The original phrase reads, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Initially attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), it was later quoted by Mark Twain, Walter Bagehot, Arthur James Balfour, Henry Du Pre Labouchere, Jervoise Athelstane Baines, Leonard Courtney, Winston Churchill, among other famous personalities. It recently appeared as the epigraph of an article written by Gil Ramos, Ph. D., a Filipino data scientist living in the US West Coast, who raised serious questions about the credibility of the two polling firms in the Philippines, Pulse Asia and Social Weather Stations. It slammed the use of “surveys” for propaganda purposes, specifically to manufacture rather than measure public opinion in favor or against certain political personalities.

I have called these surveys a blunt instrument for the idiotization of the Filipino masses, notably the voters. They are routinely inflicted on the ignorant and the gullible, and even on the not-so-ignorant and yet so gullible, with the obscene collaboration of the complicit and superficial media and other tools of mass deception and mass hypnosis. Recent and ongoing developments have reconfirmed and reinforced this analysis, thereby aggravating the nation’s increasing moral and political blindness.

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