The probability of vanishing posts 

 There was for a while a post on this blog with comments about an article on deaths in the Iraq war.  Despite many good points all parties had in this discussion, it was distracting some folks here from our mission to make the world safe for quantitative methodology.  If you're interested in reading more about this subject, we recommend Andrew Gelman's  blog post on this subject , which includes many of those who posted and commented here.  Thanks for the original post and everyone who commented, and sorry for the confusion.