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 hacks and water carriers are claiming that Jon Tester misspoke, overstated, or committed a gaffe. Maughan easily points out the obvious, that he’s spreading deliberate lies to advance the cause of subsidized logging in Montana.
The population of the United States is a smart bunch, generally, well-educated and well-versed in politics. Not much gets by them. I have been in and around politics most of my adult life, and so have familiarity with the attitudes and ideas, and the tactics by which people are grouped, for all our good, into movement politics.
By far the most effective, educated and cagey group is the Democrats. I was born and raised to be a Republican, but as I like to say, I got over to the other side as soon as I could. Once enmeshed with the culture, I found a rich garden, a full life complete with outlets for activism, self-education, and leadership. Democrats had all the bases covered. If I wanted to work to preserve the environment, they offered candidates and pamphlets and legislation designed for that purpose. If I wanted to work for human rights, where else to go? The Democratic program for Central America, the Middle East, South America and Southeast Asia was a feed bag of programs designed to advance development, democracy, and basic human dignity. The national platform included platforms on anti-racism, choice, the environment, control of the corporate sector, and most importantly, peace.
That’s why our society is so well equipped for world leadership. It’s not our leaders – sometimes we introduce clinkers like George W. Bush, but the society as a whole is so vibrant, so well schooled in ground-level organization, and so well-educated that he was but a passing ship in the night, an aberration. Soon enough he was upended and put out to pasture, and a real leader took is place, a highly intelligent man, a scholar, a community organizer, a charismatic figure, and one who was of a minority race. That sort of man could only come to a leadership position by the vehicle known as the “Democratic Party.”
So it is with some regret that I see Barack Obama’s term come to an end. Yet, and this speaks so highly of the party, there is no shortage of leaders. The party has a strong bench. Waiting in the wings is another person of intelligence, compassion, vision and skill, and a woman. I am four paragraphs into this, far enough down that everyone has stopped reading. I’ll return to the theme for the last paragraph, where most eyes generally skip when bored.
James Carville spoke at the Mansfield-Metcalf dinner in Helena last weekend. I should not have put the words “Mansfield-Metcalf” in this paragraph, as skimming eyes might pick up and read what is really being written here. But I think I am safe that most are moving on to the last paragraph. Swede brought me a quote, verified, from Carville, a man who I like for some reason. He said “The voter is basically dumb and lazy. The reason I became a Democratic operative instead of a Republican was there were more Democrats that didn’t have a clue than there were Republicans.” I am feeling a surge of pride in reading that, as I said as much on my own accord in the post below this, that Republican leadership does not have to lie to its base the way that Democrats do, as they are all “Benghazi crazy,” or on the same page ideologically, right-wing extremists who feed on and support one another.
Democrats are a wonderful party. I had to say that at paragraph opening for deflection purposes. Here is what is real. Democrats are a largely ineffective group, tending to be soft and idealistic to a degree, but who care more about winning elections and earning validation points than actually knowing anything about politics and policies. They are so easily buffaloed. Even now, as they are set to say goodbye to Neocon Obama, they are welcoming Neocon Hillary into leadership. She’ll win their nod because she stands a good chance of winning, and because her being a woman feeds their need for that sense of moral superiority they so crave. They’ll ignore her warmongering tendencies and vote her into office, if possible. This country is such a zoo, a well-to-do banana republic with a political iq somewhere in the teens. What was that blockbuster Tracy Jordan movie? Oh yeah. It was called Hard to Watch.
With Obama leaving office, we now might stumble, but I trust the Democrats, with such a deep bench, will put up another person of such intelligence and vision. I hope it’s Hillary, but I trust my party. If not her, someone of equal talent will rise through the ranks. Remember, Obama was known to no one, and by a natural process of grassroots percolation, found himself in Chicago at Grant Park in November of 2008. I saw the tears, the smiles, the hopes of a nation. Maybe that moment will never happen again, but I trust that in 2016, November, an New York, a similar moment comes about when a woman, with her former-president husband and daughter and grandchild at her side, speaks to the throngs of worshiping admirers.
This is our essence, our sense of purpose, our homeland, our hope for the future. We are all Americans, but as a Democratic American, I stand just a little higher in pride and fulfillment than the honorable members of the other permitted party.
It was three weeks ago tomorrow that I ate beef carpaccio in Akaroa, New Zealand, and I now feel that I am through the resulting illness. It was probably a staph infection, untreatable by antibiotics, carrying with it smaller attacks on eyes, ears, nose, throat, along with body fatigue and a sense of malaise. I am seven pounds lighter. (That’s the good part.)
Obviously I don’t get sick very often. I haven’t up till now, anyway. The whole episode was so strange to me. I am used to things passing through my body, being gone in a day or two with little aftermath. Such an episode as this helps me realize how vulnerable we are, how easily anything in our environment can take us down. I saw my three brothers, one by one, succumb to cancer, and last year a friend to an untreatable strain of leukemia. Each of these people treated their demise with courage, but there comes a point when they must realize …“Oh my God, this happens to other people. Can it be? This time it is me?”
How profound must be the resulting finality. Maybe it’s a release too, I don’t know, but I will someday. I do know that our friend with leukemia said to his son as he lay in bed dealing with yet another symptom, “It would be so much easier just to be hit by a bus.”
Former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam has had a great career after those halcyon days, and directed and helped write the movie “Brazil.” (I just now learned it is considered a “cult classic.”) It’s a dystopian fantasy about an Orwellian society where the authority figures are buffoons, machines do everything but don’t work properly, and where a mere administrative error has brought imprisonment to the lead character. Unknown to the viewer, this one anyway, he is engaged in fantasy, chasing the woman of his dreams, and near escape when he awakens, realizes he’s in a chair, in prison, soon to die. The trivial administrative error cannot be undone.
That moment, that realization hit me so hard so many years ago seeing that film. It was so well done. It describes what I am attempting to say here, that we are all fools strutting on a stage. I am so thrilled to have come through my illness intact. But down the road, there’ll be another. Am I ready? Of course not!
We’ve been all over the world these last few years, living life to the fullest. We’re lucky, I know. Others are jealous, I know. One thing I know as we plan future travels, one place we are not going: Brazil.
I often don’t know when I sit down to write where a piece is going. So too this one.
The public execution of Boris Nemstov is well-handled at Saker and by Paul Craig Roberts, and given the usual and expected TASS-like state subservient treatment by FOX and Huffington Post and the other usual suspects.
But worth mention is one important principle: the absence of skepticism in American news media. If the state says it is so, it is so.
The murder most likely was false flag, designed to exacerbate internal dissent in Russia, and part of the overarching attack in that country by the U.S. and its European Union pawns, and of course, the putsch government in Kiev.
There’s little evidence, of course, and the matter will fade to the degree that evidence contradicts official truth, just as with the downing of Flight MH17 last year. I only highlight one certainty, that “Putin,” or the Russian state, is not stupid, and would not do such a clumsy crime. If they thought Nemstov important enough to warrant liquidation, he’d be just as dead, but in a far more sophisticated manner. Wellstone/JFK Jr.-like small plane crash is usually most effective.
I do not claim that the Russian government is innocent and pure. It is in survival mode, under attack by US and its subordinates. But Russians are wary and cagey people, long used to attacks from the West, and very good at self-preservation and self-defense. As demonstrated at Ossetia in 2008, they are also effective military strategists and warriors, quickly and easily dispatching US/Israeli backed fighters at that confrontation, to international consternation.
A direct military confrontation with Russia will be costly, so fomentation of internal rebellion is the next best option, and in that framework, a public murder of an opposition leader in a false flag operation is a natural course of events.
The murder of Boris Nemstov was clumsy and poorly done, timed for maximum effect, but probably having less than desired impact. The US and its agents probably messed up, and I am impressed.
I often think of the US war machine as unstoppable, but then I realize that it has undergone military defeat in Vietnam, Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and now Ukraine. It might just be growing increasingly desperate. That is an extremely dangerous situation for children and other living things on this planet.
Piece of Mindful 