Nov. 22, 1963: 50 years, and still no conspiracy

OK I've heard from every distant acquaintance and social media connection since 2007 who's even vaguely neo-con that 'bama is absolutely positively a verified practicing Muslim. OK so lets say he is for the sake of an inductive proof. He's been in power quite awhile, and my kids haven't been forced to attend Mosque school, Sunday school has not been made illegal, the rapture hasn't happened, we haven't nuked Israel, Sharia law hasn't replaced our local laws, OK you clowns, if he is in fact a Muslim, aside from the thought experiment above, give me one reason, just one, why I should care? Because it obviously doesn't seem to matter. And next election, if an out of the closet Muslim was on the ballot, I'd vote for him, after all nothing relevant happened with "'Bama the Muslim" in charge, so the next Muslim president isn't going to be any more of a problem, right?

Ditto the jew thing, where people who hate jews to a ridiculous level seem quite competent at making themselves look like idiots, which seems fairly effective at discrediting their position. Their position may or may not be correct, but if the only people pushing it are morons, then ... at least from the "victims" point of view, that's a good thing? If the only people who hate you are widely viewed as morons, that's probably a good situation to be in?

[WARNING GORE] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTBInhsKW3E

Of course, that then leads to the conspiracy theorists claiming that the Zapruder film has been altered too. In fact, they believe that, incredibly, all available evidence was tampered with.

One of the things I have noticed over the years is that conspiracy theorists will often latch onto one detail that they think is odd, that doesn't quite jive with what you would expect from the official account, and use it as the basis of saying that the official account is a lie.

(Expect for a hyper-sentitivity to weirdness, that ignores the messy reality of reality..) So far, so good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with finding a reason why the official story doesn't fit the observed facts. The problem occurs when they fail to ask themselves why that weirdness makes any more sense in their version of events.

Since what I just said there might not ring true, I'll give an example:

(The best example of this I have is "Why wouldn't they just actually shoot him from the book depository? It would be far simpler, shooters from different locations buys them little and seemingly serves to do nothing other than raise the suspicion of people like yourself.")

For various silly reasons, some "9/11 Truthers" think that empty remote controlled planes, probably controlled by the CIA or some other shadowy organization, were used in the 9/11 attacks. What they can never explain to me is why the CIA, or other shadowy organization, would use empty remote controlled planes instead of actually just hijacking planes.

Why all the stagecraft to imitate something that you could just actually do?

There is far more weirdness in the case and there's plenty of collateral evidence that the FBI's modus operandi at the time was to frame suspects in high profile cases -- along with anyone J. Edgar Hoover simply didn't like -- to reinforce its reputation for infallibility.

Anyhow, the basic argument "if there was a conspiracy, someone would have talked by now" is disingenuous. All kinds of people have talked -- so many that it's impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff.

We have?

This is the source of the intense push to extremism and denial of much more minor, yet more likely, events. I strongly suspect Cuba was involved in the whole JFK thing. Now to discredit my view you'll get screaming nutjob conformist extremists claiming "I" must think cuban special forces paratrooper sniper army teams blew away JFK and ridiculous stuff like that in order to enforce conformity.

What I actually personally think is he was a nutcase and most likely went to the Cuban embassy and told some minor functionary his plan and asked for cash or help, at which time the Cuban embassy functionary, if he wasn't a total idiot, told him he's nuts and get the heck out, they're not going to help start WW3. Maybe the Cubans even told the SS but the SS blew them off too (just another nutcase or some triple crossing secret agent BS). Maybe the Cubans even gave him $10 and some bus tickets just to go the heck away. But after it actually happened, the whole thing has to be buried or it turns into an icky international incident. So my view is technically Cuba was involved, its just not at the level that extremists on either side claim in order to poison the well and prevent any further discussion. Or maybe the local police chief who laughed at him instead of reporting him was "involved". Or some SS agent who thought Oswald was a joke was "involved".

My point is there was a coverup of bad (sorta) judgment not an elaborate conspiracy / coup. Only sorta bad in that you can't assume every nut will actually do something, that would be a massive denial of service vector, handy to implement if you were actually planning something real...

I suspect that in a century when its all dusty and blown over, someone will release a letter some crackpot wrote to the Cuban ambassador explaining exactly what he planned to do (and did in fact do) and asking for help. Was it good to prevent WW3 in the 60s by covering it up? Yeah probably. Is it still a good idea in 2013? Eh. In 2113 will it matter? Probably not, so we'll finally get the truth.

Its the difference between information and actionable information. So the Cubans knew what was going to happen because he told them, well who cares what matters is what action is taken. In the 60s when the blood was still wet that would have meant WW3. Until Castro dies I guarantee nothing will be released because otherwise people will be asking for his head. In fact I'd give it an extra decade after Castro dies just to make sure theres no possibility of any course of action.

As for a conspiracy, well, it seems to have worked, JFK ended up fairly dead, now if there was a high level conspiracy you can examine history and see what they unleashed, which is pretty much ... nothing. Not even something failed. Other than certain Cuban political leaders getting downgraded from dislike to being more hated than any other human on the planet beyond any public rational level, not much really happened.

Anybody who was paying attention and had heard of Mark Kline and William Binney. The whole NSA story isn't new. Part of what makes Edward Snowden's leak of documents as powerful as it does is that it corroborates many stories that former intelligence officers have told about the internal workings of the agency.

  ...who would have believed anyone last year if you told them the NSA was collecting metadata on almost everything...

Absolutely agree with aerospace accidents occurring because of events that by themselves wouldn't be fatal, but the combination is.

I still think the original articles attempt at proving there was no conspiracy by using that example is a poor choice, because if you did want Ruby to kill Oswald, and the timing was wrong, Oswald needed to be delayed.