Ever heard of "standard deviation"
It should have been plain that I was demonstrating "standard deviation" or statistical noise. If 250,000 people think their Jesus then any public gathering of 250,000 or less is statistical noise, i.e. insignificant. One of the problems with the Internet (and space exploration discusssion groups in particular) is we are always arguing with people representing the statistical noise. For a population of 280 million people, you need a crowd of at least 5% to be politically interesting (14 million). Anything less than that can be safely ignored as politically irrelevant.
Gary