Hey, jab1! Simulpost!
JFK’s assassination is the “-gry” question of conspiracies.
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“Have some more cotton candy, Danger - it’ll help sober you up.” - Lt. Bradshaw
Just my way of saying ‘welcome to the SDMB’. Always glad to have another Firesign fan around here!
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“Corn! Now we can make tortillas!”
and
“Deputy Dan will find you, no matter where you run.”
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Seriously, though, Case Closed is pretty much garbage. Now if you want some interesting conspiracy theories, check out the deaths of MLK and RFK. Suuuure, James Earl Ray had no help whatsoever. Riiiiight, Sirhan Sirhan acted alone. (Philip Melanson has great books on both assassinations which detail the discrepancies and contradictions in the lone gunman theories.)
Obviously, great minds think alike.
Gadarene wrote:
Is not!
Yuh huh!
sdimbert said:
I have read that argument, and I have read refutations of the argument. I would be more convinced that this is possible if I saw some documentations on this with something closer to a human head than a melon. The skin of a melon is not the same as a human skull. A bow and arrow shot will blow out a melon that way too. And a melon doesn’t have a neck, so I don’t see how Penn and Teller could prove an exit wound will push a head back toward the shooter.
Gadarene said:
And you’re going to post all that is wrong with it, including Belzer’s points that “make mincemeat” of it, right? Or are we just supposed to take your word for it? Just curious…
Oh, absolutely. Give me till tomorrow evening; I need to check out Belzer’s book again. (I try to stay out of these assassination threads, since there so much dogma on both sides–but if I’m gonna wade in, at least let me get my hip boots!) One thing I remember off the top of my head is that the bullet hole in Kennedy’s jacket is grievously inconsistent with the single-bullet theory. Posner explains the hole away by saying that the fabric of the jacket was bunched…yet there’s no sign of bunching on the jacket or in photographs, and the hole is far more simply attributed to another bullet entirely. Funny how even self-professed skeptics can abandon Occam’s razor when evidence doesn’t fit theory.
Anyway, there’s more…I’ll post it tomorrow.
I’m kinda surprised that no one has mentioned the testimony of the attending physicians and autopsy attendant that all claimed that the head wound was not consistent with a shot from the depository, but more likely from the grassy knoll area. Nor has anyone mentioned that a second bullet wound (an entry wound) was seen below JFK’s Adam’s apple, but was destroyed when someone performed a trachetomy (sp?). Why was a trachetomy perfomed anyway? The president was leaving grey matter everywhere and there was no hope of saving his life.
Also, there are claims of two witnesses that they saw two men behind the picket fence area across the street from the grassy knoll (which would be a potential source of the throat wound). The witness claimed that a man dressed as a policeman fired a shot at the President’s car and then stole his movie camera. Then a deaf/mute man watching from a distance away claims that he saw a man dressed as a policeman toss a gun to a man dressed as a railroad worker, who then dismantled the gun and put it in a tool box. Then there was another man who claimed that the fourth shot hit the concrete in front of him.
It’s possible these accounts are fictious, but they make a hell of a lot more sense than a magic bullet making dramatic aerial maneuvering to hit two men at once.
I don’t see consipracy in every event, but in this case it seems very plausible.
How many here have actually seen the autopsy photos? If you accept what the Warren says about the autopsy results, it’s easy to accept the idea of one shooter. However, if you look at the photos yourself, you might come to another conclusion.
I stumbled across these photos a few months ago, while looking for info on Rasputin.
http://www.celebritymorgue.com/jfk/jfk-autopsy.html
The photos show the majority of the damage as to the right side of the president’s head, indicative of an exit wound that couldn’t have come from the depository. The photos show a wound in the back, that possibly could have resulted in the throat. Looking at it again, I disagree with the site owners who claim it’s too low. It could have possibly resulted in the throat wound.
I haven’t read any books on the conspiracy. Just caught a couple dicumentaries on the History Channel.
Bradshaw, baby! Never thought I’d be glad to see your ugly mug. What’s the bird’s eye lowdown on this caper?
All seriousness aside, I knew this topic had to have been beaten to death by the dopers long before I got here. Thanx to Jab et al for the info. A 14.4 modem combined with attention-defecit disorder does not yield a thorough search.
You know, I was a confirmed conspiracy buff until I got online. I expected to have my beliefs confirmed by hundreds of websites featuring online chats with the actual assassins and 3D downloads of Kennedy’s brain.
I found, to my surprise, some well-researched and reasonable sites which completely changed my opinions on the case.
This probably means that the entire internet is a “black-op” set up by the F.B.I., C.I.A., Dallas Police, Secret Service, Bethedsa Hospital staff, Badge Man, Umbrella Man, Babushka Woman, and the “Fake Epileptic” to cover up the horrible truth that Clay Shaw was actually Marilyn Monroe and ordered the hit because he lost a bet with Aristotle Onassis.
I won’t bore anyone with the gory details of my conversion. Here’s a good site that will do it for me:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.html
Sorry about the ‘longhand’. I haven’t bothered to learn how to put links in these things yet. (see paragraph 2)
And now, forward into the past!
Regnad Kcin
One point that Posner makes very clear is how overwhelming the case was against Oswald. There were literally dozens of witnesses who actually watched Oswald firing the shots at Kennedy. Unlike most of what’s believed by conspiracy buffs, that’s real evidence.
Beakerxf said:
That’s because it wasn’t an entry wound, but an exit wound. And, yes, they did destroy it in doing the tracheotomy. So what?
Because when they did the tracheotomy, they didn’t realize the extent of his head wound. It may sound silly in retrospect (especially to people looking for a conspiracy), but with blood all over the place, they just didn’t realize how bad it was.
Little Nemo hit the nail on the head. It’s not just one piece of evidence that says, “Oswald did it.” It’s the convergence of numerous lines of evidence.
Gadarene said:
Hmmmm. So Occam’s Razor would say that because there seems – to you and Mr. Belzer – to be a misplaced hole in a jacket, that means there must have been a huge conspiracy instead of the possibility that his jacket may not have been in exactly the place you thought it was.
Uh huh.
You sure have an odd way of looking at Occam’s Razor…
beakerxf wrote:
“KENNEDY SLAIN BY CIA, MAFIA, CASTRO, LBJ, TEAMSTERS, FREEMASONS: President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles”
– The Onion presents Our Dumb Century, page 101
Anyone else think this sounds silly? How do you mime dismantling a gun?
I mean, it could be true, but it sure sounds like a clue in an Encyclopedia Brown story, doesn’t it:
The reason noone can say what happened is because not all of the information is known (Yes David B, that’s right!) How can all the information be known when some of it is held until 2038?
Nearly everyone on this thread knows more than me about this subject and I therefore give respect to your views and try to use them to find my own opinion. Telling me to read a book and saying that “that’s it, Case Closed”(excuse the pun)is no good as you will just get someone else coming along and disagreeing with “the facts”
I’m getting out of this one as it’s an eternal debate as far as I can see, and thats from a neutral standpoint.
At one time the greatest minds on the planet thought that the world was flat…
He did it with sign language. You can purchase the BBC produced documentary featuring his interview from the History Channel.
Look, either way there is a conspiracy. Either a conspiracy to kill the president or a conspiracy among the witnesses to make it look like a conspiracy. You have two guys claiming they saw the second shooter. Another man who claims to have nearly been struck by a fourth bullet. Physicians and an autopsy attendant who claim what they saw was an exit wound on the right side of the president’s head, not left.