STACY TABB offers a full-frontal Fisking to a study on child discipline. Nutshell version: ” More free advice from the U.N. If they knew their asses from their elbows, they might actually use their power to put an end to the murder, prostitution and enslavement of children around the world instead of denouncing spankings.” (Heck, I’d be happy if the U.N. would just stop participating in the prostitution and enslavement of children).

Speaking of the U.N., I heard an NPR story earlier on a global violence survey from the WHO. The main cause of death by violence around the world is . . . suicide!

Now, as soon as I heard this, I lost all respect for the study. Suicide is, usually, a Bad Thing. But it’s a sufficiently different thing from, well, murder, that when you lump the two together it’s because you want to make the numbers bigger. And when you want to make the numbers bigger, it’s out of self-promotion and bureaucratic aggrandizement — or worse, as when gun-control advocates lump suicide into their figures on “gun deaths,” which they do because, well, there are a lot of suicides, which actually make up the majority of “gun deaths.” (In 1999, according to James Jacobs’ new book Can Gun Control Work? from Oxford University Press, there were 17,400 firearms suicides and only 9,000 firearms homicides. So naturally gun-controllers want to combine these, since it almost triples the size of the number of “gun deaths.”)

This kind of obvious bogosity is why “public health” studies have lost so much credibility over the past couple of decades: they’re full of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies. They’ve branched out into this stuff because they decided some time ago that infectious disease was no longer a problem, and they had to do something to keep the grant money flowing.

Do something about AIDS and biowar, guys, or start selling insurance. This stuff is a waste of time and money.