Curing Cancer Takes a Leap Forward - James Allison

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Curing Cancer Takes a Leap Forward

Not many in the news are looking at stuff like this right now, but James Allison, along with Tasuku Honjo, revolutionized fighting cancer and just won the Nobel Prize for it.

From Wired:

Meet The Carousing, Harmonica-playing Texan Who Just Won A Nobel For His Cancer Breakthrough

From the article:

Quote

Allison’s breakthrough was the discovery of a sort of secret handshake that cancer uses to evade the immune system, and a means to block that handshake—what the Nobel committee hailed as “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” which has “revolutionized cancer treatment, fundamentally changing the way we view how cancer can be managed.” (Allison’s co-recipient was Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University.) Advances in cancer typically come in 50-year increments; the science that Allison and Honjo helped advance, cancer immunotherapy, has made a generational leap seemingly overnight.

Thank goodness good things like this happen and get some exposure.

A few decades from now, this will be remembered as the important news of our day. Not the fake crap the news media serves up constantly.

This one made me feel good.

 

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

On 10/24/2018 at 6:38 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Curing Cancer Takes a Leap Forward

Not many in the news are looking at stuff like this right now, but James Allison, along with Tasuku Honjo, revolutionized fighting cancer and just won the Nobel Prize for it.

From Wired:

Meet The Carousing, Harmonica-playing Texan Who Just Won A Nobel For His Cancer Breakthrough

From the article:

Thank goodness good things like this happen and get some exposure.

A few decades from now, this will be remembered as the important news of our day. Not the fake crap the news media serves up constantly.

This one made me feel good.

 

Michael

Also me.  That is the criterion I use for taking things seriously.  Will X be remembered 10, 50, 100, 1000 years from now?  Most political shit has a shelf-life of under 2 years. Come the next election most is forgotten.

Thank you for the heads-up.

 

Live Long and Prosper \\//

[jts]

There are many so-called cures for cancer. Check out this list from wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments

Probably each and every one of them has someone claiming evidence of success. As a certain wise man wrote: the cures come and the cures go. They are doomed to failure if they don't reverse causes.

There are many stories where people claim to have reversed cancer. For example Chris Wark interviewed many people who claim to have reversed cancer. Unless approved by the cancer industry, all these stories are taken as false and their methods are rejected as quackery.

We can live in hope that some day the cancer industry will come up with something or approve something that will put itself out of business. Or maybe not. Is the cancer industry in the business of putting itself out of business? I figure the cancer industry has no business being in business unless it is in the business of putting itself out of business. But maybe I don't understand how the real world works.

Perhaps they should start with something easier than cancer, for example the common cold. But Dr. John H. Tilden figured out the common cold nearly a hundred years ago.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Faconc.com%2F020103toxemia.pdf

You can suppress the common cold or you can let it run its course. If you suppress the common cold, that leads to worse stuff in the long run. You can shorten the time required for it to run its course and make the symptoms milder by sleeping, keeping comfortably warm, sipping water, fasting. And all else being equal, the worse your symptoms, the quicker you are getting better; to understand this statement, read the book.

A doctor said you need 2 or 3 colds per year to maintain health. If there is any truth to this statement Tilden's book explains why.

 

[Peter]

Feed a cold, starve a fever? The only dietary aid I can imagine is eating to stay healthy. I just got the mega dose influenza shot at the VA, felt a bit off for three days but now I should be immune to just about anything. I hope that is not a joke, because immunization is a lot "easier" than getting several colds every year.     

[jts]

2 hours ago, Peter said:

Feed a cold, starve a fever? The only dietary aid I can imagine is eating to stay healthy. I just got the mega dose influenza shot at the VA, felt a bit off for three days but now I should be immune to just about anything. I hope that is not a joke, because immunization is a lot "easier" than getting several colds every year.     

1.  If you feed a cold, you will need to starve a fever. Starve them both. To eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness.

2.  I don't know what being immune to a toxemia crisis means, unless it means you are setting yourself up for bigger trouble.

 

[Peter]

Jts wrote: I don't know what being immune to a toxemia crisis means, unless it means you are setting yourself up for bigger trouble. end quote

Toxemia  [tok-se´me-ah] 1. the condition resulting from the spread of bacterial products (toxins) by the bloodstream.

That reminds me of the dread American kids felt about polio back in 1954. It was very scary because we all knew someone in our school and elsewhere, who had contracted polio and was crippled. Brrrr! They walked like zombies or were in a wheel chair. Is a parent who refuses to immunize their children for several diseases, unfit to be a parent? I know you can’t get into local schools unless your kids have gotten their shots.  Peter    

Notes. From Wikipedia: (I just donated 25): The first polio vaccine was the inactivated polio vaccine. It was developed by Jonas Salk and came into use in 1955. The oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin and came into commercial use in 1961.

From a book review by my daughter Laura: How to Lie with Statistics: The third chapter talks about a concept I am fairly familiar with – using a very small sample to “prove” a point.  Huff points out that when a study is done with only, say, 12 participants, the results will seem more dramatic.  Not only that, but the company doing the survey might be paying the researchers and making sure they get the results they want.  Also, even in large studies, results can be misleading.  The example of a polio vaccine experiment is given, in which 450 children are vaccinated and 680 are not.  None of the 450 children get polio, however, none of the 680 do either.  This makes the vaccine seem very effective when in fact it may not be.  One other point in this chapter deals with the deceiving quality of averages.  A weather reporter can say that the average temperature in an area is 70 degrees, however, there may be an incredible range.  The average does not take into account the extremes that people would probably be interested in. 

From: "May, Dennis (FF-Milan)" To: <atlantis Subject: ATL: Re: Was life made in the lab? Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 09:20:14 -0500. A former subscriber wrote: "Not too long ago, some scientists synthesized a viable, active, infectious polio virus from raw  (non-living) materials.  There's some scientific controversy over whether viruses are living things, but I think it's sensible to think that they are (I think viruses qualify as "life" under Rand's definition of the term if that's important to you).  So it seems that your above claim is wrong."

Georges Rivet wrote: "I do not know about this, but it is another piece of evidence against Ellen's view of life and matter. It appears to leave no room for Ellen's type of vitalism. Does anyone know more about this?"

Yes I wrote to the list about it when it made the science news some time ago.  There has also been a program in progress to make artificial bacteria from the approximately 300 minimal genes necessary for bacterial life. In my high school biology class in 1977-78 it was well known that natural processes starting from non-biological materials can produce structures which look like and function the same as cellular membranes. All of the amino acids have been found to form during natural processes and even more form than are used in life on Earth.  A bath of these natural amino acids form proteins from scratch.  There was recent news of a bacteria created in the lab to use an amino acid no other life on Earth uses. Dennis May

[jts]

4 minutes ago, Peter said:

Jts wrote: I don't know what being immune to a toxemia crisis means, unless it means you are setting yourself up for bigger trouble. end quote

Toxemia  [tok-se´me-ah] 1. the condition resulting from the spread of bacterial products (toxins) by the bloodstream.

A toxemia crisis is an action done by the body in response to the toxin level being above the toxin tolerance level, as explained by John H. Tilden. Why would you want to be immune to this body response? What would that mean? Read the book.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Faconc.com%2F020103toxemia.pdf

 

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, jts said:

A toxemia crisis is an action done by the body in response to the toxin level being above the toxin tolerance level, as explained by John H. Tilden. Why would you want to be immune to this body response? What would that mean? Read the book.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Faconc.com%2F020103toxemia.pdf

 

Ideology comes to medicine.

The doctor thinks Syphilis cures itself naturally. This is true in most cases but not in Tertiary Syphilis which is its sometimes fatal relapse many years after the initial inflection when the body is overwhelmed. I believe that's what killed Al Capone. Then came antibiotics. So take a pass on antibiotics and live your life in dread.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

5 hours ago, Peter said:

Feed a cold, starve a fever? The only dietary aid I can imagine is eating to stay healthy. I just got the mega dose influenza shot at the VA, felt a bit off for three days but now I should be immune to just about anything. I hope that is not a joke, because immunization is a lot "easier" than getting several colds every year.     

The flu virus mutates so fast the vaccine can't catch up. And why do you think it covers "just about everything"?

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

On ‎10‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 1:16 PM, jts said:

A doctor said you need 2 or 3 colds per year to maintain health. If there is any truth to this statement Tilden's book explains why.

Maybe there is no truth to that statement.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

On ‎10‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 1:16 PM, jts said:

There are many so-called cures for cancer. Check out this list from wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments

Probably each and every one of them has someone claiming evidence of success. As a certain wise man wrote: the cures come and the cures go. They are doomed to failure if they don't reverse causes.

There are many stories where people claim to have reversed cancer. For example Chris Wark interviewed many people who claim to have reversed cancer. Unless approved by the cancer industry, all these stories are taken as false and their methods are rejected as quackery.

We can live in hope that some day the cancer industry will come up with something or approve something that will put itself out of business. Or maybe not. Is the cancer industry in the business of putting itself out of business? I figure the cancer industry has no business being in business unless it is in the business of putting itself out of business. But maybe I don't understand how the real world works.

Perhaps they should start with something easier than cancer, for example the common cold. But Dr. John H. Tilden figured out the common cold nearly a hundred years ago.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Faconc.com%2F020103toxemia.pdf

You can suppress the common cold or you can let it run its course. If you suppress the common cold, that leads to worse stuff in the long run. You can shorten the time required for it to run its course and make the symptoms milder by sleeping, keeping comfortably warm, sipping water, fasting. And all else being equal, the worse your symptoms, the quicker you are getting better; to understand this statement, read the book.

A doctor said you need 2 or 3 colds per year to maintain health. If there is any truth to this statement Tilden's book explains why.

 

That list is a hoot. If I had a solid state tumor, however, after surgery and maybe radiation--chemo?--I'd try fasting except it'd be so extreme that it'd be more like starvation (with a potassium supplement so to avoid a heart attack). The caveat is I'd wait until I was told it was terminal.

--Brant

[jts]

13 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

Maybe there is no truth to that statement.

--Brant

Dr. Alec Burton said you need 2 or 3 colds per year to be healthy. Obviously this is not true if you live right. But I think he meant in this imperfect world it is difficult or impossible to live perfectly right. Even if you need the colds, they don't need to be bad colds. Maybe just a few sneezes and it's over.

 

[jts]

10 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

That list is a hoot. If I had a solid state tumor, however, after surgery and maybe radiation I'd try fasting except it'd be so extreme that it'd be more like starvation (with a potassium supplement so avoid a heart attack). The caveat is I'd wait until I was told it was terminal.

--Brant

Do you know the story of Dr. Tanner? In his time the medical profession was so ignorant about fasting that they believed death from heart failure happens on the 10th day. Dr. Tanner tried to commit suicide by fasting, expecting to die on the 10th day.

Where did this idea come from, that the heart fails during a fast on the 10th day? Shelton supervised 40,000 fasts and says fasting benefits the heart. Alan Goldhamer supervised 15,000+ fasts and in his lectures doesn't seem to know about heart failure during a fast. Where is the evidence that fasting causes heart failure? I tried to track it down and found nothing except theory. Why do people persist in believing this myth?

I never heard of any fasting doctor using a potassium supplement. It's not in any of Shelton's books about fasting. It's not in any of Goldhamer's lectures about fasting. It's not in any of Loren Lockman's talks about fasting that I listened to. It's not in Wardolfski's diary of his 42 day fast. It's not in Dr. Goldstein's book about his 42 day fast. The guy who did a 30 day fast every year for many years did not mention a potassium supplement. I did a bunch of fasts ranging in length up to 22 days without a potassium supplement and nothing happened to my heart.

I think this idea of heart failure caused by fasting is a leftover from the ignorance of the medical profession in the days of Dr. Tanner. Just theory, not results. Maybe they extrapolate from the first 3 days.

There is more than one version of this myth. The more common myth on quora seems to be that the heart loses protein. This has nothing to do with potassium.

If your nutrient reserves (including potassium) are so low that you can't withstand a long fast, you have no business doing a long fast, and the fasting supervisor is supposed to watch for problems. and take you off the fast if a real problem happens.

 

[Brant Gaede]

Does a potassium supplement interfer with a fast? I am merely repeating Dirk Person's concern about a radical diet not fasting. But if I did serious fasting over a long piece of time I'd take it. I'd not eat bananas or what have you instead.

--Brant

[Peter]

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Maybe there is no truth to that statement.

--Brant

--Brant wrote: The flu virus mutates so fast the vaccine can't catch up. And why do you think it covers "just about everything"? end quote

Optimism, my boy, optimism. It will lessen the severity of any flu I am exposed to, or so the manufacturers promise. And since my body’s immune system is on alert, I will be better able to find and fight “strange bugs.” In the planning for the round trip to Mars the plans include exposing the astronauts to several different “bugs” along the way so that their immune systems stay alert.

To the tune of “Rule Brittania” let's all sing:  Rule Vaccinatia, Vaccinatia tools the blood . . .         

[jts]

11 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Does a potassium supplement interfer with a fast? I am merely repeating Dirk Person's concern about a radical diet not fasting. But if I did serious fasting over a long piece of time I'd take it. I'd not eat bananas or what have you instead.

--Brant

You seem to have a fear based on the ignorance of the medical profession in Tanner's time. They were so ignorant in the time of Dr. Tanner that they did not believe it is possible for a human to live without food 40 days and they thought Tanner's claim was fraud.

Psychiatrists have a word - phobia - it means irrational fear.

If you really don't have the nutritional reserves, the potassium supplement won't do it. Build yourself up with a good diet with all the nutrients prior to the long fast. And if you have no experience with fasting you probably should do it under supervision at TrueNorth, probably the safest place in the world to fast.

 

[Peter]

5 hours ago, jts said:

You seem to have a fear based on the ignorance of the medical profession in Tanner's time. They were so ignorant in the time of Dr. Tanner that they did not believe it is possible for a human to live without food 40 days and they thought Tanner's claim was fraud.

Psychiatrists have a word - phobia - it means irrational fear.

If you really don't have the nutritional reserves, the potassium supplement won't do it. Build yourself up with a good diet with all the nutrients prior to the long fast. And if you have no experience with fasting you probably should do it under supervision at TrueNorth, probably the safest place in the world to fast.

 

I remember a scene in a movie, and maybe it was a Tom Hank's flic, where he eats sea weed and little crabs raw, straight from the rocks next to the Pacific. I think fasting is counter evolutionary to 'hunter-gatherers".  If I wanted to lose weight, I would not fast, even if the Hollywood crowd is proficient at it - to land a part. Now, where is that bowl of Holloweenie candy? 

[william.scherk]

A 'toxemia crisis' versus toxemia. Ie, "what is the definition of 'toxemia'?" What are its causes ... ?

What is toxemia, carefully defined?

23 hours ago, jts said:

A toxemia crisis is an action done by the body in response to the toxin level being above the toxin tolerance level, as explained by John H. Tilden. Why would you want to be immune to this body response? What would that mean? Read the book.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Faconc.com%2F020103toxemia.pdf

That link doesn't work for me. The link stripped of the Google Docs URL is http://aconc.com/020103toxemia.pdf. See also a reproduction at the Wayback machine, which allows you to turn pages and search terms.

Tilden's definitional dancing is found starting on page 15:

"All so-called diseases are crises of Toxemia."  Thus Spake Tilden. Does Jerry agree?  Can Jerry offer a reasonable definition of toxemia that bridges the gap between Tilden's murky one and that accepted by more recent investigators?

20 hours ago, jts said:

Where is the evidence that fasting causes heart failure? I tried to track it down and found nothing except theory.

Where did you look?  It might be necessary first to look for the claim, or a claim made plain of a process.  Ie, the physical mechanics -- broken down into steps or causative chains. 

Off the top of your head, you might recall some specific claim you are skeptical of, a claim with some detail in it, rather than researching a conclusion: "[Water]-fasting can lead to electrolyte imbalances in the bloodstream, electrolyte imbalances in the bloodstream show in symptoms D, H and K."

If you break down or break out the steps in the claim, you might get closer to finding support for a connection between water-fasting and 'heart effects.'

What I have discovered in researching the two acclaimed fasting supervisors you note from time to time is that they each note dangers in fasting -- especially for Type 1 diabetics.

It was a death under Loren Lockman's care that resulted in him fleeing the USA for Central America ... he wisely will not accept any more 'Type 1' customers/clients.

You can probably figure out that the key to most claims involving 'heart effects' of a protracted water-only fast is the so-called "electrolyte balance' in the blood.

Why would ingesting only water possibly lead to unusual or unsafe/unhealthy levels of electrolytes? Well, mostly because heart-muscle-dependent electrolytes, sodium and potassium, are 'excreted' via urine, and under the strictest water-fast protocols, neither is replenished by dietary or supplementary intake. (the list of electrolytes in our bloodstream extends to magnesium, chloride and calcium)

Possible?  Plausible? Probable?

Quote

Why do people persist in believing this myth?

It may not entirely be 'a myth.' Death by anorexia ... maybe? 

Some people (like me, perhaps) wonder about how Tilden's work might be updated. If we now know more about 'toxins' and  states of 'toxemia' in the blood than did Tilden, how to revise his notions in the list of better understanding of disease processes and dangerous states of 'unbalance'?

Harriet Hall, MD, one of the regular writers for Skeptic magazine (under Skepdoc) offers some necessary cautions about accepting without critical attention the work of Tilden, who died in 1940; this article is called '“I Reject Your Reality” – Germ Theory Denial and Other Curiosities'; emphases added.

Quote

[...] One cause for all disease. Vague unidentified toxins. A conspiracy to hide the truth from the public. A simple cure by diet. The red flags were multiplying.

I asked where I could read more about how toxemia caused all diseases. She referred me to a book by J.H.Tilden, MD, Toxemia Explained. The full text is available online.  Don’t bother reading it unless you are interested in history.

This book was written in 1926, before modern vaccines, before antibiotics, and before randomized controlled trials. Essentially before modern scientific medicine. Tilden did no experiments. He “thought” about disease and came up with a hypothesis: enervating habits allow toxic metabolic waste products to accumulate in the body, and this is the one cause of all disease. Then he proceeded to advise people about health without doing any kind of testing to determine whether his hypothesis was true or false, or whether following his recommendations really made a difference. It is all speculation, and the facts it is based on are largely pre-scientific errors and distortions. It was not entirely unreasonable for him to think that way in 1926, but his ideas have been completely superseded by 8 decades of advances in microbiology, genetics, histology, immunology, physiology, and other disciplines.

RFL wants to believe Tilden so badly that she blithely jettisons the last century of scientific progress (who says time travel isn’t possible?). Then somehow she gets beyond Tilden’s diet advice to another new paradigm.

[...]

As the creationists say about the theory of evolution, she says that germ theory is “only a theory.” I asked her to look at the gazillions of animal and human experiments that support the germ theory. You find a germ that is only present in animals suffering from a specific illness. You isolate that germ. You inject the germ into half of a group of animals and only that half gets sick. You do this over and over. You cure them with antibiotics. You fulfill all of Koch’s postulates. You accumulate a huge body of data to validate the germ theory from every possible angle. You use it to make predictions, and the predictions are accurate. Never mind – it’s all worthless. In her opinion, the people doing the experiments are believers in a false paradigm and they are not doing the science right and they are fooling themselves or lying.

She calls medicine a “foul, fraudulent, flaw-ridden menace.” It isn’t based on REAL science, as evidenced by the fact that it doesn’t work(!?).

[...]

She thinks Pasteur was asked by the French government to find out why drinking fermented alcohol causes people to get sick (the version of history I read said a distiller asked him to figure out how to keep beer from going sour after fermentation). She thinks drugs kill cells, even over-the-counter drugs, and then the bacteria come in only to mop up the garbage. She thinks drugs suppress symptoms and thereby cause further damage to the body.

She sees no need to evoke the “supernatural” idea that a little bacterium or dead piece of DNA can conquer a body millions of times larger and more powerful. She thinks people who are vaccinated are more likely to die earlier, of chronic disease. For pneumonia, fasting and appropriate re-feeding is much more effective than antibiotics. Diabetes can be cured by proper diet.

As if the 1926 book by Tilden weren’t outdated enough, she quotes 19th century authorities like Florence Nightingale [...]

It’s very frustrating trying to carry on a discussion with someone who thinks this way; it’s like trying to grasp a cloud or wrestle with Jello. It’s as if you pointed out the brick building in front of you and she said, “What building? There’s no building there! That’s an octopus.” Even if you can intellectually understand how she came to think that, it’s hard to imagine yourself in her shoes. It feels entirely alien, and is painfully disconcerting.

Psychological defenses can protect false ideas like these from any attack. Humans are amazingly creative about rationalizing away every vestige of reality that tries to intrude on their convictions. They are like the psychiatric patient who thought he was dead. They asked him if dead men could bleed. He said no. They pointed out that he was bleeding. He said, “Wow, I guess dead men can bleed.”

[...]

Here, Loren Lockwood gets salty:

Edited October 31, 2018 by william.scherk
"Does Jerry agree?"; Added Tilden's "definition" of toxemia; added link to page-turnable version of Tilden's 1926 book

[jts]

On the subject of fasting causing heart failure:

I would like to know how the medical profession in the time of Dr. Tanner got the idea that on the 10th day of a fast is death from heart failure. Many people went far beyond 10 days and I never heard or read of heart failure during a fast. So where did this idea come from? Did it come from an article in a peer reviewed scientific journal? I suspect that it is just a theory that does not work that way in practice.

I imagine it might be possible in the case of a person who is so nutritionally depleted as to not have any business fasting and no competent fasting supervisor would allow this to happen.

HMS supervised 40,000 fasts ranging in length up to 90 days. Here is a remarkable statement from him.

"... I may add that I have never seen a death from "heart failure" during a fast, although I have seen many crippled hearts make complete recoveries during a fast."

Show me a case of death from heart failure during a fast and then maybe we can examine the details of that case. Until then it seems like a myth based on only theory.

If you are worried about depletion of electrolytes during a fast (altho there is probably no reason to be), you can try water with electrolytes in it, maybe distilled water with a small amount of salts in it. That is an idea from Loren Lockman. But some people think distilled water is better.

Sure electrolytes get depleted during a fast. Everything gets depleted during a fast. Fat gets depleted. Reserve nutrients get depleted. That's why the fast must eventually end. So what?

 

[Peter]

I was thinking about something, sometime, somebody, somewhere said. Numbers don’t lie, do they? It just doesn’t add up. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." Was that said by Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British Prime Minister or was it Mark Twain? Peter

From Wikipedia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a phrase describing the persuasive power of numbers, particularly the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point.

The phrase was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Several other people have been listed as originators of the quote, and it is often erroneously attributed to Twain himself.^[1]

. . . Mark Twain popularized the saying in Chapters from My Autobiography, published in the North American Review in 1906. "Figures often beguile me," he wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"^[2]

Alternative attributions include, among many others (for example Walter Bagehot and Arthur James Balfour) the radical English journalist and politician Henry Du Pré Labouchère (1831–1912), Jervoise  Athelstane Baines,^[3] and British politician and man of letters Leonard H. Courtney, who used the phrase in 1895 and two years later became president of the Royal Statistical Society. Courtney is quoted by Baines (1896) as attributing the phrase to a "wise statesman",^[4] but he may have been referring to a future statesman rather than a past one.^[5] The phrase has also been attributed to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.^[6][7]

The earliest instance of the phrase found in print dates to a letter written in the British newspaper National Observer on June 8, 1891, published June 13, 1891, p. 93(-94): NATIONAL PENSIONS [To the Editor of The National Observer] London, 8 June 1891 "Sir, —It has been wittily remarked that there are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third and most aggravated is statistics. It is on statistics and on the absence of statistics that the advocate of national pensions relies…" Later, in October 1891, as a query in Notes and Queries, the pseudonymous questioner, signing as "St Swithin", asked for the originator of the phrase, indicating common usage even at that date.^[5] The pseudonym has been attributed to Eliza Gutch. end quote

And there was the book “How to lie with Statistics” (1954) by Darrell Huff. The cover shows a man in a suit with a paper hat standing on a pyramid of numbers.

There was a headline on the net earlier today that read, 'It's a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico.' 250,000 Dead. 37,400 Missing,” by José de Córdoba.

I don’t believe it. That sounds like WWI. Is it time to send in The Texas Rangers? Only if they plead with President Trump, but he won’t do it unless they pay up front.

[Peter]

More damn lies and statistics below. I have rarely been unhappy during my entire life and I have had my share of “bad times” too. And oddly, probably because I live on The Eastern Shore of Maryland I have always thought I made the money that was appropriate for this area. Now if I “only made” 27 grand in 1980 which I did, in ?Cakufornia? I would have been in poverty. Peter

From the net. 7 signs you are utterly average by Devon Delfino . . . . 2. You're dealing with impostor syndrome at work If you're dealing with impostor syndrome at work, you're not the only one. In fact, the International Journal of Behavioral Science estimated that 70% of people at some point deal with the phenomenon, which it describes as possessing "intense feelings that [your] achievements are undeserved." If you're afraid that you aren't as smart as other people think you are, that's probably a good sign. A Cornell University study confirmed what has long been suspected, since Charles Darwin theorized in 1871 that "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." In other words, people who are actually incompetent are often painfully unaware of that fact, and "grossly overestimate" their abilities compared to their peers.

7. You're unhappy. If recent events, or the past few years, have left you feeling a bit down, you're not alone. According to the United Nations' World Happiness Report, American happiness has "remained roughly unchanged or has even declined" even as per capita income has "more than doubled" since 1972. Though the U.S. is a major economic power, the report points to life expectancy, the freedom to make choices, perceived corruption, social support, and the generosity of those around you as contributing factors to the decline. Though these statistics can provide a useful way to get context around how you're doing, it's important to keep in mind that falling outside the realm of "normal" for any given category isn't necessarily a bad thing. But if you aren't satisfied, there are things you can do to change your circumstances.