FYI, I have updated the profile page, to what those of you who know me are use to seeing.

So, many have wondered, how many have died during the illegal occupation and invasion of Iraq. It's hard to tell, since PNAC buddy Donald Rumsfeld felt that counting the bodies was inappropriate. I guess it's more respectful to ignore the dead, at least on his psychotic planet. But anyways that criminal and disrespectful decision to the side, the latest study coming out claims that more than a million people have died since the invasion of Iraq. This would correlate to the Lancet study in 2006 which had the estimate at that time at 655,000 or more. Righties like to claim that the Lancet study was funded by George Soros, but in fact, that is not true...

The survey was not funded by Soros. It was funded by MIT. OSI only provided funds for public education. And the authors of the study weren't even aware of the OSI funding, so there was no possible way Soros could have influenced them. Why didn't this appear in Montague's story? Oh right, Montague is being paid by a pro-war billionaire.

Also, I have seen on several right wing sites that they are praising the recent study from the New England Journal of medicine, which had the estimates at around 150,000 or so dead. I have a few problems with the methodology of their study, which I will discuss...

Of the 1086 originally selected clusters, 115 (10.6%) were not visited because of problems with security. These clusters were located in Anbar (61.7% of the unvisited clusters), Baghdad (26.9%), Nineveh (10.4%), and Wasit (0.8%). Since past mortality is likely to be higher in these clusters than in those that were visited during the IFHS, we imputed mortality figures for the missing clusters in Anbar and Baghdad with the use of information from the Iraq Body Count on the distribution of deaths among provinces to estimate the ratio of rates of death in these areas to those in other provinces with high death rates. Data from the Iraq Body Count were used to compute ratios for death rates in Anbar and Baghdad, as compared with the three provinces that contributed more than 4% each to the total number of deaths reported for the period from March 2003 through June 2006.

Keep in mind, Anbar and Baghdad is some of the "hot spots" of violence in the region. To tinker with those numbers, Is certainly going to be problematic to your results.

Now, in other Iraq news, ever wonder what oil companies are doing with their record profits that they get from you at the gas pump? How about offering 5 million dollar bribes to Iraqi MPs to vote for their product sharing agreement oil laws they want passed. Makes you want to squeeze that handle on the gas pump a little harder doesn't it?