The law of statistics is not suspended.

FORBES: The Hot Hand Fallacy

Apart from his misunderstanding of statistics - or the "law of probabilities", as he put it - another point to consider is that the different leaders have different types of cancer, and the biological mechanisms behind each are different.

BBC: Hugo Chavez's US 'cancer plot' put to the numbers test

As reported by the U.S. Bureau of Statistics in 2008, 73 federal law enforcement agencies then employed approximately 120, 000 armed full-time on-duty officers with arrest authority.

FORBES: Why The Heck Is DHS Buying More Than A Billion Bullets Plus Thousands Of Guns And Mine-Resistant Armored Vehicles?

In law and order, too, it is a similar story of bold statistics proclaiming real change - not only the 11, 000 extra police, but also 3, 300 community support officers where this type of role simply didn't exist in 1997.

BBC: NEWS | UK | Politics | Full text: Blair on public services

New Jersey court officials didn't have statistics available on the number of arrests or successful prosecutions since the law was enacted in 2003.

WSJ: Drowsy driving remains an elusive highway dilemma

Learning about the distribution of earthquakes may not prevent the Big One, but for war and terrorism, power-law statistics may teach governments something about how to defeat the enemy, and make war less deadly.

ECONOMIST: Modelling conflict