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.
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” (Voltaire)
I am enjoying the news media as they wrestle with Hillary Clinton’s handling of official U.S. business on a private email server. It’s not complicated. She is hiding things we should know about. There is no other plausible reason.
She will be forgiven and the matter will pass, as the U.S. media does not investigate powerful people. We’ll get coverage, but no insight. [Along those lines, Daily Beast does its doody here]
In a recent post I pointed to (painfully obvious) planted evidence, a “hijacker’s” passport found several blocks from the World Trade Center after 9/11. No bodies survived, none of the millions of parts used to make a jet aircraft were found in the rubble. But the passport turned up.
I asked readers, including two commenters directly, to consider the implications.
The predictable response was no response. Such a glaring anomaly pushes subconscious fear closer to the surface. I fully understand the silence of the readers.
Such oppressive silence is a manifestation of hidden power, and is common in every age. Andersen published The Emperor’s New Clothes in 1837, but the story can be traced back centuries before that. Galileo was not arrested for spreading lies, but exposing hidden truth. Julian Assange lives the Ecuadorian Embassy in London now, Bradley Manning is in prison, Edward Snowden in Russia … for saying things that happen to be true.
Even recently with the Charlie Hebdo affair in France there has to be discomfort among thoughtful people that the supposed murderers were hooded men – they could be anyone. Shades of 9/11, the supposed perpetrators left behind an easily discovered driver’s license.
I know the sense of betrayal that one feels when a cherished illusion is destroyed. But we all have to grow up some time, and now would be an excellent time to start.
Robert Siegel is a news reader for NPR, and widely considered one of the better ones in the country. He is the host of a show called “All Things Considered” which airs each evening.
Siegel once commented that he would not be interested in “… airing the views of such media and political critics as Noam Chomsky” on All Things Considered. (Yes, I too marvel at the inappropriateness of the program’s name.)
Siegel routinely allows all manner of right-wing and right-center commentary on its programming, but insists that Chomsky is not welcome. He has said that Chomsky
“…evidently enjoys a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of delusion, false consciousness and media manipulation.”
The word “evidently” is a tell, indicating the Siegel is not familiar with Chomsky’s writing or his world-wide reputation. If Siegel had real chops, he would be eager to discuss Chomsky’s ideas among critics and supporters and with Noam himself. Listeners could draw their own conclusions rather than having Siegel act as gatekeeper.
Not so. Chomsky is simply dismissed. He has been interviewed widely all over the world on media outlets large and small. He routinely fills concert halls and other venues when he lectures both in the US and abroad. But only rarely, perhaps three times in fifty years, has he been allowed on the American mainstream media.
Ours is a heavily censored media that allows discussion of issues only within a very narrow framework, that of our two corporate financed parties. It is true that there is passion involved as they debate horse races and candidate speeches or wedge politics. They do give the appearance of diversity of views. This is important, as it reinforces the illusion of self-government.
The natural effect of the censorship is an out-of-sight-out-of-mind environment where media distracts more than informs, and points our attention at minutiae while ignoring the vital issues of our time, the ongoing investigation of major events part of it. Siegel (or Brian Williams or Jon Stewart) would be quickly out of a job if he dared discuss the glaring contradictions in the official 9/11 story, but is on safe ground talking about legalized pot or a mosque or abortion.
If you really want to be challenged to consider ideas of thinkers of high caliber, go back in time and watch the following, from an era when there was a freer marketplace for ideas, though even then heavily censored. (Buckley, after all, was given free access to public television for his whole right-wing agenda, while no such access has ever been allowed dissidents of Chomsky’s ilk.) The two clips in total are about nineteen minutes.
“The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.” (Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America)
Conspiracy theorists are really nothing more than skeptics. But as the case put forward by the Warren Commission began to collapse in the late 1960’s, CIA saw a need to immunize the general population from doubt, and so instructed its media moles to start branding skeptics as that. (In the late 70s we learned that CIA had placed 400 or more moles in the news media and academia, giving us our nightly news and scholarly books on current events, basically rewriting our history as we go.)
Skeptics, now belittled as conspiracy theorists, are the vigilant citizenry that a republic might need if there still existed a chance to keep it.
It appears now that the education system, nothing to brag about from the 1900’s forward, has gotten very proficient at turning out graduates at all levels who are not capable of exercising skepticism, or critical thinking skills. Consider this:
In 2003 the Department of Education did a study of adult literacy, and the findings were unsettling. Here is how it defined “proficient,” its highest level of skill:
Only 13 percent of Americans qualified as proficient. More interesting, only 31 percent of college graduates did. [More disturbing yet, see page 15 of the study: The grouping of those involved in graduate studies is only 36% proficient!]
Knowing the basic skill sets of most Americans, government, the media, advertisers and public relations people, writers and elected officials are able to lie with ease. And they do. As the bumper sticker says, everything we know is wrong. Here’s an extreme example (a 17 second clip):
(I do like that the news reader in this clip said “if you can believe that.”)
Stop and think: We were told that a jet aircraft slammed into a building at 500+ miles per hour* and that in the resulting inferno the planes and everyone aboard were incinerated.
Knowing that, what are the chances that one piece of paper encased in plastic not only survived, but ended up several blocks away? It has to escape the blaze, be transported in some manner, and be found in the huge mess that was Ground Zero. It has to be that one person’s passport, and not that of another passenger or airline employee, or even one of the several thousand people who died that day.
I do not have to calculate odds here. It is simply impossible. That passport came from some other source.
Given that the passport could not possibly have survived the inferno and then move blocks away, what are the implications?
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*Passenger airliners can only travel at those speeds in rarified air at 30-40,000 feet. At ground level, flying at that speed would cause a jet aircraft to disintegrate in midair due to resistance. The process of landing an airliner takes a half an hour or more because the pilot is slowly reducing his speed to allow him to enter heavier air as he approaches the airport.
In the JFK assassination, skeptics noticed a high death rate among witnesses due to unnatural causes such as car accidents, gunshot wounds, suicides. Death by accident is a rare occurrence, so let’s say that the chances that any one of us will die today in a car accident is one in 500. That’s actually very low. The odds of death by car accident are much higher, but I do not know what they are. Insurance actuaries make such calculations.
But when two, three, or a dozen important witnesses are CONNECTED to a single event, such as the JFK murder, then we have commonality and can multiply probabilities. Say that only three witnesses died in unusual circumstances (it is many, many more): 500 x 500 x 500 = one in 125,000,000. Yes – one chance in one hundred and twenty-five million that those three deaths would happen under normal circumstances.
This does not mean that such coincidences are impossible. Other factors, such as longevity, time frame and personal habits (drinking and drug use) must be considered. We have not PROVED anything. It is merely analytical EVIDENCE. But people who are skilled in critical thinking realize that three witnesses to one event all dying in unusual circumstances is highly suspicious, is in fact an ANOMALY. Further investigation and higher suspicion is warranted. That is simply how investigators reason. It is their logical backdrop.
People who rely on coincidence theory to explain away related phenomenon sometimes use a gymnastic trick to twist statistical probability on its head. What are the odds, they ask, that a golf ball hit from a tee will land on a particular blade of grass on the golf course?
The answer is both astronomical and meaningless. The odds that it will hit some blade of grass (assuming it does not land in a sand trap) is nearly 100%. But one event by itself is not meaningful. It is only RELATED events that matter. So the golf example is better asked as follows: What are the odds that two golf balls struck from the tee hit the same blade of grass?
The answer is, bear with me: (One divided by (one divided by / the number of grass blades on a green)) squared. Astronomical, many many billions to one.
The example, meant to “debunk” conspiracy theorists, is nonsense.
I will refer back to this post as I move forward with various conspiracies and theories. The purpose is to demonstrate that conspiracy theorists are solidly grounded in statistical analysis, while people who rely on faith in our government and other institutions are not. Further, conspiracy theorists are more skilled at basic problem solving, and rely on evidence more than faith, and are not afraid to think bad thoughts about events, leaders, and the implications if we have some bad people in power. Such things are common throughout history.
The most common example used to demonstrate the principles of critical analysis of evidence is the coin toss. It is easy to follow. Statistics is a branch of mathematics, and deals with probability. Nothing is impossible in statistical analyses, and probability only measures likelihood that some event will or will not happen.
A single coin toss yields the following possibilities: Heads (50%), tails (50%). That never changes. However, it is a little more complicated when we measure the probability of more than one coin toss. What are the chances that if we flip a coin twice, that it will come up heads BOTH times?
The answer is 25%, or one chance in four. We get this answer by multiplying the chance of heads (50%) for each coin toss. 50% X 50% = 25%. The odds of three heads in a row? 50% x 50% x 50% = 12.5%, or one chance in eight.
When phenomena are RELATED, we can MULTIPLY probabilities of their occurrence together. Two coin tosses are RELATED phenomena.
So, what are the odds of tossing a coin and getting heads ten times in a row? The answer is 50% raised to the tenth power, or 50% x 50% … ten times, or the decimal .0009765625. That works out to one chance in 1,024. It is not impossible. It is merely highly unlikely.
So what if you have already rolled heads ten times in a row? What are the odds of rolling heads an eleventh time? (50%. Any single coin toss is always a 50-50 chance.)
We are often told that conspiracy theorists discount the possibility of coincidence. We do not. We are simply critical thinkers with a grasp of statistical probability. The odds, for instance, of one hijacking being pulled off by a small group of men armed only with box cutters is slim, say one in 25. So many things could have gone wrong. The odds of that happening four times in one day is one in 25 to the fourth power, 1/390,625. Of course, 25 is just a number I grabbed, but the point is that the chances of success were not 100%, and the chances of four successes that day were simply astronomical.
Couple that unlikelihood with other events of the day, such as the complete failure of the United States air defense system, and you might begin to understand why high skepticism about the official story is in order.
End, part 2 See part 3
_________________ PS: Suppose that the probability of success of an airline hijacking using only box cutters was higher – suppose that each of the four supposed hijackings on 9/11/2001 had a 50% chance of success. Even then, the chances of four successes would be only one in sixteen (50% raised to the fourth power).
Note to reader: This post originally appeared on Monday, 3/16, and the first reactions I got were that it was too long. I therefore decided to re-post it in three parts, the second and their to appear tomorrow and the day after. Comments that appear before 8:42 were in response to the entire post.
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The post below was meant to establish that religion is an important part of human existence. Most people are religious, and it is a positive force in their lives. I note, however, that in matters of religious belief, by definition, there is no use for critical thinking. It is based on FAITH, which by definition requires no proof.
As noted in the post, religion exists and is a powerful force because people
need authority figures;
are suggestible;
and want simple answers
That is the human condition. I too am human. I have these same impulses.
It is my contention that most Americans who believe the official stories about the great crimes of our times do so based in a kind of religious faith. Critical thinking about say 9/11 or Boston or other crimes does not support the official stories. I called this faith “Americanism.”
Dr. Judy Wood, who examined the evidence around the events in the World Trade Center and destruction of the seven buildings there, came away with a completely different take on the matter, suggesting that the evidence points to use of directed energy in some form. Normal physical laws of matter and motion were not evident in the events that occurred that day. For example, buildings did not “collapse” but rather turned to dust before our eyes, and plasma (usually called “fire”) occurred without heat. It can be explained, but not in our normal frame of reference.
But beyond the physical evidence, she too speculated on why Americans are so quick to believe the official story, and postulated three reasons:
1: Poor problem solving skills;
2: Groupthink; and
3: Fear of the implications if the official story is a lie.
This post is intended to offer some basic mathematical principles, not to school anyone, but rather to use as a backdrop when examining evidence in future posts. My writing for the near future will be about evidence, and I will rely on a skill set known as “critical thinking,” often easily forgotten in our busy lives. So this is merely review.
It does not hurt, if we are going to be discussing the lies of our own times, to reflect on times past. The humble assumption is that people alive now are no smarter than those who came before. I assume that thought control is a product of our modern mass media, but how can that be?
I was raised a Catholic, and as a child my head was filled with notions of a risen savior and virgin birth. Such beliefs, designed for the mind of a child, are easily overcome with maturity except that while I was indoctrinated, I was also inocculated. I was told that anyone who told me the teachings of the Church was false was an agent of the devil. That made it very hard to mature intellectually.
It was done to me in the 1950s and 60s, and also to children throughout history, pre-mass media. Religion is a thought control regime. It is mostly benign. All of the wars that are blamed on religion really just hidden leaders using religion as an excuse.
But religion still exists and is powerful because people
need authority figures;
are suggestible;
and want simple answers.
Those simple answers do not exist. But religion supplies them anyway, and that makes people happy. So be it. Religion does far more good than harm.
Religious leaders throughout history have zeroed in on human weakness. Imagine then that leaders of civil society understood humans as well as religious leaders do. We might then expect that in civil life we would be supplied with mythology, images, dogmas, hallowed leaders and simple answers, just like a religion.
Americanism is a religion, just like Catholicism, and we are all indoctrinated and inoculated from birth. It is mostly benign in purpose, to bind us together as a nation, allowing us to live in harmony. It works. Montana has never invaded or bombed North Dakota, and probably won’t.
But what if our American religion were not so benign? What if our mythology was designed to make us warlike, acquisitive and aggressive, seeking to take control of resources of others? Americanism then might be a problem for the rest of the world.
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.
One of my favorite teachers growing up was a nun with a mustache, Sister Janice (ju-neese’), who I had in fifth and sixth grade. I probably did not learn anything worthwhile. By that time I knew how to read and cipher, so school was just repetition and testing. I do remember her, standing by the window overlooking First Second Avenue South in Billings as she talked about the death of Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations on September 18th of 1961, the day before. Sr. Janice, of course, thought that it was the International Communist Conspiracy that killed him, and we kids were brought up in that paranoid circus, so we thought that too. She spoke with gloom abut the world we were going to inherit.
Dag HammarskjoldIt would be years before I came to learn that Hammarskjold had been gunned down by our old buddies in the CIA, who had not too long before that also murdered Patrice Lumumba. In the coming months CIA would also dispatch Ecuadorian President Jose Velasco and General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.
The theme behind the murders was the dominant propaganda meme of the time, that they were communists. The real reason for their deaths was that in the wake of World War II, with Britain and France greatly weakened, former resource colonies were breaking free of chains and charting independence courses for themselves. The CIA, Capitalism’s Invisible Army, was appointed the new keeper of order and was in brush fire mode.
The murders served both to get rid of pesky democratic forces, but also to warn all others in the colonial world that a new sheriff was on the beat. Any who got in the way of American corporations’ access to local resources would encounter assassins, marines, fighter jets and thugs parading as American elected officials.
LBJ pointing at his …surgical scar.One such thug was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a crude and coarse man who once, when asked why we were in Vietnam, took out his dick and shook it at reporters saying “This is why.” Johnson was a murderer, but only a local thug. Many have inferred that his crimes in Texas suggest he had a role in the assassination of President Kennedy, but he was, in my view, merely controllable due to his corruption, much like Harry Truman. Those who wheeled him into the Vice Presidency, and ultimately presidency, knew he could be easily managed due to his past. His rightful place was in prison, or passing into the netherworld in a Texas gas chamber. He was that corrupt.
That’s just how it works – to the naive it appears that men and women arise from the grassroots and run for office and get elected and do the people’s business. There are indeed many people like that, but they don’t often get elected. They are not corruptible. One key to getting elected is a skeleton in the closet, a lever by which a person can be controlled. Ashley Dupré, used to honey trap Elliot Spitzer
Side note: Often enough, if a good lever does not exist, it can be supplied. For instance, the amazingly beautiful woman who did business with Elliot Spritzer and brought him down as governor of New York was part of a honey trap, a common ploy used to compromise troublesome officials. Please ask yourself, gentlemen, what you would do if this woman stumbled into your lap.
Many people know about Bobby Baker. He was a scandalous Washington, DC figure in the early 1960’s who ran a club where powerful people could engage in trysts and enjoy some protection. The Kennedy boys were clients, and JFK’s famous dalliance with an East German spy, Ellen Rometsch originated there. But Baker had many irons in the fire, and was tied to Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and so JFK had decided that in the 1964 election, Johnson would be dropped in favor of North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford.
That’s all filthy, but not unusual. Anywhere there is power, there is corruption, hookers, drugs, bag men and assassins. Johnson’s favorite assassin was guy named Mac Wallace. One witness has placed Wallace in a certain book depository on 11/22/63, but that’s more a rewriting of history, as CIA is anxious to do anything to deflect blame from itself in that murder. So there’s a school of thought that traces the JFK murder to LBJ, but it falls apart on close examination. Johnson was not powerful enough to orchestrate an event of that magnitude.
But Mac Wallace was a busy man.
Another friend of LBJ’s was Billy Sol Estes, who was doing a sale/leaseback scam for fertilizer storage tanks in West Texas. It sounds mundane, but there were 33,000 of them and it was a multi-million dollar enterprise. Following the money led back to a man in the Agriculture Department, Henry Marshall, who was tied to LBJ.
Billy Sol EstesLBJ ordered Marshall’s death – “get rid of him.” A man resembling Mac Wallace asked direction to Marshall’s home one day, and thereafter Marshall was bound with a plastic bag over his head and a hose running from an exhaust pipe, and was plugged with five bullet wounds. It was very clumsy. His body was moved to a nearby farm, and when the five bullets holes were tied to a shotgun found nearby, it was ruled a suicide. I guess it makes perfect sense in Texas.
In the succeeding months thereafter, George Kritilek (carbon monoxide), Harold Eugene Orr (ditto), Howard Pratt (need you ask?) and Coleman Wade (small plane crash – gotcha!) all turned up dead, and all ties between Billy Sol Estates and LBJ were severed. Billy Sol testified to all of this in 1984, after LBJ was dead, naming LBJ as a participant.
That’s your country, folks, just a small slice of real history. A thief and murderer sat in the White House for four years, in real life a man who should have been sitting in prison. Had he waved his dick at anyone there, it would have been severed.
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. 
Piece of Mindful 