there is no story
I don’t know if that’s really an ancient Chinese saying (as it was presented to me) but it most certainly is a principle underlying this blog. For most of us, coincidences are delicious bits of life, but for the conspiracy theorist who lacks a good nonsense filter, they reveal the hidden machinations of conspiracy. Without coincidences, however viewed, this blog wouldn’t exist.
The oldest thing I could find that I personally published about a coincidence was an article from 2005 titled (coincidentally) “Coincidence,” but there have been many others. What I find remarkable is how very many coincidences I find in the birther story.
One coincidence is between two adjacent comments among the millions of birther comments on the Internet that I arrived at separately for different reasons. What are the chances that Orly Taitz and I would be rear-ended by a truck on the same day?
One lawyer commenting on this blog said that he law school he heard a lot about Blackstone, but nothing about Vattel; nonetheless, when Obama taught law, the course syllabus had a reading from Vattel. And what about the crazy connection between Obama and the Skull & Bones Society I discovered.
In 2012 I wrote: “A pair of related things is a coincidence: three is an article.” That article was about the name Bivens coming up three times in wholly unrelated contexts. Other coincidences between the blog and real life appeared in my 2010 article, “Spooky.”
There are many other coincidences that I’ve written; here’s a word search for them.
And while I’m no judge or attorney, I’m pretty sure that “coincidences” do not hold up in a court of law. Especially ones that are based on two or more things that didn’t actually happen!
You wrote, “What are the chances that Orly Taitz and I would be rear-ended by a truck on the same day?”
What are the chances that an Orly Taitz and ANYBODY would ever even EXIST on a sane day?
Depends on the context. Coincidence does not replace evidence (“it’s so incredibly improbable that the contract number is 1234567890, so it means the contract is forged and I don’t owe a dime”) but it can play a role in witness credibility (“So all witnesses who saw the guy hit you happen to owe you lots of money whereas nobody else saw a thing?”).