Found posted on another board, and sufficiently amusing to steal - er, copy - for here. :)
OK, this is from the book THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED by Thomas Sowell (pages 102-3).
1. All statements are true, if you are free to redefine the terms.
2. Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.
3. A can always exceed B if not all B is counted and/or if A is exaggerated.
4. For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert, but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact.
5. Every policy is a success by sufficently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.
6. All things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.
7. The law of diminishing returns means that even the most beneficial principle will become harmful if carried far enough.
8. Most variables can show either an upward trend or a downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.
9. The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
10. Improbable events are commonplace in a country with more than a quarter of a billion people.
11. You can always create a fraction by putting one variable upstairs and another variable downstairs, but that does not establish any causal relationship between them, nor does the resulting quotienthave any necessary relationship to anything in the real world.
12. Many of the "abuses" today were the "reforms" of yesterday.
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Twelve Rules of Demagougery
This reminded me so much of the "If *I* were an evil genious, that when I saw this today I had to add it here:
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