Crimes Against Math
Mark Twain once said, "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics." Consider the humorous (if absurd) example of Extrapolating from XKCD. Strange things happen at one over zero; your number of active husbands goes up infinity% the day you get married.
A handful of successful charlatans exploit this weakness to tell the most grotesque form of lie. Jeff Bezos of Amazon has used this technique approximately forever, claiming in SEC 1997 filing revenue "grew by 838%" in a year as a technique to keep people investing. More recent vintages of Jeff have practiced a kind of numerical genocide: slides of Amazon's performance now fail to even show relative numbers. This is referred to as a "Bezos chart".
The world champion of fake promises and tortured arithmetic: Donald Trump. Fixing drug prices fits the pattern of Trump's sins: identify a real problem, overpromise, underdeliver, gaslight your detractors. Trump proposed a plan to get United States drug prices in line with other countries. Had he actually delivered on the plan, it would have been laudable. Instead, we got increased drug prices, and a new form of grift. Trump Jr. sits on the board of BlinkRx, the main supplier for government endorsed TrumpRx.
But Trump / Trump Jr. merely committing the same exact corruption he accused Joe / Hunter Biden of is evil, not a crime against math. That comes from his defense of the topic. Faced with evidence of rising prices, Trump flipped the script. Manufacture victory entirely in fiction, and then add broken math on top of it.
As of January 21, 2026, this is the "official" story: a 90% decrease is presented as a 900% decrease. Except increase and decrease are not symmetric in actual math! See the funny business around the number one, above. He compounds this with an optimistic lie: the 90% decrease is a hypothetical savings derived from changing from an injection-based GLP-1 to a soon to be approved pill version. But this is a math exercise. We'll excuse him the category error of comparing different treatments and the sampling bias of fixating on one popular drug among thousands.
The entire odyssey is met with ineffectual incredulity: major reporting outlets like CNN and Newsweek cheerfully bring on experts to mathsplain the impossibility. They hope we will not notice they have abdicated their responsibility to question authority at the tiniest deflection. Any reporter covering this topic who falls short of browbeating White House spokespeople over obvious lies cedes any journalistic integrity. The real journalists have been kicked out or resigned as their organizations become arms of state media.
The continued insistence we engage with a prince of lies on a battlefield of reasoned resistance is the most aggravating insult of all. There is a very "two minutes hate" feel to raging about today's controversy without proposing any solution. Watching the outrage, sharing the outrage, and then flinching when someone proposes doing something about the outrage is giving aid and comfort to the enemy of humanity.
Go back to sharing pet videos if you have nothing useful to say. But if you want to be useful: when someone near you is angry enough to act, don't tell them to calm down.
Ephesians 4:26 - "Be angry, and do not sin."