"LIES, DAMNED LIES and STATISTICS"
Our headline quote is often attributed to Mark Twain but he credited it to Benjamin Disraeli, a British Prime Minister of the late 1800's. Twain was observing that "statistics" are often used by unscrupulous people to tell a distorted, if not wholly false story. Statistics are a legitimate scientific tool in the hands of an honest person. Unfortunately, they are easily subject to manipulation and outright falsification - often to serve political purposes. This can be done either by cherry-picking the data to be included (i.e., eliminating unfavorable data), or by manipulating the data to ostensibly support a misleading or utterly false conclusion. In 1955 George Orwell published his famous dystopian novel, 1984 . Its pervasive theme is that citizens were subjected to a constant barrage of government propaganda such as "War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery." Propaganda is defined as " I nformation, es...