Monday, October 21, 2013

Obama Comments on Obmamacare Web Site Remind Me of This....

...paragraph in the book Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife:

The briefings were a jumble of numbers and statistics. Officers and officials recited a litany of body counts, number of weapons captured, head counts of troops in different theaters--any quantifiable information that could help prove that American forces were making progress, no matter how ridiculous the numbers were. The Pentagon invented a "Hamlet Evaluation System" to quantify how much of the South Vietnamese countryside was "pacified"---under U.S. and South Vietnamese control---and proudly reported the numbers to the press. Each month, the numbers ticked up, showing the government forces were slowly winning the war. Year after year, the number of hamlets under control dutifully kept climbing and the number of Vietcong--controlled hamlets kept dropping, demonstrating slow and steady progress until our inevitable defeat burst the bubble. 

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