more info madness

[Jonathan Lighter]

What I find objectionable is that no editor at one of the world's premier scholarly and scientific publishers thought it worth questioning the claim  of 8.5% of all U.S. service personnel in Vietnam being KIA, or of four million civilian dead during U.S. participation alone. Nor, one must suppose, did the two authors themselves. (A small-print credit line thanks a third person for updating the article, first published in 1997.)
 
Note too that everyone accepted Wikipedia as a source for the claim of "four million," when even a look at the page in question shows the Wiki estimate to have been a mere "17.5" civilian deaths - at least on the date it was supposedly accessed. 
 
JL
 




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