Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing Supplier Spirit AeroSystems Has Died (seattletimes.com) 174
Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and one of the first whistleblowers to allege Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 MAX, died Tuesday morning after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection. Seattle Times: Known as Josh, Dean lived in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit is based. He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle. He died after two weeks in critical condition, his aunt Carol Parsons said. Dean had given a deposition in a Spirit shareholder lawsuit and also filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration alleging "serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management of the 737 production line" at Spirit.
Spirit fired Dean in April 2023, and he had filed a complaint with the Department of Labor alleging his termination was in retaliation for raising concerns related to aviation safety. Parsons said Dean became ill and went to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing just over two weeks ago. He was intubated and developed pneumonia and then a serious bacterial infection, MRSA. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was airlifted from Wichita to a hospital in Oklahoma City, Parsons said. There he was put on an ECMO machine, which circulates and oxygenates a patient's blood outside the body, taking over heart and lung function when a patient's organs don't work on their own.
Spirit fired Dean in April 2023, and he had filed a complaint with the Department of Labor alleging his termination was in retaliation for raising concerns related to aviation safety. Parsons said Dean became ill and went to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing just over two weeks ago. He was intubated and developed pneumonia and then a serious bacterial infection, MRSA. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was airlifted from Wichita to a hospital in Oklahoma City, Parsons said. There he was put on an ECMO machine, which circulates and oxygenates a patient's blood outside the body, taking over heart and lung function when a patient's organs don't work on their own.
And nothing will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoever finds this questionable will be labelled a conspiracy nut, Boeing will pay some slap on the wrist fines and no C-level at that company will be worse for wear.
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I agree it looks bad. Given the MIC and deep state ties here where Boeing is concerned; I have no difficulty believing that anything *could* be possible.
However what *should* happen absent any evidence whatsoever this wasn't a freak medical condition?
Remember every event is coincident with some other event if you don't restrict the topics of the other event or allow enough time. Should we blow a bunch of tax dollars launching investigations into people who might want Boeing's critics silenced? Where do we
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> Bob Boberson, CFO, who is putting out contracts on whistleblowers via a network of international
> assassins that he became a part of while auditing financial statements for U.S. GAAP compliance.
By far the craziest example of this happening is when Atari execs parachuted in from Warner HQ were sent to the far east to set up their production lines circa 1983 and tried to hire people to push their co-execs into traffic/light rail.
God knows if that really happened, but it seems a *lot* more specific tha
Re:And nothing will happen (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had MRSA in my forties. I was lucky, my primary care provider caught it before it had gotten bad enough to require hospitalization, strong, STRONG antibiotics took care of it. When I had it, it manifested in a fashion that I thought was allergies, mostly localized swelling. I ended up trying to treat with antihistamines but that didn't accomplish anything. As it got worse I went in and was immediately sampled for testing and started on both oral and topical antibiotics.
So yeah, it can happen naturally to someone that's otherwise healthy and doesn't have a history of this sort of infection. The trouble is, it's not especially common either, so when the second whistleblower dies during a short span of months once investigators are actually paying attention, it's not something that should be ignored. Unfortunately given the budget that Boeing and its rich execs and board members have, it would probably be trivial to find a way to pay an assailant to do something to whistleblowers that doesn't easily tie back to them so long as they're not stupid about how they transfer funds.
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Same here. A few days before my 40th, I thought I had torn a leg muscle, as did 3 doctors over 5 days. It was a physiotherapist that finally said it wasn't what everyone thought it was. Ended up in hospital for an operation to remove a litre of pus, and then 2 weeks on a drip to be dosed with Vancomycin (as the doctor somewhat ominously put it 'the antibiotic of last resort.')
It was my 40th birthday when they cut me open. When asked how I celebrated my 40th, I told them I had a night at the theatre.
So yes,
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Out of less than a dozen Boeing whistleblowers two have died within a couple of months. Too many suspects though to be worth following without some definitive link between the two.
"Coincidence is the rarest beast, and its tracks look like so much else." - Illisidi in the 'Foreigner' series
Re: And nothing will happen (Score:2)
Boeing is 0.23% of the S&P500. It moves more than that on most trading day. If they went bankrupt, it wouldn't even be noticed by index fund investors.
An active fund overweight on Boeing should get a new manager. The writing has been on the wall for a while. They are on the decline. They will not be allowed to outright fail, but their shareholders could still be wiped out, like GM's.
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The way he died is not really the way someone killed dies. It's very, very difficult to intentionally cause the series of events he died of.
And considering that three letter agencies actually need Boeing to get healthy again, since it's a critical part of American military industrial complex, it would not make much sense for them to participate in this mess on the side of Boeing too much.
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It's a plausible deniability death.
So now there are two down, one from alleged suicide, one from MRSA.
If there's a third then it's becoming suspicious.
I don't expect that it's the three letter agencies directly - but that doesn't rule out individuals within them that getting money under the table.
After all - a lot of this is about big money.
Re:And nothing will happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Kiiiinda but if a single things was done to fuck his immune system then that isn't an especially unlikely series of events to follow
Nonetheless some agencies prefer to simply kill someone off in a car crash. The 9mm holes in the head being from the steering wheel. There's also the old favorite of committing suicide by shooting yourself twice in the back of the head with a rifle.
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Of course there was the Enron exec who committed suicide by running off the road, shooting himself in the back of the head twice and then dropping the gun 10 feet away.
MRSA is nasty, and not often encountered outside of healthcare facilities. Once the infection has taken hold it's really difficult to get rid of. If someone has figured out a way to weaponize it that is NOT a good development.
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You can kill people with money, but not like this
Sounds like somebody never played the educational kids game called "Mousetrap"... You only throw someone out of a window or poison them with a polonium isotope produced only in a very specific type of Russian nuclear reactor IF you want to send a message. On the other hand, if you want actual plausible deniability, you go for some wacky chain of events that causes rubes online to raise questions.
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The way he died is not really the way someone killed dies. It's very, very difficult to intentionally cause the series of events he died of.
Granted, though it really depends on why he was initially "having trouble breathing" -- I don't think TFA/S elaborates on the reason. The actual sequence of events that lead to his death would be hard to control, but not necessarily predict. It depends on how much any perpetrators knew about him and how thoroughly /permanently they wanted to shut him up. In any case, it would have been much easier, but *way* more suspicious, to simply run him off the road in the middle of the night, like with Karen Silk [wikipedia.org]
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Re: And nothing will happen (Score:5, Interesting)
I was about his age, and in good health when I almost died of pneumonia last year. I spent 10 days in the hospital. If I had the bad luck to get MRSA as well, ....
Sometimes bad things just happen. Unless they discover polonium in his system, I don't see any reason to suspect foul play
Re: And nothing will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone seems to think death is more rare than it is, so they assume it must be abnormal.
Just about everyone is one bad (common) event away from death. Pneumonia is pretty common and as you said add in any complication and you are in big trouble.
The big question is how many people that could be called whistleblowers are there. If there are 2 and both died, that looks wrong, but I suspect that there are likely quite a number of them and 2 of a hundred or more dying over a few months is not that far off the expected death rates.
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> Just about everyone is one bad (common) event away from death.
Not *just* about everyone, *everyone* is one event away from death. That event being death, which doesn't require any badness and still occurs.
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But death to TWO whistleblowers is a bit rarer when seemingly due to somewhat rare events.
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it depends on how many whistleblower there are in those companies that can be called whistleblowers. There are unlikely to be only 2. if there are 100's that could be classified as that, then 2 dying is not rare. And whistleblowers include a lot of people fired by the company in the past few years.
Around age 45 about 1 in 250 people are expected to die per year from any cause (according to cdc tables). If there are 250+ that can be called whistleblowers(complained and fired/left/stillworking in the
Re: And nothing will happen (Score:2)
And do we know what the number of Boeing whistle-blowers actually is ?
It certainly looks suspicious if it is a low number. The conspiracy theorists may or may not be right about these deaths being related to some criminal action and not just natural causes. It's going to be hard getting ahold of the evidence.
3 nuclear physicists died of pancreatic cancer in a lab of 20. All died in the same hospital. My father was one of them . Pancreatic cancer affects 1 in 10000 on average so this way way off statisticall
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Pneumonia is pretty common
Fatal cases among nursing home patients with HIV.... yeah... Fatal cases among healthy 45-year-olds who proactively check themselves into a hospital? Not really.
hundred or more dying over a few months
Hundreds of healthy 45-year-olds die of pneumonia + MRSA in US hospitals every "few months"?!? We're gonna need to see a source for such a claim.
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Not from that specific cause. 100's of 40-50 year olds in good health dying from various illnesses.
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Fatal cases among nursing home patients with HIV.... yeah... Fatal cases among healthy 45-year-olds who proactively check themselves into a hospital? Not really.
It's not proactively checking yourself into the hospital if you have been sick for 2 weeks, and go in "once you can't breathe".
Stop making shit up.
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As the saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, but three times is enemy action.
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It's more about the fact that Boeing C levels don't seem to care at all about human lives, and are more than willing to sacrifice them to lock in next quarters' bonus. Passenger, whistleblower, what about my god damn 3rd yacht??
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I don't see any reason to suspect foul play
There's definitely reason to suspect foul play. There's no reason to conclude foul play. And there isn't much that could be investigated, so the suspicion will only bear fruit in the form of articles like this one, and comments like this one.
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Re: And nothing will happen (Score:2)
Re: And nothing will happen (Score:4, Interesting)
Except there was no gain by killing him now, he already had his accounts written up, so he wan't needed for any further matters. If agencies were behind it, they would have done it before he did his disposition.
If I put on my conspiracy theorist hat - the one that fits a little too comfortably - I can see in this a warning to other whistleblowers. Granted, correlation does not equal causation, and murder by infection seems a bit of a stretch, at least in this case. But I'm willing to bet that a fair few other whistleblowers aren't looking at it that way. I'm sure some of them are reconsidering their next steps, now that two of their fellows have died under questionable circumstances.
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Whoever finds this questionable will be labelled a conspiracy nut, Boeing will pay some slap on the wrist fines and no C-level at that company will be worse for wear.
Some context [theloadstar.com]:
Aside from Mr Barnett and Mr Dean, there are some 30 Boeing whistleblowers
Still unusual, but 2 deaths among 30 middle aged plus folks isn't super unusual. Especially when you're putting them in really high stress situations like trials and corporate harassment.
And the first one, committed suicide in a parked car in broad daylight. An insanely (and needlessly) risky and difficult murder to stage.
And the second one, what? They gave him an infection and then waited for two weeks while he was hosp
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Whoever finds this questionable will be labelled a conspiracy nut, Boeing will pay some slap on the wrist fines and no C-level at that company will be worse for wear.
Having a second whistleblower die in two months is suspect no matter the circumstances. If it's coincidence, it's fifth-level bad writing coincidence. Which would be par for the course in this reality.
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Dude died of pneumonia, as a complication of Influenza, which notably makes you far more susceptible to any additional infections- in this case, MRSA.
Dude was sick for 2 weeks, and rolled into the hospital as he was fucking dying.
Worse, dude is described as a "health nut" who "never goes to the doctor, because he doesn't need to", making this squarely a case of: "Dude who never goes to the doctor dies from never going to the doctor."
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It was discovered that one of the people in the holding cell with me had raped his own 7 year old daughter.
Once that was discovered, another inmate in the holding cell, one who already was going away for a long time, he decided that rapists of 7 year old girls shouldn't be allowed to live. As he was beating the guy to death, the guards arrived and then, after a long stay in the hospital, both men were put in solitary confinement.
I do not know if the rapist survived m
Typical Squelching (Score:3)
At least it's not the usual cause of death - "suicide, two bullets to back of head".
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At least he wasn't in Russia and fell out of a window.
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Or had Polonium tea.
Re: Typical Squelching (Score:2)
Look at how long it took to put down Rasputin.
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In Related News (Score:2, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's a lot of coincidence.
At 50, I don't know anybody that die by suicide or in a crash or car accident, but then I live in Canada.
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At 50, I don't know anybody that die by suicide or in a crash or car accident, but then I live in Canada.
I do, indirectly.
And I'm younger than 50, from a much smaller and far warmer and less snowed-over country than Canada.
Further, back a decade or so ago I was commuting for work to a town about an hour away from where I live.
Every single morning there was at least one fresh car accident along the way, with the car usually flipped onto its roof at the side of the road.
Those were most certainly not all deaths, but the chances increase through repetition.
Also, as a Canadian, you're in a below-average group even
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Coincidence? (Score:2)
Another dead Boeing whistleblower? I don't believe in coincidences.
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Another dead Boeing whistleblower? I don't believe in coincidences.
You don't need to believe in them. They are a statistical certainty. Any university statistics class will teach you that a coincidence is inevitable, and quite mundane. The only thing that makes them interesting or rare is the mental process applied to assuming they have a singular cause.
In any case it really doesn't pass the smell test for a conspiracy. Why would Boeing kill people *after* they gave evidence. It's all the risk of getting caught without any of the reward of the assassination.
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Doesnt believe in coincidences... give me a break, you encounter them ever day.
Clearly I've spotted the conspiracy theory nut.
He saw it coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: He saw it coming... (Score:2)
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Shame on the editor for leaving out the most important piece of information on this story. Before his death, he literally went on a local affiliate news station and stated that if he were to die in the recent months that we should expect he was assassinated. He was warning us.
Why? I mean he's already testified. What benefit does anyone get in assassinating him. Him having a poor judgement of risk or being a conspiracy theorist is quite irrelevant to his death.
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It sends the message of "snitches get stitches". It's why the Witness Protection Program exists.
The guy may have testified already, but his death may make others who have corroborating testimony more reluctant to appear lest they get "disappeared".
Of course, if this was China, he would've been killed and no one would notice
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Second one in as many months? (Score:5, Informative)
Getting a bit spooky. . .
https://time.com/6900123/boein... [time.com]
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If there's a third one then it's starting to smell.
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If there's a third one then it's starting to smell.
I think it's quite pungent at two.
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Regardless, this is gonna turbo-charge foil hats. I've been trying to find ways to make money off conspiracy nuts. It's a win-win: I'd get richer, and they'd get a much-needed wallet-spanking lesson in reality. Don't think of it as manipulation, but as Professor Reality getting paid for giving lessons.
Well, I don't know about the MRSA (people get it every day); but in the case of the "Suicide", not only are the Police still Investigating, but the Victim warned others that if he died "by suicide", it wasn't true.
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The next whistle blower will prolly get caught in bed with a dead woman or a live man.
I love that movie!
Page out of Putin's book (Score:2)
A second Boeing whistle-blower dying is quite a coincidence! I believe it probably is a coincidence, but wouldn't at all be surprised if it wasn't.
I am quite sure that certain people have enough of a monetary interest in these affairs to be completely okay if someone took care of the trouble-makers. While we often are tempted to think such things only happen in faraway dictatorships, they certain do happen here.
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"I believe in coincidences" (Score:2)
"Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences."
hmm (Score:2)
The problem with the conspiracy theories for both whistleblowers is that in both cases they actually disclosed the damaging information already.
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Potentially it could keep others from doing similar things.
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They'd disclosed it but the first one hadn't finished testifying under oath about it. And that matters. The latter has status as evidence in court.
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They stated an intention to testify. They had not yet done so, and the last guy was actually on his way to his deposition the morning he 'suicided'.
Which after months, is still an ongoing, active investigation. So the detectives involved obviously suspect more than a simple self-inflicted wound.
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They stated an intention to testify. They had not yet done so, and the last guy was actually on his way to his deposition the morning he 'suicided'.
Which after months, is still an ongoing, active investigation. So the detectives involved obviously suspect more than a simple self-inflicted wound.
He was on his way to the third day of his Deposition. He had already had two days of Depo.
Still smells, though.
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The idea that shadowy corperations might kill you for being important feels so much better then the reality : that these big high profile stories don't actually matter to these people.
But we want them to care, we want them to care as much as we do about stories like this.. and the
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
I can imagine a sign on the shop floor:
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I can imagine a sign on the shop floor:
Wow! That's twisted! Not a criticism, just an observation...
If the conspiracy is true (Score:2)
and this is part of some coordinated cover up it also really drives home the point of the bad Boeing management. It takes a lot of effort, risk and usually money to carry out hits on people. Imagine if they had used that cunning and planning to just fix your manufacturing problems.
Conspiracy or not I really get the feeling that even more horror stories about the state Boeing is in are going to come to light over the next 2-3 months. I think even the bad things we have heard so far while already more than
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Conspiracy or not I really get the feeling that even more horror stories about the state Boeing is in are going to come to light over the next 2-3 months. I think even the bad things we have heard so far while already more than enough to take action, are really just breaking the surface.
Same here. They are obviously unable to fix their problems in any reasonable time-frame. For things to go this badly wrong as with the door, a lot of things need to be screwed up. For the door it was one incompetent installation and two missing checks. (I assume that when you check for correct bolt installation, you cannot be incompetent enough to mistake a missing bolt for an installed one...) That is three different people or teams screwing up really badly. It is quite likely that there is a lot more bein
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It takes a lot of effort, risk and usually money to carry out hits on people. Imagine if they had used that cunning and planning to just fix your manufacturing problems.
I'm pretty sure the money for such hits is small potatoes, compared with the cost savings and profit increases that resulted from them NOT fixing their manufacturing problems.
bow to our corporate masters (Score:5, Interesting)
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We truly are serfs.
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his is the 2nd "sudden" death of a whistle blower in 2 months.
Sudden? It took the guy like two weeks to slowly die from his infection.
John Barnett was found dead on March 9th THE DAY BEFORE he was scheduled to testify against Boeing
No, he had already given a few days of testimony prior to his suicide, and had been going on record about Boeing's issues since way back in 2019.
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"The doctor said he'd never seen anything like it before in his life. His lungs were just totally
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02... [npr.org]
Corporations part of the military industrial complex have access to "tools" not available to anyone else. Just ask the Putin critics.. on, sorry, you can't,.they're dead. https://www.newsweek.com/putin... [newsweek.com]
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Dean started feeling sick around two weeks ago, his mother, Virginia Green, told NPR. He stayed home from work for a couple days, but things got worse.
And just because a particular doctor had 'never seen anything like it before' doesn't mean it doesn't happen, just that HE had never witnessed it. But nice try making it seem like it was some crazy, once-in-a-lifetime illness. Oh, and the doctor himself wasn't quoted saying that anyways, it was second-hand info from his mother.
Conspiracy or not (Score:5, Insightful)
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Non sequitur. The fact that everyone has a first reaction doesn't point to anything about the ruling class. It only points to people's perception of them, nothing more nothing less.
Re: Conspiracy or not (Score:2)
Yet another oppritunity wasted (Score:2, Insightful)
We've been warned about overuse of antibiotics and MRSA. It's like every other year papers get published about how MRSA and other antibiotic resistant things should present this existential fear to humanity.
NOPE, clearly we're going to go with conspiracy I guess. I guess we'll worry about all those warnings about antibiotic resistance when it blows up in our face. Sort like all those warnings about expanding without care into uninhabited lands and how it could trigger a pandemic.
You know it's whatever.
Is the contagion man-made? (Score:3, Insightful)
Crazy Coincidence (Score:2)
Gee, what a coincidence!
Ian Fleming said (Score:2)
Boeing Whistleblower Bingo Card (Score:2)
So what is going to happen when the 3rd whistleblower also loses their life to something unexpected?
#BoeingWhistleBlowerBingoCard
Boeing Body Count now trending (Score:2)
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Doesn't have to be either - there are any number of household chemicals that could induce respiratory inflammation and failure, which could naturally result in pneumonia and death. Doesn't mean he wasn't murdered. Doesn't mean he was. I'll be curious to see what an autopsy turns up.
suside? (Score:2)
suside?
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Doesn't have to be either - there are any number of household chemicals that could induce respiratory inflammation and failure, which could naturally result in pneumonia and death. Doesn't mean he wasn't murdered. Doesn't mean he was. I'll be curious to see what an autopsy turns up.
If you allow for the possibility that he was murdered, then you must also allow for the possibility that the autopsy results will be faked.
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Sounds like he probably went to the hospital with influenza B (high in Kansas recently), where he got a bonus dose of MRSA and maybe Covid --> pneumonia, which killed him. Nobody wears masks in the hospital now; it's one of the most dangerous places to be.
I consider hospital-acquired-infections to be bioweapons of a sort. They're totally avoidable with proper PPE.
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Difficulty breathing resulting in the need to intubate? That could be Covid.
The MRSA, on the other hand, he likely caught at the hospital, as a result of the intubation and a weakened immune system.
No reason it needs to be any more than that.
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At this point Airbus just needs to contract out a few more suspicious deaths and Boeing will take the fall.
Just kidding, or am I.....
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Airbus is not happy about this shit show at Boeing either. Being a monopolist in the EU is not a nice position to have. And besides, Airbus is already manufacturing at capacity and so are their suppliers.
Re: Imagine if they're innocent (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know There are far easier way to kill someone. Fly them on a boeing for instance!
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