Hygiene, Health, Genocide, Kids and the Digital Revolution

Hygiene, Health, Genocide, Kids and the Digital Revolution

By Dennis Quinn, Ph.D.



Persons in the Public Health racket have discovered a powerful new tool to promote their careers and inflate their bank accounts -- digital computers which can do what is called "data dredging."

Here's how you do it. By telephone or in person, you "survey" a number of people. Let's call this Number of people "N". You ask this "N" of people a lot of Questions, "Q," and one of the questions is the thing you're interested in, called a Variable, or "V."

Then you program your computer to all sorts of statistical analyses of N and Q and V to see which one produces a correlation. When some Q spawns a bump in the data with respect to V, you're almost ready to go public. If you have a government grant, then you write a press release in which you claim: "Q causes V!" and newspapers will print it and you'll be famous.

If you're an academic, however, you have to write a research paper in which you can't say "causes" and you have to use jargon words like "relative risk" and "association." But if luck holds, you will get your paper published , and in the next round of federal funding, since you have already proved something in print you'll be able to get a grant to "refine" your conclusions. This is how data dredging has created many Public Health alarms in the last 20 years.

This is how they proved that left-handed people die seven years sooner than right-handed people, that bald men are far more likely to die of heart attacks than guys with hair, that pregnant women must not eat peanuts, and that second-hand smoke causes cancer and heart disease in non-smokers. You can see how the advance in computer power -- the digital revolution -- has been a boon to Public Health.

Not many years ago, the Nazis were also interested in promoting Public Health. They called it "Hygiene." They couldn't dredge data because they did their math long hand; nevertheless, they had Science on their side, and Adolf Hitler intended to stamp out smokers as well as a few million other "undesirables" after winning WW II.

But American hygienists, now called Public Health Professionals and funded mostly by tax dollars, are successful at what Hitler only dreamed of: They have proved that children must wear bike helmets, that "55 saves lives," that red meat is murder, but that if we cook chicken at home we must wash our hands and all surfaces with hot, soapy water before feeding our children, that one glass of wine is good for us but two is very bad, that movie theatre popcorn, Chinese and Mexican food, and fat are evil, that sugar is poison, and that all smokers are killing non-smokers. Thanks to data dredging in America today, Public Health bureaucrats have been able to demonize smokers as undesirables, just as in 1930's Europe, the "science" of Hygiene allowed governments to stigmatize Jews, Gypsies, and the mentally slow.

The Surgeon General's office has concluded that Americans suffer from, in their own words, "an epidemic of inactivity." Public Health officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have defined guns as a "disease." CDC has also named cigarettes, but not pipes, cigars or chewing tobacco, a "reportable [health] condition." For the purpose of controlling tobacco, the Food and Drug Administration has defined "children" as "people younger than 21." And now, based on data dredging, our Village Leader has decided that all American cigarette smokers are junkies.

Public Health authorities tell smokers they are harming not only themselves but America's kids. Apparently, however, the 8,000 U.S. kids a day reported abused and neglected, the 5,000 U.S. kids a day arrested for crimes, and the 1,000 U.S. kids a day becoming first-time unwed mothers are not Public Health concerns, though data dredging has proved the alleged 3,000 teens a day who puff on a cigarette deserve all of our Village Leader's attention and must be prevented from inhaling, for if they do, then 50 or 60 years from now, they will die.

Dennis Quinn is a U.S. college teacher and civil liberites activist.


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