Butler

 

Vance's wife's bio is worth a look.

***


Butler

“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”--Robert Heinlein. Also known as Hanlon's Razor.

"I think this trying to pin down the precise motive, and how much of it was a mental imbalance or emotional imbalance and how much of it was political, is a bit of a fool's errand. There is a mixture of things they are.

The bottom line I think is that when someone is demonized to the extent Trump was being demonized, you are putting a target on them, and you are increasing the risk they are going to become a target for someone who has a mixture of these factors -- imbalance, some potential political element to it. They become the target.

What was concerning me was that -- and I understand the people on both sides engage in extreme rhetoric, occasionally. But what was bothering me was the thrust of the Democratic narrative for this election year had become that Trump was a mortal danger to our democracy, and if he wins the country is going away. When you take that position, that is an apocalyptic and hysterical position, it is bound to lead to violence, eventually.
...

The sentiments expressed by the president in his remarks just now are very noble and I hope they follow them because if they believe it they will scale back the rhetoric. And what he said about differences in policy, fine, you can attack your adversaries, you can attack their character and their policies, and so forth. But they demonized him -- called him Adolf Hitler, a racist, and a fascist, and so forth it is ridiculous. He is not a threat to democracy they portray. He was a president for four years he carried out excellent policies and it was all done lawfully.

...

That was my perception of what we suddenly saw this increase in attacks, and the decibel level and that vitriol increase, because they did not have an alternative other than this apocalyptic vision they are trying to paint.

And by the way, it is not just about Trump. We have seen the same thing with the Supreme Court, the personal vilification of Supreme Court justices when they disagree with the Supreme Court justices on legal matters."--Bill Barr

Yet, in the analysis following the attempted assassination the event was somehow homogenized with other, general violent events like riots and the crazy attack on Pelosi's husband rather than the very specific thing it was. And the public concerns became things like 'retaliation,' and equal blame, like campus riots being attributable to both anti-semitism and Islamophobia. Even Biden's generic call for unity was tinged with politics.

Insincerity and ambition. We're having trouble looking in the mirror. And we seem to be very willing to sacrifice the common good for our own limited aims.

A Reverse Coverup

 

But there is also a cost to overemphasizing its [...racial...] impact. A black kid who believes he will face daunting societal obstacles is likely to underinvest in trying to climb society’s rungs. Every black student in the country needs to know that his return on investment in education is, if anything, higher than for white students.--fryer

***

It’s actually insane that fully self-driving cars will be everywhere without our consent but a bus or bike lane needs years of community and environmental outreach. It’s honestly cruel.--a guy on Twitter

***

Thermal coal imports by the European Union from Australia, South Africa and Indonesia increased more than 11-fold. Meanwhile, a new trans-Saharan gas pipeline will allow Europe to tap directly into gas from Niger, Algeria and Nigeria; Germany is reopening shuttered coal power plants; and Italy is planning to import 40 percent more gas from northern Africa. And the United States is going cap-in-hand to Saudi Arabia to grovel for more oil production.

Meanwhile, back at the Global Climate Summit...

***

Shooting the messenger used to be the hyperbolic suggested response to bad news. What if the "bad" news isn't "unpleasant," just "sub-standard?"

"The political campaign against the Supreme Court continues, relentlessly, and the latest example is a claim that eight years ago Justice Samuel Alito leaked word ahead of time about a Supreme Court ruling. We’d ignore this except that Democrats and the anti-Court media are treating it like a capital offense.
To call this story uncorroborated is to overstate its credibility. Rob Schenck, a pastor who has since turned against his former evangelical allies, claims he heard from a woman who heard from Justice Alito at a dinner party in 2014 about the pending opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a religious liberty case. Justice Alito denies leaking anything, and the woman denies hearing about it."--WSJ

So the messenger may be more at risk of just being ignored?

***

A Reverse Coverup

Recent events have raised questions whether agencies and unelected bureaucrats have altered the reporting of events "for our own good."

Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots. (Politico)

No doubt this will become our CIA cover-up story for the next decade. But.....

This might remind one of Oswald in Mexico City.
Now a real conspiracy. Jack Childs was a spy/raconteur who knew Castro. He says Castro told him that when Oswald realized the Cubans would not grant him a visa when he was in Mexico City he screamed with defiant bravado, "I'm going to kill Kennedy!" This was confirmed by the spy Rodriques Lahera in a debriefing with Harold Swenson. In November 1963, the Cuban intelligence officer in charge of monitoring possible CIA/exile activity against Cuba, Florintino Aspillaga, was told by Castro to abandon his usual sweeps and focus all his listening devices on the Dallas area.
So.....? 

The specifics of the assassination are beyond debate. Oswald, a defector to Russia, a communist disillusioned with the Russian system but enamored with the Cuban one, murdered President Kennedy. The only question is whether someone or some group influenced Oswald's decision. Castro may not have been involved. But it sounds as if he was not surprised.

Kennedy #2

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. --Alexander Pope

***

The English department at the University of Greenwich in London has issued a trigger warning for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner.' Not only does the 1798 poem feature the shooting of an albatross with a crossbow, which is clearly upsetting to the anxious, herbivore students of today, it also contains references to “supernatural possession” and “human death.”

***

Another serious problem to worry about. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform warns of the foreign danger in a Nov. 2 report titled “A New Threat: The National Security Risk of Third Party Litigation Funding.” Foreign financiers might see this opaque third-party funding mechanism as an exploitable fissure in the U.S. legal system through which to weaponize the courts for strategic goals.
Foreign adversaries can fund frivolous litigation to overwhelm U.S. courts, target lawsuits to weaken critical industries, or obtain confidential materials through the discovery process. Enemy funders might also push theories or use court filings as part of the well-documented disinformation campaigns they already wage through social media.


***

Well, this is curious. And, if real, might be significantly negative for Trump. Kanye West released screenshots of text messages and a video after his dinner Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump that suggest in addition to dining with the rapper this week, the former president met with an openly white nationalist and Holocaust denier named Nick Fuentes.

***

Kennedy #2

An industry has arisen to continue the mythology.

Oswald was not capable of such violence; he could not have made the shots in the time allotted; the rifle was inferior and the scope was misaligned; he had an alibi; there is no record of his interrogation by the Dallas police; he was an imposter from Russia; the "Oswald" in Mexico City was an imposter; his pictures holding the rifle with the pistol and the two Communist newspapers are fakes; he travelled with Cuban revolutionaries; the rifle found on the depository sixth floor was a Mauser, not Oswald's Italian infantry rifle Model 1891/1938; the third shot--the head shot--came from the front; a second shooter was seen on the "grassy knoll;" the Dallas doctors disagreed with the Bethesda pathologists; three tramps in a box car in Dallas were likely CIA and were probably involve--one even looked like Woody Harrelson's father; Tippit's murderer was unidentified; the bullets that killed Tippit did not match Oswald's pistol; many involved have died suspiciously; the Mafia did it because of their annimosity to Bobby Kennedy; the CIA did it because of their fear of a Kennedy retaliation over the Bay of Pigs invasion; the Garrison argument implicating Clay Shaw (on the evidence of a psychotic who failed a lie detector test); Castro did it in self-defense; the JFK movie by Stone (see Garrison); the Navy pathologist burnt his notes; the Dallas FBI burnt a note Oswald left for them before the murder; Marina Oswald burnt photographs of Lee holding the rifle, Ruby killed Tippit, Tippit was meeting Oswald and was involved, .....on and on. The democracy is hard at work here. Many of these notions come from average and concerned people, volunteers working far afield. Some are lawyers. Few are experts in the area they are focused on in the murder. One writer on the Zapruder film and what it reveals about the number of bullets and their timing is a Kierkegaard lecturer from Haverford. Some of these objections are just nuts, some are true but, of those that are true, none would change anything.

What is certain is this:
1. Oswald bought the murder weapon from a mail-order house using an alias he always used and had the false ID in his wallet at his arrest. Oswald posed with the rifle holding communist newspapers; his wife, Marina, took the picture. Marina saw the rifle many times and knew where it was kept.
2. Before going to shoot Gen. Walker, a right-wing John Birch Society member, Oswald wrote a detailed letter to Marina explaining what he was going to do and what she should do if he were killed or did not come back.
3. He shot at Walker and the window slat diverted the bullet. He then fled the state for New Orleans.
4. The day of the murder he left his wedding ring in a glass by his wife's bed, then carried the gun to the depository wrapped in paper (later found at the shooting site) in a car driven by a fellow worker.
5. He was seen and described by a witness as he pushed the gun out of the window and the muzzle fire of 3 shots was seen.
6. Men at the window one floor down and directly below the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the depository, heard the gunfire above, heard the bolt action, and heard the casings hit the floor.
7. Oswald was seen in the depository after the shooting; he left the building and took a bus, then a cab, to his rooming house where he got his pistol.
8. Officer Tippit was a well-regarded, simple guy and a solid citizen. At least ten people saw him murdered by Oswald and all identified him. Three bullets hit him in the chest. Oswald stepped away, then returned several steps to put a bullet in Officer Tippitt's temple as he lay on the ground. (!)
9. Ruby killed Oswald but his motives are obscure. It may not even have been planned. All acquaintances said he was distraught over Kennedy's death and the possibility that Jackie, whom he adored, would have to return to Dallas to go through a trial with Oswald. (The only press interview he ever gave was to Dorothy Kilgallen. Kilgallen!)

Any theory about the killing has to include and accept these facts.

Kennedy #1

Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.-- economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.)

***

3 out of 8 American homes are rentals, Eberstadt writes, and “an astonishing half of all female-headed renter families reportedly had barely $2,000 in net worth in 2019.

***

Nobel Sustainability Trust Foundation recognizes China’s green efforts while entrepreneur Bruno Wu awarded for his carbon-neutral initiatives. (A headline)
The NST Directors also awarded a Special Recognition Letter to the Government of the People’s Republic of China for outstanding contributions to advancing carbon neutrality.

Imagine.

***

The Pirates announced they’ve designated infielder Hoy Park for assignment. Park landed in Pittsburgh alongside Diego Castillo in the increasingly regrettable deal that sent reliever Clay Holmes to the Yankees.

***


Kennedy #1

The Kennedy assassination was a significant moment for me and for many. Yet the event, so terrible and intense, so researched and analyzed, has developed almost as its own entity, its own beast, as it matures along paths of manipulation, overt deception, and least resistance.

First, the reaction. Mrs. Kennedy's quote here is significant: "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights . . . . It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."

This may not have set the tone for the management of the murder in history but it certainly was representative of it. The general reaction to the murder was completely divorced from what happened. Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy's "martyrdom" to "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots." Drew Pearson wrote that Kennedy was a victim of "hate drive."A Soviet spokesman assigned "moral responsibility" for Kennedy's death to "Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right." The NYT encouraged us all to take blame for "the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down" the President. James Reston's article the day after the shooting--on the first page--was headlined ""Why America Weeps: Kennedy a Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation." Senator Mike Mansfield eulogized the President as a victim of "bigotry, prejudice, and hatred." In Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s one thousand-page history of the thousand-day Kennedy presidency, the assassin is not even mentioned. The Manhattan Institute's James Piereson, in his 2007 book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism," writes that the country's illness that led to the assassination required a curative "punitive liberalism." A newer book, Dallas "1963", says Dallas did it through a "climate of hatred" created by right-wing businessmen, religious leaders, and media moguls. And an updated take by Alex Beam in a Boston Globe article: "Kennedy brought low by some redneck."

This is not simply a need to turn away and shield our eyes; there is plenty of stomach for Zapruder films and autopsy shots. This is much worse, an inability--an unwillingness--to see things as they are. It is simply not possible for the Left to accept the idea that Kennedy was murdered by a Marxist. And this perspective will lead to any number of creative narratives, consistent or not, to shift the blame from Oswald and towards a more acceptable villain. More, it is a refusal to see the modern world and its potential where a man of great standing and regard can be brought down by a fool. 

It is the egalitarian nightmare.

November 22 and Kennedy

The Thanksgiving holiday, one of the best holidays and certainly the best secular one, has been spoiled for everyone who was awake and thinking in the mid 60's by the assassination of Jack Kennedy. That promising shift from the generation of Eisenhower to its sons, to youth and its potential, to the charismatic and the virile was just stopped cold by Oswald in Dallas. We defaulted back to the older, ponderous Lyndon Johnson, a true guardian of the Old Guard. That loss--of youth, of hope, of promise, of beauty--has never been overcome and we are reminded of it every Thanksgiving. One only wonders how much of the unrest in the 60's and 70's was a result.

An aspect of the assassination that has dogged its shadow has been the shameless exploitation of the atrocity by writers, politicians and artists. This exploitation, which has become almost a cult, believes--or says it believes--that the assassination was a conspiracy of a number of men, groups or organizations. Every aspect of the event has been picked over, every inconsistency of life magnified, every possibility made a probability. The result is that the event, right before many of our eyes, has been completely recreated and, like an alternative universe, continues without interference with its own laws, experts and history. It is very like those academic musings run wild. "If, instead, you assume that history and archeology was 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is a unexplained and unexplainable driving force in history..." "If, instead, you assume that everyone is possessed at birth by sexual urges towards their immediate family...." It is another victory of the Art of the Plausible.

This is nowhere more revolting than is seen in the movie "JFK" where a seemingly respectable director rewrites the assassination story according to a man whose grasp on the event is dangerously close to psychosis. Oliver Stone writes a story of the assassination through the eyes and the belief set of James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who had arrested, charged, indicted and tried a local community figure, Clay Shaw, for involvement in the Kennedy murder. Shaw's arrest was virtually random. There was no evidence against him other than the word of a psychiatric patient who failed a lie detector test and refused to testify. How an American citizen could come under such unreasonable, whimsical charges has never been explained. But Garrison persisted and then Stone followed up after the laughable trial (where the jury took longer to find their seats than to find "not guilty") with a movie inexplicably presenting the Garrison thesis as within the same time zone as reason. Of course, all the facts of the assassination were changed to implicate the innocent, the shooting presented was almost a complete fiction and this all was delivered by Kevin Costner, a credible actor, with certainty and outrage. Anyone who knew anything about the assassination walked from the theater with their collective heads spinning. But many with less of a good grasp left alarmed and resentful. This constant barrage of misinformation has done a lot to undermine this country's credibility and value in the minds of its people who, after all, own and run it.

There are two bad lessons here. The first is there are people and industries in the world who, even in those cultures with the highest of ideals, will do anything, say anything, publish anything to make a buck. If possible they will take the Plausible-made-Art and create an industry of it with historians, academics, and franchises. The second is that they often hide their entrepreneurship in the gowns of Art. How many of our greatest artists have questioned the reliability of memory, the interaction of history and art--even to the point of their blending? So Stone calls Julian Barnes and Cormac McCarthy as witnesses for his defense.

Stone is more Goebbels than John Huston here. He is everything that is wrong with businessmen gone rogue. His product is harmful to the society, toxic to the young and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how is it possible that Clay Shaw could be treated like a Kafka character in the United States. Another would be a clarifying and cleansing explanation of all the facts and evidence that has been gathered over the years about the murder. This might set the country at ease. But there's probably not much money, or return on arrogance, in this. Instead why not take advantage of the distressed and confused citizens, contribute to their malaise and cash in.

In 1976 the U.S. House of representatives created a commission, The House Select Commission on Assassinations, to investigate all the evidence in the murder again. This time they applied all the newer technologies available as well. Aside from the single and erroneous "fourth bullet thesis" not a single new conclusion was reached. Instead this august deliberative body concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy--but they believed one existed anyway

Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst has haunted me ever since day one. Her story started in February, 1974 when she was kidnapped by a group that called themselves The Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of wackos, crackpots, overt madmen and one possible genius. It is hard to pick what part of the story is the most distressing. And now, years later, the story is back, spearheaded by a publicity blitz for a new book, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, by Jeremy Toobin.
 

Patty Hearst was 19-years-old, the granddaughter of the wealthy newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, when she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. They were a small group with no coherent goals and several were clearly mad. Toobin's explanation for them is the best I have ever heard: They were the activist endpoint of the demonstration, the Guerilla Theater. They were not a movement, they were an armed display. A revolutionary spectacle.

There are two inexplicable elements to the story. (Toobin asks a third question: How did she get off?)

First, crazy people do not join groups and they certainly do not join other madmen. Isolation, preoccupied self-absorption, is the very nature of psychosis. Charming as the notion might be, there are no revolutions in an asylum. An individual might threaten Nurse Ratchet but he will have no help. So how did these lunatics organize? Modern problems make this question all the more important.

Second, what happened to Hearst? She was a rather simple girl from a very rich family thrown into this loony bin who emerged a gun-toting, stranger bombing, bank robber. How did this happen? What was going on in her mind? There was some serious problems at the time. During the early and mid '70s, there were 1,000 — 1,000!— bombings a year in the United States, many the result of the murderous Bill Ayres, his murderous wife and his SDS. But Patty Hearst, bank robber? Again, with the maniacs drifting to more modern death cults, it is a reasonable question.

The Smart girl failed to take some opportunities to escape but she was a frightened child. Hearst may not have been a PhD candidate but the life she was trapped in certainly looked worth escaping. Why didn't she? Here is Toobin on one of Hearst's escape opportunities: "Patty and two of the SLA members decide to go shopping. They need stuff and they go to a sporting goods store. Bill and Emily Harris go inside the sporting goods store, leaving Patty in a van across the street, with the key in the ignition. She's free to leave — she can drive away, she can walk away — but instead she waits. Bill and Emily Harris stupidly decide to shoplift. They leave the store and the clerk tackles them on the sidewalk. Across the street Patty Hearst is looking at her two comrades tackled by the clerk. So what does she do alone in the van? Does she drive away? Does she walk away? No, she picks up a machine gun and fires wildly across the street to try to free Bill and Emily Harris. It doesn't work at first, so she picks up another gun and fires another fusillade of bullets across the street, miraculously not hitting anybody, but, in fact, successfully freeing Bill and Emily Harris, who get back into the van and drive off."
She also ended up in the E.R. with poison oak. Nothing. She was in difficulty on a hike and was helped by a forest ranger. Not a word. Instead she maintained her anonymity and went on robbing banks, shooting up streets and placing bombs.

After her small group of inept desperadoes were all killed, Hearst was eventually captured by the FBI, convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in federal prison. She served 22 months before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. Later, President Bill Clinton pardoned her.

Toobin calls the presidential actions on Hearst's behalf an example of "wealth and privilege in action. ... The fact that she got these two presidential gestures of forgiveness is the purest example of privilege on display that frankly I have ever seen in the criminal justice system," Toobin says. Although, for some reason, many of the insane radicals of the time were never seriously judged. (See Ayres, his murderous wife and their SDS death cult.)

           

Hearst's iconic photograph in front of a Symbionese Liberation Army flag several months after she was kidnapped.

Nice

We are products of history. We must be; Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama all agree.
Europe is awash with theoretical responses to the current terroristic Politics of Derangement. One was Hollande’s plan to strip French nationality from dual citizens convicted of terrorism. Quite a threat.

There is a review of Christiane Taubira’s Murmures à la jeunesse on the terrorism in France. The reviewer says the short book, translated as "Whispers to the Young," offers a "particularly compelling (and upbeat) contribution to the debate of managing this"... Politics of Derangement. Taubira, from Guyana, was France’s Justice Minister until her resignation in late January 2016 because of her opposition to Hollande’s plan. As she notes pointedly, none of the nine men who carried out the November 2015 attacks in Paris was binational; but twenty-seven of the victims were. Her tract caused a sensation when it was published a week after Taubira’s resignation.

Taubira’s silent interlocutor, never mentioned explicitly, is her nemesis the hardline Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who publicly declared that there was no point trying to understand the appeal of jihadism, as “to understand terrorism was already in some sense to justify it”.

The reviewer states "Taubira makes a powerful case against the securitization of Islam, and of Muslims in general: she points out that jihadism is attractive not for its religious message, but in its quest for a radical break with the established social and political order. She observes, in this context, that a high proportion of jihadist sympathizers are recent converts to Islam. Above all, she affirms that jihadism is not a purely home-grown phenomenon, but is inextricably intertwined with the calamitous failings of Western policy in the Middle East, from Palestine and Iraq to the more recent cases of Libya and Syria."

It is a reaction, a dialectic, of history.

But there is a lot less going on here in Nice and Orlando than that. These were peripheral philosophical acts, at most. These were acts of seriously deranged people who, in the heat of a homicidal frenzy, wrapped themselves in an available flag.

There is an obvious problem here: Every individual , however destructive, if sane, has a point. He has some combination of educational and personal factors that led to his position and action. Nazis, embittered over the first war and its treaty, had a point. But the homicidal derangement syndrome we are watching unfold (and, probably, develop to larger and more efficient weaponry) has a very special characteristic: The loss of human empathy, the inability to identify with fellow members of the species.
That is very rare among the sane although it is characteristic of shards within the culture like drug cartels. And, of course, cartels have their story too. But dealing with them as a logical outgrowth of history might be giving them a lot more depth than they deserve..

Martin Luther King's Assassination

Martin Luther King was assassinated while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. King was struck by a single .30-06 bullet fired from a Remington 760 Gamemaster. The bullet entered through his right cheek and broke his jaw, neck and several vertebrae. The bullet severed the jugular vein and several major arteries then travelled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder.

Witnesses saw James Earl Ray fleeing from a rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel where he was renting a room. A package was dumped close to the site that included a rifle and binoculars with Ray's fingerprints on them. The rifle had been purchased by Ray under an alias six days before.

Ray was a criminal who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary the year before. He managed to get to Alabama where he bought a 1966 Ford Mustang and got an Alabama driver’s license. Then he went to Mexico where he tried to establish himself as a porn director. (He used the alias Eric Starvo Galt.) On November 19, 1967 he arrived in Los Angeles in where he attended a local bartending school and took dance lessons. He was very interested in the George Wallace presidential campaign there and spent much of his time as a Wallace volunteer. He disliked Blacks, liked Wallace's segregationist position and got interested in the apartheid government in Ian Smith's Rhodesia. (He actually wrote to the American-Southern Africa Council on December 28, 1967, stating, “My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia.”)

After shooting King, Ray got to Canada and flew to England where he was captured trying to get to Rhodesia with a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. On March 10, 1969, Ray entered a plea of guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. He escaped prison once again but was recaptured.

After his conviction, Ray hired Jack Kershaw as his attorney, who promoted Ray's claim that he was not responsible for the shooting. Ray said the shooting was the result of a conspiracy of an otherwise unidentified man named "Rauol". Kershaw and his client met with representatives of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations and convinced the committee to run ballistics tests — which ultimately proved inconclusive — that they felt would show that Ray had not fired the fatal shot. Kershaw claimed that the prison escape was additional proof that Ray had been involved in a conspiracy that had provided him with the outside assistance he would have needed to break out of jail. Kershaw convinced Ray to take a polygraph test as part of an interview with Playboy. The magazine said that the test results showed "that Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. and that he did so alone". Ray fired Kershaw after discovering that the attorney had been paid $11,000 by the magazine in exchange for the interview.

The King family sued several governmental agencies and the jury–six blacks and six whites—found that King had been the victim of assassination by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police as well as federal agencies.

Ray sold his version of King's assassination and his own flight to William Bradford Huie. Huie investigated this story and discovered Ray sometimes lied. Ray told Huie he purposefully left the rifle with his fingerprints on it in plain sight because he wanted to become a famous criminal. Ray was convinced he was so smart that he would not be caught. He believed Governor of Alabama George Wallace would soon be elected President, and Ray would only be confined for a short time.

He spent the remainder of his life unsuccessfully attempting to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a trial. He died in prison on April 23, 1998, at the age of 70.

The FBI was responsible for the investigation and, as with the Kennedys, many documents pertaining to this investigation remain classified, and are slated to remain secret until 2027, thus keeping at least doubt alive.

Barack Hatfield

Somebody whacks 4 Iranian scientists, the Americans target Gaddafi, the Iranians try to kill the Saudi ambassador in the U.S., a mullah puts a contract out on Rushdie, the Seal team murders bin Laden, the Russians poison a dissident in England. All of these attacks are carried out with great righteousness. But it does sound very much like the world of Don Corleone.

These events all supersede treaties and national agreements, relying instead upon some unwritten and presumably commonly held standard among some other, sometimes unstated, groups. Bin Laden is certainly an American enemy (and a Pakistani guest), but who is the Iranian scientists' enemy? And Gaddafi, who wrote the standard he violated and who gets to bring him to justice? And who sat on Rushdie's court?

Laws and agreements are all we have between civilization and the Hatfields and the McCoys. The weaponry has simply outgrown those tribes.

We Came, We Saw, He Died: Quotes From A Sorcerer's Apprentice

A friend wrote: "If NATO purposely bombs a Foreign Leader, I presume with intent to kill, is it now fair game for a Foreign Group to try to kill a NATO Leader?

i.e. The IRA trying to kill Prime Minister David Cameron."


According to Wikileaks, Obama tried to visit Hiroshima and apologize but the Japanese were too worried about the reaction by the antinuclear movement. Obama did send a letter of condolences to the family of the guy they killed with the drone in Yemen. So the short answer I suppose is: You can kill anyone you want as long as you're sorry.

But I don't mean to trivialize the question. I think a responsible, ethical nation should behave within certain restrictions in matters of war. First, all wars should be declared. No country should hid behind some artificial convention or union in an effort to hid its responsibilities. A group of nations at war is a collection of individual nations with a seemingly common aim. America should never go to war because the French need oil, regardless how close we might be. Under those circumstances we would be mercenaries. Good will is an asset too. (I'm speaking here of open display of war, not secret service activity.)

Second, a nation should never go to war without suffering. Displacing all the risk on to young soldiers while life at home proceeds apace is revolting and, incidentally, the essence of inflation in war as the citizens' lives do not contract.

Third, targeting leaders is a creepy displacement of conflict. Our international problems are the result of policy, not personality. (One might have an argument about Chavez.)Bush was the American leader and invaded Iraq as our representative. Hating him individually and not holding those who elected him responsible as well misunderstands the nature of the state. Believing that countries are nascent Tupperware parties waiting to be released from the jackboot of the oppressor completely frees the citizenry of any responsibility of the nation's behavior and likely will release a chaotic genie where policies will be piously manipulated by attacking the top of the national pyramid. "And just one death will make war more safe..."

Fourth, the belief one can fine tune a country by surgical strikes on leaders has a number of very disturbing qualities. First is arrogance, the certainty that one leader knows best, not for himself or his nation but for his current enemy's nation. Another culture with another history. That is serious arrogance. Second is more arrogance. How can anyone say that one can remove one person for the betterment of others? Are we the End of History? It is like a science fiction nightmare where someone goes back in time to kill Hitler and is surprised when he returns home to find Eastern Europe still smouldering and the rest of the world speaking German because the leader who took Hitler's place in history decided not to fight a two front war.

Real assassins know the truth: Assassination is the result of symbolism, hatred and, sometimes, money. There's not a lick of advancement in it.