I think ^(link) therefore I err

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Math

Should be useful. Counting etc, but look what these guys at the LATimes came up with after doing "math".
War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000
Higher than the U.S. estimate but thought to be undercounted, the tally is equivalent to 570,000 Americans killed in three years.


See how they do that? If there are 50,000 people in Iraq killed out of a country of 26million then that is 0.19% of the population. In the US there are 295million people. 0.19% of that population = around 570,000 people.

Reading the article it talks of how those numbers are counted etc.
HOWEVER, no where does it include projections of Saddam's killings. Let's see now. The Weekly Standard used the well known number of 300,000* since 1979. At 13,000 people a year then, you have let's see, 45,500. If you add in the UN estimates of lives lost due to ongoing sanctions, you have another (500,000 unnessary deaths due to sanctions during the 90s) 50,000 deaths per year.

Had the LATimes actually used their math for our side vs the enemie's side, they would have concluded that the Iraq war is an overall good as far as death counts are concerned.

*ps 300,000 thoughsand people dead by Saddam is equivalent to 3 million Americans killed in 23 years.

pps Each of these people count by the way. Just as each of the 5 soldiers killed yesterday count. Just because they are the equivalent of 0.0000017% of the US population doesn't mean that those numbers don't matter. Or the loss of Iraq the Model's brother in law. Those numbers matter. All I'm saying is the LATimes published that headline to make people here think that this war is for bad, not for good. Vs publishing a different headline that would have been much more neutral to the facts. The facts coming from basic, simple Math.

UPDATE: Hey, I scooped Powerline. But read their post on this anyway, they say it better and include some other numbers.