The Kennedy Assasination

For me this was one of the major planks of the programme's argument removed.

their argument abt oswald was that he was lonely and attention-seeking, not that he "wanted to be famous" precisely: his saying "i'm a patsy" doesn't invalidate the attention-seeking claim particularly - ppl who are lonely and attention-seeking and often use strategies of provocation and denial to get that attention

(i agree they should have addressed that: but actually there were dozens of things they could have addressed and didn't)

(most conspiracy theory is decidedly unscientific)

Plus will there be a documentary programme in five years about how tonight's techno evidence was invalid because it was based on faulty calculations of the physical dimensions of the Dealey Plaza and/or the frame rate of Zapruder's camera or his precise vantage point when shooting his film? I don't necessarily trust these people to put these things together without some error of that type.

The subjects interviewed also made it clear that he wanted to perform an important act so he could be seen as some sort of marxist hero. Certainly attention-seeking, but not stupid , and definitely quite single-minded.

the argument that his head jerking back = he must have been shot from the front was always just rubbish anyway... the shot caused his head to explode, large amounts of bone and brains were given forward momentum but the nature of the explosion caused the rest of his head to jerk back = total momentum conserved w/o breaking the laws of physics

in bonar menninger's book i think the ballistics expert does experiments with a sequence of watermelons wrapped in duct tape on posts, to show that when you shoot them, some of them explode and falls towards the gun

i'm not saying they proved their point, i'm saying that their argument doesn't come to pieces when he acts weird or contradictory

Plus Jim Garrison was a total psychopath, and perhaps the worst part about Oliver Stone's film is that it paints a picture of Clay Shaw (by all accounts aside from conspiracy theorists) as a decent fellow who was caught in Garrison's crosshairs for some reason and had his life ruined as a result. The whole "he was a CIA operative bollocks" is a case of people not understanding what Shaw's involvement in the CIA was, and Stone using this tiny scraping of involvement has a way to show that Shaw was a criminal. Pure fucking evil, that was.

I really recommend that book "Case Closed", which is a considerably involving read.

Especially as the 'point' of the programme, the guy and his computer simulation, were unrelated to all the other evidence (except for a couple of connections, like the motorcycle cop who they tracked down).

It only makes you sigh 'oh well it was so partisan that it doesn't really settle anything'.

Isn't it also a bit like a bullet leaving a gun causes the gun to recoil backwards? (Physics was my least favourite subject at school).

A bullet travels so fast anyway that when it passes through something, it's not going to have the time to push it in the same direction that it's headed.

When people in films get shot (particularly when riddled with bullets from a machine gun) they are usually depicted being thrown backwards.
This happens for example in the Day of the Jackal when the policeman shoots the assassin. Is this completely inaccurate? Come to think of it there's the alternative depiction in many cases of the victim becoming like a rag doll, suspended in space while the bullets are being fired, then dropping directly downwards after the shooter has finished firing.

if a bullet passes right through something it may only impart a tiny amount of momentum to it, causing it to rock back, or just bow outwards

in this case, the momentum may have been imparted to chunks of his head only: THEY flew forward, but the way the brain exploded away from the bullet passing through it, plus the "jet effect" of exiting material from the hole, caused the head to rock backwards again, more sharply than the initial impact had caused it to rock forward

relying on the physics of movies and/or cartoons is possibly unwise - ppl aren;t actually being shot... if they have exploding blood capsules strapped to their tummies, then by definition nothing is passing through them and the explosion will force them backwards

Yet another theory never investigated by the Dallas PD or the Warren Commission is that Oswald assassinated JFK in a bid to highlight the unhappy plight of Texan cross dressers. Although it's got absolutely no basis in fact, it would go a long way to explain his widely misquoted assertation "I'm just Patsy".

jim garrison really should have stuck to playing bass with 'trane.

THE TRUTH IS HERE

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jean-jacquescosmos/Images/Abso%20Fab2.jpg

truly it is said "chutzpah thy name is gordon"

arnold ridley (private godfrey) played football, cricket AND rugby for england b4 WW1, and wrote more than 60 plays, several of which he starred in

anyway, didn't john peel shoot jfk?

jesus -- how old was he?
but will you read the plays?

The Kennedy doc was pretty much a rehash of Posner's 'Case Closed' bk: I didn't think the prog explained v. clearly the stuff abt the motorcycle cop's open microphone.

As for Oswald's personality - all the evidence which said he wanted to do and could have done it don't invalidate that he still could have been a patsy being played like a piano; if i was choosing a ptasy, I'd have chosen a guy like Oswald as he would be very believable, as he himself would have believed he'd have done it. He just wouldn't have been aware of the fact that there were others helping him. Anyway. I hope it wasn't just Oswald on his own. V boring if the case.

they didn't include the usual demolition of the tape-belt which appears to feature four shots, which is that it also includes a spoken message bleed-thru from another channel which shows that it was on and recording at another time entirely - ie those fuzzy static crackles aren't gunshots at all

they did show that the policeman whose belt it was supposed to be wasn't in the place he had to be for the shots to be the shots

Did Peter Jennings narrate UK version? The US version aired last thursday.

ian penman has just filed a magnificent few hundred words on this.

www.apawboy.blogspot.com

(the question of whether it's good or not wasn't addressed, it's true and that was a weakness - but the argument that books are IN PRINCIPLE a better vector for this information and its analysis and critique than 3D diagrams seems to me simply false) < / maths rockist >

He just reads magnificently when he's angry, which admittedly is separate and distinct from the question of whether it's worth him getting so angry over this particular topic. Almost as good value as Mr Watson getting angry over the sleevenotes to the Sing Me A Song Of Songmy reissue as per current Wire.

ballistics argument in WORDS

=a chapter of finnegans wake

http://redsox.bostonherald.com/images/redSox/zim10132003.jpg

http://www.startrek.com/imageuploads/200306/tos-010-korbys-assistant-ruk/320x240.jpg

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/story.jsp?story=466803

cf 'blow up', 'the conversation'

Here's a great holiday gift for that friend or family member who has (seen) everything.

47th anniversary. Showed my grade 6s the Zapruder film off YouTube (30+ seconds, very graphic--I feel justified in showing it, though), and the original footage of Ruby shooting Oswald. One of my girls had done a short report on the assassination which I marked over the weekend. Pretty well done, but it was interesting to learn that Oswald was shot in a nightclub.

It's certainly a new angle.

It just occurred to me that today is the 47th anniversary, and JFK was only 46.

I've burned out on assassination books, but I would like to read former Secret Service agent Clint Hill's book (Hill is the agent that Jackie helps get into the limo as seen in the Zapruder film)

(FWIW, Hill doesn't believe there was a conspiracy)

I.e. he was in on it!

BACK......AND TO THE LEFT

ECHOES

you heard ECHOES

the mean, simple part of my brain wonders what a book by someone like Agent Hill could be other than "i was there, it was totally terrible."

Was Oswald sitting or standing as he fired? I always imagined him sitting, leaning the rifle on the window sill. It came as a shock to read Libra and have DeLillo paint the picture of the standing gunman, silhouetted in the window-frame (obviously he put it better) - didn't fit with my mental image of it at all.

oh weird, i would assume he was sitting/prone. no sane rifleperson would attempt such a long and, uh, important shot standing. sane, i guess, being the operative word here

Shots.with a bolt action rifle.

He had to have been sitting:

http://www.hellodallas.com/media/articles/large/237_image2_large.jpg

http://blog.mlive.com/kzgazette/entertainment/2009/05/large_Kennedy.jpeg

Man that fuckin' TSA is everywhere now.

I was kinda more interested in the auction of his birthday icing last week

I'd be interested in hearing from anybody old enough to have an actual memory of 11/22/63. I was only two; I do remember my mom telling me about RFK's assassination. As I remember it, she told me when I got home from school, but that doesn't really jibe with the fact that he was killed around midnight west-coast time. There's a teacher at my school older than me who says she still finds the sight of a pink dress unsettling. (Not that I've seen a lot of women in pink dresses recently.)

My mother in law talked about it; she was teaching in San Francisco at the time, and dragged the school's only TV set into her classroom so that the kids could watch the news updates. (She was teaching at Catholic school and the priest said she shouldn't expose the children to such awfulness and she basically told him to can it and took the tv anyway, YESS)
She said it really was a shocking few days, with the shooting, then Oswald getting gunned down on national tv. She said she really felt like something awful was changing in the country.
Should've recorded her talking about it.

Here's to Camelot in smithereens.

She said she really felt like something awful was changing in the country.

I've made reference to this many times, but there's an amazing section of the PBS American Masters on Warhol that documents his immediate reaction to the assassination, and makes basically the same point as your mother-in-law.

also worth noting that Andy Warhol was shot 3 times

by cia agents for making abstract expressionism passe.

So is there going to be anything really of interest in the released files?

The only really dumb angle I can think of for Trump to not push back the release (other than allowing the release gives him something to brag about) is there's some nebulous connection to Cuba and it'll further screw up the Obama administration's attempt to normalize relations

the files are actually just one manila folder containing a single A4 sheet with this printed on it

https://cdn.dopl3r.com/memes_files/cormac-smith-wednesday-at-239-pm-what-if-no-one-shot-jfk-and-his-head-just-did-that-3k-shares-like-comment-share-O0hFT.jpg

that would be a pleasing conclusion

Enjoy, world.

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release

all the new documents implicate Hillary as the shooter

if i were currently unemployed i know what i would be doing in my bathrobe right about now

ew

rollin' up the grassy knoll

the grassy knoll is very disappointing in person, imo

if i were currently unemployed i know what i would be doing in my bathrobe right about now

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Thursday, October 26, 2017 10:06 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ew

― Gary Synaesthesia (darraghmac), Thursday, October 26, 2017 10:19 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

rollin' up the grassy knoll

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, October 26, 2017 10:21 AM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god damn it

all the new documents implicate Hillary as the shooter

― johnny crunch, Thursday, October 26, 2017 12:06 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FUN FACT: Today's her birthday.

coincidence? OR IS IT

the grassy knoll is very disappointing in person, imo

that's what Woody Harrelson's dad said

I skimmed through the indexes for a half dozen of the download packages and nearly everything is marked "NOT BELIEVED RELEVANT". Someone's going to have to do the work of reading all this junk and listening to the interviews to skim anything vaguely interesting.

I was kind of hoping after the third file I'd get to "EXTREMELY RELEVANT, REDACT FOREVER"

Truly a difficult day for Ted Cruz

happy birthday killary

so did the driver do it

nearly everything is marked "NOT BELIEVED RELEVANT". Someone's going to have to do the work of reading all this junk assume that everything marked as such was out of deliberate misdirection and will obsessively comb over every detail contained therein to find out what's really being suggested.

that's the joke

also the good pages will be easy to find because they'll have the phrase "some really wild shit here!" scrawled in the margins

the grassy knoll is very disappointing in person, imo

― mh, Thursday, October 26, 2017 5:33 PM (one hour ago)

when i visited someone had placed a huge sign there saying "GRASSY KNOLL," presumably so ppl would be able to distinguish it from the grassy hill right next to it

btw the files haven't been released yet -- the ones on the national archives site now were released in july.

alfred to thread:
http://ahabit.com/deeeeep.jpg

Whomp whomp

NBC NEWS: Release of JFK files may be delayed as intelligence agencies failed to inform President Trump which files should be kept secret

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) October 26, 2017

http://theghostdiaries.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/JFK_ufos.jpg

Showing the trajectory of the hats that flew off the heads of two ladies deep in the crowd

Those aren't just hats, those are the two visible hats of otherwise invisible giants!

those are the flying saucers of the tiny aliens that killed kennedy

turns out trump isn't releasing all the files

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/26/politics/jfk-assassination-files-classified-document-release-donald-trump/index.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ema7lfEAMk

Wait, what

Eye witness identifies Ted Cruz as part of Lee Harvey Oswald's crew today on #warroomshow on @Infowars today at 5pm EST

— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) October 25, 2017

lmao

spoiler alert: turns out ted cruz...is really his dad

tbh i'm not sure if the Corsican mob was involved but it seems like there was a Corsican drug-trafficker in Dallas @ that time, Lucien Sarti, who I am willing to believe could be part of a larger, multiple-shooter/contingency/backup plan as part of a larger conspiracy. Howard Hunt alleged that Sarti was the one who filed the fatal shot.

I was telling the kids this morning how Jackie's blood-soaked dress is folded up in the Smithsonian somewhere. I won't live to see its unveiling, but they might. Maybe they'll think of me when it happens.

They stopped staring at me once the teacher on morning duty told them to get out of the car or they'll be late..

"You know, kids, in her shock she crawled onto the trunk of the car to retrieve a piece of her husband's skull, so she could put it back in its place..."

"I mean, what would you have done?"

My uninformed theory is that Oswald had talked to a few dudes, maybe sought out people with government ties from a few places (Russia, Cuba, CIA in Mexico, etc) or people wanted to claim they had contacted him, after the fact, for weird credit. And then some scrambled up normal dude living in Texas shot the president, and people tried to make great claims about the time this guy called their embassy line one time

if you feel unimportant and want to be a big wheel of history, shooting the president seems like the most obvious action

i think the next generation won't tell ghost stories to their grandkids but they'll tell about their creepy great uncle who was the second gunman, or a heretofore unknown grandpa who did 9/11.

MH, that’s a pretty glib view of Oswald. He wasn’t just a disgruntled random schmuck who picked up a gun one day. He was a shockingly well-traveled misfit who spent virtually every stage of his adult life in hotbeds of Cold War activity or crossed paths with people connected to it.

There’s a reason that multiple intelligence agencies were tracking his activities well before the assassination (and were aware that he was potentially dangerous). Their failure to do anything about it and the ensuing cover-up(s) are probably the source of about 90% of the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination.

Personally I’m skeptical of any high-level plots and agnostic about multiple shooters but I definitely think Oswald had accomplices or associates encouraging and/or aiding him. There’s a lot that has come out in the last few years about his time in Mexico City and the people he associated with there that is *very* interesting.

The "lone nut case who just happened to succeed in blowing the president's head apart as he traveled in a moving vehicle, using a mail order rifle fired from a long distance away" theory seems much too simplistic to be the whole story. But whatever the whole story might be is probably not recoverable at this point and perhaps never was recoverable.

Yeah. It’s the kind of case that naturally obfuscates itself. I doubt any of the newly released files will be some kind of smoking gun that instantly makes it all click together.

xp but that's the kind of well-poisoning characterization that people have been using since at least Stone's movie and definitely since the HSCA. Oswald's gun was not just "a mail order rifle," it was a standard-issue military weapon for the Italian, German and Finnish armies up through the end of WWII. It's like calling the BAR "some early 20th century gun."

And it wasn't a "long distance," definitely not for a qualified marksman using a scope on a slow-moving target traveling downhill. The infamous "Maggie's drawers" comment from Stone's movie about Oswald's marksman skills comes from a single qualifying test when Oswald was already leaving the Corps and didn't care about his scoring. Every other time he had to qualify he was well above average.

Supposing for a moment there were other shooters around, they must have been awful. Since all wounds to Kennedy and Connelly are traceable to Oswald's gun, they missed every single person in the car, the car itself, every person on the street and every building in sight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5IWK9sRYTs

IOW Phil D otm

i will always choose to continue to believe the george hickey headshot theory

(a) bcz bonar menninger's book is abrim with drawings of skulls with dowling threaded through them in various directions (and unusually well written for a JFK conspiracy book)
(b) also the idea that a secret serviceman delivered the coup de grace by accident -- when he jumped up onto the back seat of the following limo, AR-15 newly in hand to ward off the assassin's threat, lost his footing, fell backwards, and as he did so incompetently loosed off the fatal bullet in the worst possible direction -- entertains me way more than all the rogue deep state and mobsters stuff (it means the cover-up was driven by horrified embarrassment instead of they-live type 12-ft lizards)

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/DOCID-32352381.PDF?utm_source=POLITICO.EU&utm_campaign=8d2e928e71-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_10959edeb5-8d2e928e71-189694745

I didn’t mean to be too glib — Oswald spent his entire adult life trying to have some sort of role that he never quite found. Applies to a lot of people, really. *stares off into the distance*

NYTimes's patented power-flattering condescension https://t.co/ybCfbEPyjr

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) October 26, 2017

The missing records include a 338-page file on J. Walton Moore, the head of the CIA office in Dallas at the time of the killing, and an 18-page dossier on Gordon McClendon, a Dallas businessman who conferred with Ruby just before he shot Oswald. Several files on notorious anti-Castro Cuban exiles were apparently withheld, including those focusing on Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch, who had been accused of a 1976 airline bombing that killed 73 people.

The still-redacted stuff is about CIA plots to kill Castro or undermine the government of Cuba, right? It'd still cause one hell of a backlash, especially if they were responsible for, say, that bombing.

huh, never heard the mark s "accident" theory before. as likely as any.

Yes, equally likely that the headshot came from a guy holding a rifle climbing onto a moving car from the street as from a guy in a stable elevated position behind the target. Who can say? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm still guiltily laughing at "what if his head just did that"

Also lol at an 18-page dossier on Gordon McClendon, a Dallas businessman who conferred with Ruby just before he shot Oswald. McLendon was a friend of Ruby's and owned a radio station that Ruby listened to. This is the extent of that "conference," which involved letting him into McLendon's radio station to deliver some sandwiches the night of Nov. 22. Hardly "just before."

hickey wasn't the one climbing onto the moving car, that was clint hill -- hickey was in the back seat of the following car, visible here toting his weapon as the limos speed to parkland memorial:

http://media.philly.com/images/jfk-hickey-with-rifle.jpg

hill (in raybans naturally) is the one on the trunk of the president's car in the foreground

I'm not surprised Luis Posada Carriles' name came up in these files. He's the Zelig of late 20th century right wing skullduggery.

xp That's actually worse. He would've had to stand up in the car and shoot to achieve the trajectory that the autopsy showed. I think someone might have noticed. (nb I have not read the book you referred to but I've read tons of others)

OK OK fine, somewhat less likely

if you've read lots of books, phil, then you should read this one too: it's fun

it's almost entirely about ballistics: howard donahue was a professional gunsmith and sharpshooter and technical trial expert on such topics in and near baltimore; he was insistent that the ballistics work for the warren commission and the house select committee -- trajectories and entry and exit wounds and details of how different kinds of bullets work on impact and what goes into bullets -- was mediocre and unprofessional, almost as bad as the ballistics work from almost all conspiracy theorists (half the book is dedicated to demonstrating -- very effectively -- that single bullet from oswald's rifle did indeed pass thru jfk's neck to hit governor connally)

and yr right, the idea hickey carefully and deliberately aimed from that vantage point is extremely silly: the entire point of the book is that it was a horrible accident

it's very o/g csi

y'all are convincing me more and more of the "oswald acted alone but there were multiple coverup conspiracies anyway because everyone was afraid of being associated with him / that an investigation would turn up other totally unrelated things" theory. that or the mafia.

I like the Harrelson as contract killer theory

harrelson is ted cruz's dad btw

also lol the william f.buckley jr, was the umbrella man has an impressive amount of truculent internet traction

I'm still guiltily laughing at "what if his head just did that"

― mh

same. after all this passes over, i think that's what i'm probably going to remember most out of all of this

YOU GUYS MICHAEL IRONSIDE WAS THE UMBRELLA MAN AND WAS SCANNING JFK

sunspots

would the earth being flat slightly alter the expected trajectory of a bullet? just asking questions here.

Wm F Buckley is the slender man

the ballistics stuff is SO boring to me, idk why. i mostly assume the warren version of events the day of. other than that i tend to suspect that giancana (rico, cuckoldry) nudged people in the cia (cuba, liberalism, owing a favor) and people in the cia nudged oswald (world-historical ambitions, gaddafiesque third-way philosophy: clio's classic patsy), whom they thought of the same way the kgb did-- a long-term puzzle and maybe-asset they'd kept around in case someone figured him out or thought of a use for him. i think it mostly happened, like, at parties.

I think that's how it started – in the wind.

these are serious fucking guys

very very few people know this, okay

https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/45709243.jpg

studio picture, detailed biographical data, russian information, and PRETTY sure of the fact that oswald killed the president alone

i kinda think the single bullet theory is crap but at this point any argument about that sort of thing is basically just gonna be "look at this website -- THIS guy agrees with me"

Never would've allowed open windows overlooking Dealey. Never!

Our own snipers would've covered the area.

If a window went up, they'd have been on the radio!

We'd be watching the crowd: packages, rolled-up newspapers, coats.

Never would've let a man open an umbrella.

Never would've let the car slow down to ten miles an hour.

Or take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm.

You'd have felt an Army presence in the streets that day.

But none of this happened. It violated our most basic protection codes.

And it is the best indication of a massive plot in Dallas.

Who could have best done this?

Black Ops. People in my business.

whenever my dad hears about any conspiracy theory, he leans back in his chair and doesn't say anything for a long time, then tries to make eye contact with someone, and if someone looks back he says "follow the money" and then nods at the other person in the room until they nod back

i'm not sure what to think about the kennedy assassination so instead i choose to just visualize my dad trying to do that to this thread

?utm_source=POLITICO.EU&utm_campaign=8d2e928e71-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_10959edeb5-8d2e928e71-189694745

A rep theatre here is playing a restoration of Emile de Antonio's Rush to Judgement...screening Nov. 22, of course.

Make sure the doors to the box seats are locked!

"Other than that, how was the movie, clemenza?"

60th anniversary...Two choices at semi-local reps tonight: Rush to Judgement or the one where Joe Pesci wears a fright wig. The second is 20 minutes closer, so tempting, but I've never seen Rush to Judgement, so that wins.

Has anyone seen the Stone documentary?

This is a great read, a good update from last week

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jfk-assassination-documents-national-archives.html

i wonder will we ever get any closer to knowing what killed him

One or more bullets, I'd say.

one theory, poorly backed up

personally? hiccups

We nearly lost Bush the Lesser to a pretzel.

Better luck next time.

this woman knew Oswald when she was a child, and she believes the patsy theory

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/22/lee-harvey-oswald-museum-jfk-texas

ive heard two version each compelling in their own way:

hiccups after eating a pasty

hiccups after eating a patty

Oswald is entirely believable as a fall-guy. What's missing is conclusive evidence for another culprit. Plenty of hints and suspicions, but nothing you can hang your hat on.

a lot of people think you cant get hiccups eating a pasty, it breaks into too unfine a crumb and sure you can choke but hiccup your skull apart? unlikely.

proponents of this narrative however offer the nutribullet theory

You’re close but that’s not it, it was neither a pasty nor a patty but a pastry

*hic* bin ein Berliner

we are close

maybe too close

well dmac you don't have a choice anymore. you're a significant threat to the national security structure. they'd have killed you already, but there's light on you. so they'll destroy your credibility. they already have in many circles.

The de Antonio film was okay, but there was a monotonous, stilted style to all the interviewees that made them seem a lot less credible than they otherwise would have. A couple even came across as shifty-eyed. Best counter-evidence (which I knew already) was how close Ruby was to the Dallas police.

Spent 20 minutes on this with a grade 5/6 class today (complete with two old Life magazines I brought in, one of which they managed to rip while it was passed around...my own fault). They were quite engaged. I used show my own students the Zapruder film, the kind of thing I don't do anymore--too graphic. Today, though, they talked me into showing the Oswald-transfer clip, where you really just see a lot of commotion. When I went to play it, though, it was blocked by my board. Changing times.

Ruby's interview with Earl Warren was fascinating and bizarre.