I wish someone would Twitter about what is really go on in the world so Americans wouldn’t be in the dark any longer. When I travel outside this country I suddenly gain access to real news. News in America is nothing but “all politics, all the time.” (Oh, that is if you discount the Lyndsay Lohan saga—now that’s significant news! I bet more people in America know what Lohan was most-recently arrested for than can even locate the state they live in on a map.)

Political battles are meaningless unless they represent a clash of informed ideas. Americans are uninformed. That’s one reason American politics has degenerated once again into a power struggle among government officials and the two parties.

I know I’m supposed to stick to jury issues in this blog, but today I learned that the U.S. State Department has done something so boneheaded I can’t keep quiet about it—something almost as dumb as Hillary turning over British nuclear secrets to the Russians (I guess she forgot what happened to the Rosenbergs when they did the same thing).

Apparently the State Department now has a Twitter feed in the Farsi language directed toward the youth of Iran.

I would really like to know who came up with this stupid idea.

How is it stupid? Let me count the ways:

1. The only people who will subscribe to the feed are the Iranian secret police. What Iranian in their right mind would use their Twitter accounts to “follow” anti-Iranian propaganda? Don’t the idiots at the State Department realize that Iranian computer experts can use the list of followers to track down dissidents?
2. There’s no need to “tweet” in Farsi, because most of the young Iranians who use the Internet speak English; most educated young people all around the world speak English, because America is the origin of most computer software. It’s patronizing and insulting to assume that young people outside of America are as illiterate in English as American young people.
3. The content of the first “tweets” posted by the State Dept. is nonsensical. To call it propaganda is too charitable:
   • "We want to join in your conversation."
   • "allow people to enjoy same universal rights to peacefully assemble, demonstrate as in Cairo."
4. What conversation are they talking about? Do they think the protestors in Cairo were enjoying a universal right? Didn’t Hillary get the memo? The Egyptian police attacked the protestors.
   • Oh, I forgot: Our president recently added the right to social networking to the list of human rights.
5. The idea that the U.S. State Dept. is trying to use social networking to topple the Iranian government is ludicrous. I guess Hillary hasn’t noticed: the Moslem nations in which the governments are being undermined by social networking are pro-American, pro-Western, and many have large Sunni populations and Sunni rulers (Tunisia and Egypt, for example). Yemen is also largely Sunni, and Hillary made a trip there on Jan. 11 for the purpose, apparently, of demonstrating that its president was an American puppet. Shortly thereafter, of course, the protests started there, too. Iran, however, is Shi’a and anti-Western.
6. The youthful protestors in the Moslem world—IMHO—aren’t necessarily all Sunnis. The ones who “tweet” may be, but in pro-Western Moslem countries, I suspect that the most-disaffected youths are the downtrodden minority Shi’a, ones who have not had access to a college education or the Internet.

And this last point leads me back to the title of this blog. I have just returned to the U.S. from overseas, where I had access to real news (as opposed to what we get here). America, we had better demand that journalists start reporting on what’s really going on out there, because we’re going to get some nasty surprises very soon:

• Egypt’s revolution isn’t over, and it isn’t going to end in a pro-Western, democratic government. It may end in a pro-Western military coup, but it won’t be democratic; or it may end in an anti-Western Iranian-style theocracy under Sharia law. In a televised report from the streets of Cairo recently, I heard a young woman tell a reporter, “We hate Mubarak, because he made peace with Israel. We will destroy Mubarak and then we will destroy Israel.”
• Most American reporters counted down the number of days of protest until Mubarak resigned, as if the “unrest” had spontaneously sprung up one day in January. But the build-up was actually much longer. Americans were the only ones in the world who didn’t know what was happening (apparently they including the U.S. government.) In fact, for many weeks Islamists in Egypt had been inciting violence against Coptic Christians; mobs had hacked Christians to death; and an off-duty policeman stormed a train and gunned down almost a dozen Christians on Jan. 11 (the day Hillary went to Yemen). (Incidentally, the numbers 11 and 12 are significant to Shi’a Moslems just as the number 3 is significant to Christians.)
• Not all the really awful problems in the world are confined to other Continents. For some reason American news sources do not extend to Mexico. No one reports what’s going on down there. Here’s a bit of news I picked up from Chinese television: There have been food riots in Mexico for several years. Mexico has had an unusually cold winter this year, which reduced its native corn crop substantially. In addition, the American government’s requirement that a percentage of our corn crop go to ethanol production limits the amount of corn we have for export to Mexico. Mexico has been suffering from a corn shortage for several years now—corn is their staple food. So, is it any wonder that Mexicans are fleeing across the border? They don’t just want work, they want to eat.

I recommend that every American find a foreign news source and learn what’s really going on. Until I heard about the State Department’s Farsi Twitter feed, I assumed that our government knew what was going on, even if the rest of us did not. Now I’m convinced that the government is even more ignorant than we are.