Just when I thought I had seen all of Jansson’s fits …

… the poor fellow gets even more hysterical than before, in his latest production with the self-characterizing title Pearls before swine: explaining the obvious to an idiot, which largely consists of attempts to explain away his blunders and distortions, adding more as he goes along.

This blog will address Jansson's response to the blog Friedrich Jansson tries to help Mattogno ….



<sup>Update, 13.05.2015

Update, 21.05.2015</sup>

Jansson:

As the saying goes, you should never argue with an idiot. He’ll drag you down to his level and win by experience. Familiarity with this maxim, and with Roberto Muehkenkamp’s penchant for frenzied yet futile attempts at fisking, led me to comment in my post Taking out the garbage that I would not be wasting time with point-by-point rebuttals. (In his latest post, Muehlenkamp takes that comment to be a statement that I would not be criticizing his arguments at all, and suggests that I have backtracked by doing so. This of course merely shows how poor the man’s reading comprehension is.) In keeping with this intention, I will simply let pass a number of Muehlenkamp’s idiocies, in particular those where he insists I should explicate further something that was already perfectly evident to any literate person. I will, however, continuing in the vein of my above-linked post, continue to point out some of the choice idiocies which Muehlenkamp has offered in his attempts to refute my posts.

Translation: Jansson will keep on making a fuss about those of my arguments that he thinks he can make a fuss about (what the bigmouth calls "choice idiocies", obviously hoping to impress his gullible coreligionists), while ignoring those of my arguments that he has no arguments against, feebly claiming that he just decided to "let pass a number of Muehlenkamp’s idiocies". That’s a very comfortable position, but also one that (to put it politely) doesn’t exactly help Jansson’s "Revisionism" gain any credibility.

Jansson:

I will, however, defer my further comments regarding my post Muehlenkamp’s Ettling imposture until later, as this post is already long enough, and in connection with that post I would like not only to point out Muehlenkamp’s erroneous arguments but also to bring in some additional data.

Ah, he will "bring in some additional data". I hope for Jansson that these "additional data" will provide an answer to the questions repeated at the end of my previous post, before the update. Especially to the question about fuel expenditure in burning air-raid victims on the Dresden Altmarkt pyres.

Jansson:

Muehlenkamp misreads, gets upset

Reading comprehension has yet again proved to be Muehlenkamp’s weak point. (Not that he has any strong points.) In my previous post, I pointed out that the weights which Muehlenkamp assigns to adult Polish jews rest on no data whatsoever. He has misread this passage, and assumed that I meant to say that he invented the BMI range of 15-18.8. He proceeds to assume that, because I commented on his failure in the HC-manifesto to give the URL of his online source, that I must have been unable to locate it, and then goes on about how I’ve made a fool of myself.

Had Muehlenkamp read a little more carefully, he would have noticed that nowhere did I state that I could not locate his source. In fact, I explicitly stated that it was a web site, which is not specified in the manifesto, and I explicitly explained that Muehlenkamp took the BMI range of 15-18.8 from this website. These numbers are not given in the manifesto. How could I have obtained them without locating his source? They are certainly not standard in the literature. Therefore it was entirely obvious from what I wrote that I had found his source, and furthermore that when I stated that his numbers were pure inventions unsupported by data, I was referring to the numbers which he invents for weights. The statement that these are unsupported by any data is entirely correct.

Muehlenkamp imagines that he should receive a “humble apology” for my statement. Instead, he will get a frank assessment of his abilities. Here it is: Roberto, you’re an illiterate moron. However, you can avoid at least some of your errors, and the attendant humiliation which you have caused yourself, if you stop and take the time to reread before rattling off an attempt at a reply.

First of all, look who’s talking about getting upset. :-)

Second Jansson now claims that he did locate my source. If so, why didn’t he mention it, instead rambling away about BMI values that are mentioned in neither this source nor my writings, contending that I had claimed that "underweight individuals have a BMI between 15 and 18.8" and that based "on this", I had given "the figures of 38 and 48 kg"?

Jansson rhetorically asks how he could have obtained "them" (meaning the 38 – 48 kg kg weight range) without locating my source. Easy, Mr. Jansson. The weight range is expressly stated on p. 417 of the HC critique (see also the blog Mattogno, Graf & Kues on the Aktion Reinhard(t) Mass Graves (3) :

According to the Body Measurement Index table104, a person with a height of 1.60 meters is underweight at 38 to 48 kg.

Having missed the source of this weight range, or not being willing to mention it, Jansson speculated or pretended to speculate on how I had arrived at these weight ranges based on BMI values I had never mentioned. As simple as that.

As to his claim that his "pure inventions" blather referred to "the numbers which he invents for weights", what is he talking about? The mean that (as Jansson expressly mentioned) I took of the aforementioned weight figures, which I expressly stated to be an assumption? That’s also not convincing, to put it politely.

Jansson should try to make his excuses more credible.

And I’m still waiting for his apology (it need not include the "illiterate moron" thing, as I attribute this and other verbiage to Jansson’s lack of self-control and obnoxious character, which Jansson can do nothing about).

Jansson:

What is the meaning of “14 and under”?

Muehlenkamp argues that my discussion of children’s weights is not based on a comparable age range to his. Specifically, he interprets “aged 14 or under” to mean “younger than 14″, whereas I, as is conventional in English, interpreted it to mean “younger than 15″.

Before addressing this argument, I will make a slight improvement to my previous analysis. In my previous post I used 3rd percentile female data from here for age > 2, but for age 0-2 was forced to rely on an extrapolation not based directly 3rd percentile data. I had overlooked that there is comparable data for the first two years of life here. Plugging in this data and redoing my analysis from before, one obtains an average of 20.16 kg, slightly up from the figure of 20.15 kg which I obtained previously.

If Muehlenkamp were correct that the data should be analysed only for children under the age of 14, then this figure would drop to 18.88 kg, still far higher than his 16 (or 15.6) kg. But is he correct?

Let’s look at the sources. I interpreted “aged 14 or under” as including 14 year olds, because that’s what it always means in English, without imagining that there would be any controversy over the issue. Muehlenkamp, on the other hand, knew that exactly this point was contested, but he chose to simply affirm that 14 year olds are not included among children “aged 14 or under” without troubling to check the sources given. The figure comes from one of Carlo Mattogno’s writings. Mattogno cites Poliakov’s Das dritte Reich und die Juden. Checking this source reveals that the figure comes from a German translation of the 1946 pamphlet Bilan de l’extermination by Jacob Lestschinsky (Poliakov gives the name as Jakob Leszczynski). The German translation gives the term as “Kinder bis zu 14 Jahren”. Checking the French pamphlet shows that it speaks of “enfants jusqu’à 14 ans”. However, the French pamphlet reveals that it in turn is a translation from an English original titled “Balance sheet of extermination”. In that original one has the text “children up to 14 years.”

Thus, we are back to an English text that, given the standard use of the English language, includes 14 year olds. However, we can look into the matter more closely by identifying the ultimate source of the data. Although this source is not identified by Lestschinsky, it is clear that it is the 1931 Polish census. In that census, there were separate groupings for age ranges 10-14 and 15-19. The groups are divided by birth year, with the 14-year-old age cohort being those born in 1917, i.e. those who turned 14 in the year 1931, and it’s easy to see from the data given (using tables 10 and 13) that 29.6% is what that census indicated for the percentage of the Jewish population of age 14 and under, i.e. born in 1917 or later.

Thus Muehlenkamp is wrong: 14 year olds were included in the population being discussed. However, the census data also reveals that my assumption that all 14 year olds would be included is also incorrect. Table 13 clarifies that data collection for births did not go until the end of the year, but stopped after December 8th, 1931. (My previous analysis corresponds to data collection for births continuing through December 31, whereas Muehlenkamp’s assumption corresponds to data collection for births stopping at the end of the previous year.)

Thus, a slight correction is necessary. If we make a slight underestimate by assuming that births were recorded until November 30 rather than December 8, we can just leave the last month out of my analysis. The figure 20.16 kg then drops to 20.05 kg. Factoring in the first 8 days of December would bring it back up a bit, to between 20.07 and 20.08 kg.

Thus, although my analysis required a slight correction after looking more closely at the sources of data, it was essentially correct. A population covering the ages in question in our data for Polish Jewish children in 1931, uniformly distributed in age, with weights set to the 3rd percentile female values of the CDC data, will indeed have an average weight of slightly over 20 kg.

Muehlenkamp, in turn, was entirely wrong in claiming that the group under consideration does not include 14 year olds. He should acknowledge his error publicly and prominently.

Unlike Jansson, whose tries to talk himself out of mistakes with less-than-convincing excuses, I have no problem with admitting that I was wrong on a certain point.

Jansson’s essential argument here is that the "14 and under" age group included children whose 14th birthday occurred between 1 January and 8 December 1931. If so, this means that Jansson’s calculation should not have gone until month 167.5 or 168.5 as I suggested, but until month 178.5 (or a little further) instead of month 179.5, as seems to be Jansson’s new calculation. OK, point taken.

What is completely wrong, however, is to infer from Jansson’s calculation that "The assumption that the young Jews’ average weight was equal to the 3rd percentile of the female weights in the data linked above was really quite generous.", as Jansson did in this blog.

One of the reasons why this is wrong is that his CDC data are data from 2001, and as Jansson himself pointed out when explaining why he considered 1906 data "naturally unusable" to determine heights and corresponding weights in 1942, there has been a general increase in height over time. This means that the children considered in the CDC table, last updated in August 2001, must have been considerably taller (and accordingly heavier) than children of the same age groups about 60 years before – especially if the former were from present-day American or European populations.

The other reason is that the 3rd percentile, as becomes apparent from sources I quoted here, does not yet mean chronic or acute malnutrition. There are two percentiles below that, and states of malnutrition – such as affected the population of Jewish ghettos in Poland – imply weights below the 3rd percentile.

For these two reasons, the conclusions that Jansson derived from his calculation are (to use one of his own expressions) worthless. A meaningful calculation would require below 3rd percentile weights for a population aged 14 and under 60 years ago, or at least an extrapolation taking into consideration the changes in height, and accordingly in weight, that have occurred between 1942 and 2001.

Jansson:

On Otmar von Verschuer and one of his articles in Forschungen zur Judenfrage

First off, the man’s name is Otmar, not Otto. Muehlenkamp gets it wrong again.

I called the man "Otto" after having earlier called him "Otmar". Frightfully shocking indeed.

Jansson:

More to the point: in his tedious fisking of what I stated, Muehlenkamp is careful to maneuver around the point that Verschuer was not a specialist in this topic, which he merely mentioned in passing. The point is simply that Muehlenkamp does not cite the kind of sources one would need to if one were genuinely investigating questions concerning average height. A remark in passing in a survey article written by a man who specialized in a different subject is not the kind of source on which one should build a case. Furthermore – and Muehlenkamp again tries to obscure this point – Verschuer does not make a comparison of the height of Polish Jews with the height of Germans, but rather the height of Jews in general with the height of Germans.

Actually Verschuer’s comparing the height of Germans with the height of "Jews in general" and not with that of Jews in the later Eastern Poland (who according to the 1906 encyclopedia article were shorter than Jews elsewhere, as was the surrounding gentile population compared to other gentile populations) works in favor of my argument, so I would have no reason to "obscure this point" even if I had Jansson’s inclinations.

As to Verschuer not being "the kind of source on which one should build a case", first of all the man was not proclaiming his own wisdom but drawing on sources presumably more qualified than himself, and second it’s not me who has to "build a case" on the average height of Jewish deportees. I only have to make a substantiated assumption that works against Jansson’s implausibility arguments, which he then has to refute in order to support his challenge of the historical evidence he doesn’t accept. In other words, he has to demonstrate that my average height assumption regarding Polish Jews in 1942 (1.60 meters) is off the mark. Yet he expressly refrained from attempting such demonstration, as I pointed out here.

Jansson:

Muehlenkamp even tries to use my remark that Verschuer’s data for Germans was relatively recent if one can go by publication dates as proof that it was indeed valid contemporary data, while disregarding my caution that one would need to check the original source. Verscheuer indicates that his source is a periodical that only began publication in 1929, if I recall correctly, but one would need to check the publication to see whether it contained the original studies or merely references to the earlier data. Muehlenkamp, who appears to suffer from a paralysing fear of libraries (ergo his refusal to look up sources), fails to notice this difficulty. (This same failure recurs in the next section, on an even more primitive level.)

So what was this supposed to be? A demonstration that Verschuer’s sources were not contemporary enough to reflect average heights at the time of Verschuer’s writing, even though Verschuer obviously considered them to be? Such demonstration might be of some interest, but mere speculation the Verschuer’s sources might be outdated is not.

As to yet another of Jansson’s childish (and arguably self-projecting) "fear" remarks, I actually like to go to libraries, but trying to find one in Portugal that has things like Verschuer’s writings on its shelves is hardly a fruitful endeavor, and I neither have the time nor the means for research trips abroad.

Jansson:

Speaking of average heights, Muehlenkamp refers to the height data given in the 1906 Jewish encyclopedia, and writes that “this was in 1906, for sure, and the stature of the population may have increased between 1906 and 1942. It is unlikely, however, that there was much increase”. Actually, this was not 1906. The studies Muehlenkamp draws from the Jewish encyclopedia were published considerably earlier. He specifically mentions the study by Majer and Kopernicki, whose publication date is 1877-85. For the height of Jewesses he refers to a study by Elkind (whose initials were actually A.D., not N.D. as the Jewish encyclopedia has). Elkind’s book-length work was published in 1903 – but when was the data collected? In his preface he mentions collecting data among Polish Jews in 1895 and 1896. Thus, even this most recent of sources dates to a full decade before the date which Muehlenkamp imagines. Nor are Elkind’s data beyond critique. One might point to the fact that 86 out of Elkind’s 125 subjects were between the ages of 15 and 20, and ask whether they had attained their full height (particularly in light of remarks that recruits had not done so).

As mentioned in the above section, the important question (with regard to a quantity known to have changed over time, such as average height) is not when a secondary or tertiary source cited certain data, but when that data was collected. As I stated in my initial post, I have not done the research necessary to take a position on the average height of the Polish Jews in the 1940s. What I am affirming here is simply that Muehlenkamp’s research is inadequate and his arguments fallacious. This conclusion is now more firmly established than ever.

So what’s the argument here? That the sources mentioned in the 1906 encyclopedia collected their data some time or even long before 1906? Big deal, if one considers that a) these were the data available at the time; b) the 1906 encyclopedia obviously didn’t consider them outdated; c) changes in height, which are related to improvement in nourishment and living conditions, were hardly dramatic between 1877-85 and 1906 let alone between 1895-96 and 1906, and d) Jansson cannot demonstrate that height data from 1877-95 or 1895-96 no longer reflected population height realities in 1906. Bar such demonstration, using a 1906 encyclopedic source that considered earlier data to be applicable at the time of writing is hardly inadequate, and arguments based on this source are hardly fallacious.

Elkind’s data seem to be particularly uncomfortable for Jansson, for he tries to discredit them by claiming that "86 out of Elkind’s 125 subjects were between the ages of 15 and 20". Let’s have some more precise data here, Mr. Jansson. Just how many of Elkind’s 125 subjects were below the age of 20? As to remarks in the article that recruits aged 20 or 21 have not yet attained their full height, do you accept them as accurate? If so, this would be interesting, for it would imply (unless growth patterns are supposed to differ between Jews and non-Jews) that German recruits in 1890 had also not yet grown to their full height, in Jansson’s opinion. For comparison purposes, this would probably even out uncertainties as to whether Elkind’s data truly reflect the average height of Polish Jewesses at the time of his study.

Jansson:

Germany has moved to Scotland

Muehlenkamp claims that heights over several decades did not increase very much on the basis of the assumption that Germany is Scotland. (No joke. He actually makes this argument.) He calls this a “model”. The only possible response is laughter.

Laughter (or better, nervous giggling) may be the only possible response for Jansson, whose only other "argument" seem to be misrepresenting mine. Contrary to what his pitiable straw-man suggests, I used this study regarding stature and weight of Scottish males in 1941, for want of a comparable study regarding German males, to get an idea how males with statures in the range given by Verschuer (1.66 – 1.73 meters) were distributed in a European population at a time not far removed from that of Verschuer’s writing. When Jansson has stopped his nervous giggling, he can try explaining why there should have been a major difference between Germans and Scots as to the distribution of males with certain statures. Are the Scots supposed to have been less "Aryan" than the German master race, or what is Jansson trying to tell us?

Jansson:

Look, pictures! As is his wont, Muehlenkamp spams a number of pictures in an attempt to argue that the average weight of the Polish Jews was very low.

Actually the pictures included here, which show specimens at the lowest levels of malnutrition and related disease, are just part of these evidence whereby Jews in Polish ghettos were malnourished on average. A population in which people die in large numbers from malnourishment/starvation and/or related diseases, and among which hunger disease studies are conducted, presumably in order to document the direness of that population’s situation, can hardly be a population more or less normally fed on average.

Jansson:

(You would think he would have learned a lesson from his fiasco with the electrocuted Jews used for soap.)

I see that Jansson’s rabbit chum has made some fuss about one of the photos from the GFH archives I published here with the caption "2.107 A soldier of the Soviet Red Army in a Nazi camp following its liberation, standing beside a wagon loaded with corpses", arguing that this photo was falsely claimed to show Jews electrocuted in a Nazi death camp ("undoubtedly Belzec", the rabbit adds) by a contemporary source. And so? I agree with the rabbit’s assumption that the photo probably shows what he calls "genuine suffering in a German-run PoW camp", which is perfectly in line with the caption in my blog, if one considers that the mass dying of Soviet POWs in German camps was another of Nazi Germany’s major crimes (while Jansson apparently thinks of nothing other than Jews, I also care for the non-Jewish victims of his heroes’ crimes, go figure). So, Mr. Jansson, where do you see a "fiasco" of mine?

As we’re at it, the rabbit’s speculation that "the Soviet-Poles who forwarded the photograph to the U.S. in 1942 deliberately mislabelled" the picture as being from a death camp is rather far-fetched as concerns the Soviets, who were not aware of such camps at the time, and cared precious little about those where only Jews had been killed after they became aware in 1944. (The rabbit’s musings about the picture possibly showing Holodomor victims, needless to say, are classic rabbit droppings.) The Polish Armia Krajowa and Delegatura were aware of Bełżec, and for lack of knowledge how the Jews they saw getting into that camp but never out were killed, Polish observers from either of these organizations considered electrocution as one of the presumable killing methods ("It is unknown by which means the Jews are liquidated in the camp. There are three assumptions: (1) electricity; (2) gas; (3) by pumping out the air.", see the Delegatura report for April 1942 quoted after Arad on this thread), a mistaken assumption that then entered the rumor mill. It is unlikely, however, that the aforementioned Polish organizations (which reported to the Polish exile government in London and had no connections with the USSR) would get hold of a picture showing a scene from a POW camp liberated by the Soviet army, if that is what the picture shows. However, the uniformed soldier standing by the wagon, who doesn’t seem to be carrying any weapon, could also be a better-off POW in charge of body disposal, which in turn would suggest that the picture was taken by a German guard in an operating camp for Soviet POWs. If so, it is possible that the Polish resistance intercepted a snapshot from a POW camp in Poland that one of the guards sent home (as happened with the photo showing Jews being shot in Ivangorod, Ukraine), and that either the Polish resistance or whoever received the photo abroad mislabeled the photo, intentionally or not, as showing Jews killed in a Nazi extermination camp. If so, the only mistake in the caption I rendered here would be that the photo was not taken after liberation of the camp in question, but while that camp was still operating.

Now, this is one out of 315 photos shown in this blog. Has the rabbit found out anything "interesting" regarding any of the other 314 photos?

Jansson:

This silliness can be dispensed of with some very simple points:

1. These are not a representative sample of the Jews who were sent to the Reinhardt camps. In fact, those who died in the ghetto were certainly not among those sent to the Reinhardt camps.

No, but those sent to these camps were usually those who were too young, too old or otherwise too weak to work for the German war effort, and who accordingly were accorded rations far below the survival minimum before the Nazis stopped handing out rations to the Jews of the Generalgouvernement altogether (see below). So it’s reasonable to expect that the majority of the Jews who arrived at these camps (if they had not died along the way, as often happened) were malnourished specimens who would sooner or later have perished in the ghetto if they had remained there, and that the minority who were better fed were not in their best conditions either.

Jansson:

Moreover, propaganda photos – for either side – are a very poor way of determining average realities.

I can understand Jansson’s squealing "propaganda photos" as the images I showed are rather inconvenient to his articles of faith, but on what basis (other than his discomfort) does he think the term "propaganda photos" is appropriate for the photos taken by, say, German soldiers Heinz Joest and Joe Heydecker inside the Warsaw Ghetto?

Jansson:

2. As Muehlenkamp attempts to minimise the significance of his birth weight whoppers by claiming that regarding burial space, they’re only relevant to his discussion of Belzec, he is not entitled to relate the Warsaw ghetto to this matter at all, as the Jews there were not sent to Belzec. The Łodz ghetto is even less relevant.

I still have to see Jansson refuting what his big mouth calls my "whoppers", and as to the Warsaw and Łodz ghettos, are they supposed to have been exceptionally miserable and thus not representative places, whereas the Jews in other ghettos in the Generalgouvernement were better off?

That’s not what is suggested by Charles Provan’s rendering of his sources in the article KURT GERSTEIN AND THE CAPACITY OF THE GAS CHAMBER AT BELZEC, where he wrote (referring to "Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse, pg. 43ff.; Wells, The Death Brigade, pg. 49") that "The Jews of eastern Poland (and specifically, Lvov/Lemberg, which is where the Jews of Gerstein's account are said to have come from) were, in August of 1942, ill-fed and even starving.". I currently have no access to Provan’s sources, but maybe library-man Jansson can look them up and then try to convince his readers that they describe the Jews of Eastern Poland as living in rather normal conditions.

Which is unlikely, however, if one considers that

a) The food situation in the whole Generalgouvernement was critical in 1942, even for non-Jewish Poles although their rations were much higher than those granted to Jews (for details see Christian Gerlach, "Die Bedeutung der Ernährungspolitik für die Beschleunigung des Mordes an den Juden 1942", in: Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, pp. 167 to 256, especially pages 172-174, 189-194, 197 – on the last of these pages Gerlach cites an official who mentions that the food situation in the Galicia District is rather bad and mortality has considerably increased in relation to 1939);
b) As of late August 1942 Jews in the GG were no longer to receive any rations whatsoever. Gerlach, as above pp. 219-220, my translation (emphasis added):

On 24 August [General Governor] Frank at first received [Head of the Agriculture Department] Naumann and agreed to the plan prepared and presented by him. Thereafter Naumann presented it at the government’s meeting. His «trend-setting statements» the Quartermaster 2 of the Military Commandant in the General Government considered so explosive that he dared only report them orally to his superiors. Besides a 25 per cent increase of the delivery quota for peasants Naumann suggested that the self-support rations be reduced from 120 to 100 kg of grain, and that the three million non-Jewish Polish normal consumers were to receive 150 g of bread daily until 1 January, then 100 g of bread daily for two months and from 1 March to the end of July 1943 no more bread at all. This meant a turnabout and a provisional departure from the concept of a feeding the non-Jewish Poles less badly. Furthermore Naumann stated the following:
«The feeding of the estimated 1.5 million Jews is cancelled, except for an estimated 300,000 Jews who are working in the German interest as artisans or otherwise. […] The other Jews, 1.2 million in total, will no longer receive any food.»
General Governor Frank declared:
«The step that we are jointly taking here today is one of the most decisive insofar as it will surely have certain impacts on the inner order of this land in January and February of the following year. These impacts must be put up with, for before the German people somehow starve to death, of course others will have to bite the dust.
[…]
The fact that we are condemning 1.2 million Jews to death by starvation shall only be noted marginally. It is self-understood that a non-starvation of the Jews will hopefully lead to an acceleration of the anti-Jewish measures.»
So he was demanding an increased speed of annihilation, in order to prevent that the Jews would eventually still feed themselves on the black market and thus in a sense affect the food balance. Such «conclusions», said Frank in another part of the speech, must be «drawn coldly and without pity». No one protested. 1.2 million people were to die as soon as possible.

So, Mr. Jansson, does this suggest that the misery and mass dying in the Warsaw and Łodz ghettos was an exception to the rule, rather than representative of the situation throughout Jewish ghettos in the Generalgouvernement (especially in Galicia, where the food situation was so bad that mortality had considerably increased even among the non-Jewish population)?

Jansson:

One can just as easily provide pictures of Warsaw ghetto residents of quite ordinary weight:
[five photos from the Stroop Report]
What does all this prove regarding the average weight of the Polish Jews? Nothing, really. It’s just Muehlenkamp’s way of trying to distract from the fact that he’s been proved wrong.

Proved wrong how and on what exactly? Photos from the Stroop Report, showing captured Jewish insurgents in April or May 1943, don’t exactly favor Jansson’s argument, if one considers that these were people who had not been sent to Treblinka because they were working for the German war effort and accordingly better fed than the average population. Those not needed for work, insofar as they had not yet succumbed to privation or been taken to Treblinka, not only had lived for a long time on starvation rations and what smugglers risking their lives managed to bring in from the black marked, but according to General Governor Frank’s above-quoted statement were to receive no more food at all after 24 August 1942. Are we asked to believe that a population meant to starve to death (or, if they somehow managed to feed themselves, to be put to death otherwise), i.e. all Jews of the GG except for the 300,000 or so working for the German war effort, had a "quite ordinary weight" on average?

Jansson:

Hypocrisy?

Muehlenkamp claims that my use of CDC weight data is hypocritical in light of my statement that height data quoted in a 1906 encyclopedia article was unusable. In fact, there is no hypocrisy. The meaning of the statement was that one could not use those data points to get correct values. To use percentile data in order to get not a calculated value but a suggested one-sided bound is an entirely different matter. Nor would I prohibit extrapolations from such data, but I would insist that the more-relevant sources be examined first (which Muehlenkamp never does), and add that calculations aiming at giving an accurate value are decidedly more problematic than loose estimates aiming at a bound on one side.

Now Jansson all of a sudden speaks of a "suggested one-sided bound" and of "extrapolations". It seems that he has forgotten his earlier assertion that the 3rd percentile weights from his CDC table (last updated in 2001) reflect the weights of Jewish children in Polish ghettos in 1942.

The assumption that the young Jews’ average weight was equal to the 3rd percentile of the female weights in the data linked above was really quite generous.

Jansson had bragged, as if 2001 data (moreover from modern American or European populations) could be directly used to establish the weight of children in a 1942 population (moreover an impoverished and malnourished one), after having earlier proclaimed in the same blog that 1906 height data are "naturally unusable" to establish statures in 1942, "given the general increase in height over time".

Hypocrisy?

More than that, downright dishonesty, unless we are to assume that Jansson didn’t notice his departure from criteria he had earlier set himself. Now he seems to be quietly backpedaling, hoping that no one remembers his earlier categorical claim that his CDC 3rd percentile figures were "quite generous".

Jansson:

No math tutoring here

In my previous post, I pointed out that Muehlenkamp’s method for calculating average weight (as the weight of a person at average BMI and average height) is incorrect, and pointed out one of the reasons, namely the quadratic nature of BMI as a function of height. (While this is the only reason in the case of a population all of whose members have the same BMI, in the general case I might have added the fact that the non-uniformity of BMI contributes to the error of Muehlenkamp’s method. Namely, taller members of the population will tend to have higher BMI, both because they tend to be male and males tend to be heavier than females at given height, and because the exponent 2 underestimates the height scaling of weight.) Muehlenkamp complains that he is unable to understand. Too bad for him. If he can’t figure this out on his own when it’s pointed out for him he has no right to be working with numbers at all.

I’d say that rather applies to Jansson, whose "quadratic" wisecracking and "if you don’t understand, that’s your problem" – act suggest the charlatan who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and tries to hide his inability to answer a question behind a pretense of superiority.

My question:

The "quadratic function" presumably refers to the BMI being calculated by dividing mass through squared height. Yes, and so? Why is this supposed to mean that the weight of a modeled specimen with a population's average height, under certain conditions affecting that population (in this case malnutrition and underweight), is not roughly equal to that population's average weight under such conditions, i.e. the combined weight of all of that population's specimens divided through the number of specimens?

remains unanswered. Maybe the answer is in the next paragraph, let’s see:

Jansson:

While we’re on the subject of mathematics, or rather statistics, I should also articulate the basic flaw in Muehlenkamp’s BMI reasoning. Muehlenkamp takes numbers for abnormal members of a population and assumes (as always, with no data to support his conclusion, and in contradiction to all available data on other cases, as I pointed out in my initial BMI post) that he can use them to represent the average member of an abnormal population. You can’t do that. That is not how any serious person works. Scales intended to diagnose abnormal, problematic members of a population are not designed to estimate the average value for an abnormal and problematic population. For that you need to use real data, if not for the population in question, then at least for as similar a population as possible.

So now persons with a height corresponding to an adult population’s average height, and a corresponding weight under conditions affecting all of that population, are "abnormal, problematic members" of a (normal, non-problematic) population, instead of representative members of a population under abnormal, problematic conditions? Funny idea.

As to the "no data to support his conclusion", good old Otmar von Verschuer’s article and the 1906 Jewish encyclopedia are two sets of data supporting my assumption regarding the average height of ghetto Jews, which Jansson hasn’t been able to refute.

As to the "supposed contradiction to all available data on other cases", what is the fellow talking about? I don’t remember his having provided any data that would contradict those I used.

And as to "how any serious person works", what methods to determine a given population’s average weight by what "serious person" does Jansson have in mind? Mattogno’s bluntly postulating an average of weight of 70 kg for adult Polish ghetto Jews in 1942, is that how a "serious person" works in Jansson’s intellectual circles?

The pathetic next part of Jansson’s blog, which addresses the update of the blog Friedrich Jansson proudly presents …, will be commented in another update of that blog.

____________________________________________________________________

Update, 13.05.2015



In a very partial response to this blog, with a title suggesting that even its predecessor discussed above did not mark the limits of Jansson’s hysteria (Muehlenkamp cornered, lies through his teeth), Jansson dishes up another of his lame "justifications" for dodging arguments he prefers to avoid. Hoping for gullible souls who will take his bragging seriously, Jansson produces this pearl:

As I rapidly tire of explaining the obvious, particularly to an individual with a staggeringly poor ability to comprehend texts, I have often chosen to ignore Roberto Muehlenkamp’s incoherent wall-of-text replies.

One of these days Jansson will have to make up his mind to ignore my blogs, lest he wants even the biggest sucker among his readers to realize that remarks like the above are but a lame excuse for evading arguments and/or evidence he cannot address.

This lamentable performance is followed by, big surprise, another of Jansson’s somewhat-less-than-intelligent "lie" accusations.

A statement in this blog that is supposed to contain a "lie" is the following (emphasis added, as it is in Jansson’s blog):

Jansson rhetorically asks how he could have obtained "them" (meaning the 38 – 48 kg kg weight range) without locating my source. Easy, Mr. Jansson. The weight range is expressly stated on p. 417 of the HC critique (see also the blog Mattogno, Graf & Kues on the Aktion Reinhard(t) Mass Graves (3) :

According to the Body Measurement Index table104, a person with a height of 1.60 meters is underweight at 38 to 48 kg.

The above was written in response to the following argument of Jansson’s, which is also quoted in this blog:

Had Muehlenkamp read a little more carefully, he would have noticed that nowhere did I state that I could not locate his source. In fact, I explicitly stated that it was a web site, which is not specified in the manifesto, and I explicitly explained that Muehlenkamp took the BMI range of 15-18.8 from this website. These numbers are not given in the manifesto. How could I have obtained them without locating his source? They are certainly not standard in the literature.

The highlighted part of my statement is supposed to be a "lie" because, go figure, "the antecedent of the pronoun “them” is not the range 38-48 kg, which is not even mentioned, but the BMI range 15-18.8". So I’m supposed to have "lied" about a statement of Jansson’s that I had quoted verbatim a few paragraphs before. And this inane accusation obviously makes sense to Jansson.

Actually, as Jansson well knows, I referred to the "38 – 48 kg weight range" for the simple reason that I had never given a BMI range, but only a weight range, before Jansson first wrote about a claim of mine that "underweight individuals have a BMI between 15 and 18.8", accusing me of "pure inventions" in this context. Such claim didn’t exist, in the sense that, while a BMI between about 15 and about 18.8 corresponds to a 38-48 kg weight range for persons 1.60 meters tall, I had not mentioned BMI values but only weights (based on a source in which weights but no BMI values are given, the Gewichtstabelle nach BMI). Hence my assumption (further supported by Jansson’s claim that "based on this" - the BMI values - I had given "the figures of 38 and 48 kg") that Jansson had a) deducted the BMI values from the weights and b) speculated that I had proceeded the other way round, deducting weights from BMI values. So my referring the "them" to the weight range I had actually mentioned, instead of the corresponding BMI values mentioned by Jansson, was entirely justified.

Referring to my statement preceding the one quoted above:

Jansson now claims that he did locate my source. If so, why didn’t he mention it, instead rambling away about BMI values that are mentioned in neither this source nor my writings, contending that I had claimed that “underweight individuals have a BMI between 15 and 18.8″ and that based “on this”, I had given “the figures of 38 and 48 kg”?

Jansson goes on claiming that

Muehlenkamp’s claim that this is not mentioned in his source is deeply dishonest: the range is given on the same website right here and forms the basis for the calculations of the rounded figures which he uses.

First of all, what "rounded figures" that I use is Jansson talking about? The BMI values on the page that Jansson links to were obviously calculated based on the height and weight values in the Gewichtstabelle nach BMI, and not the other way round, for the page mentions that BMI is calculated as "Körpergewicht in Kilo, geteilt durch Körpergröße in Metern im Quadrat" (body weight in kg, divided by the square of body height in meters).

Second and more important, I never mentioned the page that Jansson links to as my source, as Jansson well knows. It is part of the same site that features the Gewichtstabelle, but the only source I mentioned for the weight range I gave is the Gewichtstabelle itself, which as mentioned before seems to be the basis of the BMI calculations in the page that Jansson links to.

This, in turn, means that the deep dishonesty that Jansson accuses me of is (surprise!) all on his side.

Jansson maintains that his having mentioned "the BMI range of 15-18.8" in his post commented here demonstrates that he had located my source (which, as we have seen, was not my source but another page of the website featuring my source).

If so, I wonder why Jansson didn’t bring up this page in his earlier reply.

My hunch is that he followed the upper link on top of my source, found values matching his claim there (which I’m looking at for the first time now, unsurprisingly so as they are on the lower part of the page and I only used the Gewichtstabelle as a source), and is now making a post-hoc claim based on the fact that the zero decimal and one decimal rounding of BMI values on this page happens to be the same as that of the BMI values he had calculated on the basis of the height and weight data given on p. 417 of the HC critique.

If my hunch should be mistaken and Jansson should (despite the above-mentioned indication to the contrary) actually have seen this page prior to his initial post, this would mean that he created an unnecessary misunderstanding by producing this bluster:

Muehlenkamp refers to a website (though he fails to give the url) for a claim that underweight individuals have a BMI between 15 and 18.8. Based on this, he gives the figures of 38 and 48 kg (corresponding to BMIs of 14.84 and 18.75 at a height of 1.60 meters), and takes their mean, 43 kg. This corresponds to a BMI of 16.8. Note that these numbers are pure inventions on Muehlenkamp’s part, and rest on no data whatsoever.

without mentioning where he had got the "BMI between 15 and 18.8" from.

On top if yet another puerile "lie" accusation (which is amusingly rabid, as the fellow hollers that "in addition to being an illiterate moron", I am also "an arrant liar") and another demonstrable lie of his own (besides the ones pointed out here and here), this would look bad enough on Jansson.

Update, 21.05.2015

See link ^3.