to the film.

Huckabee's Christmas ad vs. Obama's South Carolina mailer

Compare and contrast. Remember the brouhaha over this ad?

A lot of the liberals were caterwauling that the shelves - OBVIOUS shelves (you can even see Christmas decorations sitting on them) - in the background were a "subliminal cross."

Well, now consider the following mailer from Obama's camp:

Obama mailer

How much you want to bet the left will be quite silent about that?

New ratings system

Via HaloScan, you can now star-rate my blog posts in the comment box below each post. Neat!

The ACLU again desperately tries to convince us that 1 = 0

ACLU: Sex in Restroom Stalls Is Private

In an effort to help Sen. Larry Craig, the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy.

"[P]eople who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy?" Uh, okay... What about the people who use public bathrooms who have the expectation that it's a safe, clean place to go (especially if they have kids) and not a meeting place for gays to have anonymous, disease-spreading sex?

Oh, yeah, and I'm sure the ACLU really cares about Sen. Craig. Yep. Uh-huh. No doubt about it.

LB:EF - Free upgrade to Tribulation Forces

Tribulation Forces is the sequel to Eternal Forces, and for a limited time (until Jan. 17th, if I remember correctly) EF players who have been faithful in downloading the various updates can download version 1.00 of Tribulation Forces FOR FREE. (Just load your EF CD and click the update prompt or click the "Update" button on the game's control screen.) Wow! How awesome is that? I downloaded it last night. It's a huge file - 318MB - so even with a fast internet connection, it can take a while (30+ minutes for me). There's also a version 1.01 update for TF already, so be sure to check for that.


Previous posts:

LB:EF - *snicker* EF's ratings vs. Golden Compass game's ratings
LB:EF - Eternal Forces on HSN
LB:EF - Some screenshots
LB:EF - What neutral reviewers have to say about the game
LB:EF - The latest brouhaha and the left's continued lies
LB:EF - Revisiting my earlier concerns (by request)
LB:EF - Mission 19
LB:EF - Mission 18
LB:EF - More falsehoods spread in the media
LB:EF - More response to criticisms
LB:EF - Mission 17
LB:EF - Mission 16
LB:EF - Missions 13, 14, and 15
LB:EF - Mission 12
LB:EF - Missions 9, 10 and 11
LB:EF - Addressing an opening animation criticism
LB:EF - Easter egg?
LB:EF - Email from the game's senior producer!
LB:EF - Missions 6, 7 and 8
LB:EF - The first few missions
LB:EF - Tutorial
LB:EF - the manual
New S&B; series: "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" in detail
The left's lies about "Left Behind: Eternal Forces"

An update I missed

Recall this outrageous story from 2006 about Kalie McArthur, a developmentally disabled woman who was viciously sexually assaulted at a Colorado Springs high school. Well, as it turns out, a settlement was reached last year:

A mentally disabled girl who was sexually assaulted in a stairwell by a 15-year-old boy entrusted to look after her could receive as much as $4.3 million under a settlement reached with Academy School District 20.

Records obtained by The Gazette of Colorado Springs show the settlement includes $450,000 in legal fees and expenses, $100,000 to a special needs trust, and $1,845 a month to the trust for a minimum of 30 years, increasing at a 3 percent compounded annual interest rate.

Kalie McArthur, now 21, could receive about $4.3 million if she lives to 85. McArthur's family agreed to allow her name to be used by the media.

A decent outcome, but no amount of money will make up for the damage inflicted upon this poor woman to her body, mind and reputation (because of that "it was pleasurable for her" argument the school was trying to use as a defense).