DiEugenio, Cranor, and the mole (my mole) - 3/31/20

[Micah Mileto]

10 hours ago, David Lifton said:

Sorry Pat, but you're not exactly the gold standard for what's "really out there."  

That's sort of like saying "Columbus, I know you're saying you discovered America, . ... but now you're expecting us to believe there's a place called South America?.. .As a good flat-earther, I thought I was being mighty generous in believing  your alleged discovery of Miami Beach...but now you're claiming we must go "further south," to get the rest of the story?? OMG! What you're proposing strains credulity. Just too far out!"

No, Pat Speer. . . there is no tooth fairy, but two persons were shot in Dealey Plaza, and you can rest assured that if there was a medical setup prepared to deal with the President of the United States, that capability included reasonable contingency planning to deal with other unexpected developments.  Perhaps it was my training in systems engineering (or just plain common sense), but I completely disagree with the notion (i.e., your notion) that what I am proposing was (or is) "really . . . out there."  Rather, that's evidence of an inability (your inability)  to properly analyze the situation.  

I am so glad that you did not go into the field of astronomy.  We would never have discovered Pluto*.

*FWIW:  That planet, too --discovered in 1930 --  is "really really really out there" [your complete quote]. .  But its part of our reality.

You might've already known this, but Dr. Finck's 1965 report to General Blumberg contains the out-of-place phrase "black fouling": "...In my opinion, the oval wound in the right posterior superior aspect of the chest of Kennedy was an ENTRY. The edges were fairly regular and there was black fouling of the edges" (ARRB MD 28). According to scientific literature on gunshot wounds, "fouling" refers to the residue of burned gunpowder and soot spread from the discharge of a firearm at very CLOSE RANGE (JCLC, 1948; AJCP, 1953; CSLR, 1964; AJCP, 1969). Officially, Finck's reference to "black fouling of the edges" can only be interpreted as a mistake.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Ron Ecker writes:

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There are multiple witnesses to a gaping (exit) wound in back of the head. How does that evidence support the lone-nut scenario?

The single bullet theory is impossible, the evidence for that impossibility being the laws of physics. So how does that support the lone-nut scenario?

 Of course neither those witnesses nor the impossibility of the single-bullet theory support the lone-nut scenario. Sorry if I didn't express it adequately, but the point of my minor observation was that those who claim that the evidence was faked are implying that the result of the alleged fakery, the state of the body after the alleged fakery had taken place, supports the lone-nut scenario.

After all, if the wounds in their current, allegedly post-faking state don't support the lone-nut theory, they can't realistically have been faked to support that theory. What was the point of faking them, if not to make them consistent with the lone-nut scenario? To claim that they have been faked is to imply that they are now, post-fakery, consistent with the lone-nut scenario. Unless, I suppose, the forgers were particularly incompetent, which would be an even stranger claim to make.

But it is not true that the wounds, having allegedly been faked, unequivocally support the lone-nut theory. It is possible to make a plausible case that the wounds are not consistent with the lone-nut theory, which implies that they cannot have been faked, at least not by competent forgers.

For illustration, take Lifton's claim that the rear wounds were entirely fabricated, and that the "entry wounds [were] positioned exactly where they were needed" (Best Evidence, p.399). If they were, the purpose can only have been to make the positions of the wounds consistent with the lone-nut scenario. Lifton is implying that he believes that the positions of the rear entry wounds support the lone-nut scenario, and that they make the lone-nut scenario credible. (Of course, as most of us are aware, Lifton is wrong: the wounds were too low to make the lone-nut scenario credible.)

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What in your opinion was the reason for the arrival of JFK's body at Bethesda in a shipping casket, separate from the arrival of the Dallas casket?

But did it? See chapter 6 of Feinman's Between the Signal and the Noise (https://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Feinman/Between_the_signal/Chapter_six.html) for evidence that contradicts the 'musical caskets' notion, as well as the related 'ambulance chase' notion. Feinman also points out the incoherent implications of Lifton's claim.

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And why do you think Humes stated, at the start of the autopsy, that there was evidence of surgery to the head?

If he stated it, I expect that was because he thought at first that the damage to the head could have been the result of surgery. Chapter 5 of Feinman's Between the Signal and the Noise (https://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Feinman/Between_the_signal/Chapter_five.html) discusses this point, and provides reasons to doubt that there was surgery to the head.

As I pointed out earlier, whether one thinks that the body was altered or not altered, evidence exists which contradicts that opinion.

You can make a plausible case that the wounds were not altered at all, that there was no pre-autopsy surgery of the head, no game of musical caskets or follow-that-ambulance, and thus no elaborate conspiracy to fix the medical evidence.

To question the lone-nut theory, it isn't necessary to claim that the wounds were altered. The theory fails for other reasons. If you question the lone-nut theory, you have a choice between two beliefs:

- there was an unnecessary and elaborate conspiracy to fix the medical evidence;

- there was no elaborate conspiracy to fix the medical evidence.

Which is the rational choice?
 

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

David Lifton writes:

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Mr. Bojzuck lives in a world where he (apparently) believes that the primary purpose of body alteration was to create the appearance of a "lone assassin." It was much more than that; the deception goes deeper.  It was to create the illusion that Oswald's rifle was the murder weapon. To accomplish that, "non-Oswald" bullets could not be found (ergo, had to be retrieved, pre-autopsy) and "Oswald ammunition" had to be planted.

Why is it so difficult to Jeremy Bojczuk to understand that the President's body was the most important evidence in this case, and that for Oswald to be implicated (if the shots were fired from the front) then the autopsy results had to be falsified.

Of course it was not necessary to falsify the autopsy results in order to implicate Oswald! What implicated Oswald as a participant in the assassination was the presence of a rifle, which he appeared to have purchased, on the sixth floor, from where at least some of the shots appeared to have been fired.

Just as you don't need body-alteration in order to explain Kennedy's and Connally's wounds, you don't need body-alteration in order to explain the framing of Oswald. You certainly don't need all the shots to have been fired from in front, let alone Lifton's magic bullet which turned 180 degrees in mid-air and hit Connally in his back, or bizarre games of musical caskets or follow-that-ambulance. Most importantly, you don't need body-alteration in order to negate the lone-nut theory.

Lifton's entire fantastical scheme is redundant. Oswald could have phoned in sick that day, and he would still have been implicated in the assassination, simply because of the rifle.

Roger Feinman points out numerous problems with the bullet-planting aspect of Lifton's over-elaborate theory in chapter 5 of Between the Signal and the Noise: the 'Best Evidence' Hoax and David Lifton's War Against the Critics of the Warren Commission (https://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Feinman/Between_the_signal/Chapter_five.html)

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Another, even more pivotal weakness of Lifton's trajectory reversal idea (BE, p. 343) is that it rests upon the assumption that the three bullet shells which were found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository near the window from which the Warren Commission alleged that Oswald fired the shots were planted by conspirators, and upon the further assumption that the plan called for the number of wounds inflicted during the shooting to correlate perfectly with the number of allegedly planted bullet shells.

This, however, is not necessarily so: If a greater number of shells existed than wounds, it could be explained away that one or more of the shots fired had missed their target. If, however, fewer shells existed than wounds "attributable" to them, then the wounds would have to be correlated in such a way as to accommodate the number of shells. Moreover, Lifton makes no effort to address the weighty issue whether the three shells would have been planted before or after the shooting, let alone how or by whom.

Lifton acknowledges this problem:

"One fact of my hypothesis was that it demonstrated, in theory at least, that the plotters could know, once they saw the body, how much ammunition was needed, and so could coordinate the planting of bullets with the fabrication of trajectories." (BE, p. 359)

Really? How would they know how many bullet fragments to plant? Did they know how many times John Connally was struck? Could they plant fragments in Connally's chest, wrist and thigh?

Wasn't it necessary, in Lifton's world, to plant the three cartridge shells beforehand? Ignoring the faults implicit in his a priori reasoning, consider the consequences. I am grateful to researcher W. Anthony Marsh for pointing out that, if the conspirators had planted the three cartridge shells in the Book Depository, but "gotten lucky" and made the fatal hit with one shot from the knoll, the conspiracy would have been immediately exposed. As he further muses, the number of known or suspected separate and distinct shots far exceeded the three shells recovered (JFK's head and upper back/lower neck, Connally's chest and wrist, the limousine windshield and chrome topping, and bystander James Tague).

I agree with many students of the case that there are doubts about the legitimacy of CE 399. Looking at the totality of Lifton's ammunition-planting scheme, however, why plant a whole bullet on a stretcher, but only fragments in the car? What about the fragments that actually were found in the President's skull, or those that were too minute to recover? Were they planted (and perhaps "sprayed" through the brain) too?

How did the plotters know that a bullet fired from the front would not completely escape the limousine and later be recovered—maybe hours or days after the shooting?

 

Edited April 19, 2020 by Jeremy Bojczuk
Removed a smiley face which for some reason appeared instead of a closing bracket

[Ron Ecker]

18 minutes ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

What was the point of faking them, if not to make them consistent with the lone-nut scenario? To claim that they have been faked is to imply that they are now, post-fakery, consistent with the lone-nut scenario.

IMO "faking" the wounds simply means removing evidence, specifically bullets, of shots from the front. It was not to create some lone-nut scenario work of art. It's my impression that what they found at Bethesda was more an act of hasty butchery than of art. The fakery involved in the back-of-the-head photo is apparently just pulling scalp up over the hole in back of the head to take the picture. Some artistry.  

See chapter 6 of Feinman's Between the Signal and the Noise (https://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Feinman/Between_the_signal/Chapter_six.html) for evidence that contradicts the 'musical caskets' notion, as well as the related 'ambulance chase' notion. Feinman also points out the incoherent implications of Lifton's claim.

I haven't seen Feinman but the "musical chairs" notion was not an "incoherent" notion of LIfton. LIfton was not among those present who saw the shipping casket and its delivery separate from the Dallas casket. I don't know if Feinman calls those people prevaricators or what since I haven't seen his work.  

BTW I'm replying to you by inserting answers in bold into your text because if there's a way to break up a quoted passage for intermittent responses, I have never figured it out.

 

 

 

[David Lifton]

On 4/19/2020 at 1:38 AM, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

David Lifton writes:

Of course it was not necessary to falsify the autopsy results in order to implicate Oswald! What implicated Oswald as a participant in the assassination was the presence of a rifle, which he appeared to have purchased, on the sixth floor, from where at least some of the shots appeared to have been fired.

Just as you don't need body-alteration in order to explain Kennedy's and Connally's wounds, you don't need body-alteration in order to explain the framing of Oswald. You certainly don't need all the shots to have been fired from in front, let alone Lifton's magic bullet which turned 180 degrees in mid-air and hit Connally in his back, or bizarre games of musical caskets or follow-that-ambulance. Most importantly, you don't need body-alteration in order to negate the lone-nut theory.

Lifton's entire fantastical scheme is redundant. Oswald could have phoned in sick that day, and he would still have been implicated in the assassination, simply because of the rifle.

Roger Feinman points out numerous problems with the bullet-planting aspect of Lifton's over-elaborate theory in chapter 5 of Between the Signal and the Noise: the 'Best Evidence' Hoax and David Lifton's War Against the Critics of the Warren Commission (https://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Feinman/Between_the_signal/Chapter_five.html)

 

Jeremy B:

If Oswald's rifle was placed behind some cartons on the sixth floor (e.g., where it was found) and  if three shells from that rifle were found near the sixth floor window, but. . . if a valid autopsy on JFK's body established that President Kennedy was shot from the front (as the Dallas doctors stated was the case), then of course Oswald could not (and would not) be charged with the murder. (You do understand that, don't you?)  The geometry would be all wrong, and the President's body--in that hypothetical case--would be the "best evidence" that Oswald was not the assassin. Why don't you understand that the best evidence that the shots came from the rear (and from the so-called "sniper's nest") are the bullet trajectories established at autopsy.  How can you fail to see that the only way someone at the sniper's nest could be implicated (if in fact no shots were actually fired from that location --I repeat, if no shots were fired from behind) would be if the autopsy conclusions (re trajectory) were falsified--which means either one of two things: that the doctors issued  a false report, or that the evidence they examined (the President's body, i.e., his wounds) were altered.

This is as basic as "2 + 3 = 5".  How can you claim not to see what is obvious: that the Bethesda autopsy report  conclusions about trajectory (based on the wounds on the body) provides the evidential link between the alleged murder weapon (supposedly fired from)  the sixth floor window, and the homicide that occurred in the street below? So if there is evidence that the President's body (i.e., his wounds) were altered, that is powerful circumstantial evidence that the basic facts --the medico legal facts --in this case were altered, that the trajectories are fabrications, and  that Lee Oswald was framed.  You may turn your back on all of the evidence of wound alteration, but then your conclusions about trajectory are nothing more than an act of faith. But this is not about religion, its about science.

If you are so blinded by bias that you cannot understand this, there is no hope for any rational discussion.

P.S. Your reliance on the late Roger Feinman is laughable. I'm sure that, by now, you know that he was disbarred.  But do you know why?  Some years ago, I pursued the matter and obtained the relevant records. Roger Feinman was disbarred because in one of the cases he took shortly after he was admitted to the New York Bar, he started yelling at the judge, berating him in open court, and implying (or asserting) that the judge hearing the case had connections with the Mafia.  A panel of judges was then convened to consider what to do with this young attorney, who was intolerably offensive, and-- in  plain English--behaved like a nut job.  

Lots of luck, Mr. Bojczuk.  if this is the kind of attorney you take seriously, you deserve the outcome.

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by David Lifton

[Sandy Larsen]

On 4/19/2020 at 3:05 AM, Ron Ecker said:

BTW I'm replying to you by inserting answers in bold into your text because if there's a way to break up a quoted passage for intermittent responses, I have never figured it out.

Hey Ron, I'll tell you how to break a quotation box into multiple parts.

Put your cursor where you want to make the break. If there are any spaces to the right of the cursor, push Delete to eliminate them. (The reason for this is explained below.)  Push Enter on your keyboard twice. Now you'll have an empty line in the text. Move your cursor to the empty line. Push Enter and you will see that it broke the quotation box into two.

Note that this will not work if the line is not truly empty. It was for this reason that I had you delete the spaces.... they can end up on the empty line and be completely invisible. And it will drive you mad.

 

[Ron Ecker]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Hey Ron, I'll tell you how to break a quotation box into multiple parts.

Thanks.

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Put your cursor where you want to make the break. If there are any spaces to the right of the cursor, push Delete to eliminate them. (The reason for this is explained below.)  Push Enter on your keyboard twice. Now you'll have an empty line in the text. Move your cursor to the empty line. Push Enter and you will see that it broke the quotation box into two.

Thanks again.

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Note that this will not work if the line is not truly empty. It was for this reason that I had you delete the spaces.... they can end up on the empty line and be completely invisible. And it will drive you mad.

 

Thanks. It worked! I'm curious as to how you knew this unless someone told you. And if someone told you, how did they know?

 

[Sandy Larsen]

1 hour ago, Ron Ecker said:

2 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Hey Ron, I'll tell you how to break a quotation box into multiple parts.

 

 

Thanks. It worked! I'm curious as to how you knew this unless someone told you. And if someone told you, how did they know?

You're welcome.

I figured it out through a combination of these two personal traits:

• My hands aren't very steady and I constantly press keys that I don't mean to. Sometimes it leads to my discovering a useful keystroke combination.
• As a technology geek and electrical engineer, I've done a fair amount of computer programming. And so I kinda know how programmers think. That helps me figure out how they would make a program work. (This forum is a program, a.k.a. app.)

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by Sandy Larsen

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

David Lifton writes:

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if a valid autopsy on JFK's body established that President Kennedy was shot from the front (as the Dallas doctors stated was the case), then of course Oswald could not (and would not) be charged with the murder. (You do understand that, don't you?)

No, I don't. If any shots could be shown to have been fired from the sixth-floor rifle, no matter how many other shots might have been fired or where they were fired from, Oswald would have been implicated as a participant in the assassination, purely because he could be linked to the rifle. There was no need for any sort of elaborate plot involving the kidnapping and mutilation of Kennedy's body.

Mr Lifton seems to be working from two faulty assumptions:

(a) that the main purpose of his bizarre body-alteration plot was to frame Oswald as the sole participant in the assassination;

(b) all the shots came from the front.

We can rule out assumption (b) for reasons I've already given. Lifton himself seems to be the only person who thinks that Governor Connally was not shot from behind. I'd like to see Lifton justify assumption (a). Even if he were able to do this, he would still need to explain why his imaginary plot failed. After the body had allegedly been altered to show that Kennedy had been shot only by a lone nut firing from the sixth floor, the body actually showed that Kennedy could not have been shot only by a lone nut firing from the sixth floor.

The wounds in the rear of the head and torso, which Lifton claims were entirely fabricated to implicate a lone nut firing from the sixth floor, were too low to have been caused by a lone nut firing from the sixth floor.

The plot evidently didn't work out very well. Either the organisers messed up or the surgeons messed up. All those dozens of conspirators who worked out the plan in advance as an integral part of the assassination, then kidnapped the body, transported it from A to B, operated upon it, and transported it from B to C, were wasting their time. They may as well not have bothered.

Lifton's elaborate plot explains nothing that doesn't have an alternative, non-fantastical explanation.

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how can you claim not to see what is obvious: that the autopsy report  conclusions about trajectory (based on the wounds on the body) provides the evidential link between the alleged murder weapon at the sixth floor window, and the homicide that occurred in the street below?

I'm not sure what point Lifton is making here. The autopsy report concluded that the wounds were consistent with shots fired from the rifle found on the sixth floor. So what? We know that the autopsy report was wildly wrong in particular about what caused the rear head wound, because the pathologists didn't take into account the angle of Kennedy's head when he was shot, as shown in the Zapruder film. A bullet fired from the sixth floor at Zapruder frame 313 cannot have entered low down on the back of the head, as the autopsy report claimed, and then exited above the right ear. If those wounds were caused by one bullet at frame 313, that bullet must have been fired from somewhere other than the sixth floor of the book depository.

Lifton's claim that the rear head wound was deliberately fabricated to implicate Oswald is wrong. The rear head wound, as described in the autopsy report, exonerates Oswald. Either the conspirators were desperately incompetent, or the deliberate fabrication cannot have happened. Again, Lifton's elaborate plot explains nothing that doesn't have an alternative, non-fantastical explanation.

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Your reliance on the late Roger Feinman is laughable. I'm sure that, by now, you know that he was disbarred ... after he was admitted to the New York Bar.

And the relevance of that is? If Feinman had been a dairy farmer who went bust, or an accountant who got sacked, or an international jewel thief who got caught, what effect would that have on the evidence and arguments he made about Best Evidence?

Feinman put forward evidence and arguments that contradict Lifton's body-alteration fantasy. Read what he wrote, and evaluate his claims on their merits, not on the basis of his inside-leg measurement or what he had for breakfast. Thanks to Feinman (and others, such as Harold Weisberg), we know that Lifton's body-alteration fantasy is unnecessary to explain the assassination.

Incidentally, there's a technical problem with the version of Feinman's Between the Signal and the Noise: the 'Best Evidence' Hoax and David Lifton's War Against the Critics of the Warren Commission at kenrahn.com. The links at the bottom of each page don't work: the web server is set up to use case-sensitive web addresses, and the links use some lower-case letters instead of upper-case.

This page provides a list of links that work:

https://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Feinman/Between_the_signal/

Alternatively, you can find the complete text here:

https://the-puzzle-palace.com/etcetera.htm

[Micah Mileto]

On 4/17/2020 at 9:57 PM, Pat Speer said:

 

This is unrelated, but it wouldn't let me send you a PM.

 

This is from your online book:

 

A year and a half later, while interviewing Father Huber for his movie Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane followed up on Martin's questions, and received a similar response. (The transcript to this interview was made available by the Wisconsin Historical Society.) Huber told Lane "Well, his face was covered with blood and there was a blotch of blood on the left forehead, which I, at the time, thought possibly could be a bullet wound, but I learned later that it was not, that I was entirely mistaken, because he had been shot in the back of the head. I did not see really any wounds on him, because I only uncovered his face to the tip of his nose. I learned later that the bullet came out, perhaps at the jaw, I don't know."

 

I'm trying to compile information on alleged wounds in the front of the head. By any chance do you have a copy of this transcript to share?

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by Micah Mileto

[Joseph McBride]

The priest may have been referring to what appears to

be a small bullet entrance wound at Kennedy's hairline

on the right side of his head. You can see it in an autopsy

photo. Perhaps when the priest said it was "on the left

forehead," he was thinking of how it appeared to his

left when he was looking down at the dead president.

[Pat Speer]

Question for David Lifton.

I don't remember where I heard this---but it was my understanding Feinman got disbarred because he'd lost his cool while representing a number of CTs against Gerald Posner's publisher. 

Assuming this is true, it would be unfair to use his disbarment to suggest he was a lousy lawyer. A passionate advocate for his fellow CTs,  yes--but a lousy lawyer, no. 

[Pat Speer]

16 hours ago, Micah Mileto said:

This is unrelated, but it wouldn't let me send you a PM.

 

This is from your online book:

 

A year and a half later, while interviewing Father Huber for his movie Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane followed up on Martin's questions, and received a similar response. (The transcript to this interview was made available by the Wisconsin Historical Society.) Huber told Lane "Well, his face was covered with blood and there was a blotch of blood on the left forehead, which I, at the time, thought possibly could be a bullet wound, but I learned later that it was not, that I was entirely mistaken, because he had been shot in the back of the head. I did not see really any wounds on him, because I only uncovered his face to the tip of his nose. I learned later that the bullet came out, perhaps at the jaw, I don't know."

 

I'm trying to compile information on alleged wounds in the front of the head. By any chance do you have a copy of this transcript to share?

 

Once upon a time, the Rush to Judgment transcripts provided by the Wisconsin Historical Society were available on John McAdams' site. That's probably where I found it. 

[Micah Mileto]

3 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Once upon a time, the Rush to Judgment transcripts provided by the Wisconsin Historical Society were available on John McAdams' site. That's probably where I found it. 

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/pdf/lane_interviews/huber.pdf

 

Found it. Thank you.

[David Lifton]

On 4/22/2020 at 2:04 AM, Pat Speer said:

Question for David Lifton.

I don't remember where I heard this---but it was my understanding Feinman got disbarred because he'd lost his cool while representing a number of CTs against Gerald Posner's publisher. 

Assuming this is true, it would be unfair to use his disbarment to suggest he was a lousy lawyer. A passionate advocate for his fellow CTs,  yes--but a lousy lawyer, no. 

He implied that the judge had Mafia connections.  You call that "A passionate advocate for his fellow CTs"   I don't think so.