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.