The coincidence which has occurred here must have had its origin in an intention to produce it. It is utterly repugnant to sound reason to attribute this coincidence to any cause but design. (Benjamin Peirce)

Please review here for a simple example of probability as demonstrated by coin toss, and here for a more complex demonstration of the use of probability logic to show how certain events cannot possibly be coincidental.

This brief video clip, now called the “Naudet Film,” appeared first on September 11, 2001. It claimed to be evidence of a plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center, even though no plane is seen. Like everyone that day, I was doe-eyed and ate it up. It did not occur to me to question its authenticity.

It does not take much critical examination to show that the Naudet film had to have been staged. It is high quality, focused, and the object of our attention is neatly framed by buildings on either side. Many things had to come together to produce such a film highlighting seventeen seconds of a major crime, to wit:

• Jules Naudet had to be outdoors, and not indoors at the moment the event happened. (Almost all New Yorkers at any given time are indoors or in their cars or on public transportation.)
• He had to be in a place that had a clear and unobstructed view of the Twin Towers. (Such views in the canyons of Manhattan are unusual.)
• He had to be using high quality video equipment at that time.
• His view had to be of the north side of the building that was hit, and not any of the other three sides.
• Naudet had to be free of moving vehicles and pedestrians to be able to work without interference.
• He had to be with people who had the legal power to block off the intersection.
• His unobstructed view had to be of the north tower, and not the south, which presented three more viewshed possibilities for an errant aircraft that day.
• A gas leak (officially listed now as a false report) had to be phoned into the New York Fire Department at the intersection that provided the view.
• There had to be a compelling reason for Naudet to film an uninteresting event such as FDNY response to a gas leak.
• His camera had to be positioned at a place in the large intersection where he could easily shift the camera view to pick up the event.
• The video of the event is precise and the view centered and the object in focus. He had to be very lucky to make a quick maneuver and get such a result.
• After hearing the noise of an aircraft or missile he quickly moved the camera to focus on the north tower, which does not seem the normal reaction to a loud noise. (Three firemen react to noise and look up, but we do not know if is to the noise we hear on the sound track, which can be easily manipulated.)

In sum total, there were too many coincidences. The event was staged, and Naudet was positioned with foreknowledge that there was going to be an explosion in the north tower.

Leslie Raphael has done far more work on this event, and I credit him with the content of the bullet points above. But he is far more thorough, and has in fact come up with a list of 69 happenstance circumstances that had to have been in place for Jules Naudet to enjoy his brief moment of fame. In going over the list, I don’t always comprehend his reasoning, and thought maybe one or two of the 69 coincidences were duplications, but if the list were only the twelve listed above, it is enough to conclude that the Naudet film was a staged event.

Again, if indeed this event was staged and done with foreknowledge, and it is utterly repugnant to sound reason to conclude otherwise, then what are the implications?

The Howland Will Forgery Trial is a very interesting case involving Charles Peirce (pronounced purz). Louis Menand wrote about him and others in a wonderful 2001 book, The Metaphysical Club.

Peirce was involved in the 1868 Howard Will Forgery Trial, and that case is useful here as I try to demonstrate how illogical are the official stories of major crimes of our times. Please refer to this post for a simple exposition of the logic of the coin toss in analyzing observed phenomena.

Anyone interested in Howland (Robinson v. Mandell) can read about it in depth, and I will treat it briefly here. Sylvia Ann Howland died and left a large amount of money to various heirs and legatees. Any residual was to go to her niece, Hetty Robinson, who stepped in with an earlier will. Attached to that will was a letter dated later than the existing will that canceled all the other bequests. It was purportedly signed by Howland, and that was where Peirce entered.

Each of us sign documents regularly, and the quality of our signature varies with our mood, attentiveness, time of day and by pure chance. So it is rare that our signatures will always match in all detail. Peirce noticed with Robinson’s document that part of Howland’s signature, the “downstroke,” when overlaid, matched in all thirty instances with another of her signatures. Using other signatures from other documents, he noted that Howland’s downstroke rarely matched in more than a few instances, and so found this occurrence to be highly unlikely.

He calculated the odds of such a set of identical matches as follows:

That’s one chance in 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000.

In other words, the Howland signature on the codicil was traced, and the document was a forgery. The conclusion was inescapable. As Charles’ father, Benjamin Peirce, testified on the stand,

The coincidence which has occurred here must have had its origin in an intention to produce it. It is utterly repugnant to sound reason to attribute this coincidence to any cause but design.

The reasoning was relatively new at that time, and the court ruled it inadmissible. Robinson otherwise lost the case.

I will use similar reasoning in the next post as we take a close look at the Naudet film, seen below.

Why America’s Internet is so shitty and slow, by Adam Clark Estes

For anyone wanting to understand the true nature of the U.S. economy, a useful concept is “rent seeking.” It’s a term from economics, and honestly, one that might have been invented to make a “leech” into an attractive worm. If you were point your finger at an executive from CIGNA or UnitedHealth or Verizon or AT&T and yell “Rent seeker! Rent seeker!,” they would not care. However, “Leech! Leech!” might get their attention.

Here’s the concept roughed out in economic terms, and please bear with me as I want to keep it simple so I can understand it too. I won’t be too tedious.

Rent-seeking is expending resources on political activity to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating wealth. The effects of rent-seeking are reduced economic efficiency through poor allocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, increased income inequality, and, potentially, national decline.

America’s health insurance industry is a pure rent-seeking, or leech industry. They built a fence around the health care system, charge rent for access, and do nothing to make the system better. Quite the opposite, their primary function is to limit access to the system while sucking dollars out of it. They are highly inefficient by design.

This can only happen in a monopoly or oligopoly environment. Competition naturally minimizes rent seeking. New entrants into the market seek to gain advantage by offering better service and products. Consequently, most large American corporations are in the business of buying up and avoiding competition rather than making themselves into better companies.

Internet Service: If you currently get your Internet service from a company that sends it to you via a coaxial cable or phone line, you are a victim of leeches, excuse me, rent seekers. Most likely they are charging $50-70 a month, an outrageous price. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon currently control that “last mile,” the place in the transmission network where signals grind to a halt, where everything slows down. They need to fix that, they need to replace copper with fiber optic, which removes upper limits on speed. But they won’t. It’s expensive, they don’t want to, and they don’t have to. They have you where they want you.

Technology will prevail, and we’ll slowly work around the slow-footed giants. But they will fight progress by use of the revolving door to control regulatory agencies and the private campaign finance system.

The recent ruling on “net neutrality” was a small victory, largely due to Netflix, but the ultimate answer is to break up the monopolies. We need an assertive government to interfere in the marketplace (big time) to make it more efficient. We need to have service from many small competing companies while at the same time encouraging cities and towns to build their own infrastructure, as Chattanooga has done.

But the mega-corporations can write their own ticket and make their own rules right now. So for the time being, local governments are the best option for a powerful Internet, as no private sector company is able to budge the giants off their pedestal.