Denny Zartman

It was a powerful presentation.

They're starting it now.

Trump Jr. says it would be good to have RFK Jr. at an agency to ‘blow it up’ https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4839852-trump-jr-robert-kennedy/

Cory Booker doing a great job right now, channeling his inner evangelist.

Remember when people thought RFK Jr. was going to attract liberal supporters and hurt Biden's re-election chances?

The buzz is Stevie Wonder will be performing tonight.

I watched day two while reading comments in real time. It was another solid day at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. I personally wasn't crazy about the DJ music continuing underneath the speakers during the roll call of the states, but almost everyone commenting online seemed to really enjoy it. Guessing the musical theme for each state was fun, and Georgia made quite a splash. It all seemed designed to appeal to younger folks and to go viral. That's cool, I'm glad that the campaign is keeping young folks in mind. Reading the reactions of people who were watching a political convention for the first time was fascinating. There's a lot of enthusiasm out there right now. It was amusing at how panicked some people got when California passed. In my opinion, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Clinton have been the best speakers so far. Hillary really gave it her all and the speech was well written and well paced. Joe Biden was very good the first night, full of fire and emotion. The delegates were really into it as well. Doug Emhoff was quite appealing, telling some cute stories of courting Kamala. The Obama's were both good. I appreciated Barack making the case for reaching across the aisle and attempting to reconcile all the deep political divisions in our country, but pacing-wise his speech didn't really gather much momentum. Bernie Sanders was underwhelming, but he was himself.

A Citizen's Dissent by Mark Lane probably fits the bill best, if I'm getting what you're asking. Some other JFK books with a personal narrative would be: Best Evidence - David Lifton The Last Investigation - Gaeton Fonzi On The Trail Of The Assassins - Jim Garrison Last Second In Dallas - Josiah Thompson JFK The Last Dissenting Witness - Bill Sloan & Jean Hill Trained To Kill - Antonio Veciana & Carlos Harrison Truth Withheld - James Tague The Echo From Dealey Plaza - Abraham Bolden Steering Truth - Buell Wesley Frazier Nightmare In Dallas - Beverly Oliver

JFK's grandson Jack Scholssberg speaking now.

I enjoyed watching the first night of the convention yesterday. I've been watching conventions since the '80's. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to the 1988 convention. This one had a good start. I'm looking forward to tonight.

William Law's book "In The Eye Of History" has a DVD supplement where Paul O'Connor and Jim Jenkins (among others) discuss different autopsy photos. Unfortunately it seems this supplement is not available for viewing online, and I'm unable to figure out how to display photos here from outside hosts. Anyway, among other things, Jenkins & O'Connor pretty clear that the autopsy room did not have a metal stirrup attached to the table, as shown in the photo above.

Apparently he romanced his to-be wife from his hospital bed. The man had game. Yet, taking all that into account, the Warren Commission could find none of his friends. The closest thing they could find to a friend was George de Mohrenschildt, a guy twice his age with opposite political views and who only met Oswald at the urging of a CIA operative.

Well said, @Joe Bauer.

Yes, I have it. I think it's worth getting. It's comparatively short, too.

It is trickery to use the inclusion of Bell on a list as an excuse to ignore all the other witnesses observations, as you did. Which is funny, because you don't need an excuse to ignore other witness observations. You're demonstrating that in this thread. I could have sworn you've said on this forum that you didn't rely on witnesses that changed their stories. As I recall you said this rather snidely. You used to chide other researchers for what I seem to remember as you characterizing it as "unfairly pestering old people." Now it seems you're happy to accept the testimony of old people who changed their stories. Imho, the only difference is now they're changing it to a story that you want to believe. You're being inconsistent, Pat. Again, you used to say that you didn't rely on witnesses that changed their stories. Now you're changing your tune. So, to you, a recollection made months later is invalid, and recollections made years later hold weight. And recollections made the same day are mistakes, except for McClelland. It seems, rather than be consistent, you make your own decisions on who is trustworthy and who is reporting an observation in a timely manner based on the story you wish to believe. Where's your citation for "McClellands earliest statements" that aren't on my list? I've already asked you for them. And, most importantly, do these earliest statements of McClelland say the large wound was at the top of the head? Because if they don't, it doesn't help your argument at all. It undercuts your argument. You dismiss their earliest recollections and think they hallucinated seeing cerebellum. You think they hallucinated a large wound on the back of the head. And apparently you think they all also failed to see an obvious large wound on the top of the head. In my view this is simply not a reasonable way to analyze witness statements of medical professionals. A significant number of them have testified, drawn pictures, and been photographed indicating with their hands, that the location of the large head wound was at the rear of the head. I'm going to be forced to request that you show me an equal or greater number of medical professionals at Parkland who instead said in their pre-1965 statements that they saw the wounds at the top of the head.

If Ed Hoffman really did see what he said he saw, he had incredible courage to come forward and tell the public about it. Yet somehow some people knee jerk assume he was a greedy liar, knowing all the time that, if there was a conspiracy, the conspirators would have had every motivation to discredit him in every way possible. Some people on this forum think inconvenient witnesses were murdered, yet some can't spend a second thinking that other witnesses were victims of orchestrated operations to discredit them? Where would we be without witnesses with the courage to come forward, especially those who knew that they were going against the official story?

I'll never understand the endless benefit of the doubt always given to groups like the Dallas Police, while witnesses with information inconvenient to the official story need a thousand angels swearing for them before we'll even consider if they're telling the truth. Virtually the first thing Chief Curry did was order cops to investigate the knoll. Something happened up there. So we're just going to automatically knee-jerk assume Ed Hoffman is lying. He's deaf and mute. It's easy to find something inconsistent if you really want to discredit him. And let's be honest - if he did see what he said he saw, it would be in the conspirators interest to discredit him in any way possible. Is something like this ever taken into consideration? Did Ed Hoffman become rich and famous? His family urged him not to go to the police with his story. Was that made up too? I understand the need to carefully assess a witness's credibility. But it seems a ton of people are willing to hand-wave away important witnesses because they've been allegedly discredited. Again, it would be in the conspirators interest to discredit any witnesses countering the official story.

Hoffman had no reason to lie, but his disability makes it easy for people to dismiss his observations. Hoffman's family urged him not to go public with his observations. He had nothing to gain, and potentially a lot to lose.

My two cents: The question is unanswerable. If Ruby had not killed Oswald, I feel almost certain that Oswald would have been found dead of "suicide" in his cell a day or two later. He was never going to see the inside of a courtroom. He would have been lucky to have had even one meeting with a lawyer.

@Robert Morrow @Keven Hofeling I intentionally left Audrey Bell off the list. I personally have no objections to her. It's just that I've seen @Pat Speer pull this trick before: Someone else made a similar long list of back of the head witnesses, and Pat immediately used the inclusion of Bell as an excuse to ignore all of it. He thinks "old" memories are automatically unreliable as well, so I also made a concentrated effort to collect the earliest statements possible. I was being conservative with my estimation that there are no statements after 1965. I believe there are actually no statements made after 1964 on my list. Of course, leaving Bell off this list didn't stop Pat from ignoring the implications of it again, which is not at all surprising. But now, I think we all can see for ourselves that, as best as I am able to determine, the only person who explicitly located the large wound as being at the top of the head was WC lawyer Arlen Specter - who had no medical experience and was not present at Parkland as JFK was brought in.

It's a puzzle why/how a historian would/could come to this conclusion. All I had to do was read one "Oswald did it" book and it was almost immediately obvious to me that things didn't add up. And I'm definitely no "multi-honorary doctorate" guy.

You're doing Yeoman's work here, @W. Niederhut.

There's no free speech on this forum. This is a private website and we are all here at the pleasure of the site owner. If the owner of the Education Forum wants to have Lone Nut theorists on here, that's their decision. The website owner welcomes LN’s here. That's unquestionable. Some people (myself among them) think misinformation and disinformation comes part and parcel with Lone Nut theorists, because, as we see it, the Lone Nut theory has already been satisfactorily proven false far beyond any reasonable doubt. The question at issue seems to be: will any moderators of this forum be allowed the authority to stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation, or is this a Wild West where anything goes? And if the answer is “something in between,” who draws the line and determines what is innocent misinformation and what is malicious disinformation? People have a right to their own opinions; they do not have a right to their own facts. I believe objective facts exist. But, it seems some folks here think facts are merely matters of opinion. If I were on a scientific website’s forum discussing planets and solar systems, and there were flat-earthers there always chiming in, well… that's their right. But they would certainly be mucking up attempts at serious scientific discussion. I'd have to wonder what their intent for being there was in the first place. And I wouldn't blame anyone who would prefer a slightly more serious-minded forum that did not treat facts as opinions. To me, treating facts as opinions is disrespectful to the concept of truth. I feel truth should be the goal of all of us here. Lone Nut theorists believe the whole case was solved an hour after it happened. That's their prerogative. Yet somehow they think they have something useful to contribute to the conspiracy theorist’s discussions today. I don't see it. In my eyes, the most the LN’s seem to offer is scorn for those still studying the case. That scorn holds little intellectual value for me. To those of us looking for answers, what do the Lone Nut theorists offer to further our understanding of what really happened? Other than endless variations of “You're a bunch of stupid morons on a silly wild goose chase, because the answer was crystal clear the very moment it happened sixty years ago.” Again, that's their prerogative to hold that viewpoint. I'll never question that. But it often makes being on this forum tedious and unnecessarily frustrating when it seems every conversation with LN’s offers little more than the opportunity to go back to cover well-trodden ground. It's distracting, and it's hard not to entertain the idea that distraction is their ultimate goal, since truth seems to be a much lesser priority to them.

Well said, @W. Niederhut.

Very interesting. I made the mistake of deferring to the Warren Report! Thanks for the catch and correction. Warren Commission Hearings Volume 6, Pg 44 has testimony from Dr. Baxter where they had him read his handwritten statement for the record, precisely because his handwriting was hard to read. The published typewritten version in Volume 6 quotes Baxter as reading aloud "temporal and parietal." But it seems you are correct, and the handwritten original does seem to have the word "occipital" instead of "parietal."