Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
If 32 died, ok, they're killing people. If 2/32 died, that's within the realm of possibility.
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.
[1] - https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...
Boeing would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for us meddling hackers!
the deaths happened in two months. not in the space of a year. you need to take that in account.
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.
And for what it is worth, one of these deaths would be in the "suspicious" category and one wouldn't.
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.
it's not exactly a smoking gun but you can't blame the guy's age, either. 45 is just middle age, I hope
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.
Assassinations of corporate whistleblowers also falls under the category of "it's rare but it happens."
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.
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.
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.
That's just due to what is happening to health care in this country.
The underlying cause is the same short-term-profits capitalism that has fucked over Boeing.
The conspiracy is just the trivial one that requires only perverse economic incentives and not assassination.
The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This game of telephone is absurd.
His family has said no such thing. A proclaimed "friend of the family" claimed he told her this.
I mean just the other day, the emergency slide fell off a Boeing aircraft and landed essentially, in the backyard of the lawyer suing Boeing. Lol
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.
It's a bit more than just "OMG BOEING PLANES FALLING APART" clickbait. Lol.
It's the universe fucking with us.
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.
> With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues
So many? Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
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%.
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.
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%.
(given a pool of 100, not even 32!)
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.
Plugging that in the binomial calculator, P(X>=2) at 32 trials is... 0.09%!! Astronomically low odds.
And you are right, their deaths are certainly not independent :)
---
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.
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, 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?
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.
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.
And that is quite irrelevant to the question of what are the odds either of them, in isolation, would die under suspicious circumstances.
...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.
Yes, and that probability is very low. Approximately 1% based on actuarial data.
> ..and of course, people have said this about whistleblowers and witnesses who testify thousands of times.
Because it did indeed happen many times. Hence why things like the witness protection program have been set up.
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.
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.
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.
That statement is not even limited to whistleblowers.
If you restrict the population to known Boeing whistleblowers whose first name starts with J, the odds get even longer.
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.
and one died after ventilation?
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.
There was a whole court thing, he lost, and then he died aged 39 of a heart attack.
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/metric-...
Probably in imperial measures? Unless bananas were somehow sold in metric grams and the EU imposed some weird unit I don't know about.
> The prosecution of Sunderland greengrocer Steven Thoburn for selling bananas in imperial measures helped turn public opinion against the EU
Is it a troy pound, a tower pound, a london pound, a metric pound?
Also, he should have done what every supermarket does around here and sell bananas at a flat price per bunch.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Is there any reason to believe that either one of these men had any such evidence and had thus far not shared it?
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?
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.
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.'
> "Surely it can't be coincidence", "corporations conspire", and vague references to "military industrial complex"...
That was a slick transformation, I wonder if anyone noticed.
> ...are exceedingly poor arguments – actually they're not really arguments at all because you can say that sort of thing about almost anything.
Were they presented as an argument, or merely as a factual observation?
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.
A: As many as it takes for god to interfere.
i.e. You are just staying wilfully ignorant
Here is a recent case from Britain, there was evidence and the government covered it up. It took almost 50 years for us to learn the truth.
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.
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.
A month later another whistleblower who was in good health dies suddenly and unexpectedly.
I don't think it's surprising to think that this combination of events is extremely unlikely.
I mean if I had dedicated my life to taking Boeing down and was contemplating suicide, I'd consider saying that too.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...
This is easily within the reach of DIY bio folks. You just need a freezer, bath, growth serum, and other easy inputs.
It seems the risks of murdering whistleblowers, especially after they have already testified, is too great. They just want revenge here?
Has it happened, yes. Is it commonplace, absolutely not!
nobody considers Boeing a private company. It is publicly traded on the stock market.
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.
think using the full terms publicly/privately traded can help a lot in this area.
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.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb, for example.
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.
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)
So that you will think it is not suspicious
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.
Not a great example since we know for a fact that mass surveillance is happening. The U.S. Congress just voted to extend and expand it.
Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Just a handful though.
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.
Like... head shot in an alley? suffocating them in their sleep? drowning them in a body of water?
I think you can probably answer your question yourself if you think about it
That's because it's the failures we learn about. Which could be 90% or 5% of "their works".
But never mind the spooks. We are also told "there's no perfect crime". Yet, less than half the murders get solved in the US, for example:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
They brought back the time-tested art of defenestration.
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.
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.
Ask Suge Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxPTtFv4AkM
You can assume criminals have gotten better at this type of thing since 1995
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.
Again, I do not believe this happened, but that's probably how you'd do it.
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.
> 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.
That should be "MRSA", for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Terrible fact checking.
(But they did helpfully provide a hyperlink to Facebook-related stories.)
It would be really good to get as much information about these deaths (and closure for the families)
PS. for arguments sake, if another Boeing whistleblower would get a sudden disease I would be more inclined to think that maybe there is some chemical/mechanical exposure in the Boeing / Spirit factories rather then some Michael Clayton-type action...
Either way, rest assured that in the real world, a hypothetical executive who was convicted of ordering a hit would end up being treated the exact same way as a mafioso who did the same.
Sure, but the point is they'll never be convicted.
Why not? Are they special because they hurt people indirectly instead of directly?
> a hypothetical executive who was convicted of ordering a hit
Well, there's the rub. They would have to be convicted. How often are executives held accountable for anything their company does?
But yeah, white color crime that for example kills people (deadly pollution for example) should absolutely be treated like murder, or manslaughter at the very least. Why the hell not?
Looking at Nestle's historic stock performance I see no (significant) change around 2005 or 2012.
[0] - https://www.dw.com/en/nestle-under-fire-over-colombian-murde...
If boeing is SO important to the government that justice doesn't matter, then it's probably a fuckload easier to bribe a judge or two and make sure the court cases never get anywhere than to orchestrate not one, but two, clandestine hits.
Further, why the fuck would you do the hits now? In both cases the information was brought out YEARS ago, and already in court. It hardly matters if they're alive or dead at this point.
However, Boeing executives can (and should) get in to trouble. They probably care very much about what comes to light in court.
If the trial concludes with “Yes boing knew the planes were not safe but let people fly in them” it doesn’t matter how important it is to the US, no passenger will want to fly them.
2. As last resort: Us Gov can take over and actually reform Boeing (fixing public perception)
And there is whole continuum between 1 and 2.
(I really doubt that anything shady happened with this pneumonia; but IF something shady was done, US will make effort to preserve/save national aviation giant)
Also humans have startlingly short term memories.
Even if all US airlines wanted to switch, it would take Airbus a few decades to deliver replacements, by which time the issue will be forgotten (unless they keep crashing and falling apart midair).
US airlines will probably not be allowed use chineese planes as replacements.
I’m not trying to minimise Boeing’s responsibility, just saying that assuming the company starts to turn things around, nothing that comes out of the trial will affect the future of Boeing the company much, but it might well be catastrophic for the top brass.
Boeing does do highly classified things in other branches of the company that have nothing to do with any of this, even then nobody would be assassinated for the most egregious espionage outside of some absurd movie plot scenario. Spies go to prison if they’re not recruited for counterintelligence.
Influenza and MRSA would be very odd assassination tools.
I have in mind for instance the Taiwan frigate scandal that has seen all sort of mysterious deaths, including Thiery Imbot (former DGSE, and son of former head of the DGSE), who died falling from a window in Paris. The official investigation blamed the wind which will make anyone who lived in Paris laugh.
So, I don't know, but not implausible.
When Putin's regime punishes a critic or dissident, it is not done to stop this particular critic disclosing something sensitive. It is done as a warning to future critics. If you think this principle is never applied by western agencies, look at what happened to Julian Assange - after being prosecuted for 12 years the dude has lost it and Ecuador has kicked him out for smearing faeces on embassy walls.
Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
And they used to do it in the USA, in 1920's.
https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/88n97g/3-union-leaders-were-...
> Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
Unions are the kryptonite of capitalists and threaten their very existence, so it isn't that out of field; if we are to make the parallel, it means there is something in what they know that threatens the very existence of Boeing and I fail to imagine what
I hope not because that’s exactly the risk in entertaining baseless conspiracy theories. If whistleblowers are disincentivized by conspiracy theories then why does Boeing need to go to the trouble of actually pulling off a conspiracy?
... but I'm like 99.9998% confident this is actually just a series of non-malicious, tragic coincidences rather than a conspiracy.
It's a warning to future whistleblowers.
- She started receiving threatening phone calls
- Pictures of her kids walking home from school showed up in her mailbox
- Her house was shot up in the middle of the night
- The family dog was killed, disassembled, and the parts were strung up in the house
The police wouldn't do anything and she eventually had to quit her job and move out of the county.
Occasionally, reality apparently is as crass as some classic corporate conspiracy thrillers suggest.
My apologies, but my time on the Internet has definitely trained me to be skeptical of extreme reports that make me enraged, without additional evidence.
Sidenote, but coming from a country where it's "known" that speaking up against corruption can likely end up killing you, it's funny to see people being skeptical about it. It's maybe similar to racism/sexism - yes, don't believe anything without proof - but if someone claims it's happened and give details, it's certainly quite plausible.
I make no judgements, but this is absolutely a "trust, but verify" type of situation IMHO.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/two-sentenced-their-rol...
American history is full of these sorts of incidents of harassment, violence, and sometimes even murder. The history of the labor movement or civil rights movement is sobering.
It doesn’t take a CEO making a call to some assassin on the corporate payroll. Usually the reality is far more banal: a supervisor or coworker or neighbor who just takes matters into their own hands.
To be clear, I’m NOT claiming that that is what happened to Josh Dean; I’m speaking generally about people getting harassed for trying to do what they think is the right thing.
If there are, I can't imagine how they feel.
[1] "Aside from Mr Barnett and Mr Dean, there are some 30 Boeing whistleblowers, including Mr Salehpour." https://theloadstar.com/im-scared-says-boeing-whistleblower-....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnett_(whistleblower)
So which one is it? Suddenly or not?
(I say this with all of the seriousness of a 1980s British comedian who probably thought it before I did)
"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."
Edit0: Nope - 32 whistleblower complaints in the last three years, but I imagine some of those could be from the same person - so up to 32. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...
Small number of whistle-blowers: boeing looks pretty suspect, because why do they keep dying?
Large number of whistle-blowers: boeing looks pretty suspect, because why so many?
You can refrain from giving Boeing the benefit of the doubt here and still come to the conclusion "It's not weird that someone didn't recover from a respiratory infection during flu season."
I mean that’s probably the more likely story than MRSA corporate assassins. But it is still pretty nuts, right?
[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.
Interestingly, it was in the 1970's and the woman blew the whistle for safety practices around the handling of plutonium!
[1] https://twitter.com/dschwarz26/status/1786133630474977785
> So across the ~50 or so prominent whistleblower cases against big co's that I researched with futuresearch.ai, retaliation is common, harassment is rare but does happen, but murder is not. And given the details of Joshua Dean and John Barnett's death, it's simply much too plausible that this is a fluke of timing.
I think you should mention that „I looked” was done with help of your AI project. That does not spark much confidence given current state of LLMs and their „research”.
From your twitter article:
> So across the ~50 or so prominent whistleblower cases against big co's that I researched with futuresearch.ai, retaliation is common, harassment is rare but does happen, but murder is not.
Your AI looked at it, you didn't. I also have the hunch that your research was limited to US whistleblowers only, can you confirm?
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?
Sounds like a first got flu, which then progressed into pneumonia. This is normal.
Then he was admitted to the hospital, and probably contracted MRSA - which is not unusual either. Or did he get it prior to that? Either way, it happens.
And from there it progressed into sepsis, which he might have been fighting for some time? Anyway, heart attacks, strokes, etc. can happen when you get sepsis. Sepsis can come out of nowhere.
Doesn't really sound suspicious or sudden.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...
From Healthy to Dead in 2 weeks is still pretty extreme. It isn't like pneumonia and MRSA aren't known factors.
Perhaps a 'weaponized' MRSA?
Wouldn't other people in the hospital contract it as well?
I don't think people who don't spend a lot of time in hospitals have any idea how quickly a person's fortune can change. They're still the best place to care for the sick, but they're also hotbeds of disease because, hey, we keep all the sick people there.
One overlooked sanitization, one visit from a relative who touched the wrong thing on the way to your room, one spot of genetic bad luck that makes you particularly susceptible to infections you'd be likeliest to encounter in a hospital, one never-diagnosed allergic response... That's all she wrote. Doesn't matter over-much how healthy you were before because "on your back struggling to breathe for days on end in a strange environment" is a wildly different environment to "enjoying the fresh mountain air close to home."
Discussing 'conspiracies' is actually an entertainment so we don't have to think about the reality like anti-biotic resistant diseases that could cause another pandemic.
Easier to contemplate secret assassin organizations, hired by big Corps. Or a Boeing, Military Industrial complex, CIA connected death squad.
Am I the only one who knows a half dozen people who have gone into hospitals for a sprained ankle and died of an infection?
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.
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.
The airline manufacturing industry has few employers. The threat of being blackballed for future employment is much more of an incentive to keep quite IMO. But maybe I'm being naive?
Or maybe there's some backhanded government connection that someone outside of Boeing wants to keep quite.
This headline feels like it's trying to play on the conspiracy theorists among us, with the important bit way down in the article. Well, they got my view.
government is really weak with the strong and strong with the weak.
Barnett's case sparked a lot of interest because it was a suicide. Here, Dean died of an illness, so to pursue a conspiracy-theoretic angle to this story, you again need to suggest that Boeing is more than ruthless (for Barnett, that "more" is "irrational"; for Dean, it's "Bond-villain theatrical").
1. Warlord-like show of power, signaling that they're so strong they can openly act with impunity. Such as gratuitously using a military weapon not publicly available and on another country's soil, or a straight-faced coroner's determination of suicide by two self-inflicted gunshots to the back of the head before throwing self through a skyscraper window. (I don't see this in the Boeing situation.)
2. Powerful person lashing out due to mental illness instability/pettiness. Where there's no gain to be had, but their ego or other trigger was stepped upon. In the news in recent years, we've seen at least a couple powerful high-profile personalities who might fit the profile. (I don't see a connection to the Boeing situation.)
3. Prevent the whistleblower from testifying further. (I guess probably the cat's already out of the bag on the Boeing situation.)
4. Warning to other whistleblowers by that same entity, if further testimony could do more harm than has already been done. (Again, I guess probably the cat's out of the bag on Boeing.)
5. Lower-ranking individual's self-interest. Let's say there's no advantage to an organization or higher-up persons in assassinating a whistleblower, but... some lower-ranking person doesn't want to be implicated personally by something this whistleblower knows, or there is some unrelated mini-scandal that could be exposed as the whistleblower is interviewed. In general, I suspect that lower-ranking butt-covering is the source of massive number of problems and misbehavior in organizations, including all sorts of "coverup is worse than the crime" outcomes. (But I'd guess unlikely there's a big enough motivation for any lower-ranking individual connected to the Boeing situation to murder anyone over it.)
6. Uninvolved party sending a message to all high-profile whistleblowers. Let's say you're a powerful person, and evil (or imagining yourself serving some worthy cause through evildoing), and you're sitting on top of what could be a massive scandal, and you're vulnerable to whistleblowers. So, on the occasion of whistleblowers being in the news on some other high-profile scandal -- unrelated to you -- and possibly planting whistleblowing ideas among people who are a threat to you, you take the occasion to shift public sentiment about the desirability of whistleblowing in general. (Farfetched.)
7. Foreign sabotage, sowing social disorder. Make it look to people of the target country like their country is so corrupt that whistleblowers are assassinated openly and with impunity. (Farfetched, especially since we have so much erosion of trust already, I'm not sure we need any more pushes.)
Can't both virus and bacteria be injected?
Has MRSA been used in attacks before?
A car bomb, to deter other would-be whistleblowers, is more like the typical MO. As has happened with the original Panama Papers reporter on Malta.
B. Plenty of killings that we know of do not follow your typical MO. For example, the killing of Litvinenko by polonium which can only be created in a nuclear reactor (still the most overkill death of a whistleblower ever known).
C. In which case, is it possible you think that's the MO, because the others didn't get caught? And the corporations are now realizing a car bomb is too predictable?
If this is just a coincidence, it is a weird one.
A bacterium is a single bacteria and to be resistant there needs to be a lot more than one (we all have some on us at any time, an infection is greater than or equal to 4 micrograms/mL).
MRSA is bacterial, not a single bacterium.
https://www.newsweek.com/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblower-p...
But I may have missed any further developments to actually verify that his family had been told something similar.
Between that and the 30 some whistleblowers in the last 5 years that two died close to one another isn't all that damning.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...
You have not, his family thinks he killed himself, but blames Boeing for making his life awful for several years.
As a paramedic, I'd take this with a grain of salt: I have been on calls for a non-trivial number of patients who've sworn black and blue that they're "no longer suicidal", "no longer a threat", "if anything happens to me, it wasn't suicide" who, you guessed it, went on to attempt or commit suicide in very short order.
A source is helpful context for claims like this, and the person that responded with one may not otherwise have had it not been questioned.
Inside the whistleblower’s text was a photo of a wheel missing two lug nuts.... “If anything happens,” they told me, not for the first time, “I’m not suicidal.”
I don't think it's wildly conspiratorial to discuss this, even if the implication is "this might be a pattern of foul play".
Even if both of these deaths are coincidences and within statistical reason, I imagine the perceived pattern must have a chilling effect on other would-be whistleblowers.
If we had an organization responsible and capable of preventing MRSA deaths, and was failing to do so, they'd be in prison at 8 million deaths.
The issue here isn't how many deaths, it's whether boeing has a duty and capability to prevent them; whether it has failed to do so; and whether this failure has caused a systematic problem with its recent planes that could lead to more deaths.
On all accounts it seems: yes, they've gutted product quality and it has lead to severe accidents.
> If we had an organization responsible and capable of preventing MRSA deaths
MRSA is known for spreading in hospital settings. Hospitals are supposed to prevent this from happening, but it is hard.
Physician here. Hospitals do work to prevent the spread, and it is hard—so much so that it's nearly inevitable. MRSA is a naturally occurring part of the respiratory tract and skin. How do you stop that? Also important to note that those who do acquire and die from MRSA infections tend to be relatively ill to begin with. Usually those patients are admitted to the hospital for some other serious issue and then develop a MRSA infection either from their own body or the hospital. While you can mitigate the latter, you can't do anything about the former.
Is about the same as frequency with which Putin kills his political opponents. [1]. So either frequency is not a very good way of judging criminal culpability and morality, or Putin is a great guy.
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-critics-dead-full-list-navaln...
You know what isn’t very hard, is making sure nuts are on bolts instead of in the trash.
There might be something to your analogy if a crash in Boise caused everyone in town to come down with a plane to the head, but that’s not how that works so it’s kind of apples to oranges.
In this case, it would be something that includes: number of deaths or injury or near death (door flying off and potentially getting sucked out at 30000 ft) due to flying Boeing vs driving X number of miles in a car.
This would be a similarly rare occurrence but would be nice to see the comparison between plane types.
That's what one of his female friends claimed he said. You don't think it's more likely that a grown man of the boomer generation might not be up-front about his mental health to his female friends?
Meanwhile, others who were closer to him said he was having a tough time. And he was found in his own truck, shot with his own gun, with his hand on the trigger, and a note, across state lines from where he lived. And the responding investigators didn't report any signs of foul play.
It's certainly a possibly, but the evidence just doesn't add up that way. As humans, our brains are wired to fall for the narrative fallacy, even when it isn't a good explanation.
The reputation problems of killing whistleblowers are much worse than the cost of a few bodyguards and doctors.
/Irony
Dude was sick. Really sick. Had been for awhile. Nothing nefarious here, just a shitty clickbait title to get people riled up as usual.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...
Perhaps a 'weaponized' MRSA?
I love a good conspiracy theory but this sounds pretty far fetched, how do you cause someone to contract pneumonia?
Any company willing to murder two people to maintain the share price is an excellent investment in my books.
If the whistleblowers are right, then planes are going to keep breaking. If planes keep breaking, the share price is going to collapse.
Loading up.
The US is infamous for extra judicial killings, both domestically and internationally.
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.