Tue 9 Nov 2004
John Fleck commented on my exchange with Fumento here and here. He responded to Fumento’s silly charge that I “occupy the pitiful place of the harmless blogger who blogs because nobody in his right mind would punish (sic) him” with:
That’s of course ad hominem, something of a poor refuge in any argument. But it’s worse than that. It’s plain dumb in this age of Dan Rather and Little Green Footballs for a writer of Fumento’s stature to expect us to think he wins the argument because his work is published in mainstream media.
Sure enough, Fleck got an email from Fumento:
Which is pretty funny, since if Fumento had bothered to click on Fleck’s About me link he would have discovered that Fleck is the science writer for the Albuquerque Journal.Subject: Ah, another worthless observation from somebody that can’t get published so he blogs.
Earth to Inkstain and Lambert: Other than Inkstain caring what Lambert says and Lambert caring about what Inkstain says (perhaps), nobody cares what either of you says. Not only are you fully contained in the blogosphere, you’re actually in a much tinier realm than that. Meanwhile of the many places my piece on the Lancet trash appeared is today’s Daily News, weekend population above 500,000. You attack not out of a sense that injustice has been done regarding the Lancet report, but out of jealousy. But if you cleaned up your act, you might just find that somebody somewhere, even with a circulation of ten, would occassionally print you. Alas, you will not. You are a lost cause.
Fumento then sent Fleck another abusive email:
First, it seems to me that any nationally syndicated columnist, including those I can’t stand, is a journalist — whether John Fleck acknowledges it or not. Second, I dropped one of my arguments from the TCS piece only because it confused people with simple minds. Like you. As it happens, I also had to cut 200 words even as I added in new information. So we are faced with two possibilities here, neither pleasant. A) You’re not particularly bright; B) You’re not particularly bright.I wonder if Fumento has managed to read the Lancet paper yet?
On a slightly more serious note: Fumento has managed to get his attack on the Lancet paper published in the Sacramento Bee, the Arizona Daily Star and the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune. Just think how much it would bug him if you wrote a Letter to the Editor about his column.
Oh, and my humble blog is now the second site returned by a Google search for “Fumento”.
November 9th, 2004 at 2:38 am
So Fumento is proud of the number of people he can mislead?
November 9th, 2004 at 4:08 am
People wonder why John Kerry lost the election when obvious hucksters like Fumento are able to publish demonstrably false propadanda far and wide. The reality-based community has had its voice drowned out.
November 9th, 2004 at 4:16 pm
Fumento’s ugly reaction to (presumably) exposure of his guilty conscience makes an appalling contrast with Tim Worstall’s graceful contrition for error and gratitude for constructive criticism. Where are his moral values?
Unfortunately, as character flaws of a kind with Fumento’s don’t prevent one becoming, say, president of the United States, there’s no reason to think he’ll be learning many of the right lessons from this little bit of unpleasantness.
As for the the boasting that the measure of his work is its popularity and spread, that’s a bit Junior High even for a hack - bet he can find writers more widely published than he is but that he doesn’t admire. On the other hand has he noted that Christ (for one) published nothing at all? Sad, sad stuff.
November 9th, 2004 at 9:36 pm
Apropos google…
You’re no longer on top of the google search for “Deltoid”. I wonder if that’s just chance? Either way, perhaps people should start linking to Tim Lambert on Deltoid writing about Fumento :-)
November 9th, 2004 at 11:31 pm
oddly enough
i know who fleck is, and i know who lambert is. however, this is the first time i have heard of this fumento chap.
November 10th, 2004 at 6:52 am
Thanks for helping prove my point. Your blog ranking is below (worse than) 500. Until you started mentioning me, it was around 1,500. And no, the Lancet column I wrote didn� just appear in the four papers you mentioned. It appears in places you don� even know about because, unlike your blog, it isn� confined to the web but also appears in print. Yesterday it was in the Washington Times print edition. But if only the web interests you, you should know it was picked up by the entire McLatchey News Service. That means that in addition to automatically going onto the website of the Sacramento Bee (not the Sacremento Bee) it goes to:
Carolina Newspapers
Clover Herald (SC)
Fort Mill Times (SC)
Lake Wylie Pilot
The Bakersfield Californian
The Modesto Bee
The News & Observer
The News Tribune (WA)
As you let the spiders do their stuff, you�l find it on more and more newspapers as well as on blog sites that people actually read, the latest being Jihad Watch (ranking 88). Meanwhile, my apologies for not knowing that you appear in America� most widely-read newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal �circulation about half that of just the Washington Times.
Bottom line: You�e not one of those few but vital bloggers such �ittle Green Footballs�who exposed �athergate,�as you imagine. That would be as arrogant as me putting myself in the same class as Tolstoy or Hemingway because we�e all authors. Moreover, as your own postings attest, you are very much in the minority in the Blogosphere on the Lancet article. One blogger after another is ripping the study apart, even as you desperately try to show that each and every one is wrong. You�e just another pissant �ear Diary�hack without the good sense to write your thoughts down and throw them into the trash can. Now I am going to do the worst possible thing you can do to somebody who measures his life by �its.�I� not going to write to you again, and I� going to watch your traffic �such as it is �plummet. It must be sad to have jealousy as one� prime motivator in life, but that is your problem and note mine. Bye-bye.
November 10th, 2004 at 8:17 am
That’s got to be the best public hissy-fit I’ve witnessed in a long time. I’d be embarassed for Mr. Fumento if he hadn’t shown himself to be such a squit.
November 10th, 2004 at 8:59 am
Michael, since that article contains at least two complete howlers and what looks very much like an outright lie, aren’t you a little bit concerned that it is going out under your name?
November 10th, 2004 at 9:05 am
Like most residents of hackistan, Fumento is happy with the article as long as the check clears.
November 10th, 2004 at 11:51 am
Bye bye Michael, I doubt reality will note your passing from Tim’s pages but mere mortals will miss the laugh your presumption’s provided.
November 10th, 2004 at 12:50 pm
Indeed, they both wrote much better fiction than yours. One could almost believe theirs!
November 10th, 2004 at 12:57 pm
I, personally, shall mourn the passing of Tim’s blog. Who, pray tell, would want to read it after Mikey’s gone?
Of course! No one! Mikey said so himself, and lookit all the places he publishes. He must be right.
Sniff. Bye, Tim. Sorry to see your blog go down the tubes…its…its…just…
Excuse me. Oh, dear.
D
You can’t make this stuff up, folks, if it is in fact Michael.
November 10th, 2004 at 1:17 pm
Well, Micheal has now gone and made John Lott look responsible.
November 10th, 2004 at 1:23 pm
“Carolina Newspapers Clover Herald (SC) Fort Mill Times (SC) Lake Wylie Pilot.”
Wow, you’ve got all of South Carolina covered. Except the places where people actually live.
November 10th, 2004 at 4:42 pm
November 10th, 2004 at 5:52 pm
Admit it, Tim, Fumento is a reverse Mary Rosh you’ve invented to show off your skills in statistical demolitions. No real person could be such a perfect prat.
November 10th, 2004 at 6:59 pm
Michael, If I understand the thrust of your argument here, you’re saying that high Google ratings prove something about the credibility of your arguments and/or your relevance to larger issues. I searched on your name in Google, Altavista, Hotbot, Go.com, MSN, Yahoo, and Webcrawler. In every case, Deltoid and Tim’s remarks came up on the first page relatively near the top if not at it. Also, in virtually every case, at least two thirds of the hits I got were from credible sites debunking your work on a wide range of scientific issues. Of the links that were positive to you, other than your own site, nearly every one was from Right Wing front groups and hack organizations like the Reason Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the National Review, Tech Central Station, and the like. There were virtually no links or references to you from any mainstream scientific body that weren’t critical. In the scientific community, the value of a work is rated largely by the number of times it is cited for support in other credible, reviewed works. Internet search popularity does not pass that test, and neither does being carried by lots of newspapers. By the peer-review test, your popularity seems quite low.
By the way, in case anyone doubts that Internet search and/or popularity has little to do with credibility, consider the following…
1) After searching for “Fumento” in the above search engines, I tried searching on “Pamela Anderson” and “centerfold”. I got back an order of magnitude more hits from countless sources that were no less credible than the Right Wing front groups that love Fumento’s stuff.
2) I am a Data Center Sys Admin for Getty Images, the world’s largest stock photography house (the center of our AsiaPac operations is based in Sydney, not far from where Tim is a professor). We control over 85 percent of the world’s stock and editorial imagery - for ALL those newspapers Michael rates his popularity by. A search of our customer facing editorial site (editorial.gettyimages.com) for “Michael Fumento” returns zero results. A similar search for “Pamela Anderson” returns 4834 images in 63 editorial events, tied to 74 keywords, and from 110 photographers.
Hey Michael, maybe if you posed for Playboy or Penthouse, you could build up your credibility even more…
November 10th, 2004 at 7:44 pm
Oh, by the way Michael, I forgot something in the last post;
The Washington Times, like the UPI Newswire, is owned and controlled by the Unification Church - the “Moonies”. You know, the people who believe that Rev. Sun Myung Moon is a Messiah and that the work of God is spread through the world via the “Divine Principle”, which coincidently, according to Moon, is spread through sex. Moon believes that Jesus Christ failed to save the human race from its sins because he never got laid (And thus, never spread the Divine Principle). No kidding - I’m not nearly creative enough to make this kind of stuff up! Naturally, Moon, whose followers refer to him as “the Lord of the Second Advent”, believes himself to be a Messiah who will save the human race…. guess how?
HE controls the content of the Washington Times and the UPI Newswire. No wonder it has one of the worst science reporting records in the business. This is Fumento’s glowing citation, and the paper he is so proud of being published in! And Jihad Watch? You’re kidding right? These are his alternatives to a peer-reviewed scientific journal like the Lancet?
And finally, no matter how popular the Washington Times or Jihad Watch are, neither is even remotely as popular as Playboy.
So Michael, how about that centerfold deal?….
November 11th, 2004 at 1:31 am
Humm! Michael (if you are still reading), maybe you should blog about the statistics of Pamela Anderson. This would have several advantages. First, it might address that terrible and oh-so-important gap between your hits and Pam’s hits that Scott points out. Second, I suspect that it would be harder to muck up those statistics.
Regards,
Yelling
November 11th, 2004 at 4:35 am
Could it be that John Lott is paying Fumento to try to make him (Lott) look good–in terms of reasonable response to criticism–by comparison.
November 11th, 2004 at 6:37 am
No, Michael Fumento is no Dan Rather and Tim is no Little Green Footballs. But the analogy collapses in a rather more interesting way than Fumento seems to realize. Like Rather, Fumento published something that was untrue. Like LGF, Tim pointed it out. But unlike Rather, Fumento did not have the intellectual honesty to ‘fess up. One of the most important skills a journalist can have is intellectual humility. Rather and his colleagues may have lacked that, but they had it beaten into them. Fumento’s dishonesty is a small one by comparison, but it still stands uncorrected.
Here’s what’s apparently different about the vast journalistic world in which the powerful and important Fumento spends his days and the relatively modest one in which I spend mine. When someone points out a mistake in a newspaper story I write, we correct it. It doesn’t matter if the person pointing it out is meek or powerful. It simply matters that what they say is correct. It’s an important ethical underpinning of the journalistic culture in which I’ve made my life, I’m proud of it, and our readers are better served because of it. It’s too bad Fumento’s world is apparently so different.
November 11th, 2004 at 8:25 am
Hey, Scott, lemme buy a Torrefazione for you next time I’m down there to thank you for your good work.
And John, good ‘un.
D
November 11th, 2004 at 9:27 pm
Hey Dano, Thanks so much for the gracious encouragement! Sounds like you’re near Seattle. I tried to email you from the link off of your name above and got a bounceback. Drop me a line through my web site www.scottchurchimages.com and next time you’re down my way let’s do Terrafazione. Sounds like you know that they’re across the street from Getty where I work. Thanks again and cheers! - S
November 11th, 2004 at 11:56 pm
I’ve given lectures at universities in Europe and the U.S. for several years on the anti-environmental movement (focussing on think tanks, lobby groups and PR firms) and how science is often distorted to support a corporate (political) agenda (Dano knows all about this area with his contributions to other progressive blogs). Fumento’s nonsense has always featured in my talks; some of his books and articles are so atrocious that they are (almost) funny. And now this. He should change the name of his “Mythbusters R Us” to “Idiot am I”. Much more appropriate.
November 12th, 2004 at 4:42 am
I ride by your place often, Scott, usually to get to West Point light.
BTW - I’m getting a 404 on your ‘contact me’ page. I don’t leave my addy due to past virus attacks, so I’ll wait until your page is up.
Best,
D
November 12th, 2004 at 6:32 am
OOPS! Sorry ’bout that Dano! It’s fixed now. There’s also a similar Contact Me page off of my Environmental & Social Issues page as well. Thanks, and drop me a line. - S
December 19th, 2004 at 1:42 am
Anorexia Fumentosa
Mr. Fumento , I see , complains of the editorial stridtues imposed on him by TCS:”
I dropped one of my arguments from the TCS piece only because it confused people with simple minds. Like you. As it happens, I also had to cut 200 words even as I added in new information.”
My ownexperience , both as a frequent contributor to that site and as a reader is exactly the opposite.
Being down on blogs, it does not seem to have occured to Fumento that server space being quasi infinite, TCS has no discernaable space limitations- think tanls solons contributing for free can drone on ad libitum and unedited , and some of the screeds reach well past 5,000 words- about 8,000 seems to be the recent record.
Since links are also frrely accomodated in the text, authors may provide full scholarly apparatus , or at least theappearance of it so I find it odd that arguments were dropped for fear of bewildering the readers.
Fumento’s latest piece contending that since Yushenko, though now resembloing a Hubbard squash wiyh a hangover, yet lives , dioxin is nothing to worry about.
December 19th, 2004 at 1:47 am
but John Lott wrote that the worst you can expect from dioxin is a bad rash…
December 19th, 2004 at 1:57 am
Bibliography Lite
Scirus, the Google of the scientific literature has been sicced on ‘ Michael Fumento. It finds him to be the author of nothing in the known world of peer reviewed science, and fins exactly one reference to his work in learned journal- here it is , verbatim:
The Dietitians’ Philosophy and Practice in Multidisciplinary Weight Management by S.DALTON,
Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Oct 1998
” in The Fat of the Land , Michael Fumento (7) , a lawyer concerned with individual responsibility, argues that the obesity epidemic is a result of gluttony…”
December 19th, 2004 at 2:10 am
Fumento Farci
Scirus, the Google of the scientific literature has been sicced on ‘ Michael Fumento.
It finds him to be the author of nothing in the known world of peer reviewed science, and fins exactly one reference to his work in learned journal- here it is , verbatim:
The Dietitians’ Philosophy and Practice in Multidisciplinary Weight Management by S.DALTON,
Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Oct 1998
” in The Fat of the Land , Michael Fumento (7) , a lawyer concerned with individual responsibility, argues that the obesity epidemic is a result of gluttony…”
OK- lets see if Michael would like to try a high protein diet. In his recent comments arising from “Viktory over Dioxin’ he says he cannot avail himself of any to demonstrate hpoew harmless it is - but his own links afford a solution.
.
To make things easy, we might prevail upon the good doctor Golden whose link Mr.Fumento has kindly provided , and whose firm’s services include ‘ the assessment of potential human health effects that might be related to … numerous diverse chemicals including:
TCDDs/PCDDs (i.e., dioxins…)
.
Golden is clearly in a position to feed to a veritable guinea pig the thousand-fold greater dose of the dioxin in question which Mr. Fumento points out might leave a hamster unscathed.
The deceased furry creature may then be dispatched to the Peruvian guinea pig restaurant of Mr. Fumento’s choice , cooked to a turn , and presented to him on a silver or other hypoallergenic platter in the prsence of the Washington press corps.
.
After a decent interval of mourning for the unfortunate cui alternate , Mr. Fumento may avail himself of an opportunity to win the Pulitzer Prize with a first-hand account of his gastronomic experience.
.
If nothing happens, he can dine wih me at my expense at one of Gordon Ramsey’s establishments.