Lies, damn lies and statistics

The Palestinians have for years threatened Israel with a population bomb — except recent accurate counts showed that their numbers are grossly inflated.  For years, America has been chastised for its high infant mortality rate — except it turns out that other nations report lower numbers because they don’t count babies who are fragile at birth in their mortality statistics, while America does.  And of course, The Lancet lied about the number of casualties following the U.S. invasion in Iraq.

It turns out now that England is less gay and more Christian than has been advertised.  I’m not surprised about the former.  I’ve known for many years that the “10% of the population is gay” number came from Kinsey, and that Kinsey and his researchers fluffed the numbers, because they were themselves gay or bisexual and wanted to feel more mainstream.

I’m not going anywhere with these new facts and figures out of England.  I’m just reminding us all that we have to be very careful when relying on purported statistics.