Our lives are ruled by statistics. We are surrounded by polls, surveys, focus groups, and research of all kinds, trying to determine who we are, why we do what we do and how we got that way. Polls have such power that they have a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesies. How many people actually voted for Bill Clinton because they liked him, or voted for him because the polls said he was going to win? ("I didn't waste my vote -- my guy won!") People have a tendency to believe statistics without question, no matter how stupid they may seem if one took a moment to reflect on them. And there are stupid statistics out there, lots of them. A lot of this kind of data comes these days from interest groups with a vested interest in the outcome of the study, mostly folks angling to use the data to get some money out of the federal government for some purpose or another. Below are some examples that I've seen recently of amazingly stupid statistics. There are from memory, but I will try to flesh them out with specific references later.  There are 3 million homeless people in America. This one came from Mitch Snyder, the late (hung himself) director of the Community for Creative Non-Violence in Washington. Mitch was one of the great media hounds of all time, and was always hectoring some news crew or another about the plight of the homeless. His estimate was obviously self-serving, and the best guess of the government (I know, they lie, too) is about 200,000 homeless. Mitch was a darling of the Hollywood celebrities, the kind who "helped" Nicaragua and El Salvador by giving free publicity to Communists. They even made a movie about Mitch, and I always thought that he killed himself, not out of despair over his romance with his live-in, but as a result of being played by Martin Sheen.    Women have a one-in-nine chance of getting breast cancer. The media latched onto this one, conveniently leaving off the last phrase, "if you are already ninety years old." The actual chance for an average woman is much lower, but you still see this figure all the time when groups bug Congress to spend more money. (You wouldn't think you'd have to talk Congress into spending money, but things are tough all over).    Women over 35 have a .5% chance of ever getting married. At least the clowns who came out with this statistic in a magazine article in the early '90s had the decency to retract it when it was pointed out that the data used to derive it were hopelessly screwed up. But it was good for some panicked feature stories for a while, mostly about the stupidity of men.    There are 1.5 million illegal Irish immigrants in New York City. I read this one in Parade magazine about 5 years ago, and it's my favorite stupid statistic. There are 10 million people in New York, so you might be able to hide 1.5 million anything there. But look at an almanac: the population of Ireland is only 4 million. If you want to believe that one out of three Irishmen (and women and children) is tending bar in Soho, I've got some land you might be interested in.    One hundred thousand dogs are killed each year falling out of pickup trucks. No, wait . . . this is my favorite stupid statistic, again from Parade. Think about it -- that's 274 dogs a day, 11 dogs a hour, falling out of trucks. Two thousand dogs a year per state. Have you ever seen or heard of a dog dying this way? Of course, the data was from the Humane Society, campaigning for the banning of pickup trucks, or something . . .    Exxon had a 100% profit in 1979. This started as a little financial blurb, stating that Exxon's profits for 1979 were up 100% from the previous year, on increased sales of 130%. But it got garbled somewhere, and soon the media was in full frenzy about Exxon's "100% profit" -- that is, Exxon made two bucks for every buck they spent. Even intelligent journalists (I know, an oxymoron) jumped on the bandwagon, flaying the capitalist system, corporate price gouging and all sorts of apocalyptic stuff. I remember digging the original newspaper story out of the trash and rechecking it -- Exxon made a profit of 6.7%, perfectly reasonable. Someone finally wrote a story castigating everyone else for being such an idiot about it, and the whole matter disappeared.    One out of three wives is abused This statistic came in the wake of the OJ murders, and was gathered by one of the anti-abuse groups (opposed, of course, by those nefarious pro-abuse groups). They defined abuse, unfortunately, as any kind of touching in anger or any kind of verbal abuse. On that basis, Billy Graham and Steve Allen are probably ajudged abusers. The number of actual, need-help-quick, crap-beaten-out-of-them victims is, of course, a lot smaller.    One-and-a-half million children disappear in America each year. This is a new statistic, from a British author who just published a book on the subject. He says it in the book, and he said it on NPR: one and a half million American children, disappearing each year. Derek McGinty was outraged, but for the wrong reason. Think, Derek -- I don't know where your kids go to school, but his statistic means there are three kids missing from every elementary, junior high and high school in the country. As Macauley Culkin would say, "I don't think so." If you take out the non-custodial parent "kidnappings," about two hundred kids disappear each year -- still horrifying, but no one-and-a-half million.    Meat is killing us. "Federal statistics show that fully 55% of annual US deaths occur at least in part because of animal product consumption, and the annual US meat-induced medical bills top $60 billion" -- Patricia R. Bertron, of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, in a letter to the editor to the Fairfax, VA Journal, January 1998. ["Meat-induced"?]   Twelve kids die from guns every day Be glad I'm safely behind your monitor glass -- I tend to spray spittle when this subject comes us.  On Mother's Day 2000, a whole bunch of soccer moms gathered on the Mall in Washington for the "Million Mom March," one of the most moronic gatherings ever held there.  (And that's counting the farmers, the Moonies and the Clinton inaugurals.)  I never figured out what exactly they wanted, but the one statistic they kept throwing out was that twelve children (God, the children again) are killed every day in this country by guns. "Government must do something!", they cried. Well, apparently the best thing the Government could do for this crowd is teach them some math.  According to the Center for Disease Control (who for some reason keeps track of such things), there were a total of 526 children killed by guns in 1998, about half of which were accidental.  That's less than two kids a day.  Lord knows it's tragic and horrible, but it's not twelve. The Million Mom organization (which, by the way, was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Rodham/Thomasson crowd) included in their statistics "children" up to 21 years old, and those who died from their own criminal activity.  Somehow, I don't think the Bambi-like sympathizers out there pictured a already-paroled felon gangbanger with a knapsack full of crack cut down in a turf war while they were marching around in the rain. And to end on a truly stupid note, I present the following ludicrous story from Reuters, September 30, 1998. Can you say "agenda?" ''Life On Earth Is Killing Us,'' Study Finds WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Forty percent of deaths worldwide are caused by pollution and other environmental factors, and climate change will make matters worse, Cornell University scientists found in a study released on Wednesday. After studying population trends, climate change, increasing pollution levels and emerging diseases, 11 graduate student researchers led by Cornell ecology professor David Pimentel concluded: ``Life on Earth is killing us.'' Increased temperatures caused by global climate change will further encourage growth of human diseases and prod development of new illnesses, they wrote in the October 1998 journal BioScience. They predicted that millions of people would become ''environmental refugees'', forced to flee their home areas in a desperate search for food. ``More and more of us are living in crowded urban ecosystems that are ideal for the resurgence of old diseases and the development of new diseases,'' wrote Pimentel, lead author of the report. ``We humans are further stressed -- and disease prevalence is worsened -- by widespread malnutrition and the unprecedented increase in air, water and soil pollutants,'' he wrote. To help address the problem, policymakers should adopt fair population-control policies combined with effective environmental management programs, the researchers concluded. Without international cooperation, the researchers predicted ``disease prevalence will continue its rapid rise throughout the world and will diminish the quality of life for all humans.'' The researchers evaluated data from a variety of sources, including the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. They concluded: -- Each year, air pollutants adversely affect the health of 4-5 billion people, and the trend looks likely to worsen, with the number of automobiles growing three times faster than the rate of population growth. -- The snail-borne disease schistosomiasis causes an estimated 1 million deaths annually and is expanding its range as human activities provide more suitable habitats in contaminated fresh water. -- Smoke from indoor cooking fires that burn wood and dung is estimated to kill 4 million children each year. -- Lack of sanitary conditions contributes to 4 million deaths worldwide each year, mostly among infants and young children in developing countries. They also focused on other trends, including increased tobacco smoking, the spread of dengue fever by mosquitoes and growing use of agricultural pesticides. If you have any stupid statistics, please let me know and I'll add them to this page.

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