Just yesterday here were a bunch of comments and jokes about how it would look like if this guy dies too. And here we go … fast spreading infection in a 45 years old guy.
Spirit Aerosystems: the part Boeing spun off because even it did its own thing. Without the public profile of Boeing, it must have been an even more hostile place to be.
I thought for a second what if the whistleblowers get into witness protection, then I looked up what planes the us Marshalls have ... It's not looking good for the whistleblowers.
This unfortunate gentleman died of pneumonia after getting the flu and MRSA.
To the extent that his testimony last year is relevant, he may have been under a lot of stress, which can wreck up your immune system. But unless they find polonium in his system or that the flu he had was some novel strain of H-neverbeforeseen-N-cookedinalab, I think this doesn't go deeper than "45-year-old industrial worker doesn't recover from respiratory infection," which by itself would not be news.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
Shouldn’t it attract more attention from prosecution? It is clear who is behind all this (some of Boeing top managers), so they must interrogate them all about double kill.
> Shouldn’t it attract more attention from prosecution?
It 'should' - but it won't.
Look at how the legal system has treated whistleblowers who go against the MIC and fossil fuels - Assange, Snowden, Donziger, Winner, etc. High profile cases where the whole world was watching.
They're not handing out fines to fossil fuel companies for lying to the planet as they set it alight. Instead, they're handing out harsher and harsher sentences to the activists trying to bring attention to the issue. A lovely 54yo woman was sentenced to 4k in damages, a 3k fine, 60 days in jail and 24 months of supervised release for putting RINSABLE PAINT on the CASE of Degas' Little Dancer. Not even NPR would state that it was rinsable paint - how often do you hear oil companies advertising on them?
Why would you have any faith in that system to protect us from murderous corporations? The trend for these things is dramatically in the wrong direction, and it was bad when companies were allowed to fund and aid literal Nazis without repercussion.
People who deface art in museums should have their citizenship stripped and be banished for life, at a bare minimum. The JUST STOP OIL billionaire woman's a heavy investor in the Chinese lithium sector.
A glass case was smeared with water rinsable paint.
You wouldn't know it from the hysterics from mainstream media, the gallery Director, or the Judge, but absolutely no damage was done to Degas' piece. This was intentionally harmless.
> The JUST STOP OIL billionaire woman's a heavy investor in the Chinese lithium sector.
This wasn't a Just Stop Oil thing. It was the 'Declare Emergency' group. Your statement is a complete non sequitur.
Let's have the war, fossil fuel, polluters and banking criminals "stripped of citizenship and banished for life" before throwing fits about those who "deface art" by putting easily washable paint on their cases. Yaknow? Priorities.
Personally, I would rather lose every Degas, Picasso, Modigliani, Botticelli, Rodin, and Van Gogh piece; than keep losing species at the rate we are.
Fossil fuels, the military, polluters and big agri are committing far, far far worse crimes than damaging art, and our justice system protects them. Our politicians need them to win elections. Our media run cover for their crimes. Our regulators seem to be mostly former employees. Our own taxes subsidize them to an absurd degree.
If we only knew what we've already lost, we'd do worse than banish these guys..
Is there a source for/further information about this? I can't find it mentioned anywhere (including on the Declare Emergency website), and it seems difficult to square it with the gallery's claim that it cost $4,000 to repair the damage.
You could even mail it to somebody and when they open the mail, BAM. Or it could be included in the glue of business reply mail. Or wiped on your doorknob.
EDIT 3: God damn it - forget it. The rate is per 100,000 - the site I got it from was terrible [1].
So the numbers don't work at all - the death rate should be about ~0.8% in any given year for the full population going by [2] (798.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2022).
Just to elaborate: my thesis before I edited this post was that if you have a large number of whistleblowers, the chance of someone in the population dying of normal causes over a given time frame might become quite large.
You'd be correct they're not - it's much lower - per 100,000[1]. Should've cross-checked with birth data.
The underlying point though is valid: whether the rate of people dying is particularly high depends on quite a few factors. The estimate for 2023 in Q2 is 944 / 100,000 = 0.9% or so. So within a population of 100, you'd still be unsurprised to find 1 person has randomly died of some cause. So if you take say, the 30 presumed people who have complained about Boeing over the last 3 years and tracked them as a quorum...
OP's original statement of "The death rate in the United States per 1000 male adults as of 2022 is 163." comes from [1]. That statistic is defined as, "Adult mortality rate, male, is the probability of dying between the ages of 15 and 60--that is, the probability of a 15-year-old male dying before reaching age 60, if subject to age-specific mortality rates of the specified year between those ages." [2]
And if you assume that death rate is age agnostic between 15 and 60 (it's not of course, but bear with me), then this allows you to calculate the yearly chance of death as a US male adult as 1 - ((1000 - 163) / 1000)^(1/(60 - 15 + 1)). This comes to 0.386%, or ~1 in 259.
Yeah I misread the graph - I've corrected the post, although the errors sort of cancelled towards the overall result anyway. With a CDC reported rate of ~0.8-1% per year, then in a group of 10 you'd expect 0.1 deaths if they were suitably random. In a group of 100 you'd expect at least 1.
They're not random, but it's also a group with one-way membership. John Barnett was a whistleblower from 2017 till his death in 2024. So for 7 years he was a Boeing whistleblower, but every year he is he's still in that 0.8-1% chance of all-cause mortality across the general population (likely more given specific non-murder related risk factors).
EDIT: I guess the reason I'm posting up a storm on this is not to defend Boeing, but that there's an actual, identifiable harm to the conspiracy theory narrative which is that it's all fun and games unless you work at Boeing and see evidence of wrongdoing. We the public want and need you to come forward, and a storm of commentary which says "lol Boeing just straight kills people" is all good hot-take fun till you're in an actual position where it might feel quite real. Even if the odds were much worse, going on the internet and saying "this was definitely murder to create a chilling effect* is helping create a chilling effect.
> Plug that into the fact that it doesn't work to kill someone after they have testified
This way deters future whistleblowers.
If they got rid of whistleblowers before they blew the whistle, no one would hear about it. It would not be widely reported. Just another random employee who died.
No. If they were trying to accomplish what you were suggesting, you kill the first whistleblower early on to prevent others. That motive doesn’t make sense after there are already 30 whistleblowers.
I agree that it doesn't make much sense to kill someone after they've testified, but that 1.6% figure (I think you inadvertently omitted a decimal point) doesn't account for age. Joshua Dean was 45 (0.4% chance of a 45 year old male dying in a given year). John Barnett was 62 (1.5% chance).
Yeah I was way off on the death figure, but the point is relevant: the risk of a large population and a low probability event is that the low probability event can become a near certainty due to normal causes.
~30 whisteblowers[1] over 3 years is a fair number of people in your chance pool - not guaranteed, but there's confounding factors (i.e. stress, disruption to work and family life etc.)
My point was meant to be that saying "there's a chilling effect" is also creating the chilling effect by implying it's there, when in reality it can just be something more akin to the Birthday Paradox.
> ~30 whisteblowers[1] over 3 years is a fair number of people in your chance pool - not guaranteed, but there's confounding factors (i.e. stress, disruption to work and family life etc.)
People who already feel like they have nothing to lose (which I imagine would be correlated with higher chance of death, with causation in either direction) might also be more willing to become whistleblowers in the first place. Doesn't seem a factor in this case though.
The issue is that becoming a Boeing whisteblower is a 1-way gate: once you are one, you're a member of that group for the rest of your life.
Which means if you have a lot of whistleblowers, because you've got a lot of problems, then you have this ever-expanding pool of people who are "Boeing whistleblowers". Which means the probability a Boeing whistleblower dies in any given year goes up as the pool expands.
Which is fine and normal, unless the narrative question we're answering is: "is Boeing killing whistleblowers to deter future whistleblowers?"
And one conclusion is: "no, but they're being deterred anyway, because everyone is insisting they were intentionally killed". Basically the "chilling effect" is the conspiracy theory, not any actual action.
Though I would note a better way to see if they were doing it would be to look at the death rate of current Boeing employees, since if you were killing whistleblowers that's what it would presumably look like - people presently employed by Boeing dying under explainable circumstances without ever taking any action.
> Though I would note a better way to see if they were doing it would be to look at the death rate of current Boeing employees, since if you were killing whistleblowers that's what it would presumably look like - people presently employed by Boeing dying under explainable circumstances without ever taking any action.
Well, that wouldn't have much deterrent effect. I don't think it's likely that Boeing is knocking off whistleblowers, but if they were, it would be more effective as a deterrent for them to do it once the person became well-known.
I've seen some speculation [https://zeroes.ca/@maggiejk/112369197303623748] that this looks a whole bunch like COVID, and that sounds vaguely on point. Then again we're all armchair doctors now…
then again this is why i would kill someone in a way that looks like covid if i would be such inclined. also i don't know anybody who ever died of covid, not even indirectly. so, yeah ...
I think that you are missing how credibility and propaganda intertwine. The BBC gives you accurate reports on Indonesia and Chile to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Britain. Aljazeera give accurate reports on Boeing and Airbus to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Qatar. NPR give accurate reports on Angola and Bangladesh to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of the USA.
One navigates an adversarial information environment by harvesting the free truth provided by those seeking to build credibility. Then one tries to avoid the flames when the same organisations burn their credibility to boost their funders and owners.
Encouraging conspiracy theories against one of the largest components of the US military industrial complex is precisely something Al Jazeera would be willing to risk losing credibility over. Not that they actually would, because there could never be sufficient evidence to disprove such a conspiracy.
639 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadThis unfortunate gentleman died of pneumonia after getting the flu and MRSA.
To the extent that his testimony last year is relevant, he may have been under a lot of stress, which can wreck up your immune system. But unless they find polonium in his system or that the flu he had was some novel strain of H-neverbeforeseen-N-cookedinalab, I think this doesn't go deeper than "45-year-old industrial worker doesn't recover from respiratory infection," which by itself would not be news.
> I've had enough
> Because I knew Josh, I had to report this - and the coincidence with Mitch, whom I also knew
> But if you really believe Boeing has adopted Putin-style assassination, unfollow me and go away
> If you're joking, it's not even slightly funny to joke about this death
https://twitter.com/dominicgates/status/1785812827581849988
FYI 11,000 people die of MRSA every year.
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?
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.
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...
* 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.
That's the whole point of corporate assassinations isn't it, get rid of people without raising suspicions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal doesn't inspire confidence in big corporate cospiracies, heh.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/two-sentenced-their-rol...
Homicide is a top 10 leading cause of death for americans in their mid 40s.
What effect do you imagine that might have?
In the US alone.
There are many other cases.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War_crimes_witness_inti...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashim_Tha%C3%A7i#Resignation_...
It 'should' - but it won't.
Look at how the legal system has treated whistleblowers who go against the MIC and fossil fuels - Assange, Snowden, Donziger, Winner, etc. High profile cases where the whole world was watching.
They're not handing out fines to fossil fuel companies for lying to the planet as they set it alight. Instead, they're handing out harsher and harsher sentences to the activists trying to bring attention to the issue. A lovely 54yo woman was sentenced to 4k in damages, a 3k fine, 60 days in jail and 24 months of supervised release for putting RINSABLE PAINT on the CASE of Degas' Little Dancer. Not even NPR would state that it was rinsable paint - how often do you hear oil companies advertising on them?
Why would you have any faith in that system to protect us from murderous corporations? The trend for these things is dramatically in the wrong direction, and it was bad when companies were allowed to fund and aid literal Nazis without repercussion.
No art was defaced.
A glass case was smeared with water rinsable paint.
You wouldn't know it from the hysterics from mainstream media, the gallery Director, or the Judge, but absolutely no damage was done to Degas' piece. This was intentionally harmless.
> The JUST STOP OIL billionaire woman's a heavy investor in the Chinese lithium sector.
This wasn't a Just Stop Oil thing. It was the 'Declare Emergency' group. Your statement is a complete non sequitur.
Let's have the war, fossil fuel, polluters and banking criminals "stripped of citizenship and banished for life" before throwing fits about those who "deface art" by putting easily washable paint on their cases. Yaknow? Priorities.
Personally, I would rather lose every Degas, Picasso, Modigliani, Botticelli, Rodin, and Van Gogh piece; than keep losing species at the rate we are.
Fossil fuels, the military, polluters and big agri are committing far, far far worse crimes than damaging art, and our justice system protects them. Our politicians need them to win elections. Our media run cover for their crimes. Our regulators seem to be mostly former employees. Our own taxes subsidize them to an absurd degree.
If we only knew what we've already lost, we'd do worse than banish these guys..
Is there a source for/further information about this? I can't find it mentioned anywhere (including on the Declare Emergency website), and it seems difficult to square it with the gallery's claim that it cost $4,000 to repair the damage.
Its still possible that this is a freak occurrence but any agency claiming that as a proven fact right now is going to look suspicious.
I wonder if you could give someone MRSA intentionally. Is that even possible?
And "trouble breathing" could mean any of a whole bunch of things, a few of which you probably can give someone intentionally…
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
How many are left, anyhow?
So the numbers don't work at all - the death rate should be about ~0.8% in any given year for the full population going by [2] (798.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2022).
Just to elaborate: my thesis before I edited this post was that if you have a large number of whistleblowers, the chance of someone in the population dying of normal causes over a given time frame might become quite large.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.AMRT.MA
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/mortality-dashboard.htm
Surely this can't be true.
The underlying point though is valid: whether the rate of people dying is particularly high depends on quite a few factors. The estimate for 2023 in Q2 is 944 / 100,000 = 0.9% or so. So within a population of 100, you'd still be unsurprised to find 1 person has randomly died of some cause. So if you take say, the 30 presumed people who have complained about Boeing over the last 3 years and tracked them as a quorum...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/mortality-dashboard.htm
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.AMRT.MA?end=2022...
[2] https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/health-nutri...
Where did you get that number? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... and https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm are an order of magnitude lower for the general population.
They're not random, but it's also a group with one-way membership. John Barnett was a whistleblower from 2017 till his death in 2024. So for 7 years he was a Boeing whistleblower, but every year he is he's still in that 0.8-1% chance of all-cause mortality across the general population (likely more given specific non-murder related risk factors).
EDIT: I guess the reason I'm posting up a storm on this is not to defend Boeing, but that there's an actual, identifiable harm to the conspiracy theory narrative which is that it's all fun and games unless you work at Boeing and see evidence of wrongdoing. We the public want and need you to come forward, and a storm of commentary which says "lol Boeing just straight kills people" is all good hot-take fun till you're in an actual position where it might feel quite real. Even if the odds were much worse, going on the internet and saying "this was definitely murder to create a chilling effect* is helping create a chilling effect.
This way deters future whistleblowers.
If they got rid of whistleblowers before they blew the whistle, no one would hear about it. It would not be widely reported. Just another random employee who died.
~30 whisteblowers[1] over 3 years is a fair number of people in your chance pool - not guaranteed, but there's confounding factors (i.e. stress, disruption to work and family life etc.)
My point was meant to be that saying "there's a chilling effect" is also creating the chilling effect by implying it's there, when in reality it can just be something more akin to the Birthday Paradox.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...
People who already feel like they have nothing to lose (which I imagine would be correlated with higher chance of death, with causation in either direction) might also be more willing to become whistleblowers in the first place. Doesn't seem a factor in this case though.
Which means if you have a lot of whistleblowers, because you've got a lot of problems, then you have this ever-expanding pool of people who are "Boeing whistleblowers". Which means the probability a Boeing whistleblower dies in any given year goes up as the pool expands.
Which is fine and normal, unless the narrative question we're answering is: "is Boeing killing whistleblowers to deter future whistleblowers?"
And one conclusion is: "no, but they're being deterred anyway, because everyone is insisting they were intentionally killed". Basically the "chilling effect" is the conspiracy theory, not any actual action.
Though I would note a better way to see if they were doing it would be to look at the death rate of current Boeing employees, since if you were killing whistleblowers that's what it would presumably look like - people presently employed by Boeing dying under explainable circumstances without ever taking any action.
Well, that wouldn't have much deterrent effect. I don't think it's likely that Boeing is knocking off whistleblowers, but if they were, it would be more effective as a deterrent for them to do it once the person became well-known.
[Ed.] also note that https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea... says the initial hospitalization was for "trouble breathing"; this doesn't seem to be in the Aljazeera reporting.
And twice on Sundays.
One navigates an adversarial information environment by harvesting the free truth provided by those seeking to build credibility. Then one tries to avoid the flames when the same organisations burn their credibility to boost their funders and owners.
government is really weak with the strong and strong with the weak.