A Beginner's Guide to the Conspiracy Game

[Ron Bulman]

4 hours ago, Robert Card said:

Lance knows the evidence better than most do.   He, along with other LNers are apologists for whatever private society they belong to. There's no way a person could be so dumb as to not see the contradictions of the WC report.  Anytime someone says that there is absolutely not one shred of evidence to contradict the WC report or the FBI, then that's your tipoff that they're apologists for the group that did the assassination.  DVP is another.   Oh, and we know what Vincent Bugliosi was.

I'm just teasing him, as he knows I know the deal.  All he has is adhom, playing dumb with the evidence, and ridiculing and goading us.   Same with DVP, and same with VB.

Most will never see what I'm talking about, I'm just a guy that went too far down the rabbit hole.  I could mention some names and specifics, but these guys are so connected that they can ruin my life, so I'm keeping my mouth shut.  If you lived here in Colombia, you'd see what I mean.

Ha.  Rabbit hole, what rabbit hole?  Not the one lance tried to lead some down...

[Robert Card]

14 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

Ha.  Rabbit hole, what rabbit hole?  Not the one lance tried to lead some down...

Lance was leading us down the primrose path, not the rabbit hole.  Same with that lawyer in Paris, France, I forget his name.

The rabbit hole is when you dig further and further for the truth, taking the 'red pill'.  When you get there, as you so succinctly stated before, you find that 'up is down, and down is up.'  That's where I'm at, and no matter what I say to anyone, they feel that they're up, and I'm down.  That's sad, when most of the info can be found on the internet, or at least enough to get someone started.  

You can even make a living with the truth in the options markets if you know the plan.   There's the proof right there that I'm on the right track.

You can also lead a relaxing life like I do, knowing that there's nothing you can do about anything, so just sit back and relax, and try and determine the plan so you can profit from it.  

Lance is a trained critical thinker, as all lawyers are, and law school is the only institution that teaches people to question everything, and to learn how to present evidence.   (You don't think the Nutwork is going to provide us slaves with the tools to overthrow them, do you?)

Like I said, he knows the WC report is nothing but hogwash, he's just defending a faction that he may or may not be a member.  You guys pull your hair out discussing/arguing things with him and other LNers, when you should only be exposing them.  I exposed Lance, and he left, although I really wish he would stay.  He's an upstanding pillar of his community.

All my life I've been treated with disrespect from the people I was trying to help.  

 

 

[Cliff Varnell]

On 9/2/2019 at 2:54 PM, Cliff Varnell said:

Both the WC and the HSCA were hell-bent on covering up the phony medical evidence ginned up after the autopsy.

This is an under-appreciated aspect of the JFKA cover-up.  Why was the HSCA open to declaring a 95% chance of conspiracy on the basis of the acoustics evidence when they had already acknowledged the 100% fact of conspiracy on the basis of the clothing evidence?

From the HSCA testimony:

https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol1/html/HSCA_Vol1_0100b.htm

Mr. Kenneth Klein:  And with respect to the wounds in the President's back, what did the panel learn from that clothing?

Dr. Michael Baden: In the jacket and the underlying shirt there is a perforation of the fabric that corresponds directly with the location of the perforation of the skin of the right upper back that, the panel concluded, was an entrance gunshot perforation that entered the back of the President.  This is correspondingly seen in the shirt underneath.  </q>

Note that after Dr. Michael Baden acknowledged the "low" back wound which proved conspiracy 100%, HSCA counsel Klein immediately changed the subject.

What has kept official investigations from acknowledging the obvious that JFK was struck in the back at T3?  Because to do so would counterfeit both the autopsy conclusions conjured up by Commander Humes after the autopsy and the Fox 5 autopsy photo handled by Secret Service photographer James Fox.

In order to press the case for conspiracy due to the T3 back wound one must acknowledge a cover-up within both the US military and the Secret Service.

That's a bridge too far for anyone in the US government and the mainstream media.

 

[Cory Santos]

Cliff, i see the x rays were "cropped" lol, but, I don't follow your above point.  Can you elaborate?  What "low" back wound.

Edited September 6, 2019 by Cory Santos

[Cliff Varnell]

39 minutes ago, Cory Santos said:

Cliff, i see the x rays were "cropped" lol, but, I don't follow your above point.  Can you elaborate?  What "low" back wound.

T3, as indicated by the location of the holes in the clothes (and the properly prepared medical documents, contemporaneous statements of 4 Federal officers, the consensus witness statements) as opposed to the T1 wound depicted in the "back of the head" photo.

 

Edited September 6, 2019 by Cliff Varnell

[Kirk Gallaway]

On 9/4/2019 at 6:12 AM, Lance Payette said:

Last night I had prepared substantive responses to a number of the above posts.  Since I started the thread, I have felt some obligation to continue.  But as I always do when I make my rounds, I suddenly had the same epiphany I always have:  "I am actually sitting here, attempting to reason and debate with people who think shape-shifting reptilian aliens control the world … or the universe is 6,500 years old … or Scientology makes sense … or JFK was killed by some huge conspiracy of dark and mysterious forces that are still feverishly at work to keep the secrets."  It's not so much that I feel you are ridiculous (although I do) as that I feel I am ridiculous.  It's not so much that I feel sad for you (although I do) as that I feel sad for me.  Your beliefs are driven by psychological needs that I simply don't share, and I should just admit it.  I might as well be attempting to reason and debate with my neighbors' old hound.  Not that you folks are at the intellectual level of my neighbors' old hound, but merely that whatever is going on inside your heads is as alien to me as what is going on inside his head and shall forever remain just as impenetrable.  Probably like most self-appointed missionaries, I kid myself that I am actually accomplishing something, that the light of reason will dawn in at least some readers' minds, but long experience suggests it won't.  I always start with the illusion, here as elsewhere, that there is some audience out there who is winking and nudging along with me, but there isn't.  Apart from the occasional fellow missionary, folks who might be inclined to wink and nudge lurk for a day or a week and move on, recognizing a hopeless situation when they see it.  I believe that the participants on this thread, and perhaps 20 of their brethren, are pretty much the entire readership of this site.  So I'm going to leave you to your Conspiracy Game, hopefully forever but at least for a goodly while.

What are the "LN sites" that someone mentioned?  I'd be curious to see if they play their own cult-like version of the Conspiracy Game.  If they do - and they well might, I don't know - then I will find them equally alien and impenetrable.  The JFK assassination, be ye a Lone Nutter or a Conspiracy Theorist, cannot possibly be significant enough to serve as the basis for a fundamentalist religion.  The answer has to be, as I've previously suggested, that those for whom it seems to be a fundamentalist religion view it as a key myth in a larger metaphysic.  For that metaphysic to be true, the assassination simply has to be the work of a vast conspiracy or a lone assassin (as the case may be).  Damn it, I did it again - I'm going to go commune with my neighbors' old hound now.

Enjoy yourselves.

metaphysic

/ (ˌmɛtəˈfɪzɪk) /

---

noun

the system of first principles and assumptions underlying an enquiry or philosophical theory

 

Lance says:  It's not so much that I feel you are ridiculous (although I do) as that I feel I am ridiculous.  It's not so much that I feel sad for you (although I do) as that I feel sad for me. 

 

What!  Being such a devout Christian Lance I assume you've had  100's of such self deluding epiphanies. You're telling me you just realized that you've created all this out of the sheer boredom of your life, even though you've been doing it now for what 20 years, and you actually realize now for the first time your ridiculousness.?? However profound this recent epiphany I'm sure as every sinner, and every other such epiphany you've had, you'll go right back and probably  are already participating on any number of other religious, theist or ufo sites.

 

Lance says: Probably like most self-appointed missionaries, I kid myself that I am actually accomplishing something, that the light of reason will dawn in at least some readers' minds, but long experience suggests it won't. 

 

You certainly don't know yourself very well, Lance. That's not your motivation at all, it's much more personal. Long experience I bet! You've spent hours of your time on writing things like this and responding, in your own account, and when it's not here, You'll  be on to your other sites. I'm sure you'll keep kidding yourself.

                                                          

                                                                                               *********************************

If he wasn't taunting people here specifically about their belief in a JFK conspiracy, and just wrote it about people who are prone to conspiracy, a lot of points he brings up are valid. I think I've been here about 6 years, and have followed this forum off and on for much longer. And at one time or another, I've experienced every CT device he's mentioned. There's not a reasonable person who couldn't find truth in some of it. Its not that profound. It's just that he characterized it as depicting everyone on this forum all the time. So people took offense. It really wasn't the stuff that anyone here would feel like debating. It wasn't like others of Lance's posts about concrete things that can be debated yay or nay. Well, then don't debate!

 

I've see no specific addressing to Lance' treatise or whateverTF it is. The forum was not prepared to take Lance on for his generalities, which is OK, but you  let his prissy attitude lure you into food fight, and then it got wacko, which played a bit into Lance's theories. Nice going, forum!

 

Have you ever thought of just ignoring him? Then he would be a  complete fool for spending hours on it, and getting no reaction. In reality DVP needed us much more then we ever needed him, even though I personally think that thinking is short sighted. On the other hand. Lance is forum groupie can always go off somewhere else and play out his fantasy of humiliating and rejecting others, ending with his parting shot here, which he appears to be doing.  

     

Edited September 7, 2019 by Kirk Gallaway

[Cliff Varnell]

18 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

 

Lance says:  It's not so much that I feel you are ridiculous (although I do) as that I feel I am ridiculous.  It's not so much that I feel sad for you (although I do) as that I feel sad for me. 

 

What!  Being such a devout Christian Lance I assume you've had  100's of such self deluding epiphanies.

     

Kirk, the only "epiphany" Lance mustered was the realization he had no substantive responses.

He was aiming for "declare victory and depart the field" but ended up with "the dog ate my homework."

[Guest]

On 9/7/2019 at 10:27 AM, Kirk Gallaway said:

If he wasn't taunting people here specifically about their belief in a JFK conspiracy, and just wrote it about people who are prone to conspiracy, a lot of points he brings up are valid. I think I've been here about 6 years, and have followed this forum off and on for much longer. And at one time or another, I've experienced every CT device he's mentioned. There's not a reasonable person who couldn't find truth in some of it. Its not that profound. It's just that he characterized it as depicting everyone on this forum all the time.

I would hate for “my” thread to end on Kirk’s note of misunderstanding.  I made very clear in my follow-up posts that I was not saying that everyone who investigates the assassination of JFK as a possible conspiracy or holds to a conspiracy theory is playing the Conspiracy Game.  I don’t think Larry Hancock and others I could name are playing the Conspiracy Game.  You identify the Conspiracy Game when you observe it being played – when what is posturing itself as legitimate historical research is actually the Conspiracy Game as described in my original post.  Yes, I do believe that the forum in its present state of decay pretty much epitomizes the Conspiracy Game.

What I perhaps have not emphasized sufficiently is the extent to which I was a gee-whiz conspiracy theorist myself.  I joined this forum in 2015, when I was 65.  Since I entered law school in 1979, by 2015 I had been engaged in heavy-duty legal analysis and argument (because this was the nature of my practice) for some 36 years.  Yet if you look at the first 50-100 of my posts here, you will see a gee-whiz conspiracy theorist.  At that time, I would have (and did) laugh in the face of anyone who suggested the Lone Assassin explanation was the answer.

How can this be?

I would never have taken any particular interest in the JFK assassination at all except for the fact that, for many years starting at about the age of 25 (when I was a writer of advertising copy and humor), I subscribed to the huge monthly newspaper-like catalog of Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller.  Every catalog had a large selection of leftover JFK conspiracy books that had failed to sell.  I thus picked up brand new hardcover editions of Rush to Judgment, Best Evidence, High Treason and many others for a mere $1.99 or $2.99.

All this conspiracy literature put the JFK assassination squarely into the category of the sort of “weirdness” in which I am interested.  For the next 40 years, the JFK assassination thus was one of my interests.  Not an obsession, but a definite interest.  I was steeped in conspiracy literature – but nothing else.

By 2015 my wound-down legal career consisted of little more than writing one 50-page appellate brief a month for other lawyers who valued my skills.  I had lots of time and dived into things like Walt Brown’s massive chronology, on which I spent an entire year.  As I dived more deeply into the conspiracy literature, I had a dawning realization that “Something is wrong with this type of thinking and this sort of approach to the evidence.”

But still I was a gee-whiz conspiracy theorist.  I never really applied the research and analytical skills I had honed as a lawyer to the assassination, although I had begun to do this with other areas of weirdness and revised my positions extensively.  In many areas, I became less interested in the substance than the epistemology, which is the branch of philosophy dealing with how we know (or think we know) things and whether what we think we know is rational and justified.

I joined here, still a gee-whiz conspiracy theorist, expecting to be wowed by the vast knowledge of those who lived and breathed the assassination.  For the first time I applied my legal skills in the areas of research and analysis to a handful of issues and discovered the emperor had no clothes.  Conspiracy nuggets from supposedly knowledgeable contributors didn’t withstand even the mildest scrutiny.

I decided that I owed it to myself to step back and at least consider the Lone Assassin literature, which I had never done to the slightest degree.  I dived into everything I could find about Oswald and his life, the Warren Commission testimony, Bugliosi and Posner, as well numerous other researchers and sites.  Even good old DVP (with whom I have never exchanged one private word) was an influence.

Gradually but decisively, the scales fell from my eyes.  I realized to my amazement that the Lone Assassin explanation was the one that actually made the most sense and best fit the evidence.  As I have continued my growth, my position as a Lone Nutter has hardened to the point that only a genuine evidentiary bombshell would shake it.

I would bet large sums of money that most people here do not have my foundation of knowledge about the assassination.  I would bet even larger sums of money that no one here has research and analytical abilities, or experience in applying them, exceeding mine.  You can dismiss me as some delusional Lone Nutter if that’s the best you can do, but you’re just making a fool of yourself.

I’m the Conspiracy Game’s worst nightmare:  An enthusiastic former player who, when he actually applied his considerable research and analytical skills, recognized how silly and flawed the game actually was and, when he stopped playing it and started doing his own investigation and thinking, pretty quickly changed his position 178 degrees (the missing 2 degrees leaving space for the evidentiary bombshell that I eagerly await).

Most of you people are playing the Conspiracy Game.  Most of your gurus are playing the Conspiracy Game – and playing you like cheap violins.  My epiphany was that you don’t even care.  You will never do what I did – step back, take a self-critical look and reconsider your positions.  This is the nature of a mindless fundamentalist, which I have never been in any area of my life.

Just so I won’t be accused of not contributing substantively, take an hour and nine minutes of your lives and watch this History Channel video that I happened to watch yesterday.  Then let some Conspiracy Game master like Jimbo tell you why “It’s all crap!!!  They're all full of BS!!!” and go your merry ways.  Be sure to read False Witness if you haven't.

Can we now just let this thread die, or must one of you goofs have the last say?  Please, anything but more about T3. 

 

Edited September 8, 2019 by Guest

[Cliff Varnell]

39 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

 Please, anything but more about T3.

Lance, you brought up T3 in your original post.

Remember?  No, you don't remember because your crap is unreadable even to you.

You referred to a "wound in 'the right shoulder,' 'about 4” down from the neck'".

Disingenuous much?

[Joe Bauer]

Too off thread.

Edited September 10, 2019 by Joe Bauer

[Cliff Varnell]

I don't find this erudite -- it's intellectual dishonesty in the extreme.

Payette wrote:

<quote on>

1.  In the Conspiracy Game, there is a distinct approach to the evidence.  Say that three eyewitnesses report, respectively, a “purplish” car, a “red” car and a “maroon” car, or that three documents describe a knife wound in “the right shoulder,” “about 4” down from the neck” and “high up in the back.”  In the Conspiracy Game, there are three distinct, highly selective approaches to this evidence:

a.  There were three cars and three wounds on the body, if this will further your Conspiracy Theory.

b.  There was one red car and one wound 4” down from the neck, if this will further your Conspiracy Theory.  (The two eyewitnesses and documents that say otherwise may serve as further evidence of the conspiracy if you’re sufficiently creative!)

<quote off>

This is an utterly dishonest presentation of the back wound evidence.

Which is why Lance doesn't want the subject brought up.