It is not a question of "duelling citations". It is rather being able to sprinkle in a few facts here and there. It sounds to me that you are just trying to cover up some garbage with the story about what this lab assistant told you. I think I know that woman, by the way. Isn't she the one who went to work as a fact-checker for Rush Limbaugh?
Okay, if you don't want to get into historical detail, just write about something that doesn't require it. You know an awful lot about the stock market, so I assumed you worked on Wall St. Write about butterfly spreads or orange juice futures. God knows what you do for a living, since you seem so detached from reality. I doubt if you are some kind of Buddhist mendicant as the kind that appeared in R. Crumb comix. Who was that now? Mr. Natural, I believe.
In any case, at a certain point facts have to be deployed in a debate. I have heard a lot of bullshit over the years about welfare mothers having kids because it ups their payments, but the fact is that mothers on welfare have the same number of kids on average as mothers who are not.
In Nazi Germany they used to say that the Jews owned the wealth of the country and were bleeding it dry. Marxists rebutted this with the facts and when the facts proved incapable of stopping Nazi persecution of the Jews, they used their fists.
You just write a lot of lies about Indians. You have written that they made themselves sick because they didn't know that bacteria were swimming around in their water. If you wrote bullshit like this in a science or American Indian studies class, you'd get an F. This kind of puke just pops into your head because you are a right-winger and the right-wing agenda in the US includes what Melville called the metaphysics of Indian-hating.
So on a mailing-list, where you don't have to worry about getting graded, you can indulge your right-wing appetites. Well, bully for you. If you ever get motivated to debate the facts rather than sling uninformed opinion around, get in touch.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)