My first thought is "WTF!" But my second is this: every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually). With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues, it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
> With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues, it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
Also, let's not kid ourselves, even if Boeing doesn't retaliate (and there is a lot of reason to think they have), being a whistleblower adds a tremendous amount of stress & disruption to your life. Whatever your life expectancy was before you were a whistleblower was, it's going to be lower (likely MUCH lower) afterwards. It's a terrible price to pay, which is why they deserve as much protection & support as possible.
"The appeal failed in 2002 and Steven returned to work but things for him and the country were never the same again. He died aged 39 after a heart attack in 2004 leaving a widow, Leigh, their young children Georgia and Jay and a son Rhys from a previous relationship. Leigh also passed away in 2017."
To die of the stress caused by (indirectly) being enforced to use a 'new' measurement system must be one of the weirdest causes of deaths i have ever read about.
Even fines seem wildly disproportionate. Its one thing to regulate how one interacts with the gocernment, it is quite a lot less appropriate for government to regulate private transactions when the validity is easily and cheaply verifiable by either party.
Sure but dictating what units to use is a bit overboard. A pound should be a pound and a kilo a kilo but what units I use in commerce is my business, not the state’s.
It would have been a lot easier for him if he had simply sold the bananas at a flat per-banana price. That's typically how many grocery stores in the US sell them (notably Trader Joe's). Here in Japan, they typically sell them in small bunches for a fixed price, with the small bananas sold at a lower price (for a group of 3 or 4) and the larger ones at a higher price next to them. There's no need to weigh bananas at the point at the point of sale at all.
That’s an awful lot of BS to swallow. I know the blue pill is nice and all. But just know, the day you finally doubt what you’ve typed, the red pill is there waiting for you when you’re ready to see fact over fiction. But I warn and caution you in hopes of deterring you: the Truth is usually more depressing than the fantasy.
I guess what’s missing is the denominator. How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? It’s a nice little math problem.
Let’s say both of the whistleblowers were age 50. The probability of a 50 year old man dying in a year is 0.6%. So the probability of 2 or more of them dying in a year is 1 - (the probability of exactly zero dying in a year + the probability of exactly one dying in a year). 1 - (A+B).
A is (1-0.006)^N. B is 0.006N(1-0.006)^(N-1). At 60 A is about 70% and B is about 25% making it statistically insignificant.
But they died in the same 2 month period, so that 0.006 should be 0.001. If you rerun the same calculation, it’s 356.
You are ignoring literally every other variable, especially the ones that are likely common to whistleblowers in general, Boeing employees in general, and Boeing whistleblowers in particular.
Characteristics like having spent a career building airplanes surrounded by all kinds of mechanical and chemical hazards.
Whistleblowing itself is extremely stressful for the attention it draws, the personal and professional relationships it strains, the media attention and of course the rampant speculation of assassination.
Does personal health influence the psychology of a whistleblower? If you get a terminal diagnosis would you be more likely to spill the beans?
That’s why I said the denominator is important. If you hit a home run on your first at bat it doesn’t mean you can bat 1000 the whole season.
On the other hand, the more variables you add the more variance you’ll get. Actuarial tables use deaths per 100k. To my knowledge there haven’t been 100k Boeing whistleblowers.
Why would there need to be 100k whistleblowers? That’s not how actuarial tables work. They’re normalized to a population of 100k, that doesn’t mean they’re derived from a population of 100k.
Yes, reality is complex and messy and confusing and we often don’t have data to describe it. That’s why it’s important to know when we are dealing with relevant facts and when we are constructing a spherical cow out of scraps in their absence.
This is some very specific, public, whistleblowers, in the span of months. Not some pool of thousands, or even hundreds people with mere "potential to criticize".
Corporations conspiring to kill not just one but several undesirable employees is very rare. Actually, I don't really know of any other example.
And here it also doesn't make any sense; the cat is out of the bag, there is nothing to cover up because we already know about Boeing being a clusterfuck. Killing anyone doesn't really make much difference.
"Surely it can't be coincidence", "corporations conspire", and vague references to "military industrial complex" are exceedingly poor arguments – actually they're not really arguments at all because you can say that sort of thing about almost anything.
> there is nothing to cover up because we already know about Boeing being a clusterfuck
We know about the results, when doors blow off and tires fall off. You don’t need a whistleblower to tell you that.
We know less about what’s happening internally. I think the relevant information is the extent to which Boeing knew about problems and what they did with that information.
That's literally what both of these guys already made public at different times about different facilities. Is there reason to think they had additional information that they just decided not to share?
> And here it also doesn't make any sense; the cat is out of the bag, there is nothing to cover up because we already know about Boeing being a clusterfuck
Executives are the ones that have motivations, not the abstract entity of Corporation.
'Cat out of the bag' would be 'we have specific evidence that allows us to prosecute a specific executive for criminal negligence or manslaughter'. That would be why you might kill someone, to save your own skin.
'Cat out of the bag' would be 'we have specific evidence that allows us to prosecute a specific executive for criminal negligence or manslaughter'. That would be why you might kill someone, to save your own skin.
Is there any reason to believe that either one of these men had any such evidence and had thus far not shared it?
Yes, things seen in Netflix never happen in this pure and innocent world.
Presidents are not assasinated, blackmail doesn't happen, whistleblowers are not hunted, persecuted and murders, union leaders aren't targetted, hush money are never involved, corporations don't lie and cover up crimes, the head of FBI never kept tabs on politicians and public figures for blackmail, prior-presidents never pay hush money to hookers or do shady business dealings, running-presidents and their sons never get bribed to promote business deals or cover up corruption, and nice sinecures on corporate boards never await ex-presidents and prominent politicians who catered to those corporations during their time in office.
No you don't know of any other companies doing this. Nobody does. And in a few years, nobody will even remember this either. Whistle blowers, or witnesses, against powerful interests have this habit of constantly dying in really exceptional circumstances. And there's never any proof available that it was anything other than just extremely rare events, happening constantly, and in a very small population of people. Go figure.
The reason groups want to get rid of whistle blowers is two-fold. The first is to try to prevent on record testimony. But the second is to intimidate other whistle blowers. If you see some funkiness, even the sort leading to deaths, going on at Boeing right now, you're going to be thinking long and hard about these 'mysterious deaths.'
There is almost certainly no crime these whistleblowers are going to uncover that is worse than ordering a hit. Besides, I can't think of any crime more likely to fail, be a sting, or have monstrous blowback.
The reality is that the top brass are NEVER held accountable for the kind of mistakes Boeing has been making. Even when it leads to deaths, the worst one of these guys can expect is to resign with only a 15 million dollar parachute.
Sure, but how many people are whistleblowers about Boeing misbehavior. I would guess at most a hundred, the chances that two of them die in such a short time seems low. What are the odds that an apparently healthy person just drops dead in two weeks over the span of maybe two years. Certainly seems somewhat unlikely.
We can ballpark these odds relatively easily. Dean was 45 and Barnett was 62. Let's assume they are somewhat representative of the average whistleblower and the average whistleblower is in average health. Let's use the standard government actuarial tables[2] and assume the average age is 56 just to make the math easier since the odds of a single 56 year old dying in a given year is roughly 1%. The odds of at least 1 of the 32 dying would be 28% and the odds of 2 dying would be 4%. Unlikely enough to be suspicious, but not unlikely enough to be anything close to the smoking gun that some are suggesting.
Wouldn't it be fair to distinguish between the baseline probability of any death, and the baseline probability of a death that could plausibly be suspicious, such as gunshot suicide?
Sure, this was back of the napkin math and there will be plenty of ways to improve it. The problem is that the more details you add, the more difficult it will be to find actual numbers to put on these things as opposed to using the above actuarial tables if we lump all deaths together.
And for what it is worth, one of these deaths would be in the "suspicious" category and one wouldn't.
I think that would be a statistical mistake to cherry-pick the cutoff like that. What would be the argument for ignoring the X months/years beforehand in which no one died?
If I asked you for the odds of the next three coin tosses being heads, you don't start counting on the first heads. The first toss being tails is a possible outcome that can't be ignored.
That is an excellent point. Maybe the math has to be using the average length of time the whistleblowers have been 'out' as it were. That could plausibly end up being several years, which pushes the 1:32 number a lot closer to 'certain' and the 2:32 number way up into entirely plausible.
Also his isn't quite correct. John Barnett (first death) left Boeing in 2017 and his whistle blowing did not occur within the last 3 years. The 32 complaints stat is for the last 3 years.
Also it's not even clear if the most recent death (Josh Dean) would be included in those stats. He worked for Spirit and claims that he reported improperly drilled holes in the 737 Max fuselage and that nothing was done. The claim would probably be against Spirit not Boeing. It's being reported in the media as Boeing, but in paperwork it would probably be against Spirit.
My ex killed herself not long after telling me she wasn't suicidal. This may surprise you, but suicidal people often lie about being suicidal. Or, they rapidly go from not being suicidal to being so. Or, due to mental illness, they've lost a grip on reality.
Not leaning either way, but there was a famous case about a lawyer in Guatemala who recorded a video message claiming he wasn't suicidal and that the government was out to kill him. He was killed days later and the video was released. The country was (briefly) thrown in to turmoil. A few days later it came out that he had ordered a hit on himself.
That article is an absolute hodgepodge of statements and retractions, but the same hitman appears to have also killed the laywer's clients, who were causing problems for the regime. That seems like pretty strong evidence that it wasn't a suicide by hitman, unless the lawyer also had his own clients killed?
I don’t know, it was presumably extremely stressful. Extremely stressful events or when a lot of people kill them themselves.
I don’t really have a strong opinion on this particular instance one way or another. It seems unlikely to me that even Boeing is like hiring hitman to whack people and make it look like suicide, and that seems much more unlikely than a guy who was about to commit suicide saying he wasn’t going to make it look that way.
But also, it is not impossible. People have undoubtedly killed for a lot less money than what this stuff is costing Boeing.
> I don’t know, it was presumably extremely stressful. Extremely stressful events or when a lot of people kill them themselves.
Or sometimes to attack the people who made their lives extremely stressful. Or someone who works for them. Or commit arson. But somehow that's not what we are observing
Perhaps he viewed Boeing’s malfeasance as killing people. It did. And it was a clever form of martyrdom. That’s not exactly 3D chess, it’s just thinking one move ahead.
I really have no idea. I just don’t think we can say definitively that he didn’t kill himself because he said he would not.
That’s why it always cracks me up (in a sad way) when people tell someone suffering an anxiety attack to just calm down, or someone depressed to cheer up. Like oh, why didn’t I think of that? Thanks genius!
Telling someone you're not suicidal and then committing suicide sounds more like she was depressed and people worried about her and she wanted to calm people by telling them she won't commit suicide.
The wisleblower of a worldwide famous controversial airplane company didn't seem suicidal or depressed, and then he says if he hits the news that he commuted suicide it's not.
That's 2 completely different situations that you can't really compare.
You can compare any two things. Abraham Lincoln is taller than a turtle.
I wasn’t equating the two, just pointing out that suicidal people are not in their right mind and thus their word cannot be taken at face value. Perhaps he did the sequence of events we’re discussing specifically so that we’d be saying it can’t be suicide. He was, after all, trying to take Beoing down right? Maybe he viewed it as a worthy way to give his life.
I’m not saying that’s the case, I surely have no idea, just that it very well could be.
It just doesn't make sense to me that someone would commit suicide with the idea that people would think that he was murdered by a company you want to expose. That's just a ridiculous idea. Yes it's an idea and a possibility, but yeah it's very very unlikely I would say, so unlikely that it's not worth considering too much. Because it highly probably didn't happen like that, because it doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up. It's not a good theory. Even if it's a possibility.
People that commit suicide is because they stopped caring about their life. They won't have any side goals for their death, they won't care about taking down a company. Especially not if that covers up the truth of them being fed up with this world which would be the only message they would want to leave behind.
If someone really wants to take a company down, they would do stuff for that, not commit suicide with the idea that you might have blamed them for it without having assurance, and with the risk of being remembered as someone who faked their suicide in order to harm a company. It just really doesn't make logical sense to me.
Combined with the suicide two months ago (with his prior warning "please don't believe that I committed suicide") this deserves an investigation, not a simple dismissal.
Actuarial tables are for all people. So it also of course includes deaths from cancer, obesity related diseases, alcoholism/drug abuse, etc. The odds of a healthy 45 year old just randomly dying from a mysterious infection are going to be orders of magnitude lower than 0.41%.
Does anyone know if they're investigating that? It was supposedly in his car, in the hotel parking lot he was staying at for the deposition. Seems implausible there wasn't a security camera somewhere in the vicinity.
A friend died at 40 from lung cancer despite never smoking. It's rare but it happens. How many proven assassinations of corporate whistleblowers have happened in the US? I think it's zero in the last 100 years at least.
I mean, that's not exactly the same. These guys were running a local tree-cutting serving, not a Fortune 500. And they weren't just accused of negligent business practice, they were accused of human trafficking and theft. They murdered a whistleblower to keep themselves out of jail, not to protect share prices.
> These guys were running a local tree-cutting serving, not a Fortune 500.
I imagine Boeing can do anything a local tree-cutting service can do.
> And they weren't just accused of negligent business practice, they were accused of human trafficking and theft. They murdered a whistleblower to keep themselves out of jail, not to protect share prices.
Boeing execs are accused of committing massive fraud which endangered the lives of thousands, as well as other crimes to cover up the safety issues. They are currently under criminal investigation, with many individuals facing possible jail time. When people say corporate assassination, they mean people working for a corporation orchestrate the death of a person for reasons associated with the corporation.
So, for one, you just glossed over my point. Namely, no otherwise legitimate corporation has ever killed a whistleblower. Secondly, this tree-cutting service was run by two people who were caught. Boeing could not possibly pull of a murder-for-hire conspiracy without leaking. They can't pull off a skip-a-few-bolts-to-save-money conspiracy without leaking. And again, I ask what would they possibly be trying to accomplish by murdering people who's story is already told? What in the absolute world would they get out of murdering someone from a supplier while half the world thinks they just murdered someone else? They would be committing corporate suicide over cases they would probably be able to settle out of.
> So, for one, you just glossed over my point. Namely, no otherwise legitimate corporation has ever killed a whistleblower.
You claimed no corporation had killed a whistleblower in 100 years. I gave an example of a corporation killing a whistleblower from the past 5 years. I don't know how I could have possibly addressed that point more clearly.
You subsequently made a "no true Scotsman" argument that this example of a corporation killing a whistleblower doesn't count, I argued the opposite. Even if we ignored this example, that would not make the statement "no otherwise legitimate corporation has ever killed a whistleblower" true. I'm not going to go through the effort of producing more evidence when what I have already presented proves my point, but that does not mean the example I provided was the only instance of such an occurrence.
> Secondly, this tree-cutting service was run by two people who were caught. Boeing could not possibly pull of a murder-for-hire conspiracy without leaking. They can't pull off a skip-a-few-bolts-to-save-money conspiracy without leaking.
So your argument is that they couldn't have committed a crime since they have been caught conspiring to commit too many crimes already? Absurd. For starters, just because they haven't been caught yet doesn't mean they won't be later. Then it does not stand to reason that a massive conspiracy to bypass safety regulations involving countless employees and multiple facilities is easier to keep secret than the clandestine actions of a small number of people or even perhaps a single person.
> And again, I ask what would they possibly be trying to accomplish by murdering people who's story is already told? What in the absolute world would they get out of murdering someone from a supplier while half the world thinks they just murdered someone else? They would be committing corporate suicide over cases they would probably be able to settle out of.
Again, multiple people at Boeing are facing criminal prosecution based primarily on the testimony of this whistleblower and others like him. If whistleblowers don't testify, they don't go to jail. The corporation would be able to settle, but the specific execs involved would not.
Why would anyone commit murder if they know they could be caught? And yet, murders occur, and murderers get caught. Hell, why would an aircraft company commit a skip-a-few-bolts-to-save-money plot if they could be caught? Obviously they take the risk that they can get away with it. Sure two whistleblowers dead in two months looks sketchy, but not one person has actually been accused of anything. Even if 5 more whistleblowers died in the next 24 hours, all found with gunshots to the back of the head, it wouldn't on its own be enough evidence to finger any particular person for the crime. And even if someone were caught, that doesn't necessarily mean every co-conspirator would be. If faced with a choice between guaranteed jail time for a crime someone is about to testify you committed versus a non-zero chance of getting away scot-free, many people would choose the latter.
> they murdered a whistleblower to keep themselves out of jail, not to protect share prices.
And Boeing is accused of far worse, hundreds of people have died.
If a whistleblower has proof that a some executive has personally ordered to put into service a dangerous product, knowing full well that it will kill people? That's jailtime.
In my opinion it's highly unlikely he was murdered, however if he was, personally, I would be more inclined to pin the blame on an adversary of the Americans to sew some distrust vs Boeing or it's shareholders.
You have to remember that anything about Boeing gets clicks, and immediately engage your critical thinking. The Boeing 767 has been in production for over 40 years, and at this point is very nearly out of production aside from a few that are built each year for cargo use. The plane in question is 33 years old. A typical airliner lifespan is 20-25 years. Any problem with a plane of that age is maintenance, not design.
> Any problem with a plane of that age is maintenance, not design.
I am p sure noone has been saying the designes of the aircrafts are fundamentally unsafe and a risk. It's always been a problem of negligence and lack of security culture, which maintenance problems fall under.
In my subset of aviation the end user is only to follow manufacturer approved maintenance guidelines, with no deviations. So I believe it's not a critical thinking problem, as much as a distinct lack of domain knowledge in comments like these.
The proper comparison is not the size of the employee pool over a human lifespan its the size of the list of people actively advocating or publicly known to be testifying against Boeing over the course of a month.
That's a ridiculous idea. If you commit suicide because of years of depression that you can't get out of and don't have any positive outlook on the future, you wouldn't care about wisleblowing and bringing some bad rep to a company.
And especially you wouldn't cover up your suicide. You wouldn't want to lie to your family about the cause of your dead just to get back at some company you worked for.
I don't think this is a good theory. I don't see the logic in that. Much more logical if he was assassinated because he was spreading info that people with big money didn't want out.
Or he just got an infection. How do you think they MRSA into his lungs? Not even Putin can pull off an execution that slick with a chemical weapons lab.
Not that I disagree with you, but since the is the most upvoted comment - had this happened in, say, Russia, people would say: "The bloody Putin's totalitarianism!". But in the US, well: "[...] every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die". This is absolutely hilarious and deserves the best comment of the year award.
No-one is truly healthy. Everything is a game of statistics
You may be totally healthy and the peak of physical fitness and a sudden stroke destroys you. Everyone can improve their chances, but no-one can guarantee they're indestructible.
> every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually)
That's extremely tautological.
> it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
It's surprising they have so many whistle blowers that more than one has died in a short span of time, in particular, before the investigations over their allegations have been satisfactorily and publicly completed.
> and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
That doesn't mean it's pointless to ask questions and to investigate further. There's a lot of people who seem very eager for this all to just "go away." That should make anyone, let alone a forum of hackers, somewhat suspicious.
> I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.
No. It happens every day. Yes, if you pick two random middle-aged people at random, it's exceedingly rare for both of them to die without warning. However, if you pick a large population of otherwise healthy middle-aged people, the probably that two of them might die without warning is actually quite high.
The question is, how large is the population? If the union is to be believed (and there's a lot of credibility there), Boeing whistleblowers are a pretty large population. Add in to that the stress & disruption of being a whistleblower, and then layer on the stress from any retaliation from Boeing (which allegedly is happening on a daily basis), and the probability of two of them dying around the same time isn't really that low.
e.g., if you assume a mortality rate of 1 in 1000/yr (which seems very low, considering their circumstance) and a population of 100, the odds of two of them dying over the course of a year is over 50% (1-0.999^100)^2 = 53.29%.
I'm really trying to figure out where you got 53.29% from. Your formula is not only not how you'd calculate this, but gives 0.009. If you want to know the right answer, the easiest way is to do a binomial calculation, which is easiest using a calculator [1].
The answer is there being at least (so this value includes all possible values >= 2) 2 deaths in a population of 100 with a rate of 1 in 1000, would be 0.464%.
If we assume their base mortality rate is 0.1%, that the pool is only 100, and that the deaths are completely independent (and we know that since they were both whistleblowers, both worked for the sample employer, that may very well not be true), it's a low probability case, yes. The sense is that those are both extremely conservative numbers.
Try looking at the cumulative probability for P(X>=2) when you manipulate the numbers a bit. Even if you just change the base probability of mortality to 1%, it jumps to 26% chance. If you restrict the population to 32 people, the threshold for it be more likely to happen than not is a 5.2% chance of death.
I'm not sure why you think the 0.5% figure is relevant. One of them was 62. Even if they were both 45-55, their risk of death would no doubt be dramatically higher than the mean. They were both whistle blowers, and not just ordinary whistle blowers, but whistle blowers in a high profile story. IIRC, at least one of them had been fired from their job in the last year. That's not average for that age group.
Here is how to use the calculator, because you're still messing up the math a bit. We'll assume a 1% chance of death, and a population of 32.
---
Probability = 0.01
Number of Trials = 32
Number of Successes = 2
Now you look at cumulative probability (P X>=2) = 4%
---
You are correct that if bump the chances up to an annual 5.2% of death, then finally it starts becoming reasonably probable. So, for contrast, whistle blowers at Boeing seem to have approximately the same survival rate as somebody diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.
I agree with you in that the population size is the key question here. However, I have two issues:
First, otherwise healthy people don't just die from stress. Stress can sometimes exacerbate underlying health issues and lead to a long, downward spiral in health that can result in death, but it does not happen in a matter of just weeks or a couple months. It also does not happen in people without underlying health issues.
Second, while a mortality rate of 0.001/yr is reasonable for middle-aged men, that assumes we know nothing about them or their deaths—that isn't the case here. John Barnett's death was a suicide. According to the CDC, there were 14,668 suicides in the 45–64 age group in 2021. The 2020 census shows that there are 85 million people in the US in that same age group. The suicide mortality rate comes out to 0.00017, which is about an order of magnitude lower than your estimate. Josh Dean was otherwise healthy from what's being reported. Given his age and state of health, his 1-year mortality rate is also likely substantially lower than your estimate
> First, otherwise healthy people don't just die from stress. Stress can sometimes exacerbate underlying health issues and lead to a long, downward spiral in health that can result in death, but it does not happen in a matter of just weeks or a couple months. It also does not happen in people without underlying health issues.
First, there's a difference between being "otherwise healthy" and appearing to be "otherwise healthy". People who seem otherwise healthy but under a tremendous amount of stress are absolutely more likely to die from a sudden heart attack or stroke. People who seem otherwise healthy but under a tremendous amount of stress are absolutely more likely to commit suicide. People who seem otherwise healthy but under a tremendous amount of stress are absolutely more likely to be in a car accident...
> Second, while a mortality rate of 0.001/yr is reasonable for middle-aged men, that assumes we know nothing about them or their deaths—that isn't the case here. John Barnett's death was a suicide. According to the CDC, there were 14,668 suicides in the 45–64 age group in 2021. The 2020 census shows that there are 85 million people in the US in that same age group. The suicide mortality rate comes out to 0.00017, which is about an order of magnitude lower than your estimate. Josh Dean was otherwise healthy from what's being reported. Given his age and state of health, his 1-year mortality rate is also likely substantially lower than your estimate
I don't agree that John Barnett's death was as likely to occur as anyone else in that age group. He was almost certainly experiencing stress above the level of the top percentile of the 45-64 population. The mean likelihood of suicide mortality isn't representative of his risk condition.
But you're right, if you narrow it down to the specifics of the deaths, you can absolutely reduce the probability to ridiculously low percentages. Like throw in the day of the week that they died, the hour of the day, the use of a gun, the specific gun used, etc. Does that really reduce the chances that they died though?
> But you're right, if you narrow it down to the specifics of the deaths, you can absolutely reduce the probability to ridiculously low percentages. Like throw in the day of the week that they died, the hour of the day, the use of a gun, the specific gun used, etc. Does that really reduce the chances that they died though?
The chance they died is 100%. The question we're asking is what are the odds we'd be talking about their death. If it had been a different day of the week or a different model of gun, that would not have an influence. If the cause of death were different, it would. No one would be talking about foul play had he died of say a long term chronic condition, or cancer, or a natural disaster. The odds of dying under suspicious circumstances are inherently less than the odds of just dying in general.
> No one would be talking about foul play had he died of say a long term chronic condition, or cancer, or a natural disaster. The odds of dying under suspicious circumstances are inherently less than the odds of just dying in general.
This is an extremely important point, looking at most causes of death, they are things like Heart Disease, Alzheimer, Chancers, diabetes. Nobody would be accusing Boeing if that was the case. Comparing this to general chance of death will lead to vast overestimate.
You have to compare to causes of death that are sudden, where the person was healthy enough to testify in court just a few weeks ago.
How do you figure this is suspicious circumstances? The pathology seems pretty reasonable, he got sick, developed pneumonia & MRSA, and ultimately suffered a stroke. It's not like he had radiation poisoning.
It's suspicious in that foul play can not be easily ruled out. It is plausible that someone could be deliberately infected with an infectious disease that has high odds of killing someone quickly. Conversely it's not plausible to say make a hurricane strike someone's house.
And again, this is all with the context of another suspicious death - gunshot wound to the head. Again, suspicious because foul play is plausible, not because there are no other reasonable explanations.
If someone died of something for which there was no reasonable explanation besides foul play, such as radiation poisoning, that would be referred to as evidence.
There you go. Because it is after the fact, it's a given. It's not surprising that you can find a connection of some kind between them after the fact. Just because you can, after the fact, draw the connection, doesn't change the probability that they are dead.
I was unaware of such prediction, but it's unsurprising. In that case, it's the probability of one dying, which was no more unlikely than the first one.
...and of course, people have said this about whistleblowers and witnesses who testify thousands of times. It'd be weird if one of those forecasts didn't come true once in a while.
One of those people died of a gunshot wound, so whether it was self-inflicted or not, their age and health and any related statistics have nothing to do with the death.
> One of those people died of a gunshot wound, so whether it was self-inflicted or not, their age and health and any related statistics have nothing to do with the death.
Mental health is health. Age and physical health are factors that can effect mental health, particularly when someone is under tremendous amounts of stress. Their age and health could very well have something to do with their death.
> Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
Yeah, out of a population of 32, it's unlikely to happen. It seems likely that this number is grossly underrepresenting the size of the population. Maybe whistleblowers are being targeted, maybe there are a lot more than 32, maybe both of those are true, but it seems unlikely that both of them are false.
There were 2 deaths from the population of known whistleblowers. If there are additional unknown whistleblowers, they still don't count as members of the population. There's no way to count deaths among unknown whistleblowers.
And if someone had predicted ahead of time that the second dead boeing whistleblower would have a first name starting with J that would have been quite astounding. But since we are waiting until after the two whistleblowers are dead and then choosing something we already know they have in common, no it is not any less probable.
I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.
Suicide is the 7th leading cause of death for men 55-62. It's considerably more common than murder.
Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
Barnett hadn't worked for Boeing since 2017, and was being deposed as part of his appeal of his original whistleblower complaint. It makes no sense to think that someone trying to silence him would wait until 7 years and one Netflix documentary have transpired.
No, he did not. This is literally false. Someone who claims they are a "close family friend" who talked with him occasionally "at get-togethers, birthdays, celebrations and whatnot" told a local news affiliate that he told her that in private.
Which is something quite different from him personally reaching out to the local news affiliate and telling them that.
Not to be cynical or make any claim about this particular case, but if a person were going to commit suicide as a kind of FU to someone, then it seems like making this kind of statement before adds an extra layer of FU.
That doesn't make any sense. You're calling someone ignorant for favoring evidence over hearsay and hysteria. That's the exact opposite of witch trials, where the whole concept is finding guilt without evidence.
You're trying to defend a conspiracy theory by saying that waiting for even a shred of actual evidence is willfully ignorant? Really? And your point of comparison is a religious belief, something by definition not based on evidence? Wow.
Here is an illustration that demonstrates that the OP’s expectation is unrealistic and that nobody here actually thinks that way:
Dozens of Putin’s opponents died by falling out of a window, and no evidence of any kind was found that they were murdered. However, if I clam that Putin’s opponents were murdered, nobody calls it a conspiracy theory. Why?
Because a) we would not be told if there was physical evidence b) dozens of specific people dying suspiciously is statistically impossible, that is evidence in its own right.
So either the OP thinks that Putin is innocent, in which case his opinion is questionable
Or his position is based on a-priory trust to an institution and not on evidence, in which case it is also questionable.
It is probably the second - some people trust Boeing and some people think, hey, they already killed several hundred passengers, civility and sanity can no longer be taken for granted.
But as improbably events happen more and more, a sane person must shift their position to account for this. Ignoring improbably events and demanding physical evidence as people die would be madness.
Evidence of Putin murdering opponents has been discovered. Alexander Litvinenko being an excellent example.
The problem with your speculation as it relates to Boeing is that you have extrapolated from “someone had someone killed once” to “everyone who dies was assassinated”. I don’t believe you are making such an assertion but you’re attacking the method of thinking that avoids it.
You need to leave some room for there to be other causes of death, even in cases that feel suspicious. If there are suspicious circumstances they should and will be investigated. But if nothing nefarious is found that’s not evidence of foul play.
I’m having a hard time seeing how pneumonia and stroke could be inflicted on a person as part of a cover up. Seems like this was just unfortunate illness.
Pneumonia is just a lung infection, so I imagine there's a number of ways you can make a person to unknowingly inhale something.
However, it looks way too complicated for a plot. There are many tried and proven methods of getting rid of people. Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works - we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done - shootings, stabbings, explosions, poisons, drownings, falling from heights, whatever - but I can't remember any case where a biological agent were used. And thinking about it - biological agents are hard to produce, hard to handle, unstable, unpredictable in use, can't be properly targeted, why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?
So while it does look suspicious on its face, I'd have hard time believing it's an example of an assassination.
> Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works
This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.
> we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done
Let's not forget about survivorship bias. You only know about the assassinations you know about. You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.
I believe that was indeed their point. People used to dismiss mass surveillance of the US on its people as a crackpot conspiracy theory, until the full extent of it was revealed by Snowden.
Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Just a handful though.
By "people" you mean "some people" and there are always some people. For as long as I've been alive the predominant public opinion has been that mass surveillance does take place. We've had evidence for that decades before Snowden got specific about the NSA's abilities.
> Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.
But that's not true - actually, we learned about the mass surveillance reasonably soon after it started. They aren't actually good at hiding. True, there was a period that somebody could say "we haven't learned about it yet so it probably doesn't exist" - which would be fallacious - but within a reasonable period of time, that option had disappeared.
Now, with assassinations, the biological weapons option has been existing for almost 100 years. If that were so common that even corporate machinators don't hesitate to use it to silence a witness of fairly low importance - we'd have heard at least a couple of cases, at least some rumors or defector reports. Just as we did with all other means of getting rid of witnesses. Since we didn't, I attribute very low probability to the possibility that this is how we learn about this being common.
> You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.
Yes, I mentioned that in my comment. However, as I also mentioned, we have, over the years, pretty generous sample out of the mass of all assassinations. It would be rather weird if assassinations specifically using biological agents were somehow so special that while we have leaks about pretty much every other kind, we don't have any indications specifically about those. One could assume that is because this method is used only by the very best operatives going for very high-value target - but then we'd need to explain why suddenly Boeing corporates have access to it to deal with a pretty low-grade issue (and frankly I don't even see how it helps them by now - they are so deep in doo-doo anyway that one less witness is not going to save them). Such assumptions do not form a coherent picture if you look at the likelihood of the events involved.
Not really. It depends more on how you interpret the phrase "the dumb ones." It's clear that if the IQ distribution of prisoners skews lower than the general population, then we only catch "the dumb ones" with respect to the general population. What isn't necessarily clear is that we only catch "the dumb ones" with respect to the IQ distribution of all criminals. (I don't think we even know or have any good way of determining what the IQ distribution of all criminals even is, do we?) It's just another instance where plain language can fail to be precise.
This is a good point. People here seem to be assuming that Boeing is competent at carrying out hits, which I highly doubt. We should consider whether they have actually tried it on a bunch of people.
These things are ordered by executives as individuals (or small groups with similar exposure), not abstract legal entities. It's not like it was decided at a board meeting, LOL.
And one would expect are carried out by people good at their jobs. After all they're paid top dollar for this service. those people have not only tried it, they have impressive resumes at it to be hired in the first place. Like how corporations in the past used to use the mob to do those things to annoying union leaders.
The murders not being solved aren't "Perfect crimes". It's a matter of resources and timing.
99% of murder investigations mostly boil down to:
1. Literally witnessed by one or more people, possibly officers or on camera.
2. They brag about it.
3. A brief investigation of friends and family where it turns out so and so always hated them and happens to have a gun, and hey look at that the ballistics match.
There are a very small number of officers in comparison to the total population (as it should be), and the vast majority of them are not the kind being assigned to homicide.
Some major % of the "unsolved" murders in the US that mostly just get thrown on the pile because they find out 2 weeks later and either can't identify the victim, or can't find enough useful information to start investigating. Forensics is very useful, but hardly as portrayed in shows like CSI, and the simple realities of "well we didn't find much, found out weeks later, and it'll be weeks before we get any lab results back" often just mean there's 10 other "no shit" murders to deal with instead.
And this isn't even on the core topic here of "could this have been a hit by Boeing", which is just insanely unbelievable, ESPECIALLY given the method. People are off handledly mentioning things like Ricin or Polonoium attacks, but the important things about those is that they are INSANELY LETHAL and extremely easy to control.
"Lets infect him with pneumonia that turns into MRSA" has got to be one of the most risky, difficult, expensive, and unreliable methods of killing someone ever.
Hell if you want deniability there's probably at least 10 or so ways to easily cause a human to have a heart attack and look like they died of natural causes as compared to some magic MRSA gun.
"Something?". Having them inhale oil or dirt will do it. Pneumonia is usually caused by a bacteria that's just everywhere (though usually on the skin), that's too simple. If it starts growing in your lungs, you can try antibiotics. If that doesn't work, well, nice knowing you.
We are surrounded by lethal bacteria. That humans survive depends on the immune system having a 100% success rate preventing bacteria from forming even a small colony in the lungs (and several other places, like the teeth, where infections can rapidly and surprisingly turn deadly)
This is why people cough so extremely hard when inhaling solid or liquid stuff in their windpipes.
Also this happens all the time. That someone dies from pneumonia is not uncommon (though for oil it's usually someone who manages to spray themselves with aerosolized oil at work). So even if an autopsy found a few specs of dirt in the lungs, and even if they actually trace that to be the cause, that's not extremely suspicious. (Plus why would they check? Obviously with a pneumonia patient you know the cause of death)
This sounds a bit like the toupee fallacy - you have never seen a good toupee, because the good ones you don't recognize as anything other than normal hair.
I'm not at all inclined to believe this is anything more than a co-incidence, but those things can definitely be induced in a way that's difficult to detect.
Not to say that I believe it happened, but there is a difference between actual cause of death and reported cause of death. As in, just because it was written down that pneumonia and stroke were involved doesn't necessarily make it true.
Again, I do not believe this happened, but that's probably how you'd do it.
MRSA [1], though? He could have been inoculated with it.
MRSA is awful, difficult or impossible to clear, and can certainly be fatal.
This could be a very diabolical way to assassinate someone.
How would you be able to trace it? It could have been laced in his food or drink. Or simply transfered by touch (got on his hands, then wiped on his face or nose). Or aerosolized as he walked by.
There are 3 million Americans unknowingly walking around with MRSA in their nose right now, all around us. It is so common I'm not sure it would be a good assassination weapon even if you tried.
MRSA is fairly common especially in hospital settings. After all, you have a setting where people are coming in sick with a disease that is hard to kill and resistant to antibiotics.
It's also trivially easy to culture MRSA. A lot of university micro-bio classes induce anti-biotic resistance in e-coli as an experiment for under graduates.
Can confirm. I did undergraduate bio and cultured lots of different bacteria species. I even used agrobacterium (which smell like feet) to clone genes into plants.
This is easily within the reach of DIY bio folks. You just need a freezer, bath, growth serum, and other easy inputs.
certainly not out of reach for a determined and powerful adversary. infecting someone with a respiratory virus isn't exactly rocket science. just spraying a subperceptibly thin aerosol into someone's face should do it.
Doubt Boeing or its spook going to use a bioweapon to off a whistleblower. Too complex, too many parties involved, too much of a trail, too high consequences if caught (i.e. terrorism), too high survival % vs. the panoply of less exotic options. It’s a Wile E. Coyote-level plot.
He talks about a historical factoid. He also talks about something that can induce pneumonia that's deadly, not just waiting for some common cold to turn to pneumonia in an off chance. WTF about what he is talking about was difficult to parse?
I figure there's like a 99% chance it happened naturally, and a 1% chance it was the most brilliant assasination of all time specifically because any rational person would think it's unlikely to have been one.
I think there were some heavy metal poisons (not Alice Cooper or Bret Michaels) that had symptoms of pneumonia, and the treatment for pneumonia fucked up the patient a bit.
I don’t think too many spooks want to handle something as dangerous as MRSA. How do you even infect someone with that without infecting yourself in the process.
He had a sudden mysterious illness that caused him to have problems breathing. If this were a cover up, that illness would have been the cover up attempt, not the pneumonia. The breathing problems required the whistleblower to be intubated and he later developed pneumonia, and later still MRSA.
The pneumonia and MRSA were certainly just an unfortunate illness. The more conspiratorial can debate over if the original breathing difficulties that brought him into the hospital were the result of an assassination attempt or not. For all we know he just had Covid.
Que the leaked pentagon briefing from … what was it, 12 years ago … about the use of “vaccines” to alter the brain chemistry of people with “extremist” views, so they too may benefit from approved values.
Running someones immune system or poisoning them is a fantastic way to get plausible deniability. No smoking gun...
Plausible Deniability is when a person's involvement or culpability in an event might be denied, or at least mitigated, by creating a situation where they can claim ignorance or an inability to act.
Guy comes in with routine influenza, transfer him to emergency, pacify him and forcibly intubate him with MRSA infected tube. The rest happens as if by mistake.
He didn’t say that’s what happened, just someone did not understand how it could be done. The response suggested a possible way it could have been done. People are blackmailed and encouraged with carrots to do all kinds of extreme things. I know this for a fact.
I think people massively underestimate what a huge keystone Boeing is in the American empire. The top of the system has rapidly started getting extremely anxious about the stability of the whole system, especially as they are fomenting war with China and Russia and their plans not only becoming unstable, but actions they’ve taken revealing themselves as extreme risks in the light of stalled progression and unaccounted faults like what has been observed at Boeing the last years.
I personally see just the suspicion of what happened to these folks far more is a symptom of a failing system than is the failing system had neutralized them in hopes of snuffing out threats to keystone components if the empire. The people arts loosing confidence in the competence of the system, a far greater threat than even Boeing failing.
Historically companies have not shyed away from killing people for profit. Boeing is a very very well connected company, and it can barely be considered a truly private company to begin with anyway.
Boeing is a private company in the sense that its stock is owned by private indviduals as opposed to entities like Amtrak, USPS, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc, which are companies that are owned by the government. That is it's a private sector company (vs public sector or government).
It's an admittedly weird overloading of the term "private company" but it's a useful thing to know about - usually context clues can help, but definitely gives me a pause when I encounter the term.
I agree contacts please help a lot, but in this case the context was someone that thinks companies casually murder people and that Boeing is de facto socially owned because of the influence that Boeing has. I'm not sure how oversized influence on government translates to citizen ownership, but asking for coherence is probably too much.
think using the full terms publicly/privately traded can help a lot in this area.
It's also worth noting that "killing people for profit" is not limited to murder: companies kill people all the time - rarely in the form of murder, less rarely in the form of homicide (think security and military contractors), commonly in the form of gross negligence, safety violations, and polution.
If someone thinks that building bombs or killing via pollution is evidence for homicide, they are making a gross category error. The former has very little bearing on the latter.
Just pointing out, now these guys will never be on 60 minutes or giving interviews to popular mechanics, Rogan or Lex Friedman. Whatever testimony is made available will be all that we have on the topic.
It's quickly becoming worse than Reddit w/ regard to conspiracy nonsense that hits the first page within 5 minutes of being posted. Either HN loves conspiracy nonsense or it's being played by inauthentic actors.
My problem is that you're all implying an unprecedented criminal conspiracy and cover up with absolutely no evidence. My problem is mainly the no evidence part and that's not why I come here- I come here for evidence/fact-based discussion. Not conspiracy nonsense. With this amount of evidence we could claim anything and everything!
I don't think anybody's saying "This happened!" but are rather expressing a deep (and well-founded) distrust for the system in which whatever did actually happen occurred.
Actuarial table says death from all causes at 45 is ~0.4%. It's an unlikely death, paired with another unlikely death - the previous Boeing whistleblower.
I'm really confused by the reporter's attitude. It seems like the exact opposite attitude from what you'd want in a reporter. He seems to be dismissing the unusual coincidence based on... I guess nothing? Just "come on, you can't believe that - we aren't Russia."
How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? How many should we expect will die by chance this year? If another one dies is that the cutoff where it's reasonable to be suspicious?
I don't understand why I would extend any courtesy to Boeing. I was suspicious when the first whistleblower died. Why shouldn't I be? You may be a perfectly nice guy, but if the witnesses testifying against you start dying, I'm going to be suspicious. Why should I treat Boeing any differently?
There are still a lot of unanswered questions around the first death.
In a post-COVID world, a 45-year-old dying of a respiratory infection isn't at all surprising. I concur with the reporter's assessment that more evidence of foul play before open accusations is warranted in this second case.
Yes, it is surprising. As I mentioned, 0.4% chance of death for a 45 year old man from all causes. That's surprising. Unexplained rapid onset respiratory disease to MRSA to dead is also surprising.
More evidence is needed - that depends what you mean. Needed for what? Conviction? Arrest? Sure. Suspicion and investigation? No.
Thing is... This isn't "all causes," nor is a 45-year-old aerospace employee a perfectly-spherical unit human. Adjust the Bayesian priors.
I've had relatives who worked in manufacturing. Note the past-tense. The things it can do to a person's respiration and cardiovascular system are... Not pretty. Especially if, say, they were working for a company with a history of dodgy behavior (because if they're putting product out to paying customers that sucks, are they really providing their front-line crew all the PPE that is required to keep them healthy?).
So a 45-year-old who put 20 years in at a place that, let's hypothesize, isn't controlling for silica dust the way OSHA demands, gets a flu during flu season, and down they go? Especially when we don't yet know what the long-term effects of exposure to COVID are (even with vaccination)?
Too many variables to be suspicious of direct malice. But, probably enough to warrant OSHA making a snap inspection of Spirit to count the respirators and check the filter expiration dates...
Check your priors. What's your base rate likelihood for a person dying from:
* suicide (many documented cases)
* infectious diseases (ditto)
* corporate assassinations (zero cases in the US documented)
Everyone thinking Boeing is carrying out killings that have minimal potential upside and massive downside is succumbing to some cloak and dagger deus ex machina. After age 40 people die from all sorts of causes. This is not about "courtesy," but rational thinking that there would be almost no point in killing an employee when the company is already mired in bad news and that corporate assassinations just don't happen in the US.
Gates has been reporting news critical of Boeing for 20+ years. He is not a fanboy and never has been. They probably should have taken him out long ago.
"It was definitely a murder to create a chilling effect on whistleblowers" says a guy on the internet, pushing a narrative that if you whistleblow on Boeing you'll definitely be murdered.
Bacterial infection, grammatical inflection, both natural causes of death [According to uncyclopedia Wiki probably? Don't ask me, I am not germ-anist here in germ-any]
Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.