Thread 8—Nonconspiracy is thoroughly discredited

      Thread 8 consisted of five messages, an introductory one from M to the effect that nonconspiracy was finished and he could prove it, followed by replies by KR and M, and then JM and M. Here is M’s first message, preceded by the part of my essay that he was responding to:

KR: Viewed in this light, there is only one theory in the JFK assassination—the idea of a lone gunman. Not only has this explanation been tested severely, repeatedly, and continuously over the last 36 years, but it has survived that ordeal handily. [ SNIP ]

M: Nothing could be further from the truth. No theory has been more thoroughly discredited. Of course, in a democracy no consensus will ever be perfect - We still have the Flat Earth Society with us after all.  Still, over 80% of the American people believe that John F. Kennedy was the victim of an organised conspiracy, and that the Warren Commission was a coverup. This is possibly the ONLY issue that you could get this kind of agreement on in the States. The government itself has rejected the theory in it’s most recent investigation. The findings were carefully couched to avoid implicating government officials either in the assassination or the coverup, but the bottom line is that the U.S. government has officially abandoned the theory.

If anyone honestly still believes that President Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, I’d encourage you to visit the site:

 http://www.warrencommission.com/home.htm

Which has a clip of the fatal head shot from the Zapruder film. No amount of mumbo-jumbo from the “critical thinkers” will convince any reasonable person that that bullet came from the rear! A nice touch is that the video is synched with Dan Rather's Orwellian commentary.

M’s message contained many logical flaws. For example, he equated consensus with correctness: “Of course, in a democracy no consensus will ever be perfect…Still, over 80% of the American people believe that John F. Kennedy was the victim of an organised conspiracy, and that the Warren Commission was a coverup.” He appealed to ridicule: “We still have the Flat Earth Society with us after all.” He left out critical information by accepting the HSCA’s verdict as solid without noting the checkered history of the acoustics upon which it was based. He combined a lack of understanding of the Zapruder film with a strong antiintellectual stance: “No amount of mumbo-jumbo from the “critical thinkers” will convince any reasonable person that that bullet came from the rear!” These problems nullified his entire message.
      In response to these fatal errors, I sent him a critique in the second message:

M: Nothing [the validation of the nonconspiracy theory over the last 36 years] could be further from the truth. No theory has been more thoroughly discredited. Of course, in a democracy no consensus will ever be perfect - We still have the Flat Earth Society with us after all. Still, over 80% of the American people believe that John F. Kennedy was the victim of an organised conspiracy, and that the Warren Commission was a coverup. This is possibly the ONLY issue that you could get this kind of agreement on in the States. The government itself has rejected the theory in it's most recent investigation. The findings were carefully couched to avoid implicating government officials either in the assassination or the coverup, but the bottom line is that the U.S. government has officially abandoned the theory.

KR: Lots of nice words, but little substance. (1) Please cite exactly how nonconspiracy has been discredited. Remember that it requires that conspiracy be proved, nothing less. And if conspiracy were proved, newsgroups like this would vanish. (2) Appeals to "Flat Earth Society" and the like are a form of ridiculing, which is the opposite of thinking critically. (3) The appeal to 80% of the American people is an argument from majority, which is valid only when the majority is well informed, which in this case they are not. (4) Appealing to the authority of the U.S. government only works when you ignore the fact that the acoustics evidence has been discredited. How about some real arguments?

M: If anyone honestly still believes that President Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, I’d encourage you to visit the site:

http://www.warrencommission.com/home.htm

Which has a clip of the fatal head shot from the Zapruder film. No amount of mumbo-jumbo from the “critical thinkers” will convince any reasonable person that that bullet came from the rear! A nice touch is that the video is synched with Dan Rather's Orwellian commentary.

KR: Again ridicule (mumbo-jumbo from the "critical thinkers"; any reasonable person), but it carries no more weight than the first time around. The two-phase nature of the interaction of a high-speed bullet and an organ means that the second movement of the head (the obvious one in the Z film) cannot tell you where the shot came from, and that the first movement (seen only frame by frame) is key. See

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/PSC482G/Spring2000/Scientific_topics/Wound_ballistics/How_a_high-speed.html 

for a full explanation. The head snapped forward; the bullet came from the rear.

M then responded with a short third message to the effect that no matter what, JFK’s lurch to the rear meant that he was shot from the front, because that’s how bullets transfer momentum:

M: Hi. I'm sceptical of the "scientific" testimony brought forward to support the government's position re the Kennedy assassination. gave my reasons for this in a response to Judy on this thread. You can see a competing argument to the one you cite on the Lancer site in an article by Sherry Guttierez, an experienced professional crime scene analyst.

I don't see any point in getting involved in the very complex modelling assumptions involved, because this is a simple empirical question: If you shoot someone in the head, are they propelled away from you, or back towards you? We do have existing examples on film in which the murder weapon is clearly visible. I doubt that you will really be surprised to learn that in all cases without exception, the victim is propelled AWAY from the murder weapon in exactly the way we see in the Zapruder film. Also we have the testimony of hundreds of eye witnesses to a common form of execution used for example in the death camps in Germany and Cambodia. The victims are lined up and kneel facing a ditch. The executioners stand BEHIND them with rifles, and shoot them in the head. The victims then are thrown FORWARD into the ditch. This is transfer of momentum. Nothing very complicated here.

The unjustified intellectual arrogance displayed in this message nearly defies belief. It shows the reason why so many educated people have abandoned the two major JFK newsgroups—it is incredibly frustrating to deal with people who know nothing about a subject but close their minds to it. Specifically, M completely ignored my explanation in the previous message about the two-phase nature of the interaction of a high-speed bullet and an organ. From those safe waters, he then pronounced his completely ignorant judgment about transfer of momentum. The less said about this sad nonresponse, the better. A mind is a wonderful thing to close!
      The fourth message of this thread was JM responding at length to M’s original message and trying to bring him back to the main thrust of my essay:

Great M, I am happy to hear that it has been proven that the shot came from the front. Now my IMAGES OF AN ASSASSINATION tape or THE ASSASSINATION FILM tape do not prove to me that the shot came from the front. Plus, from my reading of multiple experts who have reviewed and studied the films, many the original and even better copies do not agree with that assessment. So does that mean we are unreasonable people?

Well let us take this as your hypothesis: Anyone who does not think the frames of the Z film at the time of the head shot prove the shots came from the front are unreasonable people. Thus your prediction is that all evidence will prove that anyone who does not believe in a frontal head shot is an unreasonable person.

Now what is the evidence you provide 1) polls that show 80% of the population believe in a conspiracy and the WC was a cover-up. First belief is not evidence. Many believe in UFO and they represent life from another Galaxy, but there is no strong evidence to prove it. 2.) the HSCA government agency proved there was a conspiracy so the government itself has abandoned the theory. Well, we all know the story behind the acoustics. I think K is its strongest supporter and has studied the issue tremendously. but, I have even read that he is questioning if the tapes he studied are real. If that is correct, then that means all the info he has used to prove them faked, is wrong also. So, the acoustics are not very helpful in disproving the WC theory. But none of this evidence concerns the unreasonableness of the people who believe the head shot came from the rear. Remember there are some who agree that a head shot came from the rear at the same time one came from the front. So do you include them in your unreasonableness category or just ignore them in your hypothesis?

Now my argument that your hypothesis is in error is of course, myself. I believe the Z film does not prove the shot was from the front. I know I am a reasonable person. Thus I alone disprove your theory. Now there are many physicist, historians, physicians, ballistic expert, researchers, posters on this group, and many others who also disagree with that hypothesis, and I dare say they are mostly made up of very reasonable people. Thus my evidence outweights your evidence that anyone who believes the shot came from the rear are unreasonable people is false. And I think all future evidence that comes in will prove that many reasonable people believe the head shot came from the rear.

Now, I hope by now you have caught on that I am having some fun here. The article was really about how to look at evidence, how to develop a theory, and how to use predictability of evidence now and in the future to support the hypothesis. KR did compare this aspect to the JFK case. If anyone can really comprehend the impact of the article, then they should realize what he says up to this point is true. So far nothing concrete enough has over turned the WC version, including the HSCA, in that LHO was the gunmen.  Remember even the WC could only say that "no evidence" of a conspiracy was found at that time. That does not imply that there is 100% proof there was no conspiracy.

I believe H or someone in another response, listed several areas that researchers were studying at this time that might reveal there were others involved. But, you see the article does not eliminate that as a possibility. Otherwise, KR would never have talked about the WC THEORY. While he, and I agree, that as time passes it may become harder to find new evidence, A has mentioned two incidences in his post, that more time then this had passed before such evidence did come to light. So the article is not a slam dunk against conspiracy theory, it is a logical approach in how to consider evidence and theories the evidence may lead to.

I personally think this is an approach that will lead to more truth then the believe it because I say so approach. P and I discuss the medical evidence regularly because we do see it from different views. I discuss it with him because only by seeing the other view will I ever understand that I may be wrong, or maybe I will be able to show him where he may be wrong. At some point we will both be closer to the truth because of our discussions. If I ignored him, or he me, then we will both go along our way, not ever testing out ideas. That approach will lead neither of us closer to the truth. Hope P, will accept me using him as an example, he is a tough guy that I respect.

The article was about *one* aspect of testing a hypothesis based on the evidence available now and if future evidence will continue to support or disprove the hypothesis. Does that not sound exactly like what has hapened to the JFK case?

M responded to JM with the fifth and last message of this thread, a long one in which he condescendingly suggested that at least many of the people in government who participated in the [obvious] cover-up felt that it was the best thing for the country. Then in the spirit of “if you repeat a goofy idea enough times, it will become legitimate,” he revisits several times the simplistic (and wrong) idea that a lurch to the rear “obviously” means a bullet from the front. Along the way, he allows as how it’s not a bad thing for the other guy to be unreasonable, and condescends once more to note that he understand how emotional an issue this lurch is (for the unreasonable other guy, I suppose). He then reveals that he thinks Haizen Page is a girl (wonder what Mr. Paige thinks about that!), that jet-effect testimony is suspect, that people who think a shot from the rear can produce a lurch to the rear can’t be serious, and that a single interview by Michael T. Griffith with his local neurophysiologist can settle the issue. This is classic material for a class in how not to think and reason, and I know one JFK class that’s going to have a hard time avoiding all this juicy stuff.

Hi JM, I guess I can understand why government officials have to approach this issue with caution. A lot of people participated in the coverup honestly believing that this was very necessary for the good of the country. If we were really perfectly straight about what happened these people could all be accused of treason and as accessories to murder. Also, the constitutional legitimacy of all subsequent U.S. governments would be severely undermined. It’s possible that the ability of any government to deal with the very pressing issues of the day would be weakened if we opened up that hornet’s nest.

I think the HSCA tried to have it both ways. If they had pointed to the backwards head-snap and said: "LOOK any idiot can see that the shot came from the front!", then they would have implicitly been accusing Earl Warren et al. of treason. Instead they chose to contradict the previous account of the shooting based on the shaky acoustic evidence. Conveniently, this was not available to the previous investigation. There are lots of similar examples re the HSCA. For example, the former president’s personal physician contacted them, saying that he had conclusive evidence of conspiracy. Again, this was too hot to handle. They simply never got back to him.

On the other hand, in a forum like this we can, and should be perfectly straight. Yes, I would say that anyone who can watch that clip from the Zapruder film and then look me in the eyes and say that they think that the shot came from the rear, then I would say that that person is unreasonable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though! This is understandably a highly emotional issue.

Re the governments use of "scientific" testimony in this case, I think that this has to be approached with great scepticism. This issue comes up a lot, so I’ll append some comments I made on a previous thread. I hope this addresses the points you made in your post.

REPOST

I don’t think that Haizen or anyone else is suggesting that we throw reason or science out the window. She is quite correct in criticising the expert testimony adduced to support the idea that the fatal shot to the president’s head came from the rear. First of all, any reasonable person would be suspicious of this work, knowing that the government originally tried to cover up the backwards head-snap altogether. I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record on this point, but I can’t overemphasise how important this is. If we can’t agree on the existence of a coverup here, we’re not going to agree on anything. When these frames from the Zapruder film were published in the Warren Report, they were reversed in order, making it appear that the president was thrown forward by the impact of the bullet, consistent with a shot from the rear. This was also consistent with the early press reports, which were clearly carefully managed by the government. After a private viewing of the Zapruder film, Dan Rather reported that the president had been thrown violently forward by the impact of the bullet. He emphasized how impressed he had been by this.

Of course, we now know that the president was actually propelled violently BACKWARDS by the impact of the bullet. Once this became public knowledge, the government was forced to change tack. This resulted in a barrage of highly suspect "expert testimony", most notoriously the "Jet Effect" theory. As Haizen said, this theory is highly contrived, having been invented especially to explain this one single event. Alvarez’ experiments with melons wrapped in electrical tape were designed to demonstrate the possibility that such an effect could occur. This is a valid approach to developing a theory, but once you have developed a theory, it must be tested in the real world. Of course it’s not possible to test this one by shooting people in the head. However, as Jim Davies pointed out in a recent post here, we do have existing films that show people being shot in the head. In no case does the victim’s head go flying back towards the murder weapon. In all cases the head goes flying AWAY from the murder weapon in exactly the way that we see in the Zapruder film. No serious person will claim to find this result surprising. Surely with all the money the government spent on developing this theory and all of the war footage they have in their archives, they should by now have been able to produce ONE example that demonstrates that the "Jet Effect" can occur.

Another important point is that Alvarez has a history of helping the government out by "proving" that inconvenient events didn't happen. For example, about the time of the Camp David talks a nuclear test being conducted by Israel was detected. They were working under cloud cover, but there was a break in the clouds during the explosion, and one of our satellites picked it up. Alvarez used almost exactly the same m.o. in this case, desperately searching for SOME room for doubt in the physical evidence (which was very solid), so that the government could claim that the existence of the test had not been absolutely proven. Of course, once this was given to the politicians, "not absolutely proven" soon became "there is absolutely no credible evidence". Gary Aguilar posted the full article on this here not too long ago.

The second theory advanced to support the official story is that the backwards head snap was caused by a neuromuscular reaction. In this case, not only have the promulgators of this theory failed to produce any other example in which such an effect has occurred, but they have even failed to produce a single expert who will say that what we see in the Zapruder film can possibly be explained in this way. On the other hand, Mike Griffith recently posted an interview with a distinguished neurophysiologist who dismisses the theory as nonsense, and supports this with a detailed analysis.

I’m all in favor of scientific analysis, but it’s important to recognise that analyses are done by people, and therefore it’s necessary to consider the political context. Science can be used to obfuscate the truth as well as to bring it out. All the evidence indicates that in regards to the Kennedy assassination, the government has consistently been obfuscating.

Mercifully, M stopped here, and the thread ended. Given the fallacies, inaccuracies, antiintellectualisms, and physical nonsense that littered M’s comments from beginning to end, this thread was unproductive (to put the kindest possible spin on it).

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