So is David Lifton's Final Charade just going to be lost to history?

[Sandy Larsen]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Yay, Bill Fite, a person who understands math! And knows how to apply it!

Bill, as part of my proof, I did do it the way you did. But instead of getting an answer of 1 in 83,818,  I got 1 in 109,605. I tried another online calculator and got the same.

But it occurred to me that the two calculators might be using the same code. So I did the calculations manually, both on my HP calculator and on the Windows scientific calculator. Those calculators give a far difference answer of 1 in 112,236,203. Which obviously is a far different answer!

I trust my HP calculator far more than any online calculator, which can be wrong due to the extremely large numbers involved with the factorial calculations.

Do you have a scientific calculator that you can do the calculation on? Just to be sure.

 

EDIT: I found the problem. The binomial probability formula I used to do the manual calculation has a typo. Using the correct formula, I again get 1 in 109,605. So I'm sure that is the correct number.

 

 

I found the problem. The binomial probability formula I used to do the manual calculation has a typo. Using the correct formula, I again get 1 in 109,605 on my HP and the Windows calculators. So I'm sure that is the correct number.

 

[Aaron Sharpe]

15 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Not in evidence now, no. But how could conspirators be sure one wouldn't surface at some point?

I'm not mocking anything. I'm trying to understand the logic of (poorly?) editing only one of the films without knowing if other films/photos would surface and render the original alteration exposed as fake for all to see.

The people who have allegedly proven the Zapruder film to be a forgery have been working on an explanation for more than a decade, and their claims have not been subjected to peer review. I'll be curious to see what they come up with.

If you want to wait for science (as an institution) or for peer review (as a process) to confirm or disprove anything about the JFK assassination, you will be waiting a very long time. The problem is purely political, which also reaches deep into our scientific institutions. If you lived through 2020, that should be evident, though these past few years merely pulled away the curtain; things were always this bad. JAMA published a shiny defense of Humes and Boswell right on the heels on JFK (the 1991 movie), to cite just one of thousands of examples.

The end game here would be to get our government to loudly and without caveat concede that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy, an act of state perpetrated by corrupted institutions that still survive and expect our trust to this very day; that the media was also compromised and complicit; that the investigations were bogus; that much evidence was faked, forged, disappeared, or manufactured; that independent investigations were sabotaged by institutions we pay for. Here is when that will happen: Never. 

Science isn't going to bring that goal any closer. The best we can hope for is an improved version of what we have now, which is a populace in a state of tension between what is acknowledged ("it was LHO, the nut, and yeah there was some hinky stuff so probably a shot from the grassy knoll but that missed because !!science!! so it was still LHO, he musta been mobbed up") and what the majority of people know in their bones (see preceding paragraph).

Improving the situation takes evidence that is accessible to everyone, distributed as far and wide as possible, presented clearly and elegantly. For my money, no one has done more to get at the truth of the JFK assassination than Oliver Stone. A Wilkinson/Whitehead documentary could yield such results, though I doubt it will be quite so polished or widespread. Besides, the people were given their ARRB. They largely went back to sleep as documents were shoveled into a pile and more books were written. The moment is gone. 

Only the winners of bloody revolutions get to rewrite history. Which is, let's face it, what we're trying to do.

12 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Greetings. Aaron. I beg to differ on your initial statement. Even if one is to conclude the back of the head was blown out, it makes little sense to elevate the evidence for this fact above a number of other items of evidence.

There is some dispute about the nature of JFK's head wound, to put it mildly.

There is however little dispute that the the throat wound was unusually small, which suggests it was either an entrance or the exit of a low velocity projectile, neither of which fits the single-assassin scenario.

I disagree. If David Lifton got one thing right, it's that the body is the "best evidence." The autopsy should tell us everything we need to know. That the greatest country in the world, with the smartest doctors and unlimited resources produced the atrocity it did—an autopsy that conceals rather than reveals—is a screaming fireball of information. I am no scientist and have very little in the way of medical training. But I can point a camera and operate the zoom and click the button. There is no innocent explanation for the mess of this autopsy. 

Statistics can be made to show anything. Frankly, I'm bored by the analyses of probabilities that group A might have witnessed something incorrectly or less accurately than group B. All I know is that a few score medical professionals saw—first hand and on the first day—a hole in the back of JFK's head and have repeatedly and consistently said so for decades. Respect to Dr. Aguilar, who wasn't there, but Dr. McClelland saw the cerebellum leaking out, and one of the autopsy attendants was able to put his fist inside it, and the mortician filled it in with a piece of rubber. And yet we have a photo of a neat and clean and intact back of the head. Another screaming fireball. 

The other evidence you cite is terrific, I agree, but the best of it is not "science" per se. It is circumstances that appeal to people's natural intuition for truth. The throat wound for instance. The idea that a bullet, entering from the back, traversed a human body and just happened to gracefully exit near dead-center in one of the most vulnerable and exposed anatomical locations, leaving a neat little hole, is just crazy talk. Only science could make me believe the lie. 

A consistent web of circumstances, especially when arrived at from an assortment of sources (consilience), is the strongest indicator of reality. The back-of-head wound is powerful not only because of the mass of people who saw it and described it so similarly, but because it fits with so much else. Ie, the motorcycle outriders to the rear who were splattered with blood and brain, the piece of occipital bone found in the plaza (oops, lost that), and then, decades later, the testimony from the mortician that he had patched the back of the head with rubber filler. 

I think it's the best evidence. I don't think it's possible that we'll ever get better evidence even if we could have anything we could plausibly want. To be clear, if a new video emerged next week, taken from behind the grassy knoll and showing a man with a gun firing at the president over the fence, and everyone agreed it was legitimate from 11/22/63, we'd soon hear a song about "well, the HSCA said there was probably a conspiracy and a shot from the knoll, so now we have proof of that, but this is the guy that missed, so it was a conspiracy but LHO killed him, nothing new here, musta been a Corsican."

The body evidence indicates both a conspiracy and a coverup, and also points to the only entity that could possibly have covered it up. There's a little wiggle room in there for the "benign coverup" explanation (which is just more coverup), but  if that's the case then why is it still going on?

The only thing I can think of that would be better would be something that definitively exonerates Lee Harvey Oswald. There is a single possibility for that: Getting our hands on the original Darnell film (or Weigman, or maybe some unknown other) and being pleasantly surprised to find that the resolution is utterly amazing—and I'm talking a degree of clarity that would make it impossible for people to say, "Looks a lot like Oswald, almost exactly, but there's no way that's him because we know he was six floors up." I don't see that happening. 

Don't take me as "anti-science." Not at all. Science is beautiful. The institutions that practice it these days are not. Science makes my radio work, but rarely changes hearts and minds. Relying too much on "assassination science" just draws scads of people who will talk at you like this ⬇️

11 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Jonathan Cohen writes:

One thing the pro-alteration claimants really need to do is get their heads together and come up with a set of claims they all agree on. If you look at James 'Sandy Hook' Fetzer's comic masterpiece, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, which came out in 2003, you'll find all sorts of claims made. Other sources make other claims, while ignoring some of the claims made elsewhere.

Come on, make your minds up! If alterationist A makes a claim but alterationist B doesn't believe it, why be surprised when the rest of us don't take it seriously either?

Anyone who has been following this debate will have noted the general level of amateurishness involved. This bit of the film contradicts what this witness said, so it must be a fake! That bit of the film looks a bit funny to me, so it must be a fake! The whole debate gives the impression of being just a game of moon-landings-style spot-the-anomaly rather than serious research. To get over this problem, let's see a bit of consistency and joined-up thinking.

Exactly which parts of the film were altered, and why? The three main claims that come to mind are: the popular black blob covering up a back-of-the-head wound; the claim that frames were removed to hide an incriminating car stop; and that other frames were removed to hide the car's incriminating (why?) turn onto Elm Street.

So was it just this part that was faked? Or was it just that other part that was faked? Or were they both faked? Or are those two parts authentic but some other part was faked? Or was the entire film fabricated from scratch (as is claimed on page 181 of Fetzer's book)?

For each specific claim, what would have been the rationale? Why would anyone go to the trouble of faking this part while leaving that incriminating part intact? And why does at least one claim of alteration have the effect of making the lone-nut claim more rather than less plausible? I'm thinking here of the claim that frames were removed which showed the car moving along Elm Street before the head shot. Without the Zapruder film's timing of the car's progress along the road, there is no constraint on the amount of time required to fire three shots from the sixth-floor rifle.

Then you need to agree on the evidence for alteration. Which of the apparent anomalies in the film are the result of alteration, and which have plausible non-conspiratorial explanations? If an apparent anomaly has a plausible everyday explanation, but you prefer an inherently less plausible pro-alteration explanation, why do you do this?

Pro-alteration claimants also need to come up with, and agree on, a plausible account for each apparent anomaly. If the film shows Mary Moorman standing on the grass when she should have been standing in the street, or this or that road sign in a strange position, or that back-to-front car on Houston Street, or this seven-foot-tall spectator, what type of alteration must have been made to produce that particular anomaly? And what good reason would there have been for making that particular anomaly-producing alteration?

Jonathan's remark about the lack of peer review is a good one. Once you have agreed on what's fake and what isn't, get your evidence together, write an article, and submit it to a serious scientific journal. Then, if your article gets rejected, let us know the reasons that were given for its rejection. And before anyone claims that no serious scientific journal would accept an article critical of the lone-nut view, look at the examples of the Journal of Forensic Sciences and the Annals of Applied Statistics, each of which published articles that seriously undermined the HSCA's use of neutron activation analysis.

But just to start with: get your heads together and tell us definitively which parts of the film were altered and which parts weren't.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Bill, as part of my proof, I did do it the way you did.

 

@Bill Fite Just a clarification... I just checked and see that, in the post I linked to, I didn't do the proof exactly the way you did. But I did do it your way exactly somewhere in one of the topics I've posted to. I've been posting this proof again and again over the last several days, refining it based on the response I get.

 

[Bill Fite]

4 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Yay, Bill Fite, a person who understands math! And knows how to apply it!

Bill, as part of my proof, I did do it the way you did. But instead of getting an answer of 1 in 83,818,  I got 1 in 109,605. I tried another online calculator and got the same.

But it occurred to me that the two calculators might be using the same code. So I did the calculations manually, both on my HP calculator and on the Windows scientific calculator. Those calculators give a far difference answer of 1 in 112,236,203. Which obviously is a far different answer!

I trust my HP calculator far more than any online calculator, which can be wrong due to the extremely large numbers involved with the factorial calculations.

Do you have a scientific calculator that you can do the calculation on? Just to be sure.

 

EDIT: I found the problem. The binomial probability formula I used to do the manual calculation has a typo. Using the correct formula, I again get 1 in 109,605. So I'm sure that is the correct number.

 

Sandy

I checked on Wolfram Alpha -> link

Seems to give the same probability as I had in python which would give the same odds.

You can click on the fraction and it will give the decimal.

The to get the odds enter 1/that decimal number.

Rgds

[Sandy Larsen]

6 minutes ago, Bill Fite said:

4 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Bill, as part of my proof, I did do it the way you did. But instead of getting an answer of 1 in 83,818,  I got 1 in 109,605. I tried another online calculator and got the same.

6 minutes ago, Bill Fite said:

I checked on Wolfram Alpha -> link

Seems to give the same probability as I had in python which would give the same odds.

 

Bill,

Even on Wolfram Alpha I get 109,605, not the 83,818 that you get.

But I figured out why we get different numbers.

It's because I am calculating the odds of exactly 40 of the 50 witnesses getting it wrong. In contrast, you are calculating the odds of 40 or more getting it wrong.

 

[Pat Speer]

3 hours ago, Aaron Sharpe said:

If you want to wait for science (as an institution) or for peer review (as a process) to confirm or disprove anything about the JFK assassination, you will be waiting a very long time. The problem is purely political, which also reaches deep into our scientific institutions. If you lived through 2020, that should be evident, though these past few years merely pulled away the curtain; things were always this bad. JAMA published a shiny defense of Humes and Boswell right on the heels on JFK (the 1991 movie), to cite just one of thousands of examples.

The end game here would be to get our government to loudly and without caveat concede that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy, an act of state perpetrated by corrupted institutions that still survive and expect our trust to this very day; that the media was also compromised and complicit; that the investigations were bogus; that much evidence was faked, forged, disappeared, or manufactured; that independent investigations were sabotaged by institutions we pay for. Here is when that will happen: Never. 

Science isn't going to bring that goal any closer. The best we can hope for is an improved version of what we have now, which is a populace in a state of tension between what is acknowledged ("it was LHO, the nut, and yeah there was some hinky stuff so probably a shot from the grassy knoll but that missed because !!science!! so it was still LHO, he musta been mobbed up") and what the majority of people know in their bones (see preceding paragraph).

Improving the situation takes evidence that is accessible to everyone, distributed as far and wide as possible, presented clearly and elegantly. For my money, no one has done more to get at the truth of the JFK assassination than Oliver Stone. A Wilkinson/Whitehead documentary could yield such results, though I doubt it will be quite so polished or widespread. Besides, the people were given their ARRB. They largely went back to sleep as documents were shoveled into a pile and more books were written. The moment is gone. 

Only the winners of bloody revolutions get to rewrite history. Which is, let's face it, what we're trying to do.

I disagree. If David Lifton got one thing right, it's that the body is the "best evidence." The autopsy should tell us everything we need to know. That the greatest country in the world, with the smartest doctors and unlimited resources produced the atrocity it did—an autopsy that conceals rather than reveals—is a screaming fireball of information. I am no scientist and have very little in the way of medical training. But I can point a camera and operate the zoom and click the button. There is no innocent explanation for the mess of this autopsy. 

Statistics can be made to show anything. Frankly, I'm bored by the analyses of probabilities that group A might have witnessed something incorrectly or less accurately than group B. All I know is that a few score medical professionals saw—first hand and on the first day—a hole in the back of JFK's head and have repeatedly and consistently said so for decades. Respect to Dr. Aguilar, who wasn't there, but Dr. McClelland saw the cerebellum leaking out, and one of the autopsy attendants was able to put his fist inside it, and the mortician filled it in with a piece of rubber. And yet we have a photo of a neat and clean and intact back of the head. Another screaming fireball. 

The other evidence you cite is terrific, I agree, but the best of it is not "science" per se. It is circumstances that appeal to people's natural intuition for truth. The throat wound for instance. The idea that a bullet, entering from the back, traversed a human body and just happened to gracefully exit near dead-center in one of the most vulnerable and exposed anatomical locations, leaving a neat little hole, is just crazy talk. Only science could make me believe the lie. 

A consistent web of circumstances, especially when arrived at from an assortment of sources (consilience), is the strongest indicator of reality. The back-of-head wound is powerful not only because of the mass of people who saw it and described it so similarly, but because it fits with so much else. Ie, the motorcycle outriders to the rear who were splattered with blood and brain, the piece of occipital bone found in the plaza (oops, lost that), and then, decades later, the testimony from the mortician that he had patched the back of the head with rubber filler. 

I think it's the best evidence. I don't think it's possible that we'll ever get better evidence even if we could have anything we could plausibly want. To be clear, if a new video emerged next week, taken from behind the grassy knoll and showing a man with a gun firing at the president over the fence, and everyone agreed it was legitimate from 11/22/63, we'd soon hear a song about "well, the HSCA said there was probably a conspiracy and a shot from the knoll, so now we have proof of that, but this is the guy that missed, so it was a conspiracy but LHO killed him, nothing new here, musta been a Corsican."

The body evidence indicates both a conspiracy and a coverup, and also points to the only entity that could possibly have covered it up. There's a little wiggle room in there for the "benign coverup" explanation (which is just more coverup), but  if that's the case then why is it still going on?

The only thing I can think of that would be better would be something that definitively exonerates Lee Harvey Oswald. There is a single possibility for that: Getting our hands on the original Darnell film (or Weigman, or maybe some unknown other) and being pleasantly surprised to find that the resolution is utterly amazing—and I'm talking a degree of clarity that would make it impossible for people to say, "Looks a lot like Oswald, almost exactly, but there's no way that's him because we know he was six floors up." I don't see that happening. 

Don't take me as "anti-science." Not at all. Science is beautiful. The institutions that practice it these days are not. Science makes my radio work, but rarely changes hearts and minds. Relying too much on "assassination science" just draws scads of people who will talk at you like this ⬇️

 

Greetings, Aaron. Unfortunately, the head wound evidence is not as clear-cut as you remember. 

You write "a few score medical professionals saw—first hand and on the first day—a hole in the back of JFK's head and have repeatedly and consistently said so for decades." This is an exaggeration. Only a handful of Parkland witnesses recorded their impressions that day, and the majority of them corrected their impressions once shown the autopsy photos. 

You write further: "Respect to Dr. Aguilar, who wasn't there, but Dr. McClelland saw the cerebellum leaking out, and one of the autopsy attendants was able to put his fist inside it, and the mortician filled it in with a piece of rubber. And yet we have a photo of a neat and clean and intact back of the head. Another screaming fireball." This is misleading. Dr. McClelland failed to mention cerebellum in his 11-22 report, which was to be his only official statement on the case. He was then offered a chance to correct his report before publication in a medical journal, and changed his claim the wound was "of the left temple" to "of the right side of the head" and still made no mention of cerebellum. In fact, he only started mentioning cerebellum months later, after becoming aware of what others had claimed. Now, this doesn't prove he didn't see cerebellum, of course, but it cuts into his credibility. As far as autopsy attendants being able to put their fist inside the wound, well, yeah, once the scalp was peeled back and skull fell to the table, there was a gaping hole on the right side of the skull through which the brain could be removed. And this supports what was observed by the morticians as well. The right side of the skull was largely missing at the end of the autopsy, and it fell upon Stroble to reconstruct the skull so the President would be acceptable for public viewing, so he pieced the scalp and skull together with the hole on the back of the head, where it could be buried in a pillow. 

As far as the autopsy reports... the discussion of the nature of the President's head wound and the subsequent discussion of the President's brain injuries in the reports proves he was not shot by a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet entering low on the back of head. IOW, the proof of conspiracy is in the reports and has been all along. 

[Bill Fite]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Bill,

Even on Wolfram Alpha I get 109,605, not the 83,818 that you get.

But I figured out why we get different numbers.

It's because I am calculating the odds of exactly 40 of the 50 witnesses getting it wrong. In contrast, you are calculating the odds of 40 or more getting it wrong.

 

Yes - that explains the difference.  I think in a question like this the desired probability can be stated - 'What is the probability of at least 40 out of 50 being wrong?'  If 41 are wrong then 40 are also wrong.

Edited February 8 by Bill Fite

[Jamey Flanagan]

I find it funny how DSL seemed to dismiss the two Oswald evidence so easily and always said there was only one Oswald as if the idea were absurd while embracing such wild theories in the last decade or two of his life, lol! I guess since Final Charade started off as being a book about Oswald, he had skin in the game and more than one Oswald complicated matters. In every interview I've heard of his he always goes on and on about how beautiful she was back in the day when speaking of Marina, lol! Sounds almost like he had a thing for her. I could be wrong, but it seems like I had heard of an affair she had with one JFK researcher. Not talking about McMillan or whatever either, though I had heard they had relations more than once.

[Micah Mileto]

On 2/3/2024 at 12:30 AM, James DiEugenio said:

It was more than that, it was over 300 K according to my sources.

But Paula if you do not mind, what were some of the ideas that Lifton developed that led to your separation?

I did hear that he maintained that Jackie got out of the car en route to Parkland.?

DId he really think that?

See his last 3 appearances on the Night Fright show with Brent Holland.

[Mark Ulrik]

18 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Bill,

Even on Wolfram Alpha I get 109,605, not the 83,818 that you get.

But I figured out why we get different numbers.

It's because I am calculating the odds of exactly 40 of the 50 witnesses getting it wrong. In contrast, you are calculating the odds of 40 or more getting it wrong.

 

Sandy,

Like Bill F, I think the cumulative approach should be preferred here, and I, too, get a probability of 1 / 83818 (rounded) by feeding the following expression into an online calculator.

(50!/(40!*10!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(41!*9!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(42!*8!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(43!*7!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(44!*6!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(45!*5!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(46!*4!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(47!*3!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(48!*2!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(49!*1!))*(1/2)^50

So, yes, this shows that it would be virtually impossible for such a large majority of witnesses to independently and randomly give you the same answer to a simple binary question, but is that answer necessarily "correct"? Witnesses are not unbiased coins. In particular, they're susceptible to the same misleading impressions. They also talk to each other, read the same newspaper stories, are eager to please, impress, etc. How is the question phrased? Is it appropriately neutral (non-leading)? Is the interpretation of the answers free of bias? Tom G said it more eloquently, but this is far from a simple yes/no proposition.

[Cliff Varnell]

According to Pat Speer, fourteen throat entrance wound witnesses and sixteen low back wound witnesses all got it wrong.

How does that impact calculations?

[Bill Fite]

1 hour ago, Mark Ulrik said:

Sandy,

Like Bill F, I think the cumulative approach should be preferred here, and I, too, get a probability of 1 / 83818 (rounded) by feeding the following expression into an online calculator.

(50!/(40!*10!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(41!*9!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(42!*8!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(43!*7!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(44!*6!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(45!*5!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(46!*4!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(47!*3!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(48!*2!))*(1/2)^50+
(50!/(49!*1!))*(1/2)^50

So, yes, this shows that it would be virtually impossible for such a large majority of witnesses to independently and randomly give you the same answer to a simple binary question, but is that answer necessarily "correct"? Witnesses are not unbiased coins. In particular, they're susceptible to the same misleading impressions. They also talk to each other, read the same newspaper stories, are eager to please, impress, etc. How is the question phrased? Is it appropriately neutral (non-leading)? Is the interpretation of the answers free of bias? Tom G said it more eloquently, but this is far from a simple yes/no proposition.

Agreed - that's why it's important to state the assumptions --- independence etc...

[Mark Ulrik]

16 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

According to Pat Speer, fourteen throat entrance wound witnesses and sixteen low back wound witnesses all got it wrong.

How does that impact calculations?

Probably not a great idea to look at these things as a math exercise 🤠

[Bill Fite]

19 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

According to Pat Speer, fourteen throat entrance wound witnesses and sixteen low back wound witnesses all got it wrong.

How does that impact calculations?

 

Just now, Mark Ulrik said:

Probably not a great idea to look at these things as a math exercise 🤠

Well - when LNers claim that the whole murder was possible by one man LHO it is enlightening to look at the probabilities of all the independent events.

Assuming that the evidence that would make an LN scenario impossible is not admissible (holes in the jacket and shirt, angles etc..) then what's left -- for example:

* Test firing 100 rounds into carcasses and bones did not produce 1 case where the bullet was in as a good a shape as CE399.  So let's say there's a 1 in 100 chance it could occur.

* There were 120 different sequences for the spikes on the audio tape to occur when the audio tests were done in Dealey Plaza.  However, they occurred in the order corresponding to approx motorcycle location.  So that's 1 / 120.

* IIRC, the CBS recreation of the shooting sequence resulted in 2 or 3 marksmen in 13 coming close to duplicating the shots in time and/or hitting the moving target they rigged up.  If there is a later, better test I'd find it interesting.

So, just with that data

p(Lone Nut) = 0.01 * 0.0083 * 0.23 or approximately 0.000019

or 1 in 52,000

Throw out some tests if you object or multiply in others --> paraffin/chemical spectroscopy / NAA on the LHO paraffin for example.0.0000190.0083

 

[Pat Speer]

1 hour ago, Cliff Varnell said:

According to Pat Speer, fourteen throat entrance wound witnesses and sixteen low back wound witnesses all got it wrong.

How does that impact calculations?

This is not true. In fact, I have recently posted that the argument for the throat wound's being too small is far greater than the argument for the head wound's being in the wrong place, and I would agree that the argument that the back wound was too low is also a much stronger argument. 

Statements that something "looked like an entrance" after all, are meaningless. What is important is why they thought it looked like an entrance and that is that it was extremely small, and, according to the HSCA, smaller even than the small back wound. 

Now, that's telling. Because the HSCA's Charles Petty wrote a textbook claiming that a wound of such small size should be considered an entrance wound. Now, there are exceptions to this in that a low velocity projectile will often barely escape the skin and leave an extremely small exit wound. 

But that only supports the importance of this wound. Whether or not the throat wound was an exit for a slow moving projectile or the entrance of one, is not that important, as both destroy the single-bullet theory and both lead us to the conclusion there was more than one shooter. 

So yes the throat wound is a "smoking gun" per se, as is the low location of the back wound. 

In both instances, after all, there are no witnesses or photographs claiming or proving otherwise. 

But here's the thing: the autopsy doctors were pressured into misleading the public about the back wound's location. And the Clark Panel perpetuated that deception, And the HSCA FPP tried to have it both ways by saying yeah the back wound was low but JFK was leaning over while behind the sign and never mind that other panels claim he was shot before that time. But it's right there in the record. The back wound was too low to support the SBT and the "experts" from Specter on down all knew it, and bent over backwards to avoid it, and even flat-out lied about it. 

So, yes, that's a second smoking gun in the medical evidence.

Now let's circle back to the head wound. The EOP entrance was too low to support a shot from above and an exit at the top of the head. And the damage to the brain proved this didn't occur. So the Clark Panel conjured up a higher entrance on the head, to try and explain these inconvenient facts. But the autopsy doctors--to their credit--refused to play along. So...we are left with an entrance low on the head and a large wound on top of the head--that are not connected via a path through the brain. 

So, yes, the head wounds are yet another smoking gun in the medical evidence.

Now, that's three smoking guns. None of them reliant upon a super secret someone's faking photos in a super-secret photo lab or whatever, and none of them reliant upon some ghouls altering the body to make it look like there was more than one shooter. 

But do people care about this? No. They've developed a taste for red herring, and can't bear to alter their diet. No matter how unhealthy. 

Edited February 9 by Pat Speer