Statistics can only be twisted to prove/disprove/etc a point to those who do not understand statistics. The level of understanding of statistics needed to defrock misuse of statistics isn't that arcane or obtuse. A book back in the fifties "How to Lie with Statistics" is enough. Some basic notions: You have to have large numbers to get a reliable relation between variables. To say that four of five Feeblics use Dunstan Downovers is useless if only five Feeblics were asked. It normally would take several hundred. A relation between variables may be that one causes the other, the two are related to a third cause, or the relation is accidental. For years there was a near perfect relation between the stork populations and the birth rate in Stockholm .... leading to the old adage. The common factor was weather and what one does when there are long cold nights. In pedophilia, it is more likely that pedophiles gravitate to pedophilia because of their condition than the other way around. Few managers in the world today know how to count. While one and one make two, it's important to clearly establish what a one and a two are. Is one bunch of bananas and one bunch of grapes make two banapples? Two fruits? Lawyers are fearful of numbers. It makes them look stoopider. Conservative lawyers particularly as they rant and rave against the use of numbers in race discrimination cases, not realizing that the numbers, statistically, are useless. None, to my knowledge, has ever introduced scholarly studies on how to use/trust numbers. A statistician takes care to define the size of the population to be tested to ensuer random sampling and unintended bias. The pollsters in the Truman-Dewey presidential race used phone books to determine that Dewey beat Truman in 1948. Too bad those without phones voted for Truman. The belief that exposure of media that portrays bad things leads inexorably to the acting out of those bad things is at the foundation of tyranny. Those subjects singled out for bad thing repression fall in three categories: Sex, Politics, and Religion. And in all three, the death penalty has been exacted for violations of the selected badness index .... The Jews were denounced as degenerate, as proven by their art. Possession of the Bible in Saudi Arabia is a serious crime. And reactionaries were shot in a lot of countries ascribing to the Communist faith. I lean to an absolutist view of the Right of Expression. Hate crimes, Sign Ordinances, rules against offensive speech, laws against porn, et al are violations of the rights of man and in the US - unconstitutional. Only expression which DO NOT or ARE NOT offensive, upsetting, obscene, DO NOT require the protection of Law, certainly a constitutional guarantee

Gordon