Photo Credit: thewe.cc

I decided to do a survey-based count of the number of people who are in the telecom business. I went down to Brick, N.J. and asked my nephew how many people he knew in the telecom business. He answered one, me.

Then I went to my brother and asked him the same question. He answered one, me. Then I called my brother-in-law in Reunion, FL and asked him the same question, He answered one, me.

After questioning more than three dozen relatives, friends and associates, and tabulating the answers, I was able to extrapolate that based on the fact that 36 people knew 36 individuals in the telecom business that there must be approximately 300 million people involved in the telecom business in America. This result is of course, absurd.

Where did I go wrong? Here's the problem: if you ask people about their profession you will get an accurate answer because you are not getting duplicates. But if you ask someone whether they know someone who is in the X profession, it is highly likely you will get duplicates and triplicates and even worse.

The 36 people in telecom were all me. There is only one person that they knew and he was me.

Let me explain what this has to do with the Iraqi civilian body count. Many of my Muslim readers like to leave comments saying that American Judeo-Crusader alliance killed one million Iraqi civilians. Where do they get this absurd number?

From two places:

1. From Osama Bin Laden in his World Islamic Front Statement declaring Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders on the 23 February 1998:
   

   ... for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

   If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

   Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

   
   


2. From a London based polling company, Opinion Research Business (ORB), which estimated 1 million (~~ 946,000 to 1,120,000) violent Iraqi deaths by August 2007.

We can discount the first because it's just a large number mentioned for effect and has no basis in reality.

As to the second, we should tell you that ORB did the same thing I did. It went around asking Iraqis how many people they knew were killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In a meticulous and detailed analysis of ORB's survey (1), IBC researcher Josh Dougherty and Spagat debunked the survey as being utterly ridiculous.

As I noted in my article Large Numbers in the Ancient World, "according to the leaked Iraq War Logs published on the Internet by WikiLeaks on 22 October 2010, the files show 66,081 civilian deaths out of a total recorded death toll of 109,000. The great majority of those civilians were not killed by American forces."