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At the risk of sounding like a crazy person... I think I'm going to have to stand up and defend the JFK conspiracy theories here.
That was some weird, shady shit. JFK gets shot by Oswald, Oswald loudly proclaims his innocence, and then is shot, very publicly, two days later by Jack Ruby. Then Jack Ruby dies of cancer 4 years later. Oh, and they both led very... interesting... lives (Oswald defected to the Soviet Union for a while, and Jack Ruby was associated with organized crime.
How do you look at that and *not* see a conspiracy? That's an age-old method for assassinating someone- you send an assassin, then send *another* assassin to kill the first before he can talk. If the second assassin is himself already dying of cancer, even better.
I certainly don't buy into the more fanciful theories, like the people saying it was time travelers or that LBJ did it. But is it such a stretch to imagine that someone in the mafia organized it? An organized effort to commit a crime and keep it quiet would indeed make it a conspiracy.
As one FBI expert brought in to talk about the organized crime angle noted, "If you're going to bring in someone to kill Oswald to keep him quiet... well, then you're going to need to bring in someone to kill Oswald's assassin to keep him quiet, right? And then you need to bring in someone to kill that guy, and so on. It's an unsolvable problem, and it's not how the mob worked,"
The FBI in years following the Kennedy assassination had dozens of mobsters turn themselves in, offering to testify for the state in exchange for protection / sentence leniency. Not one of them ever spoke about a plot to kill Kennedy, and neither did any arrested mobsters in later years.
Oswald himself had absolutely zero mob connections. His wife Maria (whom he beat every day) knew about nearly every single plot Oswald cooked-up (including an earlier attempt to assassinate General Edwin Walker), and said nothing on being interrogated about any mob connections, did not ask for protection against mobsters, did not appear to know anything about organized crime or Chicago, etc.
Jack Ruby knew some guys in Chicago who had mob connections because Ruby was a hot headed club owner. He did not actually engage in organized crime and had a good relationship with both the Chicago police and the Dallas police. There is overwhelming evidence that he did not go down to the police station with the explicit intent of shooting Oswald - but that he blew a fuse when he saw Oswald walking towards the armored transport with a big smile on his face. People in that area of town knew Ruby and were on a small town, first name basis with him: you can hear people asking in the media footage, "Why did you do it, Jack? Why did you do it?"
He later told friends that he though he was a hero for avenging the murder of the President.
There wasn't anything cloak and dagger about Oswald's killing; it was a result of the Dallas police mishandling the prisoner and assuming that local press / business owners weren't going to try and kill him. Also, nobody knew that Ruby was sick.
Oswald's movements after the shooting were also rather curious for a mob hit man. He kills the President, then walks out of the book depository (nearly being arrested right as he was walking down the stairs) and tries to get on a bus. Failing that, he keeps walking to try and get to a bus depot. He's spotted & questioned by a police officer who IDs him based on an APB - so he shoots the officer and runs to a a crowded theater, where he's cornered and arrested (police had to wrestle away the revolver which he just used to kill officer Tippet). He then pleads innocence and claims not to have shot anyone, even though dozens of people just watched him murder a policeman.
Not exactly a slick & discrete wet job (and Oswald seemed to know how the day was likely to end, given that he left Maria all of the money he had as well as his wedding band).
At the risk of sounding like a crazy person... I think I'm going to have to stand up and defend the JFK conspiracy theories here.
That was some weird, shady shit. JFK gets shot by Oswald, Oswald loudly proclaims his innocence, and then is shot, very publicly, two days later by Jack Ruby. Then Jack Ruby dies of cancer 4 years later. Oh, and they both led very... interesting... lives (Oswald defected to the Soviet Union for a while, and Jack Ruby was associated with organized crime.
How do you look at that and *not* see a conspiracy? That's an age-old method for assassinating someone- you send an assassin, then send *another* assassin to kill the first before he can talk. If the second assassin is himself already dying of cancer, even better.
I certainly don't buy into the more fanciful theories, like the people saying it was time travelers or that LBJ did it. But is it such a stretch to imagine that someone in the mafia organized it? An organized effort to commit a crime and keep it quiet would indeed make it a conspiracy.
I'm going to respond by doing something that I normally dislike, which is breaking up a post into a bunch of small chunks and responding to each one. I think it looks way too antagonistic, and you might well be right, but it's the best way i can think of to respond to everything you said.
As one FBI expert brought in to talk about the organized crime angle noted, "If you're going to bring in someone to kill Oswald to keep him quiet... well, then you're going to need to bring in someone to kill Oswald's assassin to keep him quiet, right? And then you need to bring in someone to kill that guy, and so on. It's an unsolvable problem, and it's not how the mob worked,"
I see it more like one of those math problems where you have to optimize between two variables. The more assassins you bring in, the more separation there is between you and the original murder, but you're also introducing more complexity which means more people know about it, and there's more chance for something to go wrong. Two would work well- a crazy guy that you can convince to murder the president, and a less-crazy guy that you can convince to murder the original guy, and then keep his mouth shut. You could have a third guy ready to go if it looks like Ruby is about to talk, or just threaten his family. No one trustworthy is going to assassinate the president, because he's guaranteed to get caught. And if they do catch the second assassin, conspiracy to commit murder is a much lesser offense than conspiracy to assassinate the president.
The FBI in years following the Kennedy assassination had dozens of mobsters turn themselves in, offering to testify for the state in exchange for protection / sentence leniency. Not one of them ever spoke about a plot to kill Kennedy, and neither did any arrested mobsters in later years.
That doesn't prove anything. There were lots of mobsters- that's why they called it "the mob". And the hypothetical conspirators would have kept the number of people who knew about it to an absolute minimum. You don't get to be a mafia don without knowing how to keep your mouth shut.
Oswald himself had absolutely zero mob connections. His wife Maria (whom he beat every day) knew about nearly every single plot Oswald cooked-up (including an earlier attempt to assassinate General Edwin Walker), and said nothing on being interrogated about any mob connections, did not ask for protection against mobsters, did not appear to know anything about organized crime or Chicago, etc.
No, but he was an obviously violent and unhinged person with a clear button to press (communism). If the mob needed a triggerman, he seems like he'd be a good choice.
Jack Ruby knew some guys in Chicago who had mob connections because Ruby was a hot headed club owner. He did not actually engage in organized crime and had a good relationship with both the Chicago police and the Dallas police. There is overwhelming evidence that he did not go down to the police station with the explicit intent of shooting Oswald - but that he blew a fuse when he saw Oswald walking towards the armored transport with a big smile on his face. People in that area of town knew Ruby and were on a small town, first name basis with him: you can hear people asking in the media footage, "Why did you do it, Jack? Why did you do it?"
Sure, he didn't need to actually be *in* the mob, they just needed some leverage against him. Who knows. Maybe they threatened him, or bribed him, or blackmailed him. Just because you're not in the mob doesn't mean you can't owe them a favor.
He later told friends that he though he was a hero for avenging the murder of the President.
There wasn't anything cloak and dagger about Oswald's killing; it was a result of the Dallas police mishandling the prisoner and assuming that local press / business owners weren't going to try and kill him. Also, nobody knew that Ruby was sick.
This doesn't prove anything except that he did the killing in a very simple way and didn't admit to anything.
Oswald's movements after the shooting were also rather curious for a mob hit man. He kills the President, then walks out of the book depository (nearly being arrested right as he was walking down the stairs) and tries to get on a bus. Failing that, he keeps walking to try and get to a bus depot. He's spotted & questioned by a police officer who IDs him based on an APB - so he shoots the officer and runs to a a crowded theater, where he's cornered and arrested (police had to wrestle away the revolver which he just used to kill officer Tippet). He then pleads innocence and claims not to have shot anyone, even though dozens of people just watched him murder a policeman.
Not exactly a slick & discrete wet job (and Oswald seemed to know how the day was likely to end, given that he left Maria all of the money he had as well as his wedding band).
True. More consistent with a crazy person who got put up to it by the mob, than a professional hitman. But a professional hitman wouldn't have taken the job in the first place, because there's no way you can get away with being the guy who shoots the president.
And yeah, I realize that I can't prove anything either. This is all just conjecture. But you have to weigh that against the odds of two random crazy people being in the same place at the same time.
Dallas haaaaaaaaaated JFK, FWIW. Like, more than anything you've ever heard threatened at the current President.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
At the risk of sounding like a crazy person... I think I'm going to have to stand up and defend the JFK conspiracy theories here.
That was some weird, shady shit. JFK gets shot by Oswald, Oswald loudly proclaims his innocence, and then is shot, very publicly, two days later by Jack Ruby. Then Jack Ruby dies of cancer 4 years later. Oh, and they both led very... interesting... lives (Oswald defected to the Soviet Union for a while, and Jack Ruby was associated with organized crime.
How do you look at that and *not* see a conspiracy? That's an age-old method for assassinating someone- you send an assassin, then send *another* assassin to kill the first before he can talk. If the second assassin is himself already dying of cancer, even better.
I certainly don't buy into the more fanciful theories, like the people saying it was time travelers or that LBJ did it. But is it such a stretch to imagine that someone in the mafia organized it? An organized effort to commit a crime and keep it quiet would indeed make it a conspiracy.
But then don't you have to send in an assassin to take care of Jack Ruby, who was known for not being able to keep his mouth shut? And if you are going to silence Oswald, why not have Ruby take care of Oswald on Friday, when he was picked up and Ruby was in the police station with Oswald?
Seriously, read Reclaiming History by Bugliosi. Its a giant book, so maybe the abridged audio book is better. But he really does a great job of knocking down the conspiracy theories.
I always like to think of it this way. No way the Mafia does JFK. For one simple reason. If it is found out, there is no more Mafia.
You know how hard America has been on Al-Qaeda? That is nothing compared to what we would do if a group assassinated the President. I can promise you warfare on a scale not seen since World War II Japan and the American Civil War. It would not be a matter of mobsters getting arrested and tried. They would just be shot "resisting arrest." In their beds, with drop pistols located conveniently nearby.
See I think what you just said about the war on mafia is the strongest evidence for this theory. Because that war? It pretty much happened, and the mafia lost. There basically is no more mafia in America, or if there is it's a shadow of what it once was. And even by the 60's, they had lost a lot of their former power. I think the mafia leaders knew that they were quickly losing power, and would have considered drastic action to try and hold on to their influence. The mafia hated the Kennedy's- the Bay of Pigs cost them hugely because of their investment in Cuban casinos, and Robert Kennedy (then attorney general) was aggressively prosecuting organized crime.
The Bay of Pigs was well after the mafia had been kicked out of Cuba and lost their casinos. If they had gone after anyone for the loss of the casinos, it would have been Castro.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Lee Harvey Oswald was an accomplished forger, highly regarded by his peers. He invented a fictitious person, one Omar Khayaam Ravenhearst, a private in the US Army. Using the address of the administration building at his base, Lee Harvey Oswald was able to send out requests for various "missing" documents, thereby completing the ruse. Generals and politicians asked to meet and have their picture taken with Mister Ravenhearst, taken as they were by descriptions of his giant stature, gentle manner, hairy body, and fluency in seventy two languages.
The Ravenhearst identity eventually fell into the hands of Lee Kerry Thornley, a friend of Oswald and inventor of both the Official Bavarian Illuminati Lettering Kitas well as a holiday named Jake Day.
In addition to impersonating a yeti soldier, Thornley was also a prophet.
Wut?
"Official" Illuminati stationary and stamps, made to fuck with people and mailed to various weirdos. Probably got the name wrong, been so long since I've read into it.
That doesn't prove anything. There were lots of mobsters- that's why they called it "the mob". And the hypothetical conspirators would have kept the number of people who knew about it to an absolute minimum. You don't get to be a mafia don without knowing how to keep your mouth shut.
But you have to understand this: the only reason that the organized crime angle was even posited was because:
1) Members of the committee on assassinations were convinced by audio cues suggesting that a second gunman fired on the limo from the grassy knoll. That interpretation of the audio cues has since been discredited.
In other words, the problem that the second shooter idea was necessary to solve was never actually a problem - the analysts simply got the position of their microphone wrong.
2) Specifically, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans was cited as a suspect for ordering the hit on Kennedy.
This is just too far fetched given the advantage of contemporary hindsight. Look at the work done by Ralph Salerno; mafia hit men and dons from Chicago, New Orleans & Texas, all coming forward and admitting to crimes in order to secure protection deals for themselves & their family members, not a single one of them ever hearing a single word about a hit on Kennedy. Like, a hit that big and that high profile... and nobody talked? Nobody bragged? Nobody tried to use it as leverage or as a means of intimidation?
It stretches all credibility.
Marcello himself was under surveillance by the FBI, and was heard complaining to other mafia members about the allegations against him in a conversation that he thought was confidential.
It's not enough to just say, "But you can't prove the mafia didn't kill Kennedy," - if you're going to argue that they did, it's on you at that point to show the extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary crime.
See I've been thinking about those robo-park rangers.. Why would a robot need a watch? Switzerland based illuminati taking over the world is why.
The hardest one for me to stomach is the 9/11 conspiracy. I have lost a couple of friends over that one.. Coincidently it's two friends that haven't done anything with their life and thus have all the time in the world to watch YouTube "documentaries"
I don't remember how, but years ago I stumbled on the James Randi Educational Foundation forums. They have a section entirely centered around conspiracy theories. It tends to act as a honeypot for conspiracists who think they can out-argue the skeptics, and it is fascinating to watch them get absolutely dismantled over and over again. Conspiracy theories are a pretty amazing combination of exaggeration, wishful thinking, and outright lies.
I find the psychological explanation that some people just cannot deal with the thought of a random, uncaring universe and so feel the need to ascribe every problem or negative outcome to a secret cabal of powerful evildoers fairly elegant. Combine that with the need to feel superior or special by possessing secret or forbidden knowledge, and voila, conspiracy theorists.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
See I've been thinking about those robo-park rangers.. Why would a robot need a watch? Switzerland based illuminati taking over the world is why.
The hardest one for me to stomach is the 9/11 conspiracy. I have lost a couple of friends over that one.. Coincidently it's two friends that haven't done anything with their life and thus have all the time in the world to watch YouTube "documentaries"
I'll never forget the first time I encountered a truther in the wild, many years ago. He was handing out Infowars flyers in the courtyard of the community college I was going to at the time. Lord knows why but I decided to talk to him and ask questions about why he thought it was an inside job. He pulled out the usual Loose Change bullshit, which was whatever, but then he went on about how all the people who were killed in the planes were taken to some other country and they all live in a government-built town and can't have any contact with the outside world, and there weren't actually any people in the towers that day so actually no one died. When I told him that I was there, that I watched people jump out of 80th-floor windows rather than burn to death before the towers came down (something I still see sometimes when I close my eyes more than a decade later), he looked me in the eye and said "how much are they paying you to spread these lies?"
I'm not proud of punching him, but I don't really regret it.
That doesn't prove anything. There were lots of mobsters- that's why they called it "the mob". And the hypothetical conspirators would have kept the number of people who knew about it to an absolute minimum. You don't get to be a mafia don without knowing how to keep your mouth shut.
But you have to understand this: the only reason that the organized crime angle was even posited was because:
1) Members of the committee on assassinations were convinced by audio cues suggesting that a second gunman fired on the limo from the grassy knoll. That interpretation of the audio cues has since been discredited.
In other words, the problem that the second shooter idea was necessary to solve was never actually a problem - the analysts simply got the position of their microphone wrong.
2) Specifically, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans was cited as a suspect for ordering the hit on Kennedy.
This is just too far fetched given the advantage of contemporary hindsight. Look at the work done by Ralph Salerno; mafia hit men and dons from Chicago, New Orleans & Texas, all coming forward and admitting to crimes in order to secure protection deals for themselves & their family members, not a single one of them ever hearing a single word about a hit on Kennedy. Like, a hit that big and that high profile... and nobody talked? Nobody bragged? Nobody tried to use it as leverage or as a means of intimidation?
It stretches all credibility.
Marcello himself was under surveillance by the FBI, and was heard complaining to other mafia members about the allegations against him in a conversation that he thought was confidential.
It's not enough to just say, "But you can't prove the mafia didn't kill Kennedy," - if you're going to argue that they did, it's on you at that point to show the extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary crime.
But again, *most* people in the mafia wouldn't know about it. The people who talked, talked about the specific crimes that they knew about. If there were only like 2-3 guys who knew about it, then it wouldn't matter who else came forward- unless you actually catch those *specific* 2-3 guys, you'd get nothing.
And, since I'm not trying to prove someone guilty in a court of law, or establish a new scientific theory, I don't really have to prove anything. I'm just trying trying to show that the mafia conspiracy idea is *plausible*.
It's not impossible that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy
there's just no real evidence for it and plenty that corroborates the official story
I think that's a common thread in the conspiracy thing as a whole. It isn't impossible that every single jet aircraft has tanks that spray chemicals into the atmosphere for Nefarious Purposes, or that the government has had contact with little green men and they've been covering it up since the 40s, or that the mob/the CIA/little green men/Castro/Johnson had a hand in Kennedy's murder, true. It doesn't really matter though what's possible, the question conspiracy people should be asking but aren't is "how likely is this compared to the commonly-accepted story?" In the case of all these things, the conspiracy theory introduces too many wildcards to be likely
Some pretty good proof for this is that once a conspiracy person starts getting into specifics, it becomes easy to say that his particular story isn't possible. 9/11 couldn't possibly have been a controlled demolition because it would've required the employment of a hundred thousand people, it isn't possible that the moon landings were hoaxes because the video technology to fake it didn't exist at the time, and also you can triangulate radio signals to find out where they're coming from and if the Soviets had found out we faked it it maybe would've started a war, et cetera
It's not impossible that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy
there's just no real evidence for it and plenty that corroborates the official story
I think that's a common thread in the conspiracy thing as a whole. It isn't impossible that every single jet aircraft has tanks that spray chemicals into the atmosphere for Nefarious Purposes, or that the government has had contact with little green men and they've been covering it up since the 40s, or that the mob/the CIA/little green men/Castro/Johnson had a hand in Kennedy's murder, true. It doesn't really matter though what's possible, the question conspiracy people should be asking but aren't is "how likely is this compared to the commonly-accepted story?" In the case of all these things, the conspiracy theory introduces too many wildcards to be likely
Some pretty good proof for this is that once a conspiracy person starts getting into specifics, it becomes easy to say that his particular story isn't possible. 9/11 couldn't possibly have been a controlled demolition because it would've required the employment of a hundred thousand people, it isn't possible that the moon landings were hoaxes because the video technology to fake it didn't exist at the time, and also you can triangulate radio signals to find out where they're coming from and if the Soviets had found out we faked it it maybe would've started a war, et cetera
A guy from my high school year has gotten big into chemtrails. Which, I didn't even know was still a thing until my reunion when someone told me about it - I thought that was one of those ones which had burned itself out in favor of more practical and stupid things like fluoride in our water (which you know, does actually exist, it's just good for you).
The funny thing is they're obsessed with various facets - i.e. the military buying a whole bunch of barium. Which is funny, because the moment I heard that I thought "oh yeah, probably used for weather resistant paint..." - which you know, it is, and turns up in all sorts of random things.
Now I'm more concerned because I painted aircraft.
My dad isn't a conspiracy theorist per se (anymore) but he's a cynical cuss and during the 80s he was absurdly paranoid about the Cold War and the US and Russia.
He has always been distrustful of the US government (I'm Canadian, it's worth pointing out), and during the 80s he was firm in the belief that the war between the US and Russia was not only imminent, but was going to start in Alaska and extend onto Canadian soil.
He believed that the US would see Canada's liberalism and socialist tendencies as a worrying vulnerability and in the lead up to when "it happened" or "it went down" (his code words for when the Cold War went hot) the US would "defensively" annex Canada and Russia would eventually invade us and we would have to defend ourselves from two hostile nuclear powers with guerrilla tactics and insurgency.
So that was how my dad raised me. That was the kind of games and camping trips I went on as a kid. I still had a fairly normal childhood for the most part, because my parents were divorced so I was only at my dad's some of the time, and my mom didn't necessarily agree with his crazy shit. But she also didn't expressly decry it either.
It informed a lot of my worldview as a kid and even as an adult who fucking knows better, there will be places that crazy shit has hidden itself in the corners. I'm in my 30s for fucks sake and I still sometimes catch myself saying or thinking things that I know are crazy.
The point I'm trying to make is this stuff is sometimes a world, especially if you're raised in it. It's like being Mormon. You can get out of the Church, but getting the Church out of you is harder than you think.
Childhood experiences can definitely inform your life well pay the point of relevance.
When I was 12 I lived through a civil war, and spent next few years being a refugee in several countries before settling in the US. Decades later those experiences stock with me. Like when I was buying a house it had to have a basement, you know, in case of shelling.
It's not impossible that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy
there's just no real evidence for it and plenty that corroborates the official story
I think that's a common thread in the conspiracy thing as a whole. It isn't impossible that every single jet aircraft has tanks that spray chemicals into the atmosphere for Nefarious Purposes, or that the government has had contact with little green men and they've been covering it up since the 40s, or that the mob/the CIA/little green men/Castro/Johnson had a hand in Kennedy's murder, true. It doesn't really matter though what's possible, the question conspiracy people should be asking but aren't is "how likely is this compared to the commonly-accepted story?" In the case of all these things, the conspiracy theory introduces too many wildcards to be likely
Some pretty good proof for this is that once a conspiracy person starts getting into specifics, it becomes easy to say that his particular story isn't possible. 9/11 couldn't possibly have been a controlled demolition because it would've required the employment of a hundred thousand people, it isn't possible that the moon landings were hoaxes because the video technology to fake it didn't exist at the time, and also you can triangulate radio signals to find out where they're coming from and if the Soviets had found out we faked it it maybe would've started a war, et cetera
People go buck wild with that one, though, and talk about how there are lower levels with David Icke reptilians conducting experiments and all kinds of crazy shit.
People go buck wild with that one, though, and talk about how there are lower levels with David Icke reptilians conducting experiments and all kinds of crazy shit.
That one even made it into Assassin's Creed! (Honestly, that series has fun with conspiracy theories, and some of the ones they thought up in II/Brotherhood were...disquieting.)
That doesn't prove anything. There were lots of mobsters- that's why they called it "the mob". And the hypothetical conspirators would have kept the number of people who knew about it to an absolute minimum. You don't get to be a mafia don without knowing how to keep your mouth shut.
But you have to understand this: the only reason that the organized crime angle was even posited was because:
1) Members of the committee on assassinations were convinced by audio cues suggesting that a second gunman fired on the limo from the grassy knoll. That interpretation of the audio cues has since been discredited.
In other words, the problem that the second shooter idea was necessary to solve was never actually a problem - the analysts simply got the position of their microphone wrong.
2) Specifically, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans was cited as a suspect for ordering the hit on Kennedy.
This is just too far fetched given the advantage of contemporary hindsight. Look at the work done by Ralph Salerno; mafia hit men and dons from Chicago, New Orleans & Texas, all coming forward and admitting to crimes in order to secure protection deals for themselves & their family members, not a single one of them ever hearing a single word about a hit on Kennedy. Like, a hit that big and that high profile... and nobody talked? Nobody bragged? Nobody tried to use it as leverage or as a means of intimidation?
It stretches all credibility.
Marcello himself was under surveillance by the FBI, and was heard complaining to other mafia members about the allegations against him in a conversation that he thought was confidential.
It's not enough to just say, "But you can't prove the mafia didn't kill Kennedy," - if you're going to argue that they did, it's on you at that point to show the extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary crime.
But again, *most* people in the mafia wouldn't know about it. The people who talked, talked about the specific crimes that they knew about. If there were only like 2-3 guys who knew about it, then it wouldn't matter who else came forward- unless you actually catch those *specific* 2-3 guys, you'd get nothing.
And, since I'm not trying to prove someone guilty in a court of law, or establish a new scientific theory, I don't really have to prove anything. I'm just trying trying to show that the mafia conspiracy idea is *plausible*.
You failed, pretty hard. You might have '2-3' guys, you might only have '1' when it's a random actor on his own, but if the 'mafia' decided to put a hit on a president, by necessity, there's a lot more than 3 guys involved.
People go buck wild with that one, though, and talk about how there are lower levels with David Icke reptilians conducting experiments and all kinds of crazy shit.
When David Icke reptilians are on the table it's all crazy shit. Those little bastards get all the juicy UFO shenanigans.
My dad isn't a conspiracy theorist per se (anymore) but he's a cynical cuss and during the 80s he was absurdly paranoid about the Cold War and the US and Russia.
He has always been distrustful of the US government (I'm Canadian, it's worth pointing out), and during the 80s he was firm in the belief that the war between the US and Russia was not only imminent, but was going to start in Alaska and extend onto Canadian soil.
He believed that the US would see Canada's liberalism and socialist tendencies as a worrying vulnerability and in the lead up to when "it happened" or "it went down" (his code words for when the Cold War went hot) the US would "defensively" annex Canada and Russia would eventually invade us and we would have to defend ourselves from two hostile nuclear powers with guerrilla tactics and insurgency.
So that was how my dad raised me. That was the kind of games and camping trips I went on as a kid. I still had a fairly normal childhood for the most part, because my parents were divorced so I was only at my dad's some of the time, and my mom didn't necessarily agree with his crazy shit. But she also didn't expressly decry it either.
It informed a lot of my worldview as a kid and even as an adult who fucking knows better, there will be places that crazy shit has hidden itself in the corners. I'm in my 30s for fucks sake and I still sometimes catch myself saying or thinking things that I know are crazy.
The point I'm trying to make is this stuff is sometimes a world, especially if you're raised in it. It's like being Mormon. You can get out of the Church, but getting the Church out of you is harder than you think.
Childhood experiences can definitely inform your life well pay the point of relevance.
When I was 12 I lived through a civil war, and spent next few years being a refugee in several countries before settling in the US. Decades later those experiences stock with me. Like when I was buying a house it had to have a basement, you know, in case of shelling.
Living in the Soviet Union during the cold war is why Ayn Rand is Ayn Rand. Thanks, Russia.
Buzz Aldrin: Ending Conspiracy Theories, One Punch at a Time
'Man, I'm so smart. Much smarter than all these sheeple.
Now, let's walk up to an ex-military pilot who's clearly had enough of my dumb bullshit stunningly brilliant rhetoric and continue mouthing him off. Holy shit I'm such a genius.'
It's not impossible that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy
there's just no real evidence for it and plenty that corroborates the official story
I think that's a common thread in the conspiracy thing as a whole. It isn't impossible that every single jet aircraft has tanks that spray chemicals into the atmosphere for Nefarious Purposes, or that the government has had contact with little green men and they've been covering it up since the 40s, or that the mob/the CIA/little green men/Castro/Johnson had a hand in Kennedy's murder, true. It doesn't really matter though what's possible, the question conspiracy people should be asking but aren't is "how likely is this compared to the commonly-accepted story?" In the case of all these things, the conspiracy theory introduces too many wildcards to be likely
Some pretty good proof for this is that once a conspiracy person starts getting into specifics, it becomes easy to say that his particular story isn't possible. 9/11 couldn't possibly have been a controlled demolition because it would've required the employment of a hundred thousand people, it isn't possible that the moon landings were hoaxes because the video technology to fake it didn't exist at the time, and also you can triangulate radio signals to find out where they're coming from and if the Soviets had found out we faked it it maybe would've started a war, et cetera
*I didn't even know that was an actual conspiracy theory when I started typing this, but lo and behold! The internet always has more surprises.
Hahaha what the fuck. This is even better than hollow earth
That link has conspiracy theories I've never heard of and each one crazier than the last!
The whole Cold War was just an excuse for the vatican to wipe out Protestants. Nuclear Bombs only work at specific times and only if they are at the right point on the Earths surface. The US prevented Chaing Kai Sheik from leaving Taiwan so he couldn't defeat the communists. The secret conspiracy to control all the universities with non-protestants.
Not to mention that Russians had no idea how toilets worked and thought they had something to do with eating bread.
That site is proving to be an endless source of joy
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
My dad is slowly going to the crazy side.
In the evenings when we talk he brings up 9/11 and the other buildings that collapsed and the other Loose Change bullshit. Like, he's just asking questions. The problem being that because I don't have an answer as to why the other buildings collapsed must mean that he is right. It's frustrating because if you don't know something, why would you insert all these other things there? Like, the one video of the one aircraft (actually missile, obviously) hit the Pentagon must mean that the other videos didn't capture, blah blah flag, blah blah inside blah, blah blah nonsense. Like, if I were the Pentagon, I wouldn't be releasing all the information to the world; I'd be sitting on it for at the very least legal reasons. But no, inside job and other nonsense.
My dad is slowly going to the crazy side.
In the evenings when we talk he brings up 9/11 and the other buildings that collapsed and the other Loose Change bullshit. Like, he's just asking questions. The problem being that because I don't have an answer as to why the other buildings collapsed must mean that he is right. It's frustrating because if you don't know something, why would you insert all these other things there? Like, the one video of the one aircraft (actually missile, obviously) hit the Pentagon must mean that the other videos didn't capture, blah blah flag, blah blah inside blah, blah blah nonsense. Like, if I were the Pentagon, I wouldn't be releasing all the information to the world; I'd be sitting on it for at the very least legal reasons. But no, inside job and other nonsense.
The buildings that were part of the WTC complex but not directly hit by the planes collapsed due to 2 factors:
1) Uncontrolled fires left burning throughout their structure.
2) The collapse of the massive primary towers.
The collapse of the buildings released a huge amount of energy, and a nice slice of it went into shaking apart nearby structures. Conspiracy nuts like to completely ignore that over a million tons of steel & concrete falling from the sky doesn't just inertly collect on the ground.
The aircraft that was rammed into the Pentagon knocked over street lights, tossed a mobile back-up generator on a tractor trailer unit and otherwise did the opposite of what you would expect in terms of damage to the pentagon from a warhead: massive damage to the outer wall where it struck, and then rapidly decreasing levels of damage as it traveled into the structure (whereas a missile carries it's payload through the outer wall of it's target and then detonates inside. Even if it blows-out the wall, the damage to the wall is still usually small in comparison to the damage caused by the explosion inside the building).
Salvage crews also dug out large chunks of the aircraft from the building (most of the frame didn't survive, but sturdy components like the engines & landing gear were all found).
Not that this will help with your father, but *shrug*. Sometimes it's sort of satisfying to watch someone get forced to just dismiss every piece of evidence as part of a cover-up, because then they can't really claim to be 'just asking questions' anymore.
"Let's hijack four planes. Crash two of them into the World Trade Center and one into a field in Pennsylvania. But we want to hit the Pentagon too, so shoot a missile at it. Oh that fourth plane? I dunno, hide it under Denver airport or something."
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
"Let's hijack four planes. Crash two of them into the World Trade Center and one into a field in Pennsylvania. But we want to hit the Pentagon too, so shoot a missile at it. Oh that fourth plane? I dunno, hide it under Denver airport or something."
Hell, if they were going to use a missile for a false flag operation... why even disguise that it was a missile?
Paint that shit in Iraqi symbols and tell the public that one of Saddam's goons shot it into the Pentagon. Boom, instant invasion approval.
To be 'fair', though, the Loose Change cult does not think a plane went down in Pennsylvania. They think the government just dug a hole there and claimed that it went down, and the actual flight either was diverted and the passengers were turned in Soylent Green at some point, or the flight was just full of government agents who staged a hijacking and nobody actually died, victims' families be damned.
Speaking of Illuminati they were founded today 238 years ago.
And now they control the world (supposedly). How time flies..
The trick is that there was never one illuminati. There were multiple foundings as each one picked up what hearsay they heard about the previous ones and founded a new one on that. The same thing kept happening with the Gnostics. Both tended to be opposed by the local kings or church.
Posts
Red Dwarf had the best JFK theory.
As one FBI expert brought in to talk about the organized crime angle noted, "If you're going to bring in someone to kill Oswald to keep him quiet... well, then you're going to need to bring in someone to kill Oswald's assassin to keep him quiet, right? And then you need to bring in someone to kill that guy, and so on. It's an unsolvable problem, and it's not how the mob worked,"
The FBI in years following the Kennedy assassination had dozens of mobsters turn themselves in, offering to testify for the state in exchange for protection / sentence leniency. Not one of them ever spoke about a plot to kill Kennedy, and neither did any arrested mobsters in later years.
Oswald himself had absolutely zero mob connections. His wife Maria (whom he beat every day) knew about nearly every single plot Oswald cooked-up (including an earlier attempt to assassinate General Edwin Walker), and said nothing on being interrogated about any mob connections, did not ask for protection against mobsters, did not appear to know anything about organized crime or Chicago, etc.
Jack Ruby knew some guys in Chicago who had mob connections because Ruby was a hot headed club owner. He did not actually engage in organized crime and had a good relationship with both the Chicago police and the Dallas police. There is overwhelming evidence that he did not go down to the police station with the explicit intent of shooting Oswald - but that he blew a fuse when he saw Oswald walking towards the armored transport with a big smile on his face. People in that area of town knew Ruby and were on a small town, first name basis with him: you can hear people asking in the media footage, "Why did you do it, Jack? Why did you do it?"
He later told friends that he though he was a hero for avenging the murder of the President.
There wasn't anything cloak and dagger about Oswald's killing; it was a result of the Dallas police mishandling the prisoner and assuming that local press / business owners weren't going to try and kill him. Also, nobody knew that Ruby was sick.
Oswald's movements after the shooting were also rather curious for a mob hit man. He kills the President, then walks out of the book depository (nearly being arrested right as he was walking down the stairs) and tries to get on a bus. Failing that, he keeps walking to try and get to a bus depot. He's spotted & questioned by a police officer who IDs him based on an APB - so he shoots the officer and runs to a a crowded theater, where he's cornered and arrested (police had to wrestle away the revolver which he just used to kill officer Tippet). He then pleads innocence and claims not to have shot anyone, even though dozens of people just watched him murder a policeman.
Not exactly a slick & discrete wet job (and Oswald seemed to know how the day was likely to end, given that he left Maria all of the money he had as well as his wedding band).
I'm going to respond by doing something that I normally dislike, which is breaking up a post into a bunch of small chunks and responding to each one. I think it looks way too antagonistic, and you might well be right, but it's the best way i can think of to respond to everything you said.
I see it more like one of those math problems where you have to optimize between two variables. The more assassins you bring in, the more separation there is between you and the original murder, but you're also introducing more complexity which means more people know about it, and there's more chance for something to go wrong. Two would work well- a crazy guy that you can convince to murder the president, and a less-crazy guy that you can convince to murder the original guy, and then keep his mouth shut. You could have a third guy ready to go if it looks like Ruby is about to talk, or just threaten his family. No one trustworthy is going to assassinate the president, because he's guaranteed to get caught. And if they do catch the second assassin, conspiracy to commit murder is a much lesser offense than conspiracy to assassinate the president.
That doesn't prove anything. There were lots of mobsters- that's why they called it "the mob". And the hypothetical conspirators would have kept the number of people who knew about it to an absolute minimum. You don't get to be a mafia don without knowing how to keep your mouth shut.
No, but he was an obviously violent and unhinged person with a clear button to press (communism). If the mob needed a triggerman, he seems like he'd be a good choice.
Sure, he didn't need to actually be *in* the mob, they just needed some leverage against him. Who knows. Maybe they threatened him, or bribed him, or blackmailed him. Just because you're not in the mob doesn't mean you can't owe them a favor.
This doesn't prove anything except that he did the killing in a very simple way and didn't admit to anything.
True. More consistent with a crazy person who got put up to it by the mob, than a professional hitman. But a professional hitman wouldn't have taken the job in the first place, because there's no way you can get away with being the guy who shoots the president.
And yeah, I realize that I can't prove anything either. This is all just conjecture. But you have to weigh that against the odds of two random crazy people being in the same place at the same time.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
"Official" Illuminati stationary and stamps, made to fuck with people and mailed to various weirdos. Probably got the name wrong, been so long since I've read into it.
But you have to understand this: the only reason that the organized crime angle was even posited was because:
1) Members of the committee on assassinations were convinced by audio cues suggesting that a second gunman fired on the limo from the grassy knoll. That interpretation of the audio cues has since been discredited.
In other words, the problem that the second shooter idea was necessary to solve was never actually a problem - the analysts simply got the position of their microphone wrong.
2) Specifically, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans was cited as a suspect for ordering the hit on Kennedy.
This is just too far fetched given the advantage of contemporary hindsight. Look at the work done by Ralph Salerno; mafia hit men and dons from Chicago, New Orleans & Texas, all coming forward and admitting to crimes in order to secure protection deals for themselves & their family members, not a single one of them ever hearing a single word about a hit on Kennedy. Like, a hit that big and that high profile... and nobody talked? Nobody bragged? Nobody tried to use it as leverage or as a means of intimidation?
It stretches all credibility.
Marcello himself was under surveillance by the FBI, and was heard complaining to other mafia members about the allegations against him in a conversation that he thought was confidential.
It's not enough to just say, "But you can't prove the mafia didn't kill Kennedy," - if you're going to argue that they did, it's on you at that point to show the extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary crime.
The hardest one for me to stomach is the 9/11 conspiracy. I have lost a couple of friends over that one.. Coincidently it's two friends that haven't done anything with their life and thus have all the time in the world to watch YouTube "documentaries"
I'll never forget the first time I encountered a truther in the wild, many years ago. He was handing out Infowars flyers in the courtyard of the community college I was going to at the time. Lord knows why but I decided to talk to him and ask questions about why he thought it was an inside job. He pulled out the usual Loose Change bullshit, which was whatever, but then he went on about how all the people who were killed in the planes were taken to some other country and they all live in a government-built town and can't have any contact with the outside world, and there weren't actually any people in the towers that day so actually no one died. When I told him that I was there, that I watched people jump out of 80th-floor windows rather than burn to death before the towers came down (something I still see sometimes when I close my eyes more than a decade later), he looked me in the eye and said "how much are they paying you to spread these lies?"
I'm not proud of punching him, but I don't really regret it.
hitting hot metal with hammers
But again, *most* people in the mafia wouldn't know about it. The people who talked, talked about the specific crimes that they knew about. If there were only like 2-3 guys who knew about it, then it wouldn't matter who else came forward- unless you actually catch those *specific* 2-3 guys, you'd get nothing.
And, since I'm not trying to prove someone guilty in a court of law, or establish a new scientific theory, I don't really have to prove anything. I'm just trying trying to show that the mafia conspiracy idea is *plausible*.
there's just no real evidence for it and plenty that corroborates the official story
I think that's a common thread in the conspiracy thing as a whole. It isn't impossible that every single jet aircraft has tanks that spray chemicals into the atmosphere for Nefarious Purposes, or that the government has had contact with little green men and they've been covering it up since the 40s, or that the mob/the CIA/little green men/Castro/Johnson had a hand in Kennedy's murder, true. It doesn't really matter though what's possible, the question conspiracy people should be asking but aren't is "how likely is this compared to the commonly-accepted story?" In the case of all these things, the conspiracy theory introduces too many wildcards to be likely
Some pretty good proof for this is that once a conspiracy person starts getting into specifics, it becomes easy to say that his particular story isn't possible. 9/11 couldn't possibly have been a controlled demolition because it would've required the employment of a hundred thousand people, it isn't possible that the moon landings were hoaxes because the video technology to fake it didn't exist at the time, and also you can triangulate radio signals to find out where they're coming from and if the Soviets had found out we faked it it maybe would've started a war, et cetera
hitting hot metal with hammers
Maybe they did find out! Maybe they simply decided to reply with an even bigger prank. Maybe the entire Cold War was nothing but an elaborate hoax! *
*I didn't even know that was an actual conspiracy theory when I started typing this, but lo and behold! The internet always has more surprises.
Now I'm more concerned because I painted aircraft.
Childhood experiences can definitely inform your life well pay the point of relevance.
When I was 12 I lived through a civil war, and spent next few years being a refugee in several countries before settling in the US. Decades later those experiences stock with me. Like when I was buying a house it had to have a basement, you know, in case of shelling.
Hahaha what the fuck. This is even better than hollow earth
hitting hot metal with hammers
People go buck wild with that one, though, and talk about how there are lower levels with David Icke reptilians conducting experiments and all kinds of crazy shit.
That one even made it into Assassin's Creed! (Honestly, that series has fun with conspiracy theories, and some of the ones they thought up in II/Brotherhood were...disquieting.)
No thread on conspiracy theories is complete without this video:
Buzz Aldrin: Ending Conspiracy Theories, One Punch at a Time
You failed, pretty hard. You might have '2-3' guys, you might only have '1' when it's a random actor on his own, but if the 'mafia' decided to put a hit on a president, by necessity, there's a lot more than 3 guys involved.
And a conspiracy video "proving" that the punch was staged because Sibrel reacted before getting hit
WoW
Dear Satan.....
When David Icke reptilians are on the table it's all crazy shit. Those little bastards get all the juicy UFO shenanigans.
Living in the Soviet Union during the cold war is why Ayn Rand is Ayn Rand. Thanks, Russia.
'Man, I'm so smart. Much smarter than all these sheeple.
Now, let's walk up to an ex-military pilot who's clearly had enough of my dumb bullshit stunningly brilliant rhetoric and continue mouthing him off. Holy shit I'm such a genius.'
That link has conspiracy theories I've never heard of and each one crazier than the last!
The whole Cold War was just an excuse for the vatican to wipe out Protestants. Nuclear Bombs only work at specific times and only if they are at the right point on the Earths surface. The US prevented Chaing Kai Sheik from leaving Taiwan so he couldn't defeat the communists. The secret conspiracy to control all the universities with non-protestants.
Not to mention that Russians had no idea how toilets worked and thought they had something to do with eating bread.
That site is proving to be an endless source of joy
In the evenings when we talk he brings up 9/11 and the other buildings that collapsed and the other Loose Change bullshit. Like, he's just asking questions. The problem being that because I don't have an answer as to why the other buildings collapsed must mean that he is right. It's frustrating because if you don't know something, why would you insert all these other things there? Like, the one video of the one aircraft (actually missile, obviously) hit the Pentagon must mean that the other videos didn't capture, blah blah flag, blah blah inside blah, blah blah nonsense. Like, if I were the Pentagon, I wouldn't be releasing all the information to the world; I'd be sitting on it for at the very least legal reasons. But no, inside job and other nonsense.
The buildings that were part of the WTC complex but not directly hit by the planes collapsed due to 2 factors:
1) Uncontrolled fires left burning throughout their structure.
2) The collapse of the massive primary towers.
The collapse of the buildings released a huge amount of energy, and a nice slice of it went into shaking apart nearby structures. Conspiracy nuts like to completely ignore that over a million tons of steel & concrete falling from the sky doesn't just inertly collect on the ground.
The aircraft that was rammed into the Pentagon knocked over street lights, tossed a mobile back-up generator on a tractor trailer unit and otherwise did the opposite of what you would expect in terms of damage to the pentagon from a warhead: massive damage to the outer wall where it struck, and then rapidly decreasing levels of damage as it traveled into the structure (whereas a missile carries it's payload through the outer wall of it's target and then detonates inside. Even if it blows-out the wall, the damage to the wall is still usually small in comparison to the damage caused by the explosion inside the building).
Salvage crews also dug out large chunks of the aircraft from the building (most of the frame didn't survive, but sturdy components like the engines & landing gear were all found).
Not that this will help with your father, but *shrug*. Sometimes it's sort of satisfying to watch someone get forced to just dismiss every piece of evidence as part of a cover-up, because then they can't really claim to be 'just asking questions' anymore.
"Let's hijack four planes. Crash two of them into the World Trade Center and one into a field in Pennsylvania. But we want to hit the Pentagon too, so shoot a missile at it. Oh that fourth plane? I dunno, hide it under Denver airport or something."
And now they control the world (supposedly). How time flies..
Hell, if they were going to use a missile for a false flag operation... why even disguise that it was a missile?
Paint that shit in Iraqi symbols and tell the public that one of Saddam's goons shot it into the Pentagon. Boom, instant invasion approval.
To be 'fair', though, the Loose Change cult does not think a plane went down in Pennsylvania. They think the government just dug a hole there and claimed that it went down, and the actual flight either was diverted and the passengers were turned in Soylent Green at some point, or the flight was just full of government agents who staged a hijacking and nobody actually died, victims' families be damned.
The trick is that there was never one illuminati. There were multiple foundings as each one picked up what hearsay they heard about the previous ones and founded a new one on that. The same thing kept happening with the Gnostics. Both tended to be opposed by the local kings or church.