Statistics: Getting Your Sums Wrong

As one jester said, 85% of statistics are made up on the spot. That was certainly the case for the numerous crimes against the taxpayer in which I was a minor accomplice. The second Department of Social Security project I worked on in 1982-1986 was allegedly the second biggest IT project in history, second only to the computer projects which supported the Apollo moon shots. The original estimate was £700 million (over a billion dollars even then). Needless to say, it climbed and climbed to over £2 billion by the early 1990s, so God alone knows what it finally cost.

One particularly telling episode was the frenzied week when the decision was taken to reduce the number of mainframe computer centres from seven to three in a desperate effort to make the cost/benefit figures add up. I was frantically multiplying the original estimates by 3/7 or 7/3 in one of the crudest recalculations you can imagine. But any questions of value for taxpayers' money and justifying the investment evaporated as time went on. When one of the senior bullshitters was summoned before a Parliamentary committee on public expenditure, he unblushingly explained the original £700 million estimate as "an academic exercise". The original "seven centres" network design was influenced by the 7 regional controllers in DSS who wanted an IT centre in each region; any region without a centre was perceived as second-class. It is a measure of the almost limitless contempt in which the public administrators of this country hold the taxpayer that they are able to indulge in such expensive power games.

Another (mercifully minor) project was justified on the basis on a 10% saving of existing clerical costs. This was a figure I had plucked from thin air, with not a shred of solid evidence to support it. It looked modest enough to be credible and large enough to make the discounted cash flow calculations deliver a worthwhile return after 7 years. The whole project never reached the 7 year mark, being abandoned after a trial at one site. Plainly no one in government has learnt anything from these fiascos as hundreds of millions continues to be poured down the toilet on aborted or inadequate civil service IT projects year after year. The most monstrous outrage at the moment is the National Health Service computer strategy which will cost anything from $20 billion to $60 billion, depending on which estimate you believe - or more likely don't believe.

The old jibe about the truthfulness of statistics (Lies, damned lies and statistics) has an extra edge in counting Christians. The recent revelation that Catholics had overtaken Anglicans in British church attendance loses some of its lustre when you think about the quoted figures. Both were less than 900,000. Out of an alleged 4 million Catholics and 40 million Anglicans, the figures ranged from bad to abysmal. Far from any cause for Catholic celebration, they underlined the long term decline in both Churches' influence. As I said in my previous post, the fact that Catholic church attendance is relatively healthy is largely due to the East European invasion we have enjoyed since 2004.

The Polish invasion has revealed some of the glorious confusion in head counting any large group. According to one figure I have seen, there are nearly one million new Polish arrivals in the UK out of a total population of 60 million, i.e. less than 2%. Yet if you take the figures town by town, it looks rather different, nearer 5 to 6%. The moderate sized town of Crewe in north-west England had a population of 45,000 until 3,000 Poles arrived. Most of them were recruited by a local employment agency whose owner confessed that he could not believe what he had done to his home town. The ocean port of Southampton, with 300,000 people, has allegedly 15,000 to 20,000 Poles. Reading, with around 250,000 people, has 8,000 to 14,000 Poles. These figures look a trifle imprecise, especially when you realise that both estimates appeared on the same page of the "Reading Chronicle" and were offered by two people with allegedly intimate knowledge of the local Polish community. All you know for certain is that three Polish shops have popped up in a half mile stretch of the Oxford Road.

From the Polish viewpoint one advantage of Reading is the long-established Polish church of the Sacred Heart and the Dom Polski social club. They are not ideally placed for the new arrivals, being in the east/centre part of Reading while the immigrants are clustered heavily along Oxford Road is on the west side. Up to 2004 Sacred Heart had two masses each weekend and a declining congregation as the post-WW2 migrant generation who did not return to a Communist Poland slowly died out. Now it has 4 masses each weekend, all packed to the doors. Yet curiously its church attendance is not included in the diocesan directory figures which contribute to the calculations of the national total of Catholics which were quoted above. If you add in the numerous Polish churches, and other national minority Catholics around the country which are similarly excluded, the true figure is probably considerably higher than 900,000.

Dom Polski tends to cater for the older generation of Poles (plus any number of English/Irish customers), so the newcomers have launched "Ecce Homo" (Pontius Pilate's words on presenting Christ to the crowd) as a social/educational society to attract young Poles, educate Poles about England and the English about Poles.

Oxford Road has seen wave after wave of immigrants; Jewish, Irish, West Indian, Pakistani, Indian and now East European. Some linger in the crowded, but cheap side streets off Oxford Road, most move on to more prosperous suburbs. A multi cultural collection of buildings bears testimony to this complex mix; the Irish Centre is 200 yards north of Oxford Road, the synagogue is 100 yards off Oxford Road and the first purpose-built mosque in town is being built right on Oxford Road. The steel skeleton of its minaret dominates the nearby Methodist church and the restaurants of several nationalities which line the road.

The church attendance figures, flawed as they are, provide the main basis for decisions on diocesan administration. Some of the truly bizarre proposals in the plans for reorganising our Portsmouth diocese seem to have arisen from "management by spreadsheet" where distant bureaucrats carved up and regrouped parishes based purely on their attendance figures. Sacred Heart, bursting at the seams, was not even mentioned in these plans. But it is not only church attendance figures that entice Catholic leaders into highly suspect initiatives. A current fad backed by allegedly startling figures is a pretty good bet for launching clerical careers.

Nearly 20 years ago I attended a talk by a priest who was advertised as the diocesan expert on AIDS, which was the main threat to the human race at that time. His main qualification for the job seemed to be a willingness to swallow and regurgitate every terrifying statistic promoted by the AIDS industry. Among his prophesies was the assertion that in 5 to 10 years we would see people with Karposi's sarcoma on their faces on the buses and in the shops on a daily basis. Needless to say, I have never seen a single person anywhere with Karposi's sarcoma - except in Hollywood gay propaganda such as "Long Term Companion" or "Philadelphia". I have also never seen a single diocesan expert on amoebic dysentery or malaria or TB, all much bigger health problems than AIDS......but then I have never seen a Hollywood star wearing a shit coloured ribbon to advertise his burning compassion for amoebic dysentery sufferers. These people have the unforgivable bad taste to have an unchic fatal disease which doesn't afflict celebrities. And I would not be surprised to find that our diocesan AIDS expert has now moved on to global warming activism armed with a fresh set of terrifying statistics. AIDS is so five minutes ago, especially as barely 0.1% of the UK population suffer from it, despite widespread chaotic promiscuity.

That talk on AIDS, incidentally, was unforgettable for a ferocious intervention by the retired doctor sitting in the row in front of me. He was probably irritated by a non-medical guy lecturing on his turf, but his venom was fuelled mainly by the utterly secular and rationalist attitude to the disease displayed by the priest.

"What the church should be teaching, Father, is that sodomy is mortally sinful. That fornication is mortally sinful. That if a virgin man marries a virgin woman, they will not get AIDS...."

The priest was visibly startled by the force of this call to morality and was belatedly and unconvincingly forced to concede the importance of the Church's teaching on sexual behaviour. It was plain that for him the only real mortal sin was being judgemental i.e. truthful. It is difficult to decide what was most shocking about the old doctor's comments: his total lack of respect for the clergy, his complete lack of knowledge of the precepts of Political Correctness (unforgivable in a man of his education) or his use of clear unambiguous English.

Education is a major area of contentious figures. The "league tables" of secondary schools provide statistics by the sackful on the exam results of every school in the country. Like the church attendance figures above, they are mostly a herald of dismal underperformance, especially given the ever increasing sums poured into state schooling. The exams for 16 year olds (GCSE or General Certificate of Secondary Education) must be among the most derided qualifications ever promoted by any major education system. The basic "satisfactory" standard is that a pupil gets a grade C in 5 subjects, including English and Maths. But according to some credible reports, you need get only 32% or 36% to get a grade C. In other words a bad failure in any other exam system is enough to get you a Grade C, with still lower marks getting you a pass at D or E grades (i.e. abysmal failure). Thus the league tables for the best local schools look like Albanian election results in the Stalinist glory days, with over 99% of the electors voting with joy for Enva Hoxa. Reading, Kendrick and Abbey Schools regularly get 97 to 100% of their pupils with at least 5 GCSEs at grade C. Of course, this Stalinist 100% includes their dumbest pupils with the basic 5 "C"s and their best with 11 or even more Grade A*s. So the statistics conceal as much as they reveal. The fact that you have an A* grade as well as the basic A is grim testimony to grade inflation.

As you descend the tables, like descending the circles of Hell, you get schools with 50%, 40%, even only 20% getting 5 C"s. You can only imagine the moral of staff in such places. The John Madejski Academy was recently launched in the grim South Reading housing estate of Whitley, replacing an earlier massively failing school (Thamesmead, formerly Ashmead). Despite an investment of $50 million on gleaming new buildings, IT facilities, etc, it is plainly still one of those schools where the "middle classes would rather eat their own livers" than let any child of theirs step inside. The JMA hit the national press recently as one of the 5 worst schools in the country. It must be mortifying for local multi-millionaire and philanthropist John Madejski who also bankrolls the local soccer team, various museums and art galleries. But, as a very successful businessman, he probably reflects that you win some, you lose some. The very worst in town (Phoenix College, previously Reading Alternative School) is not even on the tables for obvious reasons. It is always a really bad sign when a school or business changes its name and even worse when it is changed twice. No wonder that a parishioner at Christ the King church, across the road from the JMA, works a second job cleaning toilets at midnight to send his daughter to a private school.

A more scarey figure for education is the percentage of pupils who carry knives. Plainly the league tables don't carry this more useful piece of information. My cynical take is that the percentage of knife carriers is in inverse proportion to the GCSE results. So Reading, Kendrick and Abbey have zero slashers while JMA and a few others have 20%+. I have no statistics or metal detectors to back this hunch, but I would sooner not use my vital organs as a knife detector. So I and most other adults ignore the more abominable misbehaviour by underclass youths, on the buses and elsewhere.

The problem with statistics is that they are a basis for decision making at all levels of private industry, local and national government. One of my acid-tongued, but extremely well informed friends at church tells me of one policy document circulating in the civil service in London which basically recommends writing off the lowest 30- 50% of the British population - those below social classes ABC1. Decades of ever increasing investment in education have produced consistently disappointing results and it is not clear that further increases would create any better returns. Needless to say, I want to get my hands on this paper to see what sort of recommendations it is proposing, but obviously no one in authority would ever admit to entertaining such lines of thought for a second or sponsoring such Darwinian thinking. Given some of the utterly appalling proposals coming from the "elite", such as near-compulsory organ donation, it will be interesting to see how long it takes such ruthless thinking to surface into the public domain.

Organs of Coercion

Dear Stan,

Here is a fascinating and depressing article by Melanie Phillips. It echoes concerns about organ transplantation which have been discussed on Catholic websites for the past few years, i.e. are the moribund donors really "deceased" when the transplant team move in?. As Melanie is from a traditional Jewish background, her cogent comment shows that it is not an exclusively Catholic area of moral anxiety. The immediate cause of her article was the recent proposal by the Reverend Blair's sinister successor Gordon Brown that you have to opt out of donating your organs rather than opting in. As one contributer to another website noted, it is not bad enough that the Government plunders our wallets while we are alive, it now wants to asset strip our corpses. And it could be a fantastically lucrative business, selling everything from kidneys and hearts to bone to the private medical trade.

At least Phoney Tony only squandered our money.

Bill

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January 14, 2008
Organs of Coercion
Daily Mail, 14 January 2008

The news that Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to register everyone automatically as an organ donor unless they opt out has all the hallmarks of a major spin operation.

The Sunday newspapers ran prominent stories about the proposal, which is piggy-backing on tomorrow’s government review aimed at boosting the number of organs donated for transplant. Mr. Brown himself penned an article arguing that voluntary organ donation should be replaced by an opt-out system. Similarly, the BBC had clearly been primed with information to promote the story to pride of place.

If this is supposed to assist Mr Brown’s new year campaign to restore his waning political fortunes, it’s a pretty rum way of going about it. To begin with, the idea is not even new. England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, first proposed such an opt-out system last summer. Maybe Mr Brown thinks he can humanise his image by capitalising on the distress of people suffering or dying for want of a transplantable organ.

Undoubtedly, the impulse to give people the gift of life after one’s own death is a noble one. But if Mr Brown really imagines that he will win popular acclaim by saying that the state will whip out people’s hearts or kidneys without their consent, his advisers undoubtedly need a brain transplant.

For the implications are truly terrifying. There is no more fundamental human right than control over our own bodies and what is done to them, both in life and death.

The inescapable implication of a donor opt-out is that we no longer possess such control. The presumption instead is that the state controls our bodies and can do what it likes with them after it declares us to be dead.

If the medical profession alone were to suggest this — as its leadership most lamentably is doing — it would be alarmingly coercive. For the Government to be backing it, however, deepens coercion into something even more threatening.

Volunteering to donate your organs is one thing. Making it compulsory unless you opt out transforms an act of altruism into state oppression.

Sir Liam attempts to defuse public hostility by saying soothingly that opting out would be an ‘inalienable right’. On the contrary - being forced to opt out of automatic donation destroys our inalienable right to control what happens to us.

It is a weaselly, back-door means of trapping people into having something done to them when they are declared to be dead which may be unacceptable to them in life. Opting out requires an effort. Many will simply forget to do so. That is the cynical calculation behind the scheme. In addition, what will happen - as inevitably as night follows day —is that people will be put under great pressure not to opt out.

Patients who have done so may well be discriminated against. Chillingly, hospitals are to be rated according to the number of dead patients they ‘convert’ into donors. It is hard to imagine a more sinister incentive for the wholesale abuse of vulnerable patients.

There is, however, a yet more fundamental objection to the opt-out proposal. This is the serious doubt whether people whose organs are harvested are indeed dead.

All the evidence suggests that organs are harvested not from the dead but from the dying. In other words, at the time the organs are removed the patients are still alive.

This is because, in these cases, the criterion doctors use to decide that someone has died is the death of the brain stem. This is said to be ‘brain death’, and thus death itself.

However, it does not follow at all that the rest of the brain has also ceased to function. Yet no tests are carried out on other parts of the brain to establish whether all activity there has actually ceased or not.

As a result, people are declared dead while their heart is still beating unassisted and blood is still circulating round the body. Most of us would think such patients are not dead but very much alive.

Indeed former transplant doctors, who became so horrified by the implications of what they were doing that they abandoned the practice, say that organs for transplant are only viable if the donor is still alive — since when the body is really dead the organs become useless to anyone else, as they die too.

Brain stem death is in fact merely a convenient definition that allows surgeons to remove organs from a living body while they are still being nourished by its blood supply.

Such observations provoke outrage in transplant doctors who claim there is no basis for such ‘scaremongering’, which will cause more people to die because potential organ donors will be unreasonably frightened off. But among such doctors, their own behaviour gives the game away.

Some give ‘brain stem dead’ patients a general anaesthetic before removing their organs. But whoever heard of anaesthetising a corpse? The reason they do it is because of a sharp rise in blood pressure during the organ removal. Some doctors claim they administer the anaesthetic simply because it stops the excessive bleeding caused by this blood pressure rise. But a rise in blood pressure during any surgical procedure is an indication that the body is experiencing physical distress.

Dr David Hill, a retired anaesthetist who has long expressed deep concern about organ donation, has written that if patients react in similar fashion when their organs are being removed, the most logical conclusion is that they are not in fact dead.

In recent years, ‘brain stem death’ has been increasingly questioned as we realise how little we know about the brain. Doctors are discovering that, among patients in a persistent vegetative state whose brains are presumed to have stopped functioning, there is in fact a large amount of brain activity. The implications for what patients presumed to be ‘brain dead’ might be experiencing are simply unknowable.

More and more experts have been expressing increasing concern about brain stem death and organ donation. Three doctors wrote in a medical journal last year that declaring patients dead for the purposes of harvesting their organs was in effect a fiction, and that prospective organ donors were not being told the truth.

And a professor of philosophy and expert in medical ethics, Michael Potts, has drawn the horrifying conclusion: ‘Since the patient is not truly dead until his or her organs are removed, it is the process of organ donation itself that causes the donor’s death.’

In Britain, however, the medical establishment backs organ donation and the proposed opt-out scheme. This is because the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges long ago lost their own ethical plot.

Renouncing the core medical precept, ‘First do no harm’, they have come to believe instead in the amoral doctrine that the end justifies the means.

As a result, from abortion, embryo research and cloning to starving and dehydrating ‘dispensable’ patients to death, respect for human life has been replaced by the belief that individual lives are merely instrumental to the creation of the happiness of the greatest number.

This way lies the most alarming infringement of human rights and a descent into tyranny.
A system the public believes embodies the highest form of altruism rests instead on deception and unlawful killing. Far from being forced into an automatic/opt- out donation system, people should finally be told the truth.

Old and New Labour - An Apology

Dear Stan,

Sorry for another update so soon, but I regret that I have been insufficiently rude to the Reverend Blair. It is admittedly hard work keeping track of his unbridled venality, as the information changes by the day. On Thursday 10th January the London "Evening Standard" ran a front page story that he was going to be paid a million dollars a year for services to J P Morgan. Just a minute, isn't he going to be a Middle East peace envoy, public speaker for hire, and possibly President of the European Union as well? How is he going to fit it all in? Well, the JPM job will be only part-time, the article explained. A article promptly appeared on the "Guardian" website explaining that a million a year for the Vicar of St Albion's wise counsel was good value from JPM's point of view. The Guardian often reads like the New Labour court circular, but this reeked higher than usual.

Come Friday 11th January, the "Telegraph" ran an update explaining that the JPM salary was actually $4 million a year for two days a month. This redefines "part-time", which most ordinary mortals understand as two or three days a week. Of course JPM are making truckloads of money from the reconstruction of Iraq - a situation which the Vicar played a supporting role in creating.

It is a sad reflection on the power of inflation that $4 million bucks doesn't buy you much of a politician any more. Many years ago, two Conservative Members of Parliament received £1,000 ($2,000) each to ask questions in the House of Commons on behalf of their benefactor. Neither resigned or was forced to resign once the news broke. At the time you had to pay around £2,000 for a top class hooker in London, so you could buy two MPs for the price of a whore. At that rate, you could have bought a working majority in Parliament for $640,000, but mercifully I don't think the majority were that corrupt. Now you have to cough up $4 million for an utterly discredited creature like Blair. As one correspondent in today's "Telegraph" noted "JP Morgan omitted to follow the most elementary employment procedures - it failed to take up references from Tony Blair's previous employers: the people of the United Kingdom".

Even worse, I had assumed that, once Blair left office, he was at least off the public payroll. But, no, he still gets $180,000 a year from the taxpayers for an ex-PM's office expenses.

The best comment ever on political corruption is of course from "A Man for all Seasons", when Sir Richard Rich gives the crucial perjured evidence which convicts Sir Thomas More and is rewarded by being made Lord Lieutenant of Wales. Sir (later Saint) Thomas comments: "Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world.....But for Wales!"