Why Fallacies are False -- 07, Categoricals and Negatives

The phrase “I haven’t seen…” is an attempt to assert a categorical negative claim. Let’s look at categoricals.

A categorical claim says that all X are Y.

If you can find even one example of X that is not Y, the statement is false.

And since none of us are omniscient, nor can we access every piece of evidence that might exist, we cannot make categorical claims – UNLESS WE HAVE A COMPLETE DATASET.

To get a complete dataset to make claims about, we need a clear definition of what is in our dataset and what is not. But we can make the definition so stringent we defeat ourselves.

Real world example? You want to test a drug. If your dataset of test subjects is strictly white males between 20 and 50, your results don’t necessarily apply to women, to children, to the elderly, or to POC. So you can’t make the categorical statement that “Drug X is 75% effective” except for test subjects who represent 10% or less of the world’s demographics. But decades ago, everybody assumed that if it worked on white males of a given age, it would work on everybody else. People died over that assumption.

The “all X are Y” claim means every member of one dataset is also a member of another dataset or has the same description. The problem comes if you claim that all X are not Y. This can mean two things.

One is that no member of dataset X is in dataset Y or matches the description in dataset Y. When we’re just talking normally, saying “all X are not Y” could mean that some X ARE Y: “all dogs are not vicious” in normal conversation could mean you’ve been talking about dogs that are vicious but you want to point out that viciousness is not a universal quality of dogs.

That doesn’t work in logic. If you mean “some are not”, you have to say “some are not”.

The other thing it can mean is that you are confusing inherent qualities (essence) and qualities perceived or caused (accidence). This is the basis for the “all dogs are not vicious”. The person saying that probably knows that historically, abused animals turn mean. They’re saying that dogs are not inherently vicious, the viciousness is caused.

Negation is an operation in Boolean algebra. It is a categorical claim that something does not exist. When you don’t have a complete dataset, making a negative claim risks somebody finding the exception that proves your claim doesn’t hold water.

“I haven’t seen…” is an attempt to pretend that you have a complete dataset. In reality, on social media for example, it only means that you don’t follow every account on every possible platform.

Instead, it often means that you only follow the accounts of people who already agree with you. It’s called “being in an echo chamber”. If you want to say “I haven’t seen…”, make sure you do it inside your echo chamber, because people outside it may have the evidence that what you say is false. And so I have a habit of replying “follow more accounts”, especially when I HAVE seen whatever the OP is denying.

Instead of saying “I haven’t seen…”, give the hard evidence that the probability of existence is infinitesimal. Calculating an infinitesimal probability of truth shows that an argument is “down in the noise”, not worth troubling your head over. That’s what forensic DNA testing does, tells the court that there’s an infinitesimal probability that somebody other than the accused provided the sample that gave the test results.

Now. In logic, you can also defeat a negative by proving that it creates an absurdity, reductio ad absurdam. It’s kind of like what Elle did to her ex in class in Legally Blonde. He made a categorical claim that a guy was not stalking the girl who birthed his child, he was worried about what happened to the sperm he had donated. Elle reduced that to an absurdity by asking if he would do the same thing if he donated to a sperm bank or had a nocturnal emission. But that was in class, not in court.

So let’s be careful about both the categoricals and the negatives that we try to prove.

Knitting -- videos

Time has passed since I started my Knitting thread. Some of the videos I link to don't work any more. 

Johnny Vasquez' New Stitch a Day site used to have videos for basic stitch patterns but they have reorganized on some stupid principle you will never figure out and a search for "basic knit stitch" doesn't turn up a video.

Here's one solution. I have used a number of Joanne's patterns.

https://joannesweb.com/how-to-knit-the-absolute-beginners-guide/

This page has a video for the long tail cast on that I have learned to love, as well as knit and purl stitches.

https://joannesweb.com/how-to-knit-the-absolute-beginners-guide/

If you've been using my knitting blog and got frustrated by links that didn't work, I hope this helps.

Why Fallacies are False -- 06, Argument from Silence

The issue of hard evidence is important to every argument. When you don’t have any hard evidence, you’re done. You can’t prove anything. Right? Right?

Have you ever heard the phrase “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”?

I’ll give you a concrete example some of you may be too young to know about.

There are currently no Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. Does that mean there never were?

Us old people may remember the Bamian Buddhist statues carved into rock in Afghanistan. The Taliban blew them up. Pictures remain, but if you don’t know about the history or you’ve never seen the pictures, you might claim those statues never existed.

This is a fallacy called “The false argument from silence”. Does that sound familiar?

There is a true argument from silence. You can’t make it unless you have the complete dataset.

So if you claim that HBO is not running a specific film, all you have to do is show the HBO program schedule. If that film isn’t in the schedule, it follows as the night the day that HBO is not running it. HBO has complete control of the dataset and they are not going to list something they are not running.

But when anybody goes on social media and says “I haven’t seen…” they are running into the false argument from silence for several reasons.

First, they are not Gd. They are not omniscient. There can be many things they do not know. I have labeled this The Omniscience Fallacy but it’s a subset of the false argument from silence.

Second, the world churns out 1 terabyte of data daily. It is not possible for a mortal to access every piece of data the world turns out.

“I haven’t seen” is also a bigger issue called making a negative claim, and it’s related to categorical statements, which deserve a post of their own.

But on the subject of the false argument from silence, before there was a terabyte of data in the world, the false argument had concrete examples. If you’re a paleontologist, you know it as natura non facit saltus.

No paleontologist can discover a new fossil without knowing that at least half a billion years of ancestors lie behind it. That’s because the hard evidence for the age of earth says it is 4.5 billion years old, and the hard evidence for the history of life says it goes back 4 billion years. There’s no such thing as finding a fossil, and thinking that it had no parents, grandparents, or other antecedents. You don’t need hard evidence of all the antecedents to know they existed.

And we know of many mechanisms that deprive us of the remains of living things: fires; volcanoes; earthquakes that bury them; tectonic plate shifts; normal decay and weathering; rockslides and cave collapses.

On my blog, I change this for archaeologists: cultura non facit saltus. There are no archaeological remains that arise out of nothing. They all have cultural antecedents. But a 350 century old archaeological site had 1 micrometer per year of remains, in a hunting camp repeatedly occupied across human evolution, by both Neanderthals and Cro Magnon. As time went on and human tools became more durable, remains at the various archaeological sites became deeper; ceramics lasted longer than leather bottles and metal survived longer than ceramics, except for precious metals and iron which were remelted and recast.

And any historian who talks about Dark Ages and pretends that the next stage in a culture arose out of nothing can go pound sand, for the same reason. No historian has a complete dataset even for a single year in time, let alone for the antecedents of whatever they are studying.

So with my Torah example, claim one saying that there is a single source for it, does not need hard evidence for support. Torah definitely exists, and being a cultural artifact, has a history behind it involving that culture. We will never have all the steps in that history. But denying that there is a history is bad logic. I’ll say more about this at the end of this thread.

The same is true for DH. Just because we have no hard evidence for JEDP, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. The problem for DH is that the concept is full of false data and fallacies.

So next time you are tempted to say “there’s no evidence of that”, stop yourself and ask “do I have a complete dataset?” Being that we are not omniscient and can’t cope with all the evidence that might exist, the answer is probably no. Even if you’re a specialist in the field, remember my professor, who wrote the dissertation on Biblical Hebrew and didn’t know that there was external evidence that what he wrote about was a thing.

I’ll say more about incomplete datasets later, but next week I’m going to clean up after myself.

Why Fallacies are False -- 05, Conjunctions and Documentary Hypothesis

Here’s why I love Linda. A quick review.

The Linda problem starts with a dataset describing Linda. You can say anything you want about her. It doesn’t even have to be true.

Then you try to decide which of two statements is more likely to be true:

1.     Linda is X.

2.     Linda is X and Y.

There is no relationship between X and your dataset about Linda. There is also no relationship between Y and your dataset, or between Y and X. So you can’t prove that either X or Y is true about Linda based on the dataset.

To turn this into math, assign a probability of truth to each of X and Y, and the number is between zero and one because you can’t prove anything about either one. Because statement #2 is a conjunction, the math is multiplication. When you multiply two fractions smaller than 1, the product is always smaller than both of them. That means it will be smaller than X. So the product of #2 is smaller than #1 and 1 is more likely to be true. But most people get that wrong the first time they meet a Linda problem, and even after you explain it, some people still get it wrong the next time they meet one.

Linda’s formal name is the Conjunction Fallacy.

Here’s why I love Linda. The Documentary Hypothesis has a dataset describing at least four putative documents. DH claims that my Torah is made up of these four documents. You may have heard of JEDP; that’s them.

DH denies that “Linda is X” is possible. They reject any description of “Linda” that allows the simple statement.

DH insists that “Linda is Y and Z and…”, that is, Torah is made up of four sources. The probability of that is the product of the probability that each assignment to one of the four putative documents is correct. There is no hard evidence that any of them existed, so the probability of every assignment is between zero and one.

To get the answer, you must multiply because DH says you can’t assign the whole thing to just one document, and you must have enough assignments to achieve the whole Torah. So the answer is some fractions between zero and one multiplied together, with at least four terms contributing to the product.

Now, it would be one thing if DH took each book in Torah and assigned the whole book to one of the four sources. So your terms might be J for Genesis, E for Exodus, P for Leviticus, D for Deuteronomy, and then one of them again for Numbers. 

But the dataset doesn’t support that because the descriptions of the documents don’t match any one book. P gets the closest to Leviticus and assignments to P would have the highest value – if they were all restricted to Leviticus.

But they aren’t. DH splits all five books. Numbers is split up the most, with parts from each of the four documents. Leviticus is split up the least, but some of its putative sources are not even JEDP. But at any rate, the number of terms is larger than four and you might as well make it ten for starters. That would be the outcome if Leviticus was all P and Deuteronomy was all D, and each of the other three books was split between two or three of the documents.

But they’re not. All right, then, it would be nice if DH took each narrative in Torah and said it came from one of the four sources. That means you’re looking at each narrative as one term and assigning it a probability of coming from one of those four documents. I’ve counted some 80 narratives in Torah, stories with plots and characters and action (and this feeds into something I will talk about later). So there are at least 80 terms in the calculation, all of them fractions between zero and one. And then you have to consider the non-narrative portions, which fall between the narratives. So the number of terms is larger than 80; we could set it at 100 for starters. A fraction between zero and one to the 100th power is infinitesimal, down around 10 to the minus 61. (For comparison, the Planck length is 10 to the minus 35 meters.)

But that’s not what DH does. DH splits some narratives up and assigns part to one document and part to another. So you can’t count on two verses that are sequential, being assigned to the same document. Actually, it’s worse than that, because DH splits some verses up, assigning part of the words to one document and part to another. But let’s ignore that last bit, because what I’m saying is that DH has a probability that is the product of some fractions between zero and one. You have the same number of terms as the number of pieces in the DH assignment, something more than 100 terms.

Since you can’t count on a chunk of verses to all be assigned to the same document, you have to consider every verse a separate term. 

Torah has 5845 verses.

DH’s probability calculation has at least 5845 terms. Each term has a value between zero and one. If every term had the same value, the answer would be that value raised to the 5845th power. The answer is infinitesimal. The probability of DH being true is vanishingly small.

Now, DH will say that it is not a Linda problem, there IS a connection between the dataset and the assignments, the dataset describes the four documents to which they are making the assignments. But as I said, we don’t have hard evidence (yet) that they ever existed. What’s worse, I show on my blog that the descriptions themselves have a basis in fallacies, two of which I will get to later. Worst of all, I show that, from the start, DH relied on false data. This is what I wrote about last time: even if you don’t have a real conjunction fallacy, but your dataset contains falsehoods, you’re wrong. The whole concept has a zero probability of being true.

My science author was a trained biochemist but, like I said last week, that doesn’t mean he had training in logic. And even if he did, it's obvious that he didn't subject DH to a probability calculation. He had no training in the Bible, he admits that. It was one of a number of instances where a scientist writes about something they’ve never researched, and the work gets attention because of who they are, not because they know what they’re talking about. I won’t go into that rant here.

Knitting -- ripple throw with piped edging from leftovers

I haven't posted on this page in a long time because I was working on a project which I just finished.

A long time ago, when I was in high school, there was this craft thing where you had a wooden spool with a large hole down through it. At one end there were some thin nails, and you used a crochet hook to loop yarn around them and then sort of knit a long snake. 

Technically this is called an I-cord. You can use it for the edge of a coat; I used to have a coat pattern with this specific design.

Otherwise the only other thing you might do with an I-cord is make a piped edging for housewares, like a cushion cover. So let's do that.

I worked this project on straight needles because my circular needles already had projects on them. The leftovers were Comfy fingering and I used size 3 needles.

This being a throw, it was rectangular. I used Arne and Carlos' video to make the I-cord for the bottom edge, but I used 3 stitches not 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lQU5QsdNs

I made an I-cord that was 312 stitches long. This gave me 306 stitches for the pattern and 3 stitches on each end for the side I-cords.

I used a crochet hook to pick up the Vs on the top of the I-cord to work the yarn into them, then I knitted the next row with I-cord stitches at each end.

ON RIGHTSIDE ROWS:  K1, yarn forward, slip purlwise, yarn back, K1. Work across in pattern, then K1, yarn forward, slip purlwise, yarn back, K1.

ON WRONGSIDE ROWS: slip 1 purlwise, yarn back, K1, yarn forward, slip purlwise. work across, and then yarn forward, slip purlwise, yarn back, knit, yarn forward and slip.

The pattern is an 18-stitch repeat. Work this between the 3-stitch edges. If you want to work it stand-alone, K1 at the edges on R3 and R4.

R1 & 2: Knit  

R3: *[(Knit 2 sts together) x 3, Knit in front and back of next stitch, (Yarn Over, K1) x 4, K in front and back of next stitch, (Knit 2 sts together) x 3], repeat * till last stitch.

R4: Purl to last stitch.

Work this until all your leftovers are gone -- or at least until there's not enough of the leftovers to do a full 4 row pattern. I used 4 sets of the pattern for white and 5 sets for all the other stripes. One skein of yarn made three sets of 5-pattern runs. I had one full skein of that dark pink and it made all three of those stripes.

When your leftovers are used up, add in the color for the top piping. I recommend working the same  number of repeats at the top as you did after starting the bottom I-cord.

For the top bind-off work another series of piping.

Put a DP needle into the three stitches of the edge piping and pick up the first stitch of the top row. Using another DP, K1, yarn forward, slip purlwise, yarn back, K2TOGTBL leaving the last stitch on the needle. Now pick up the loop in front of the next stitch and do this again. Pick up that same loop and K2 K2TOGTBL. This turns your corner.

Use one of your DPs to * pick up the next stitch of the top row, K2 K2TOGTBL leaving the last stitch on the needle * until all the top row stitches have been worked. Slip two stitches over to make an edge for the piping and work the end of the yarn into the wrong side. Notice that this will roll the I-cord just as on the bottom since you never turn the work over and purl.

If you want to work this in bulky, make a bottom I-cord 132 stitches long.

This I-cord piping makes another nice non-curling edge and, as you see, it follows the ripple in the pattern. 

Why Fallacies are False -- 004, Conjunctions and Conspiracy Theories

You’ve had a week now to think about that last statement. If you teach somebody about the Conjunction fallacy and why it’s wrong, at a later time they will STILL PICK THE WRONG STATEMENT AS MORE LIKELY.

If they’re looking at the exact same problem, that’s nuts. But it could be a matter of not realizing they’ve seen it before. We all forget things.

To show you how conspiracy theories are Linda problems, I have to emphasize some things.

First, it is irrelevant whether the “description of Linda” dataset is true or false. It’s just a bunch of information labeled Linda for the purposes of the explanation. You could collect sports statistics and that would still be your dataset.

The important thing is that both your X and your Y have nothing in common with that dataset. In the classic problem, the first statement is that Linda is a bank teller. Nothing in the description says she went to business school or college or any training sessions that qualify you to be a bank teller. If your conspiracy theory is a real conjunction fallacy, the simple statement will have nothing in common with your dataset. If it does, you’re not looking at a conjunction fallacy.

The same is true about your Y, which in the classic problem says Linda is a feminist. Again, there’s nothing in the dataset that says she belongs to NOW or any other woman-oriented organization, or that she participated in feminist protests. Again, if the “Y” in your conspiracy theory actually has a relationship to your dataset, it’s not a real conjunction fallacy.

At that point, it becomes important if your dataset has falsehoods in it. If you can prove that, you prove the whole thing is probably not true. Same if the connection between the dataset and the other statements have fallacies in them.

Once you pick your dataset, be careful with the claims you make about it. Prove the X claim. Then you can go on and prove the Y claim. And THEN you can make a probably true conjunctive claim involving X and Y. And this is exactly what science does, under Cartesian method: break a problem up into pieces; prove one piece true at a time; and then combine them.

Highly educated people face as much risk of creating and believing conspiracy theories as people who left school in their teens. Higher education does not force people to learn about fallacies. Even if STEM training teaches Cartesian method, they don’t necessarily lecture on the connections to logic or why the Method helps prevent creation of fallacies.

Next time I’ll give an example of a conjunction that never heard of Cartesian method.

Mendel Beilis -- the Kievlyanin articles and the Baba Bathra question

I wrote a lot about Pranaitis in a couple of places, one here about the Mendel Beilis trial, and another about his plagiarizing Eisenmenger’s ignorant and bigoted book that falsely claims Talmud has stories about the Christian Jesus. For those of you who haven’t read either one, this post is the short form of Pranaitis’ story. Then I’ll get into Kievlyanin’s revelations about his testimony at the Beilis trial. Then I may or may not apologize to some writers, even though they are all dead.

Pranaitis was a Catholic from Lithuania, from a part of that country where most people knew German. He tried for the priesthood, but his thesis was rejected because it misrepresented scripture. At trial he was called a kzendz, a docent.

Pranaitis’ thesis plagiarized Entdecktes Judentum, published about 1700 by Johann Eisenmenger. Eisenmenger hated Jews, and he falsely claimed that Talmud refers to the Christian Jesus. The citations he gave have been used ever since by people making the same false claim; I know where all of them are, I’ve read them in the source tractates, and that’s how I know it’s false. Eisenmenger did not read Hebrew or Aramaic and there’s no knowing where he got his list – but it wasn’t from Jews because some of the citations don’t exist at all.

Why did the prosecution in the Beilis case call a Catholic as a witness? After all, Pranaitis behaved badly; he proselytized, and in Russia, that was illegal. The Catholic church punished him with an assignment to Tashkent, which was mostly Muslim.

Well, the Beilis prosecutors had a problem. The same month in 1911 that Andrey Yushchinsky’s body was found, the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds started agitating that it was a case of the blood libel, the false claim that Jews have to use Christian blood to make Passover matso. If you know of anybody who uses “blood libel” in any other sense, they are committing the redefinition fallacy to get attention. Bust their chops and move on from any relationship you have with them.

Anyway, the same month, the Russian Orthodox Church pronounced that the murder was NOT a case of the blood libel, and prohibited its clergy from participating in promoting the idea. Well, that’s all the case was about. Why?

My personal opinion is, Justice Minister Shcheglovitov was helping Nikolay II push back the reforms forced on him by the 1905 revolution – which is how the government viewed the events of Bloody Sunday in 1905. Nikolay was forced to form the Duma and give it some responsibilities and some immunities, but every year he took back some of its powers. In 1906, the Duma repealed a law criminalizing “murder out of religious fanaticism”, which means that a murder could be prosecuted on the blood libel. A prosecutor could also use it if one of the Skoptsy sect died under the operations they performed, but in my opinion, it primarily had the blood libel in mind.

If Beilis were convicted of the blood libel, the Duma would have grounds for restoring the law. But prosecuting Beilis for the blood libel violates the principle that you cannot try somebody as a criminal if what they did is not covered in the criminal code. Nullum crimen sine praevia lege poenali has been part of western legal systems since 1813 and Japan adopted it when they westernized their legal system. During the Beilis trial, the defense tried several times to point out that there was no statute that applied to the case. At the last moment, the justice ministry gave in and broke the single charge into two: one about the fact of the murder with no responsibility assigned; and the blood libel charge, which had no statute on it.

So anyway, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church prevented its clergy from testifying in this trial for the prosecution which endorsed the blood libel charge. Three defense witnesses did come from various parts of the church hierarchy, including its educational system.

So the prosecution in the Beilis case was stuck with a plagiarizing Catholic. Civil prosecutor Shmakov, who was trying to get punitive damages for Andrey’s mother, hated Jews, had read lots of the anti-Semitic material that floated among the Black Hundreds, and knew that Pranaitis worked with Forensic Investigator Mashkevich on materials involving the blood libel for the trial. But that happened a year before the trial, and Pranaitis was stupid as well as a liar. The transcript shows that Shmakov and the other prosecution attorneys had to lead him through his testimony, and he kept saying “I don’t know” or sitting silent about things he and Mashkevich discussed in 1912.

The account in Kievlyanin agrees with the transcript. On day 27 (21 October Julian/3 November Gregorian calendar), defense attorney Zarudny verified with Pranaitis that the copy of Talmud Pranaitis claimed was hard to get, was the Amsterdam Talmud. Then Zarudny left the court for a while, during which questioning proceeded. When he returned, he showed the book and got the court to verify that it was the Amsterdam Talmud – and somebody in the court laughed.

This might have been Benzion Katz, who attended the trial. People give him credit for making up a list of questions Pranaitis would never be able to answer. Supposedly one of them asked “Who was Mrs. Baba Bathra?” I discuss this on my blog.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2013/11/mendel-beilis-baba-bathra-question.html

Issue 293 of Kievlyanin, for 24 October (Julian), reports on the end of Crown Rabbi Mazeh’s testimony. At this point, the trial transcript shows that Pranaitis takes the stand again. After a while, the defense starts asking questions that prove he knows nothing about Talmud. This is where Katz’ Baba Bathra question should have been asked. The newspaper ignores the entire line of questioning and goes straight to closing arguments.

That means I have nothing to apologize for. From 2012 when I found the transcript online and translated Pranaitis’ testimony, to this point when I have read what Kievlyanin had to say about his testimony, I have argued that the Baba Bathra question was never asked, contrary to what Katz supposedly said.

When none of the contemporary reports give it, and none of the people present in court record it in their memoirs, it’s easy to conclude that while Katz may have contributed some of the questions the defense team did ask, that one question was not among the ones asked in court. I talk on my blog about why or why not.

So it’s nice not to have to apologize. And, one more time for those who didn’t read my blog, while the jury voted yes on the charge that a crime had been committed, six of them voted NO, Beilis had no responsibility for the murder. This being the second charge that included blood libel language, Beilis was NOT convicted of the blood libel. Later history endorses this.

One of the people who was supposed to be on Beilis’ defense team was Arnold Margolin, who worked on the case from April 1911 on (as Mr. Eli Rubin learned). But since he turned out to have important evidence to testify about, Oscar Gruzenberg replaced him. Why Gruzenberg? In 1900 when he was still apprenticing, having been kicked out of law school under the “May Laws”, he wrote an appeal in a blood libel case from Poland and got the conviction reversed. If Beilis had been convicted, the best expert in the world was handy to appeal the case. No such thing happened. Beilis went home after the case closed, later moved to the Holy Land, and then to New York, where he passed and was buried.

In 2009 in the magazine Tradition, Shnayer Leiman published the information that the Baba Bathra question was asked. I did not find the transcript until 2012, though it might have been posted years earlier. The issues of Kievlyanin were not posted until 2016 and I did not find them until 2024. This kind of thing happens all the time; you can only write about the evidence you found. But it’s out there now so make the most of it.

Why Fallacies are False 003 -- Meet Linda, the Conjunction Fallacy

I love Linda. You will, too, if you pay attention, because Linda is why conspiracy theories are fallacies.

You may have heard of the Linda problem.

You create a dataset describing Linda. You can say anything you want about her. It doesn’t even have to be true.

Then you try to decide which of two statements is more likely to be true:

1.     Linda is X.

2.     Linda is X and Y.

There is no relationship between X and your dataset about Linda. There is also no relationship between Y and your dataset, or between Y and X. Based on the dataset, you have no idea about how likely it is that X is true about Linda, or Y is true about Linda.

Linda’s formal name is the Conjunction Fallacy. “X and Y” is a conjunction. That will ring a bell if you know anything about Boolean algebra, which you should if you have a degree in computers. The rest of us not so much. I met Boole decades ago when I got into a computer internship program where I worked, because my old boss declared my skill area non-essential so I couldn’t get advancement or CEUs any more. (Eleven people jumped his ship and he had a shreck and tried to stop them, and his bosses said they’re non-essential now, so you can’t do that. It’s called hoist with your own petard.)

Anyway, for one thing, Boolean algebra tells you the results of combining two bits of data, where each bit can have one of two values. I’m going to call the possible values zero and one to make the relationship to math clear.

Boolean algebra has operations, the two most important of which right now are conjunction and disjunction. Conjunction means that our two bits, A and B, have to both be 1 for the answer to be one. Disjunction means that A and B have to both be zero for the answer to be zero.

In words, a conjunction is AND while a disjunction is OR. Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but people can go get into the other details if they want. For now, look at statement 2 above. It’s a conjunction, right? So what’s the answer?

We can’t tell.

Since neither X nor Y has any relationship to Linda’s dataset, we don’t know their values.

What we do know is that, since there is no proof for or against their truth, the probability that they are true can’t be either 100% or 0%. It’s between 100% and 0%. And if you know percentages, you know that 100% is 1.0. If the answer has to be between 1 and 0, it’s a fraction less than 1. You can express it as 0.50, 0.167, whatever. Its value is not the issue; the issue is the fact that it’s a fraction less than one.

What’s the algebra for a conjunction?

A	B	A OR B		A	B	A AND B
1	1	1		1	1	1
1	0	1		1	0	0
0	1	1		0	1	0
0	0	0		0	0	0

 

If you changed the words to arithmetic operators, you would have to use a plus sign for the OR and a multiplication sign for the AND. (You can’t go above a probability of 1 and that’s why adding 1 and 1 is still 1.)

Do you remember your grade school arithmetic? If X is 0.50 and Y is also 0.50, what’s the answer for a conjunction?

So for statement one, the answer is X or 0.50. But for statement 2, the answer is the product of X and Y, which is 0.25. It’s smaller.

Whichever of X or Y is smaller, the product will be smaller than that. 0.25 AND 0.50 is 0.125.

So statement 2 cannot be more probable.

When you meet up with a conspiracy theory, break it down.

·       Identify the dataset. If it contains false data, you’re done. The theory is false.

·       If the dataset is true, examine the statements about it. Do they have a natural organic relationship to the dataset such that it supports their truth or undercuts it? If the latter, the probability for statement 1 is higher, but it still may not reach 100%.

·       If any of the statements are conjunctions, then if the dataset does not support them or there’s no relationship to the dataset, those statements are LESS LIKELY TO BE TRUE.

You’re not trying to prove that they’re not true, which would be a value of zero. You’re proving that they are not likely to be true, with a value below 100%, below 50%, below 25%, or worse. The least likely term of the conjunction, is the top limit.

The problem with the Conjunction Fallacy is that most people will pick the conjunction as more likely. You basically have to give them a quick course in probability math to show them why that’s not true. And then, when they meet another conjunction fallacy, they are STILL likely to pick the wrong answer. There could be a number of reasons: normal forgetfulness; not realizing that a new problem could be a conjunction fallacy; or it says something they want to believe and they throw logic out the window. They STILL pick the wrong statement.

Mendel Beilis -- March 22 1911 Kyevlyanin article

Andrey's parents were not married when he was born. His last name is his mother's maiden name at that time. Her name changed upon her re-marriage but Andrey's did not. This is important for the investigation.

К убийству мальчика на Кирилловской ул. Вчера, 21 марта, место, где найден был труп убитого Андрея Ющинского, мальчика 13 лет, в усадьбе кырпышного завода Бернера по Кирилловской улице, посетило много народа. Осмотр местности, прилегающей к пещере, где лежал убитый, в поверхностный осмотр самого трупа не дали определенных указаний на обстоятельства, при которых совершенно было обнаруженное преступление. Возможно, что мальчика убили где-нибудь пососедству, а затем труп его оставили в пещере. С этой отдаленной от квартиры его матери и училища  окранной города  Андрей Ющинский был хорошо знаком, так как раньше его мать жила в этой местности и только после выхода вторично  замужъ переселилась в Никольскую слободку. Возможно, что убитый имел здесь знакомых сверстников, к которым иногда заходил и здесь около пещеры дети играли. В настоящее время чины полиции и следственной власти заинтерсованы семейным положением  убитого. пока в этом отношении выяснено, что он внебрачный сын солдата, погибшего в последнюю войну. Об этом Ющинский знал и иногда сетовал на свое тяжелое положение, особенно когда его мать вышла замуж. Её удалось разыскать только вчера утром и объявить о находке трупа сына, об исчезновании которого она заявила 12 марта в училище. На многих случайныйх свидетелей, толпившихся вчера около пещеры, Ющинская произвела странное впечатление. Она как-то безралично отнеслась к трупу бедного мальчика. Вчера труп доставлен в анатомический театр, где будет произведено судебномедицинское вскрытие; быть может, оно даст нужный материал для судебного следствия .

 

On the murder of a boy on Kirillovskaya Street. Yesterday, March 21, many people visited the place where the body of the murdered Andrei Yushchinsky, a boy of 13, was found in the estate of the Berner kurpyshny factory on Kirillovskaya Street. An inspection of the area adjacent to the cave where the murdered man lay, and a superficial examination of the body itself did not give any definite indication of the circumstances under which the crime was committed. It is possible that the boy was killed somewhere nearby, and then his body was left in the cave. Andrei Yushchinsky was well acquainted with this outlying area of ​​the city, far from his mother's apartment and school, since his mother had previously lived in this area and only after remarrying moved to Nikolskaya Slobodka. It is possible that the murdered boy had acquaintances of his age here, whom he sometimes visited, and that children played here near the cave. At present, the police and investigative authorities are interested in the family status of the murdered boy. So far, it has been established that he is the illegitimate son of a soldier who died in the last war. Yushchinsky knew this and sometimes complained about his difficult situation, especially when his mother got married. She was only found yesterday morning and had announced to her the discovery of her son's body, whose disappearance she had reported on March 12 at the school. Yushchinskaya made a strange impression on many of the random witnesses who crowded around the cave yesterday. She was somehow indifferent to the poor boy's body. Yesterday, the body was taken to the anatomical theater, where a forensic autopsy will be performed; perhaps it will provide the necessary material for the trial.

Mendel Beilis -- latest news

A few days ago I found on Internet Archive, three years of copies of the Kievlyanin newspaper, from 1911 to 1913 inclusive. 

I'm starting to explore this treasure chest, starting here.

https://archive.org/details/kievl1911/01/

File number 80 is for March 21, the first date to publish about Yushchinsky's death. 

It's a short squib on page 2, column 4, about the middle. 

It will take me a long time to go through all three years of newspapers, saving them off one by one. The ZIP download function won't do it.

Once a month I'll report on my progress. Be patient.

Here is the first article in transcription and translation. Please forgive the transcription errors; my active knowledge of Russian is a little rusty now but I'm sure it will improve. Also, the original is in the pre-Soviet orthography. Notice that the newspaper initially attributes the death to blunt-force trauma, likely an accident at play. The first autopsy was completed the day after this article appeared.

Вчера, 20 марта, около 1 часа дня, гимназист Борис Веломитский и Пётр эланский, играя в рощь , находящейся при усадьбе кирпичного завода Бернера по Кирилловской улице, в районе Плоского участка, случайно нашли в небольшой пещере труп мальчика, по виду 10-12 лет, около которого лежал кожаный ученический пояс, несколько тетрадок, фуражка, и куртка. Труп в одном нижнем бельё , в неестественном полусогнутом полусидячем положение, был прислонен к стенке пещеры. На голове увитого ясно видна рана, нанесенная, по-видимому, каким-то тупым предметом, возможно, что камнем. Руки скручены и связаны на спине. Пещера, в которой найден труп, имеет в диаметре более аршина. На глубине её около сажени, где был труп, она разделяется на два хода. Вчера же установлена личность убитого. Он оказался учеником Киево-Софийного духовного училища Андреем Ющинским, жившим при матери в одной из слободов за Днепром По словам матери, утром 12 марта сын её ушел в училищу и более домой не возвращался. Пока совершенно не выяснены обстоятельства, при которых Ющинский мог быть убить. Возможно, что он был смертельно ранен камнем во время какой-нибудь игры. По словам матери, на убитом было новое пальто и сапоги, которых пока не нашли.

yesterday, March 20, at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, high school student Boris Belomitsky and Pyotr Ehlansky, playing in the grove located at the estate of the Berner brick factory on Kirillovskaya Street, in the area of ​​the Plosky plot, accidentally found in a small cave the body of a boy, apparently 10-12 years old, near whom lay a leather student belt, several notebooks, a cap, and a jacket. The corpse, in only underwear, in an unnatural half-bent, half-sitting position, was leaning against the wall of the cave. On the head of the corpse, a wound is clearly visible, apparently inflicted by some blunt object, possibly a stone. The hands are twisted and tied behind the back. The cave in which the body was found is more than an arshin in diameter. At a depth of about a fathom, where the body was, it divides into two passages. Yesterday, the identity of the murdered man was established. He turned out to be a student of the Kiev-Sophia Theological School, Andrei Yushchinsky, who lived with his mother in one of the settlements beyond the Dnieper. According to the mother, on the morning of March 12, her son left for school and never returned home. The circumstances under which Yushchinsky could have been killed have not yet been completely clarified. It is possible that he was fatally wounded by a stone during some game. According to the mother, the murdered man was wearing a new coat and boots, which have not yet been found.

Why Fallacies are False -- the Math

Fallacies are errors in logic. Logic is not “a wreath of pretty flowers that smells bad.” Nor is it wordplay.

Logic connects up with two fields of mathematics and I’m going to use both of them so settle back.

Symbolic logic is one way of representing set theory in math. You define a set of elements (which may have nothing in it) and then you can do actual math: add, subtract, multiply, and so on. One part of this field is the stratospheric issue of infinite sets, some of which are bigger than others. If that blows your mind, dig around and find work on it.

You can say things with set theory that are not even wrong but you can also estimate the probability that you are right. I have used probability calculations and identification of fallacies to argue against Documentary Hypothesis, which I first heard about in the 1970s from one of my favorite science authors. I also used the Test of Occam’s Razor, which DH fails in many ways.  I have about 50 posts with the details.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/07/fact-checking-torah-structure-of-torah.html

When you talk fallacies, you also have to talk formal epistemology. How do we know what we know? What sources of data do we use to get elements for our sets? This is the hill on which so many conspiracy theories die. They fail the Test of Occam’s Razor because they don’t address all the available data, or they use sources that misrepresent the data. Conspiracy theories and DH have this in common.

By the way, the other way of representing set theory is Venn diagrams, those colored circles that intersect or not. Gary Curtis has some Venn diagrams on his site. Here’s an example.

https://www.fallacyfiles.org/somernot.html

The math shows that logic is not just wordplay. It’s also an example of why some mathematicians say, we don’t invent math, we discover it. The oldest description of logic that we know of is in Aristotle’s Organon, comprising his Categories, On Interpretation, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations. You can find these works free online and can download them for free.

https://archive.org/details/AristotleOrganon

But probability math is rooted in gambling and the first calculations come from the 1600s CE, while set theory is the work of the late 1800s CE and in that century, Venn adapted Euler diagrams to help with studies of Boolean logic.

As with any good STEM field, it all fits together around the edges – and it helps show objectively why a fallacy is wrong.

This is the end....

I am deactivating my Twitter account. If you have not bookmarked this page, it's time to do that, and check back on Sundays for the rest of my fallacy posts.

Why Fallacies are False 001 -- Introduction

I wish I didn’t feel compelled to do this, but people with the best and worst intentions in the world both promulgate fallacies.

It’s partly because nobody taught them about it. Even people who get through college – even people who teach college as I show on another thread – write fallacies.

So how can you expect people who didn’t get to college to do any better?

And it’s partly because so few people pull their education up by the bootstraps. One of my favorite actors, Burt Lancaster, grew up in the New York slums, but he had access to libraries run by the Settlement House program – and he used them. He read everything he could get hold of and got good grades at a challenging high school – but he went to college as a jock and got treated like one. That was no challenge, so he and his best friend ran away and joined the circus – and the rest is history, except that he never stopped reading. One reason he annoyed people in Hollywood so much, is that they expected him to play lover boys, cowboys and athletes, and leave the intellectual roles to people like Orson Welles. Burt was having none of that and turned in one of the most impressive histories of films in the history of films.

I have read obsessively since I taught myself at the age of four. I studied four languages, two in high school and two in college – but I learned five outside college because they were the gateway to things I wanted to know. Rene Descartes agreed that languages are the beginning of knowledge, but he went on to say that academe keeps chewing over the same old fat and there are new things on the horizon, that they will never have anything to do with. This is in his Discours sur la Method and boy was he right.

He was talking about the liberal arts, and that’s where I find the fallacies. When you come to STEM, the method promulgated by Descartes has two important features. One is, following the method means you will usually pass the Test of Occam’s Razor. The other, which Descartes might not have expected, is that STEM fits together around the edges.

But people whose concentration is run out of the Liberal Arts department at a university are, like their forebears, pipelined. So you have archaeologists who ignore radiocarbon testing, hard evidence about how old material at their site is, or historians who ignore the DNA results of the Human Genome Project in discussing the origin and movements of populations.

And especially in two fields you have people with zero cross-fertilization. The professor whose dissertation showed me that Biblical Hebrew does not work the way everybody else teaches it, never heard of Axel Olrik until I told him in an email. So he was not capable of realizing that some of his grammar has the same functions as Olrik identified structures for in oral narratives. I have a thread on that.

What’s more, in Classical Greek studies, people are just starting to realize that there’s an aspectual sense in its verb system that applies, not just to usage, but to the features of conjugation. Their problem is, they fail to understand the Test of Occam’s Razor. They have built a terribly complex structure including both versions, which is the opposite of the Test. Worse yet, they do not use examples of surviving text to support their claims, which fails the other side of the Test – and some of the surviving data contradicts their claims. I have a thread about that.

So scholars of Classical Greek not only are pipelined to ignore anything outside their field, they can’t support themselves from within their field.

People in the 21^st century have the world’s greatest library and learning tool at their fingertips, and they don’t use it. The third reason why I should not have to write this thread is that there are two great resources on fallacies, Gary Curtis’ Fallacy Files website, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is peer-reviewed. But since people don’t know what fallacies are to begin with, they don’t do their homework.

So here I am, about to put up a third site. While hits on my blog pages are approaching 400,000, the number of daily hits probably reflects people ripping down posts from the blog onto storage, not people actually reading the posts. But I’m going to do this anyway. I feel obligated.

Next, I'll talk about why fallacies are not just word games.

Fact-Checking -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 9

There's a sucker born every minute. Twitter has turned up three new pieces of ignorantly desperate pretense that there was once a nation called Palestine.

As usual, two are newspapers that refer to Palestine which was under Arab attack. Think about the logic of making that claim: the Muslim Arabs were attacking a place full of Muslims. 

One is dated May 1, 1948. The British Mandatory period did not end until May 15.

The other is more subtle. The masthead date is May 16, 1948. The people making this claim are too young to know how print newspapers work. To get out a morning edition, the editor(s) and typesetters worked all the afternoon and night before that. The first print copy went to an editor who looked it over for gross errors. At this point, even if somebody reminded him about the end of the British Mandate, he would probably say, "I'm not going to pay a typesetter to tear apart the entire first page just because of a name nobody cares about."

They were so rationally naive in those days that they could not imagine pro-terrorists using this one piece of business rationale out of irrationally ignorant desperation.

The new example is two coins struck with the word Palestine on them. The date on one coin is 1927. Yes, people put dates on coins. If you have any lying around, check them out. Anyway, 1927 is well within the British Mandatory period. So is the date on the other, 1942.

I keep hoping that this will stop but when you're dealing with nutjobs, you have to shoot them down every time or they claim victory.

UPDATE: proof positive that you have to answer every nutjob. A third coin has turned up. The date on it is 1939, again, within the British Mandatory period. There never has been a self-governing nation called Palestine.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH's mischsprache mishegas

So I was reading Devarim last Shabbos in my own version, Narrating the Torah, and came across a comment I made. I've seen it before but obviously my brain cells were too occupied to realize what it meant.

It is a comment on Samaritan Pentateuch, which is available free online in two versions, Walton's "London" Polyglot (uses the Gezer script) and August Freiherr von Gall's critical edition (uses the Aramaic ("square") script).

The comment has to do with the Documentary Hypothesis' claim that Biblical Hebrew is a mischsprache incorporating Aramaic forms as a result of hybridization during the Captivity.

In fact, Biblical and Talmudic Aramaic or Neo-Babylonian is a hybrid of real Aramaic and Akkadian. It uses the lettering of Aramaic, with the full guttural set that Akkadian lost during the Gutian takeover, but the conjugations use their Akkadian vowels. On the other hand, Neo-Babylonian never did recover the nifal binyan present in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew from the start. It gained words from Hebrew, but not grammar.

Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, is an ancient Semitic language with many of the features of Old Akkadian, such as epistemics and other modals. I discuss this in detail in my Hebrew lessons.

So Biblical Hebrew is not a mischsprache formed from the collision of languages in the Nebuchadnetsar era; Neo-Babylonian is the mischsprache.

And Samaritan Hebrew is also a mischsprache. The Samaritan Pentateuch has all the same narratives as Jewish Torah. It has about 90% of the same words. One reason for the difference is something called regularization. When you transmit material verbally instead of in writing, each narration risks changes that make sense to the narrator and audience, because all languages change over time. When a narrator forgets the exact word to use, she is likely to use something similar that has a high frequency at the time she is retelling the story. She may also re-use a word from nearby in the story she is re-telling.

When enough time has gone by, grammar also begins to change, often to simplify. For example, English conjugations are simpler than their Norman-French or Anglo-Saxon ancestors. During hybridization, as with Neo-Babylonian, conjugations look like both their parents for a while, and then the new descendant develops its own characteristic grammar. 

This never happened in Biblical Hebrew. The grammar of Chronicles is the same as the grammar of the rest of Pentateuch -- that of the ancient Semitic languages, not Neo-Babylonian or Mishnaic Hebrew.

It did happen in Samaritan Hebrew. The surviving manuscripts have grammatical changes in them compared to Jewish Torah; the changes do not reflect either Mishnaic Hebrew or Neo-Babylonian. A classics scholar named Ze'ev ben Hayyim worked with Samaritans and the description they gave him led him to think that the way the manuscripts used Hebrew was a survival of the Second Temple period.

That made no sense to me. I thought it might be a survival of Assyrian, so I studied Delitzsch's book, which is online. It was no help at all.

Not until I went through several books on Arabic grammar that I found online, did I find the features that ben Hayyim described for verbs in Samaritan Hebrew.

One issue he did not discuss, is changing the spelling of el, alef lamed, to ayin lamed. The Hebrew spelling looks like the Arabic definite article; it is never agglutinated, which is required for the Arabic definite article. The changed spelling resembles Arabic ila, "to". The manuscripts have altered spelling that people who spoke Arabic could not tolerate, it was just too disconcerting. 

The Masoretic text of Jewish Tannakh footnotes vowel issues and qeri, it does not change the body of the text. The Jews regarded the text as canonical; the Samaritans did not.

All the surviving Samaritan manuscripts date after 1000 CE, that is, 300 years after the Muslim conquest. 300 years is how long it took English to develop out of the hybridization of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. 300 years is how long it took the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa to develop Ionian Greek out of the language that they wrote in Linear B. 300 years is how long the post-Exodus Israelites had for developing the Gezer script out of Ugaritic before the Sea Peoples destroyed Ugarit. 300 years is a reasonable period for the Samaritans to hybridize their version of Hebrew with Arabic.

I'm pretty sure the people who invented Documentary Hypothesis never accessed Samaritan material. It's not just the wording or language; there are other claims in DH that don't work, because the Samaritans are ideal candidates to produce the E text -- and they did nothing of the kind. I did a verse by verse comparison of Jewish Torah to Samaritan Pentateuch that I call The Real Difference, and if the DH people had seen what I saw, they could not logically have said what they said.

But there's precious little logic in DH. It's an absolute Conjunction Fallacy or Linda problem based on false factual claims and false logic. Nobody can tell me differently without proving they've done the homework I've done.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Clearing up a lot of ignorance part 8

I should have known there'd be a part 8 in here somewhere. This week's event, in the current environment of Jew hatred, is Twitter posts about Judaism as a religion. They come from poorly educated Jews who are selling Judaism short.

Judaism is a complete culture. It always has been. It had to be the whole way back before Abraham left Haran for the Holy Land. Why?

It's codified in Exodus. Courts run by oaths. Oaths are taken in the name of something so awesome, nobody would take that oath falsely. But what is awesome in one culture is shekets in another. You can't take an oath by a shekets. 

And you can't run a culture without a court. People get sideways to each other all the time. You have to settle disagreements with the help of impartial people. Not relatives. Not the people who already have the disagreement. And for thousands of years, the people who testify to help resolve these disagreements have taken oaths. 

But it's not just that. Every culture has its own way of doing things. The American ignoramuses shocked by a French woman proposing to her fellow after winning Olympic gold were proof of that. So there's a million and one things that are OK in one culture when you run a trial, that are a shekets in another culture.

So when a number of places in Torah warn about how to deal with judges and other officials (or not) we find that Jewish law has always prohibited a lot of things that are going on right now in America.

If you have not studied Jewish law as the basis for a complete culture, you don't know anything about it.

If you have studied Judaism as a religion, not a culture, you don't know anything about it.

There are a million and one places on the net where you can start to get your head set on straight. My blog is one of them, especially the first part on law, which will show you how many urban legends you believe about Judaism and how many fallacies have gone into that belief.

If you're not willing or don't have the guts to admit that maybe you are ignorant, you will never improve, and what you say about Judaism or Jewish law is a waste of everybody's time.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- my fellow language geeks

Me and Rachel Weisz: "YES, I am... a language geek!"

Although some of you already know that.

For the last few years I've been trying to chase down hardcopy of a specific version of Tannakh. I forget now where I first heard about it.

It's in Ladino. Fine, Internet Archive has the Ferrara Ladino edition, but it uses Latin characters.

This one is in Rashi script. It was produced in Constantinople, in a number of editions. I was looking for the 1905 edition, but the only thing being advertised was volume 2 of a two-volume set.

NEVER SAY DIE.

I was googling for it again a couple of months ago, not expecting to find anything new, and I struck gold.

Volume 1

Volume 2

The downside is that if you want to put this on your own storage, you have to download every page image, copy and paste it. Unlike the 1342 Munich Talmud manuscript, which you can download as a PDF.

Rashi script is not hard to learn but then you have to realize that Ladino is based on Spanish. So having one of the Latin script versions is a good idea, and then you can type lines into Google translate for some idea of what the Ladino says. There are online resources for learning Ladino, the standard text and a website. You can also listen to programs in Ladino on Israel's Kan radio and on Radio Nacional de Espana.

So there, my fellow Bible and language geeks, is something new to errrr spend your time on.

Mendel Beilis -- the YIVO records

This turned up in a google search over the weekend. YIVO is the Institute for Jewish Research, concentrating on eastern Europe.

https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE12125685

I have given this link to Jay Beilis, Mendel's grandson. You can download the file for your private use but I have to make one thing crystal clear. On page 28 is a typed letter between two people interested in the case.

It unequivocally declares that Mendel Beilis was acquitted by the jury.

Anti-Semites will try to persuade you otherwise, but the same conclusion comes out of the trial transcript, if you read Russian. Which I do. My translation is here.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2013/11/mendel-beilis-verdicts.html

Page 31 shows that Pranaitis' claims were "exploded" years before Beilis was arrested, let alone tried. Because Pranaitis plagiarized Eisenmenger, this means Eisenmenger is also exploded. Since Laible and by derivation Herford used Eisenmenger, they are also exploded. What they say about references to Jesus in the Talmud is a lot of malarkey. Anti-Semites will also claim the contrary of this.

Several of the letters show that physicians and psychologists all over Europe debunked Prof. Sikorsky's claims about ritual murder and blasted him for saying what he did.

Several letters are addressed to a Mr. Montefiore, who was not the philanthropist and Zionist Moses Montefiore, who died in 1885. It also could not be his heir, Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore, who died in 1903. It is clear that the Montefiore referenced in the letters worked with Lord Rothschild, who obtained Vatican copies of bulls and encyclicals which refuted part of Pranaitis' testimony. Page 98 from October 21st (Gregorian) 1913 confirms Cardinal Merry del Val's answer to Rothschild.

Page 149 refers to a leading article in the London Times on November 13, 1913, about Russia, which reflected western condemnation of Russia for the Beilis case. You have to have an account to access this article. Anybody who does can find a link to it here, if Google turned up the right result.

https://www.thetimes.com/archive/find/russia/w:1913-10-31~1913-11-14

Many of the YIVO papers are in German and in handwriting at that. I can read German but I didn't stop to absorb them. You're welcome to them.

Every new bit of evidence in this case is precious and this set of records makes one thing clear. Anti-Semites believe that everybody who is not Jewish agrees with them, secretly if not publicly. There is always massive evidence to the contrary and these records give some of it, including the Times article.

I'm just saying -- the long hot summer of 2024

People, we still have half of July and all of August to go and if you still don't have your hot weather routine straight, here it is.

1. Hopefully you have at least double pane windows. Close them before you leave the house in the morning, AND close the curtains, especially on a sunny side of the house. This can keep the house TEN degrees cooler even if you don't run the AC while you're gone. If you have a storm door, open the glass panes so as not to trap the heat from the sun against your inside door.

2. SET YOUR AC TO 80 degrees. This is the most energy efficient temperature, and it is much cooler than outside in a heat wave. Using windows and curtains properly will avoid stressing your AC and the grid.

3. A dehumidifier can be the equivalent of five degrees of AC. My home can't have HVAC and mini-splits don't handle these heat waves well. But my through-the-wall unit has a dehumidifier and when it's 100% humidity but not hot, that's the ticket. 

4. USE CEILING FANS. Air movement is crucial to keeping cool, as you know from experience. It will also make you feel cooler when you are trying to sleep on a hot night.

5. Make sure your pets are inside if you're not home during the day or night. Talk to your veterinarian about ways to keep nervous pets from tearing up the house, but leaving them outside in heat that would kill you is just abuse.

6. If temperatures are going to drop below 85 at night, turn off the AC and open the windows. Ventilation is crucial to sleeping well. Make sure internal doors are open so rooms don't get stuffy. 

7. COLD SHOWERS. A cold shower just before bedtime cleans and refreshes. Start with mildly warm water and then turn the temperature down every half minute or so. Then only dry your butt to avoid diaper rash, and let your ceiling fans blow you dry. It's cleaner than a swimming pool and you don't have to get into your hot car or run through the heat wave to use it. Also running cold water over your wrists, or splashing your face with cold water, are refreshing. And if you're not at work, pouring cold water over your whole head also works.

8. DRINK YOUR WATER. Not iced coffee, not alcohol, not caffeinated soda. These will all drain fluids from your body, removing your coolant. 

9. Put bottles of your emergency water in the freezer, at least 5 of them. In a heat exhaustion emergency, put one against each side of the neck, one in each armpit, and one in the groin while you wait for emergency services. You can also run cold water in the bath and put the person into that, but put in the ice bottles because I know from experience that cold water doesn't stay cold in this kind of heat.

10. Keep FOUR ice cube trays frozen. I'm just one person and I know I go through at least one tray each day.

11. Prepare cool foods in advance to eat when "it's too hot to cook". Make large batches; freeze some of it if it's more than a week's worth of food. Get vegetables, fruit, cheese, milk if you can tolerate it, and juice (not juice cocktail or fruit drink which are sugary). Yogurt is great: you can mix two tablespoonfuls with flavoring like cocoa powder and sugar or fruit preserves, and stick it in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Chex mix with raisins and carob chips is another good choice.

12. Dress as lightly and loosely as you can. If you have to run in and out of buildings, wear light colors. Dark colors absorb light and heat up.

13. Linen bedding is the best, it is historically known for its coolness. It wicks heat away from you. It cools off rapidly once you roll over onto the other side of the bed.

14. Hopefully your bed is two people wide. When you have heated up one side, you can roll onto the cool side. Pillows are the same way, once the one you are lying on gets warm, especially if the pillow case is linen, you can move it so the cool side is under your head.

15. Have a downstairs sleeper. It can be as much as FIVE degrees cooler downstairs than up. This will help you get to sleep. Sometimes if I wake up around 2 a.m. I will then go upstairs and finish the night in my bedroom.

16. PLAN FOR THE ELECTRICITY TO FAIL. This can happen if the drain of AC is too high or a storm shreds the grid. In 2012, a derecho storm took out power to some 2 million people in the DMV who had my same power company. It lasted 22 hours. The heat index was about 112. My only ventilation was the windows on the north side of my house. My only air movement was a Victorian type wooden lady's fan. 

I keep my freezer packed with food. You cannot open your freezer when there's no power or things start to defrost. In 2012, mine stayed frozen and I didn't have to throw anything out. When Hurricane Isabel came through in 2003, my power was out for THREE DAYS but my packed freezer stayed frozen. Some things in your refrigerator freeze well. Throw them into the freezer the minute the power goes out and you might save even more. 

If you don't need electricity to run your shower, you can still use cold water in case you start to develop heat exhaustion, but you will need to keep the water running because, like I said, it doesn't stay cold long in severe heat.

You may need to leave your neighborhood to find cooling. The derecho took out power to such a wide region, I probably would have had to go 200 miles to central Pennsylvania to find a hotel that still had AC. KEEP YOUR CAR GASSED UP so you can evacuate in such an emergency. 

Keep your phone charged and plan to use it only for communication, not entertainment. HAVE A DEVICE SPECIFIC CHARGER THAT USES YOUR CAR TO RECHARGE, whether it plugs into a cigarette lighter or in-board Wifi/USB port. Some chargers come with multiple plug ends to suit most outlets.

Also since shit happens, buy one of those multi-charger boxes that you can recharge from house power. Mine has an AC/USB recharging port useful for phones. Its charge stays good for over a month; I can use it to power my laptop for 5 hours. I have a flashlight that will recharge from this box or from my laptop using a USB port -- and so it will also recharge from my car's USB port. Some multi-charger boxes can also pump up a tire. Mine has already paid for itself by saving me two towing fees.

Nobody is immune to weather emergencies, and that includes wildfire seasons in the Pacific Northwest. Emergency assistance is always stressed at first and you need to prepare to be your own first responder. But even when there's no emergency -- wildfire, derecho, hurricane, tornado -- you need to prepare to deal with hot weather, if you want to behave like a responsible adult.

Clearing up a lot of ignorance -- Part 7

They're still doing it. People are still trying to prove there was a nation named Palestine where Israel is now.

They offer up bits of yellow paper. 

But they haven't read those papers very well.

Because every single one of them falls within the British Mandatory period, the only time there was an entity called Palestine.

1929 birth registry.

Passport for somebody born in 1920 during the British Mandatory period.

Tax receipt from 1943, DURING THE BRITISH MANDATORY PERIOD

Newspaper from 1936. The masthead is hard to read and could be 1930, but the reference to Stessen says it's 1936.

So don't expose your foolishness on Twitter or anywhere else. Find the date. If it's within the mandatory period, it's not a nation called Palestine, it's the British once again confusing everybody by assigning names randomly.

Clearing up a lot of ignorance Part 6

So another ignoramus on Twitter brought up something I remember hearing about before but forgot about. The idea that Jews are Khazars.

Let's review the bidding.

Jews descended in the male line tend to have the NE Anatolian Neolithic J1/J2 Y-chromosome subclade also found in other Semitic peoples, including Muslim Palestinians. (Christian Palestinians tend to have an East African E33 subclade suggesting Coptic descent)

Jews descended from converts can have any subclade there is: Incan; Indian subcontinent; Ethiopian; Indo-European; Chinese either in those living in China or those descended from travelers on the Silk Road centuries ago; African L33, including the L33e found in the Americas. So far I don't know of evidence for C-M, K-M or S-P Australian indigenous subclades but I haven't checked.

Among Khazars, the subclades include R1a, C2b, G2a, N1a, Q, and R1b. R1a is a Siberian subclade which spread to the west before 1200 BCE. It occurs in Mycenaean Greeks, in populations outside the Basque country, but is very rare in Italy. Q is also Siberian. C2b is East Asian, 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351294127_Y-Chromosome_Haplogroup_Diversity_in_Khazar_Burials_from_Southern_Russia

The G2a subclade is all over Europe and currently is strongest around Switzerland and Austria. It would only show up in Jews descended from converts. Otzi the iceman falls into this subclade. 

The subclade that Ashkenazi Jews have is G2b which has the same origins as J1/J2 and is also found in Pakistan.

N1a comes from the Arabian peninsula. It would make more sense for the idiot on Twitter to say that all Arabs are Khazars than to say that all Ashkenazi Jews are Khazars.

Why didn't the idiot say that? Well, A, she wants Jews to go "back" to wherever, the further the better.

B, she has this hazy idea of the Jewish Khazar kingdom that conquered Ukraine and was later overwhelmed by the Turks. 

C. she really knows nothing about genetics, it's the Swiss or Arabs who have DNA in common with the Khazars.

By the way, if you think I'm snarky in these posts, you should see what I do to people who talk about "black" and "white" and "brown".

So just thank your lucky stars that you're not an idiot.

Fact-Checking -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 5

So the latest ignorance on Twitter is about past issues in Holy Land history, and it comes in two parts.

First, a photo has been circulating of an official document with the word Palestine on it. People use it to claim that a Palestine existed before there was an Israel. But as you know, I wouldn't be posting about it unless it was an urban legend. Here's the photo.

This document was issued by the British mandatory authority which, under the Sykes-Picot agreement, took control of parts of the Ottoman Empire after WWI (the one that ended in 1918). The year on the document is 1935 or something like that.

The British named the mandate Palestine for whatever reason. The region was not under control of its long-time residents, not even the Jews of the Old or New Yishuv, let alone the Jews that remained in Jerusalem or the Kabbalistic settlement in Tsfat.

The other is claims about the term Zionist, similar to false claims about the term anti-Semitic.

The term anti-Semitic was invented by Edouard Drumont and his right-Orleanist political associates in France, to describe themselves. Ignorant, bigoted and weak-minded people have tried over the decades to pretend that the term relates to non-Jewish Semites like Arabs, but that is a fallacy called redefinition.

The term Zionist was coined by Herzl and his followers in the 1800s CE, while the Ottoman Empire still governed the Holy Land. The Empire divided its territories into units called, in the 20th century, vilayets. I googled an article which shows that the Ottomans never had a sub-unit called Palestine; Nablus (now on the West Bank) and Jerusalem were part of the same sub-unit.

A lot of things are swirling around in world affairs right now. They come down to two things. Evidence is piling up that the demonstrations and protests are promoted by Russian interests, including the photo of a "Polish protestor" with pro-Russian signs on his tractor. From promoting political candidates like Trump and Geert Wilders; to fostering secession movements including Catalonia and Brexit (ask me for receipts); to allying with existing far-right movements, to sponsoring the French Yellow Vests and, as we now know, Antifa; to the US "trucker's" convoys and Polish "farmers" protests; to embedding ISIS (which is wholly owned by Putin) with Hamas and Russian troops that attacked Ukraine in 2022; to promoting civil war starting with Syria in 2011 and including the civil war bloviating by MAGA; most of the unrest in the world is a result of Russian activities, not spontaneous or ideated movements. Russian criminal maneuvers were unmasked in 2015 with the Deutsche Bank Global Laundromat scandal over money laundering going back to at least 2010. Russian promotion of Palestine to the detriment of Israel goes the whole way back to 1948.

And two, a bunch of ignorant adrenaline addicts are committing reckless endangerment by closing down commerce and transport, providing screens to the violence prone and, in airports, to potential terrorists.

If all of this is news to you, don't get mad at me. Get mad at yourself for being 15 years behind the news cycle, and thousands of years behind crucial facts about the Holy Land.