A Reverse Coverup

On this day:

43 BC
The Second Triumvirate alliance of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (“Octavian”, later “Caesar Augustus”), Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and Mark Antony is formed.
1939
Shelling of Mainila: The Soviet Army orchestrates the incident which is used to justify the start of the Winter War with Finland four days later.
1944
World War II: A German V-2 rocket hits a Woolworth’s shop on New Cross High Street, United Kingdom, killing 168 shoppers.
1944
World War II: Germany begins V-1 and V-2 attacks on Antwerp, Belgium.
1970
In Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1.5 inches (38.1 mm) of rain fall in a minute, the heaviest rainfall ever recorded.
1983
Brink’s-MAT robbery: In London, 6,800 gold bars worth nearly £26 million are stolen from the Brink’s-MAT vault at Heathrow Airport.

20112011 NATO attack in Pakistan: NATO forces in Afghanistan attack a Pakistani checkpost in a friendly fire incident, killing 24 soldiers and wounding 13 others.

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Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von mises

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Is there any reason to think the people writing the reports have nothing to hide?

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Gerrymandering is an effort to frustrate the general political will to the advantage of a political minority. It is quite simply an effort to advance a political subset by manipulation and deceit. The principles that created the Constitution, as so many of those ideas in the country's evolution, are put aside for personal advantage.
This is not just a cabal at work. People vote for these cabals.

There is no excuse for supporting such anti-democratic, aristocratic positions in the New World.

***

Many radical economic theories contain a very inhuman promise: the freedom to be unmotivated.

***

The Pirates tendered Santana.

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So...the plan is to make NYC housing 'more affordable'. Will other small areas in the nation benefit from 'more affordability'? What products qualify?

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A Reverse Coverup

Recent events have raised questions as to 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

On this day:

1120
The White Ship sinks in the English Channel, drowning William Adelin, son of Henry I of England.
1667
A deadly earthquake rocks Shemakha in the Caucasus, killing 80,000 people
1758
French and Indian War: British forces capture Fort Duquesne from French control. Fort Pitt is built nearby and it grows into modern Pittsburgh.
1839
A cyclone slams India with high winds and a 40 foot storm surge, destroying the port city of Coringa (which has never been completely rebuilt). The storm wave sweeps inland, taking with it 20,000 ships and thousands of people. An estimated 300,000 deaths result from the disaster.
1863
American Civil War: Battle of Missionary Ridge – At Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, Union forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant break the Siege of Chattanooga by routing Confederate troops under General Braxton Bragg.
1864
American Civil War: A group of Confederate operatives calling themselves the Confederate Army of Manhattan starts fires in more than 20 locations in an unsuccessful attempt to burn down New York City.
1876
Indian Wars: In retaliation for the American defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, United States Army troops sack Chief Dull Knife’s sleeping Cheyenne village at the headwaters of the Powder River.

1950
The Great Appalachian Storm of November 1950, otherwise known at the time as the “Storm of the Century”, strikes New England with hurricane force winds resulting in massive forest blow-downs and storm surge damage along the Northeast coast including New York City. This storm also brings blizzard conditions to the Appalachian Mountains and Ohio Valley, becoming one of the worst storms of all time. 353 people die in the event.
1970
In Japan, author Yukio Mishima and one compatriot commit ritualistic suicide after an unsuccessful coup attempt. 

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False opinions work more mischief than bad men.--Lord Acton

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Since joining Congress in 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene's net worth has increased from around $700,000 to as much as $25 million.
(Yahoo Finance)

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Aidan Toner-Rodgers, 27, was an MIT student who published a research paper on the impact of AI on the workplace. It was quoted everywhere and read in Congress.

It was made up. Completely fabricated.

He took advantage of a MIT culture where high levels of trust, integrity, and rigor are all assumed. That is, he took advantage of an optimistic, honorable environment where AI was already mistrusted.

Any resemblance to American social and political culture is probably coincidental.

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The Slenderman attacker is living in a group home. With other people.

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So, suppose you distort the market to make the unaffordable affordable. How is that different from making below-prime mortgages, prime, as was done twenty years ago, and triggered a disaster?

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Don't worry about anything. Turkeys are being pardoned.

***

Kennedy #2


An industry has arisen to continue the mythology. It will likely find the current suspicious times a fertile field.

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 criminal 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 ordinary and concerned people, volunteers working far afield. Some are the ubiquitous 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. Mamet himself thinks the film was edited. 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

I’ve never seen an orgy of hypocrisy quite as brazen as how the exact same media corporations and journalists who spent years demanding more Big Tech censorship turned *overnight* into free speech champions: because now it’s their friends being silenced rather than their enemies.--Greenwald

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Who has decided that these notions--affordability, housing--raised by a peripheral NYC socialist are going to be the basis for the next national election?

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Is it really true that Trump's efforts at peace should be dismissed because they are driven by his desire for a Nobel Prize?

***

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 or 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, 1963

On this day:

498
After the death of Anastasius II, Symmachus is elected Pope in the Lateran Palace, while Laurentius is elected Pope in Santa Maria Maggiore.
1718
Off the coast of North Carolina, British pirate Edward Teach (best known as “Blackbeard”) is killed in battle with a boarding party led by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard.
1942
World War II: Battle of Stalingrad – General Friedrich Paulus sends Adolf Hitler a telegram saying that the German 6th army is surrounded.
1963
In Dallas, Texas, US President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Texas Governor John B. Connally is seriously wounded. Suspect Lee Harvey Oswald is later captured and charged with the murder of both the President and police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald is shot two days later by Jack Ruby while in police custody.
1974The United Nations General Assembly grants the Palestine Liberation Organization observer status.
1990
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher withdraws from the Conservative Party leadership election, confirming the end of her premiership.

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“President Trump is the biggest con job in American history,” said Nancy Pelosi, the US speaker emerita, to reporters on Thursday while criticizing his anti-climate agenda. 

Actually, the Biden Regency is the biggest con job in American history by far, and its dishonesty allowed for the rise of Trump.

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The Sagas of Icelanders, backed by hard archaeological evidence at L’Anse aux Meadows, tell that Vikings journeyed from Scandinavia to Newfoundland via Greenland as early as 999 AD.

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"...the fact is that European leaders are corroding the right to free expression, and show every sign of sliding further down a slippery slope into illiberalism.

Europe and the United States have always had different free-speech cultures. In the postwar era, both confronted the question of how tolerant societies should treat intolerant factions. Much of Europe concluded that, although free speech is important, views that threaten democracy itself are different and can be criminalized; see laws in various European states against Nazi propaganda. In contrast, the American system protected expression as vile as neo-Nazis marching through a town of Holocaust survivors because, by First Amendment logic, fascist speech poses less of a danger than enabling the state itself to engage in viewpoint discrimination. Despite these differences, both Europe and America mostly expanded speech protections in the 20th century and pulled back from censorship, seeming to converge on liberal values by the time the Iron Curtain fell and the internet spread."--The Atlantic, believe it or not.

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November 22, 1963

The past and present merge:

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 '60s and '70s 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 an 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 the story 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 that 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 guise 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 society, toxic to the young, and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how it is 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 have 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 of 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.

A Reverse Coverup

Anti-NATO demonstrators set off smoke bombs and marched through the streets of Montreal with Palestinian flags.
According to the Montreal Gazette, the rioters set cars on fire and clashed with police.
Protesters also threw small explosive devices and metal items at officers. At one point, the group burned an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Their phone records would be interesting.

***

In 1984, the first year for which data is available, 35 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day,” according to NAEP. By 2023, that figure was down to 14 percent, and 31 percent of respondents said they never read for fun at all.

***

China is the world's largest producer of renewable energy, now constructing almost two-thirds of all large-scale wind and solar power, according to nonprofit Global Energy Monitor although the country still gets more than half its power from coal.

***

Six states — California, Washington, New York, Oregon, Massachusetts, and New Jersey — are poised to effectively eliminate the sale of new gas- and diesel-powered RVs starting January 1, 2025.

***

A Reverse Coverup

Recent events have raised questions about 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. 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

Swedish battery maker Northvolt filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S., delivering a blow to Europe’s electrification ambitions.

***

A British lawyer has died after a suspected methanol poisoning that is thought to have killed four others in Laos, south-east Asia.

Simone White, 28, from Orpington, south-east London, was among a number of people taken to hospital following the incident in the tourist town of Vang Vieng.
Vang Vieng is a small, riverside town in central Laos, about two hours north of the capital Vientiane.
It is a hub for backpackers travelling across south-east Asia. It's home to the Banana Pancake Trail - a popular backpacking route spanning Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

***

The number of used and refurbished smartphone shipments grew nearly 10 percent from 2022 to 2023, while the number of new smartphone shipments declined by over 3 percent, according to the market intelligence firm IDC. That adds up to the secondary market for phones being worth about $65 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow to nearly $110 billion by 2027.

***

COP29 report: the rich nations — the U.S., Australia and those from Europe — agreed to transfer $300 billion per year by 2035 to poor countries to help them fight climate change and transition to cleaner energy. Just imagine.

***

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.

November 22, 1963

 

Smollett's overturned conviction is probably legally correct but his stubbornness and arrogance are telling indicators of the nation's shamelessness.

***

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, showing meaningless and embarrassing symbolism is not limited to the U.S.

***

The media outrage over Biden's availability is strangely timed. There has really been no change over the last four years.

***

November 22, 1963

The past and present merge:

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-60s 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 '60s and '70s 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 were 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is an 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 of 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.

November 22, 1963

In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. Fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure.
According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks,

***

Black women of African descent were more likely to die of the medieval plague in London, academics at the Museum of London have found.

***

Pittsburgh officials are warning about increased coyote sightings in some city parks.

***

November 22, 1963

The past and present merge:

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-60s 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 '60s and '70s 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 an 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 of 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.

Kennedy #2

Biden has invoked one of the Cold War "war powers" acts to pass an Executive Order to coerce homes to use electric power for heat and appliances.

***

The Chinese-supported biolab in California has the look of a bioweapons research facility with TB, Ebola, HIV, and other charming lifeforms.

***

And everyone seems surprised with the rise of international populist tendencies--see Argentina and even Sweden.

***

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.

A Reverse Coverup

CNN did a segment encouraging the canceling of Thanksgiving. They interviewed an almost incoherent Indian lawyer complaining about the decline of the American Indian.

***

Realtors across the country are rethinking their jobs, and some are backpedaling from the profession, fearing that the heyday of their business is over.
A court verdict last month stands to radically alter the way real estate agents are paid for their work, and could result in far lower pay for the 1.6 million men and women who sell homes as their main job or as a side hustle.---wsj

***

Historically, 60% of children born in the large Pakistani community in northern England had parents who were first cousins. That has dropped to 47%.

Is the criticism of such marriages culturally intolerant?

***

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.

A Reverse Coverup

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.--Marx (Groucho)

Fearful of the challenge that a thriving Chinese private sector might pose to the Communist Party’s political hold on the country, President Xi is now reestablishing party discipline and increasing the role of China’s state enterprises.--Lachman

This is a neat little generality that seems to me to be completely meaningless but could provoke fun debate:

Fraction of all US wealth owned by Boomers & Gen-Xers when the average member of each was age 35:

Boomers, 1989 21%
GenX, 2008 8%

The average Millennial turns 35 in 2023. Right now they own 3%.

There will surely be political implications. (somewhere)

Definitions: Baby Boomer=born 1946-1964, Gen X=born 1965-1980, and Millennial=born 1981-1996.

According to a report by InfluenceMap, the UK-based think-tank, investment portfolios held by some of the world's largest asset managers, including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, “remain significantly misaligned” with climate-change goals set by world leaders in Paris in 2015.

The most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement was to keep the rise in global temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and aim for 1.5C. But InfluenceMap’s analysis of 50,000 investment funds found little exposure to companies across the oil and gas, automotive, electric power and coal industries that are deploying green technology to limit their impact on the environment.

These numbers are not new, but they bear repeating. One of the front-runners, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), touts proposals that seem to add up to roughly $49 trillion over the next decade. Another, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would spend more like $97.5 trillion. Warren would focus on programs like “Medicare for All,” free college and other new entitlements. Sanders would add to that a job guarantee program. Apparently, free stuff is expensive.
“The wealth of the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, is not gold bars hidden under his mattress. Rather it is that his 12 percent ownership stake in Amazon.com, a company that employs more than 600,000 people, creates a platform for many other businesses, and saves consumers a huge amount of money.” A significant wealth tax applied to these assets will have consequences for the workers who count on it for employment and more.
The bottom line is that, as much as vast swaths of Americans want what Warren and Sanders are offering, we still have no clue how they will pay for it.--deRugy

Someone with a mild infection--maybe even a virus--will be given amoxicillin or other first-line treatments, and only if that doesn’t work will they be given a second-line treatment, such as a carbapenem. But in emerging markets, many precious second-line medications are widely available and presumably used inappropriately. India makes every product, often with Chinese ingredients, and they are the cheapest products in the world. India is also incredibly poor, where sanitation is often lacking and where antibiotics are used as substitutes for better hygiene. While second-line antibiotics are not cheap compared with first-line treatments like Cipro or amoxicillin, patients can at least buy them when they or their dependents inevitably get sickened due to poor sanitation and first-line treatments do not work. Clinical failure may be due to resistance but just as often because of substandard production. But regardless, inappropriate use of second-line treatments occurs.
it’s possible to buy these products without even a prescription. Although the situation improved in 2018 an alarming number of establishments were still selling carbapenems, a critical second-line type of antibiotic.
Perhaps worse still is that many of the products are substandard in some way or other. In a few instances, 25 percent don’t work and at best 8 percent fail.


South Korea ranks second to last in terms of conscientiousness but also ranks first in the number of hours worked.  South Korea is not an anomaly.  Country-level reports of Big Five conscientiousness are unrelated to the number of hours worked.  The rank correlation between hours worked and conscientiousness across countries is negative, though statistically insignificant. I'm unsure if this is meaningful, especially with the soft metric of "conscientiousness." But there is a lot of scientific literature out there.

On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II made perhaps the most influential speech of the Middle Ages, giving rise to the Crusades by calling all Christians in Europe to war against Muslims in order to reclaim the Holy Land, with a cry of “Deus vult!” or “God wills it!”

                     A Reverse Coverup

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 last fall, 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

In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity.--Sowell


Saw some of "The Crown" last night. Very well done and the Royals never looked so good. I can always console myself with Andrew.
Also saw the beginning of the old "Thing from Outer Space," one of the best. It is said William Faulkner worked on it.
Chris made the best pumpkin pie I've ever had.

Over the most recent 15-year investment period from June 30, 2004, to June 30, 2019, roughly 90% of professional fund managers (89.83% for large-cap, 90.33% for mid-cap and 90.25% for small-cap) failed to outperform their benchmarks on a relative basis. 

Once Silicon Valley’s highest-flying darlings, companies from WeWork to Uber Technologies have collectively lost about $100 billion in value this year, prompting some startup executives to talk up profitability over growth. (wsj)

According to a new study from researchers at Princeton, Stanford, and UC-Davis, the children of recent immigrants are moving up the economic ladder in the USA today just like the children of European immigrants 100 years ago.

The American Farm Bureau Federation’s 34th annual survey of classic items found on the Thanksgiving Day dinner table indicates the average cost of this year’s feast for 10 is $48.91, or less than $5.00 per person. This is a 1-cent increase from last year’s average of $48.90.



 Compared to the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 in 1986 of $66.89 (in 2019 dollars), today’s classic turkey dinner is 26.9% cheaper at $48.91 this year.

On this day in 1922, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, British archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first souls to enter King Tutankhamen’s tomb in more than 3,000 years.

                          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 were 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 acquaintences 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

Indeed, much of modern history is a sad story of absurdities cloaked in power.--Will

Amazing Steeler game. Amazing being different from "good."

Pope Francis warned about the potential damage to society from technology such as nuclear power after meeting victims of the 2011 tsunami-caused meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. He seems to be wandering into difficult waters, without prompting.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey thinks that government restraints on speech would be a good idea. He wants “regulators” to “ensure a level playing field.” Does that mean limiting the dollars that Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can raise online? Does it require MSNBC and CNN to give equal time to conservative voices? Does it require Twitter to deactivate overly influential accounts? Limit their number of tweets concerning “issues?” How level must the field be, and who determines both the standard and when it has been reached? A primary reason why the Founders adopted the First Amendment was their recognition that we couldn’t trust government to decide what is “fair.”--Smith

The clock is ticking for Democratic presidential contenders hoping to make the sixth debate on Dec. 19. And a new survey of the Iowa caucuses by Quinnipiac University has given two candidates the final qualifying poll they need. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard got 3 percent support in the new poll, which qualified her for the November debate, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar earned 5 percent, putting her on the December stage. This means 10 candidates have now made the fifth debate and six have qualified for the sixth.

Quantifying the obvious: "This paper provides theory and evidence that worker effort has played an important role in the increase in income inequality in the United States between 1980 and 2016. The theory suggests that a worker needs to exert effort enough to pay the rental value of the physical and human capital, thus high effort and high pay for jobs operating expensive capital. With that as a foundation, we use data from the ACS surveys in 1980 and 2016 to estimate Mincer equations for six different education levels that explain wage incomes as a function of weekly hours worked and other worker features. One finding is a decline in annual income for high school graduates for all hours worked per week. We argue that the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs forces down wages of those with high school degrees who have precious few high-effort opportunities outside of manufacturing. Another finding is that incomes rose only for those with advanced degrees and with weekly hours in excess of 40. We attribute this to the natural talent needed to make a computer deliver exceptional value and to the relative ease with which long hours can be chosen when working over the Internet."

Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not. Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.--Tabarrok

On this day in 1950, the so-called “storm of the century” hit the eastern part of the United States, killing hundreds and causing millions of dollars in damages. Also known as the “Appalachian Storm,” it dumped record amounts of snow in parts of the Appalachian Mountains. An accompanying windstorm covered a far greater area. New York City recorded a 94 mile-per-hour wind gust. At Bear Mountain, just north of the city, a 140 mph gust was recorded. The winds throughout New England were of hurricane-like force. In addition, high tides and wind-driven surf battered the coastline. On the south edge of the storm, record low temperatures were recorded in Tennessee and North Carolina even without the wind chill. In Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, a temperature of 26 degrees below zero was recorded.

The storm was unique, however, because it featured not only extremely strong winds and heavy snow but both record high and low temperatures. In Pittsburgh, 30 inches of snow fell in a blinding snowstorm. Further north, Buffalo saw no snow but experienced 50 mile-per-hour winds and 50-degree temperatures. Paul Kocin, a Weather Channel expert, has said that this storm “had the greatest contrast of weather elements in probably any storm, including the 1993 March Superstorm.” The extreme weather was deemed responsible for the loss of 160 lives over several days.

                                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. 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.