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duxup

A weird dude acting alone seems entirely plausible and not surprising historically.

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But then a man like Jack Ruby killing Oswald under such circumstances doesn't make any sense:

Who Was Jack Ruby? https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/who-was-jack-ruby...

Why Jack Ruby Killed JFK's Assassin https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/jack-ru...

Weird dudes tend to have weird lives. And if someone is going to kill them we are by default talking about other weird people.

Any such event is going to involve more of the same people.

Weird dudes probably have utterly mundane lives in equal if not greater numbers.

The Texas Monthly article you've cited makes a pretty strong case that (1) everyone in Dallas wanted to kill Oswald and (2) Ruby's involvement in a conspiracy theory is what really doesn't make sense.

And yet Ruby "died" in jail while he wanted to testify away from Dallas. The series of inception-like coincidences you have to pull to explain this brings the credibility of a man acting alone to zero.

And Oswald was far from your regular crazy loner. He was intelligence (OSI) and probably counter-intelligence as well, from all that we know about him being able to travel back and forth to Russia in the iron curtain era.

> A weird dude acting alone seems entirely plausible and not surprising historically.

*A weird dude that could break the laws of physics with 3 bullets and a rifle.

3 shots in anywhere from 8-19 seconds depending on who you ask. Either way it's doable. Not really that physics bending.

I don't know that "doable" is exactly the right adjective. 3 shots from a bolt action rifle at a moving target ~260 feet away, with 2 of the 3 shots on target. It's not impossible in that timeframe, but it's not easy either.

As I described above with my link to the video of CBS, in 1967, testing the difficulty of those shots, they had multiple marksmen hit with two shots, and one hit all three, firing the same rifle from the same height at a moving target, within six seconds. It really wasn't that difficult for a practiced shooter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghmY6HmR4fs

That matches what I was saying, in my opinion. We were shown their best performances, and they were experts with recent practice. The test was also a bit easier than the real-life scenario to me. No other occupants, the real car does change speed a couple of times, etc. It's possible, but you would have to assume Oswald kept his skills pretty current. The Marines have 3 levels of high proficiency for marksmen. In his prime, Oswald hit the mid level once, and the lowest level once.

Edit: I can see I'm in the minority here, but I still feel this way. The Marines didn't even test with moving targets until very recently. It's possible, but it does require above-average and recently used skill. If it were trivial, all 3 of the testers would have gone 3/3 on all their runs (only the best runs were shown). Only 1 of the 3 made all three shots.

Former competitive shooter here. This is easy, nearly any bolt action rifle resting on something is incredibly accurate. And this is not a long shot - that would be 600 yards and up. And still possible at that range.

To understand why people find this unremarkable consider the record sniper shot is 11,000+ feet and someone thought the odds where good enough to make the attempt at those ranges. This is a worse gun and worse marksman but under 1/40th that distance. As to timing they get as long as they like to make the first shot and make two more in ~8 seconds one of which can miss.

It’s both fairly pedestrian and nobody would be talking about it today if he had missed all three. 4 presidents out of 44 where successfully assassinated in office. Ronald Reagan was shot and suffered a punctured lung, but survived.

Andrew Jackson survived an attempt due to a misfire. Gerald Ford was similarly fortunate as the assassin’s gun failed to fire.

Franklin Roosevelt was shot at but only a bystander died, Harry Truman pardoned an assassin who stormed where he was staying.

Theodore Roosevelt was shot while campaigning for reelection but wasn’t the current president at the time. He was hit, but the bullet first hit his eyeglass case and his speech so he survived.

That’s 9 attempts serious enough made history, and presumably several others failed earlier.

A much, much, much worse rifle, scope and marksman, in a much higher stress situation.

A human sized target at those distances make the rifle and scope practically irrelevant. People can reliably do longer distance shots at targets that size with a hand handgun.

It takes some skill, but nowhere near what would qualify as a serious marksmen. According to the US army the average soldier can hit a man sized target at 900 feet about 10% of while at 300 feet it’s closer to 50/50 which is roughly where 2 out of 3 shots puts him. People talk about the car being a moving target but people where beside the car, it was barely moving.

Another thing worth considering is just general probability. Was he likely to hit that on the first try, vs ever. Eg imagine he had ten attempts to take those three shots. If that raises the possibility he could do it, then it’s worth considering. I’m the grande scheme of things there is some survival bias — there’s plenty of assassination attempts that did NoT work and we hence never talk about them. The Andrew Jackson one in particular blows my mind (what it’s consequences might have been). Anyways just got me thinking.

It is not easy for a random man off the street, but any properly trained sniper could do it while drunk and with one hand tied behind their back.

Not with that rifle. and Not with Oswald, who was apparently a poor shooter based on the army files we have about him. And let's not forget the pristine bullet... surely there's no problem anywhere.

I live in Dallas, walking distance from Dealey Plaza, have been up to the sixth floor plenty of times, and have fired similar rifles. There are often Xs on the street marking where he was hit you can see from up there. It's my opinion that those were really not difficult shots for a moderately accomplished marksman, certainly not the impossibility that the Oliver Stone movie made it look like. Moving target, but it was moving at a slow and constant speed.

As far as Oswald's service records show, he wasn't great, but wasn't bad. I guess there's no way to know how much he practiced afterward.

That’s pretty straightforward for anyone with some experience behind a bolt gun.

This is a similar (I think slower) pace than you'd see at CMP bolt gun matches. It's typical for even average participants to at least get all the rounds on target.

Trajectories matter. And the shot from that angle is the least likely to hit the car. From where Oswald was supposed to be located a frontal hit before the car turns around the book repository would be the best shot. Makes no sense. Also, you would be ignoring dozens of witness testimonies that mentioned that they heard shots coming from other places. But sure, believe what you want.

The "Magic Bullet" people seem to be running off of incorrect assumptions about how the shot was laid out and how the car was designed. If you take the actual angle of the shot and the actual layout of the presidential car (which did not have normal seating arrangement!) the "crazy" bullet path devolves into a straight shot.

Hell, even early 2000s Discovery channel was able to figure this out!

This is the video where Discovery Channel recreated the shooting. (I have no opinion on it's accuracy.)

https://youtu.be/mODFnl8e83M

CBS and Dan Rather successfully reproduced the shooting by putting marksmen on a tower of the same height, firing at a moving target with the same rifle. Several hit with two bullets; one hit with three bullets. All fired three rounds within six seconds.

Video of their tests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghmY6HmR4fs

Regarding the "magic bullet", PBS showed how the path lines up when you correctly locate Connelly in the jump seat, which was lower and offset, turn Connelly slightly in his seat, and have JFK leaning forward a bit, as he was known to do because of back pain. The magic bullet trajectory isn't very magical.

From this episode of Nova, IIRC: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/cold-case-jfk/

The path of the bullet isn't the most eyebrow raising to me because bullets take some wonky paths when they collide with bodies. What's a bit concerning is after taking that wonky path, hitting ribs and wrist bones, the bullet came out practically un-deformed and in relatively pristine condition.

The most plausible explanation I've heard is that after going through JFK's neck and most of Connally's chest without striking bone, it was significantly slowed down so that when it hit Connally's rib and wrist, it was with less than full force so the copper jacket held up better. Warren Commission tests on comparable bullets showed them staying relatively intact even when striking solid wood.

This is a situation, I think, where people's intuitions don't line up well the reality of full metal jacket ammunition, which by design is supposed to deform or fragment less than softer slugs.

I think that's a reasonable enough explanation to change my mind.

I'm no expert, but I thought a bullet deforms due to hydraulic pressure, not necessarily due to contacting a rigid object like a bone.

Are you possibly confusing it with the concept of hydrostatic shock which is more about the wound channel irrespective of bullet deformation?

My favorite theory is that the killing blow was actually done by the secret service, but not because they had a grand scheme to kill him and blame all on Lee, but because the senior members of the SC were hangover and gave rifle duty to a junior that had just completed training. During the commotion of the first shots, he accidentally fired from the second vehicle when it accelerated and killed the US president.

It wasn't really pristine though, its was quite bent along its length. Probably hit bone sideways, etc.

The images I saw didn’t look deformed at all, but maybe they were not at the best angle

It doesn't look bent much at all (maybe we're talking about different rounds)

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/images/ce-399-bu...

Yeah but this "weird dude" has the backstory of being a US Marine, who defected to the USSR and then defected back to the US... Why assume they stopped being a state actor.

That sounds exactly like the life decisions a weird dude would make.

There's some evidence that he gave U2 spy plane secrets to the USSR. They didn't trust him and put him to work in a toy factory. He later came back to the US with a Russian bride that was related to a KGB officer. Unlike everyone else who came back, he was not debriefed by the CIA. They just welcomed him back.

Compare that with how they treat Chelsea Manning.

So maybe he was a CIA asset on top of being a weird dude. Many such cases ;)

Oswald shot himself in the arm to try to get out of the Marines too. You examine his life and he was a loser his entire adult life. He couldn't keep a job. He believed in Marxism and defected to the Soviet Union expecting to be some hero there. The KGB was rightly skeptical and put him in some horrible factory job. He was disillusioned. Came back to the US expecting to be a media sensation. No one cared. He then believed that Cuba got communism "right" and tried to go there, but the Cubans wouldn't let him in. About all he could handle was menial labor and got a job moving books around a warehouse, when opportunity to get the fame he always wanted presented itself...

Except Oswald was not such a loser, as he was a double agent while in the SSSR [1], and he was staying at the home [2] of George de Mohrenschildt [3], who used to be member [4] of the Nazi Gehlen SS Division which was incorporated the CIA and german BND after WWII [5], and who was expulsed in 1957 by Yugoslavia for having spied on military installations there [6].

Most interestingly, the day of his "suicide", de Mohrenshild had given an interview to a certain journalist named Jay Epstein (! - supposedly no relations), during which he claimed "that in 1962, Dallas CIA operative J. Walton Moore and one of Moore's associates had handed him the address of Lee Harvey Oswald in nearby Fort Worth and then suggested that de Mohrenschildt might like to meet him." - which he had also told the Warren commission.

Oh, and he personnaly knew G.H.W. Bush before he became the director of the CIA, the latter having been the roomie of de Mohreshild's nephew [7].

I know that the sound of hooves generally means horses are coming, and the "six degrees of separation" theory... Yet, don't you get the distinct impression we're in the middle of the savannah and insted those sounds might be zebras ?

[1] https://knrasm.typepad.com/.a/6a0154328936da970c0168e5939b50...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Mohrenschildt#Dallas...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Mohrenschildt - a German noble from Bielorussia, where Oswald had "defected" in 1957

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Mohrenschildt#House_...

[5] https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/germany/gehlen.h...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Mohrenschildt#cite_n...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Mohrenschildt#Later_...

Gehlen was FHO, not SS. His postwar organization employed SS members, but that's something different. To say it was an "SS Division" is just nuts.

There's no information that I'm aware of that connects de Mohrenschildt to Gehlen, and the article you linked to doesn't provide any either.

That first document is fake. This is the problem with the conspiracy crowd. They have to fake things to make their argument.

That's certainly your reading of things, but I'm not sure it's supported by strong evidence.

To be clear, he was married to a KGB agent. So if you really think he had to be a state actor then the only state that makes sense is the Soviet Union.

Then why was a Soviet defector who was married to a KGB agent welcomed back into the United States with open arms? Just one of many facts that don't jive with the official narrative.

What doesn’t jive? What basis is there for the government to refuse a US citizen entry to the country? Being married to someone doing something illegal isn’t a crime. “Defecting” (in quotes because I’m not aware of Oswald having anything of value for the USSR) isn’t a crime.

I suggest you learn some history so you can understand the manner in which "subversives" and suspected Communists were treated in the 1960s. The FBI and was kidnapping, assassinating and doing a variety of other nasty things to "subversives" and suspected Communists. But we are to believe that Oswald, who openly defected to the Soviet Union, was suspected of giving Soviets classified information about the U2 spy plane, and renounced his US citizenship in the US embassy would be welcomed back to the US without sanction or retribution?

>In 1971 in San Diego, the FBI financed, armed, and controlled an extreme right-wing group of former members of the Minutemen anti-communist paramilitary organization, transforming it into a group called the Secret Army Organization that targeted groups, activists, and leaders involved in the Anti-War Movement, using both intimidation and violent acts.[10][11][12]

>The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception; however, covert operations under the official COINTELPRO label took place between 1956 and 1971. Many of the tactics used in COINTELPRO are alleged to have seen continued use including; discrediting targets through psychological warfare; smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media; harassment; wrongful imprisonment; illegal violence; and assassination.[13][14][15][16] According to a Senate report, the FBI's motivation was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order".[17]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Could you give any examples? It is definitely true that people are often portrayed as "weird dudes acting alone", however it is much rarer that that is actually true.

The assassination of James Garfield and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan are both very clear evidences of "weird dudes acting alone." I don't know enough about McKinley's assassin to know if he would also qualify, although that was part of an era where anarchists assassinating notable political figures was relatively common. I also don't know enough about Teddy Roosevelt's attempted assassination.

Indeed, if you look at attempted or successful assassinations of US presidents, excluding JFK, only Lincoln's assassination involved a conspiracy.

Also the assassinations of MLK and RFK. But at this point there are so many "weird dudes acting alone" that that in itself becomes suspicious.

I don't think not being part of an organized conspiracy and being a weird dude acting alone are the same thing. Especially in recent years the term "stochastic terrorism" has come up a lot, where people become part of a group where acts of violence are not explicitly ordered but nontheless tacitly encouraged. I think most so called "lone wolf" attacks fall into that pattern.

Why is that suspicious? There are a huge number of people in America.

The unabomber?

The Unabomber was also an unknowing MK Ultra test subject... so there is that.

The lsd could well have broken him in a way that led to the murder and mayhem, but he was destined to be an asshole. His brother's description of his life is a tragedy of misanthropic disaster - how not to raise a child.

> The lsd could well have broken him in a way that led to the murder and mayhem

"the LSD" way to minimize being the subject to hundreds of hours of interrogations, experiments and abuse by the CIA as a child.

Murray was (among other qualifications) formerly a military intelligence officer, conducting horrendous, abusive, and unethical psychological experiments at Harvard, and Kaczynski was a 17 year old victim of his.

MKUltra was also a series of horrendous, abusive, and unethical psychological experiments conducted (in secret) by the CIA.

Ethically, Murray wasn't, unfortunately, much of an outlier; lots of psychological experimentation in the US during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was horrifying. Although Murray's background and professional history is suggestive, there is no evidence that he or his experiments on Kaczynski were actually part of the MKUltra program.

Sirhan Sirhan & RFK. Here there is no elaborate story of defections to the USSR or meetings with the KGB head of assassinations or anything. Just a dude who really wanted to kill RFK for his support of Israel, who put his mind to it, and then did it.

You're sure there wasn't a bird on his shoulder, so to speak?

There always is

Yes, Sirhan Sirhan, the man who conveniently "forgot" everything leading up to and including the shooting itself.

Strangely enough, years later his attorney's argued that he was framed. Even RFK's son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes that Sirhan Sirhan was framed and did not actually conspire to kill RFK. He actually wants Sirhan Sirhan released [0].

[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Robert... [1] https://justiceforrfk.com/index.html

Multiple witnesses saw him approach RFK with a revolver and fire it three times at him. Nobody really denies that. What his son (and others) allege is that one of RFK's bodyguards used the assassination attempt as cover to actually assassinate him.

Nobody argues that Sirhan conspired to kill RFK and shot a revolver at him, and very few people question the leadup to that attempt.

Point taken, however, that RFK's assassination is not an unquestioned case of a single deranged individual.

> RFK's son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Now one of the most prominent and vocal anti-vaxxers.

The guy who shot John Lennon and the guy who shot Pope John Paul II?

One reasonable explanation I've heard for all the secrecy was that it was indeed Oswald, but in the heat of the moment one of the Secret Service guys shot JFK by mistake, and it was decided it was best to avoid the embarrassment.

> and it was decided

I love how these stories always go all passive-voice at key moments.

How about: A weird dude acting alone killing a weird dude acting alone?

As long as you believe the historical hoaxes.

an official narrative is necessarily plausible

Agreed, but worth noting that "plausible" is subjective. WTC 1 & 2 collapsing after being hit by jets may be plausible. WTC 7 collapsing after simply being in the area of the other towers... much less plausible.

I don't find it particularly implausible that one building near a massive building collapse happened to not have adequate fire protection

Relevant gif of collapse of WTC7: https://c.tenor.com/0PG_F9eZVmEAAAAC/wtc7-building.gif

I love clips like this that completely remove all context. The building was on fire for hours. If you watch the entire collapse, you see parts of the building collapse at different times. The fires were so intense, flames were shooting out of the windows like a blowtorch. Gigantic chunks of the other two towers pierced the building like swords.

I've seen the video of the fires but I haven't seen an angle that shows parts of it collapsing at different times. Would you mind sharing?

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_iBYSqEsc

Simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAkTbyENZ5s

That's it? Alright. That's not what I visualized when you said "parts of the building collapse at different times." I thought you were talking about exterior parts. Though it's technically fair to say the inside collapsing before the outside is "different parts."

In regards to the simulation, it's actually great evidence for the opposite side of the argument - NIST was not able to simulate a collapse that appeared at all similar to the actual collapse.

The best part of this is that even if one believes jet fuel burning for many hours led to the collapse of at least one of the buildings (I don't buy this argument), in the basements of the collapsed towers where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, in an oxygen deprived environment, cannot be explained by combustion. On the other hand, thermite contains its own supply of oxygen and does not require any external source of air. Consequently, it cannot be smothered, and may ignite in any environment given sufficient initial heat. It burns well while wet, and cannot be easily extinguished with water—though enough water to remove sufficient heat may stop the reaction.

Eh, I find it far more plausible (in an Occam sense) that “literally molten steel” was a flawed observation than the alternative of invoking the enormous conspiracy machinery that controlled demolition implies.

The jet fuel would have burned for ten minutes and then been exhausted. The consequent fire it started is what burned for hours.

I don't know if ground zero at WTC7 burned for months, but ground zero below the twin towers definitely did. The claim being hours vs the claim being months is obviously significant.

It isn't called Ground Zero for a reason. Do some research and check what that name means. Then the months long fire does make sense

> It isn't called Ground Zero for a reason. Do some research and check what that name means. Then the months long fire does make sense

It really isn't clear what this means / You're saying this relates to a nuclear weapon somehow?

A simple nuclear destruction device, demanded by the city construction policies. As in Chicago with the Sears Tower.

Architects could tell you lots of stuff

In that gif, you can see the sky through the windows on the top floor on the left side; the building is already collapsing when that gif starts. In slightly longer versions of that clip, you can see the change occur in those windows: https://youtu.be/PK_iBYSqEsc?t=15

Your gif starts approximately 8 seconds too late.

WTC7 collapsed several hours after the other. If it was a controlled demolition, why wouldn't they bring it down at the same time as one of the other towers fell? The debris cloud from the larger towers would have covered their crime, and I don't think anybody would really find it very suspicious that one building was evidently crushed at the moment another was falling next to it.

Therefore it makes more sense to me that WTC7 fell exactly as the official story describes. It was damaged and burned for hours, then the penthouse fell through knocking out much of the interior and the facade came down moments later.

> not surprising historically

When considering history through the lens of bulletpoints in a child's textbook, maybe.

Its a plausible narrative if you are entirely ignorant of the actual facts of the case and the numerous investigations that followed.

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