Tuesday, July 21, 2020

HBO's John Oliver Blows It Conflating JFK Assassination With Kooky COVID Conspiracies

Image result for John OliverBrane Space: James K. Lambert- Another WC Toady and Tool - Tries ...
John Oliver- left- analogized John Hinckley's  1981 attempted assassination of Reagan with the 1963 Kennedy assassination on his show 'Last Week Tonight'.  Alex Jones (center) is the epitome of the low grade morons who create conspiracy codswallop- like his Sandy Hook false flag bunkum. Meanwhile, Mark Lane (left)  has all the attributes of a professional assassination researcher, see e.g.http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/05/rip-mark-lane-one-of-earliest-jfk.html

"How do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories too?" - Matt Ridley in 'Maybe We're All Conspiracy Theorists'The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10-11, 2011

"Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: 'Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room, plotting things?' For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?"-

Michael Parenti in 'The Dirty Truths', p. 174


John Oliver, usually a bright guy, fell into the usual doo-doo trap of conflating unrelated conspiracy phenomena on his July 19th edition of 'Last Week Tonight'. What did he do?   In a whole segment headed 'Conspiracy Theories'- which included the cockeyed ideations about Covid -19 such as spun by  Judy Mikovits in her mockumentary 'Plandemic'-  he included the JFK assassination.   He cited it under the error of what he called "proportionality bias" or the erroneous belief that "big events must have big causes or actors".  

Hence,  Covid 19 has been rendered a huge event (by the media) because  Bill Gates wants to use it as an excuse to mount a vaccination scheme to inject microchips into an unsuspecting population to control them.  By the same token, "the JFK assassination caused such havoc and global shock that people could not believe one lone gunman did it" - so had to confect a much grander conspiracy.   

 Prompted by this misconstrued meme he goes on to compare the Kennedy assassination to the John Hinckley -attempted 1981 assassination of Ronald Reagan.  He plays a clip from a Barnard College "academic psychologist" named Rob Brotherton,  author of the book 'Suspicious Minds' e.g.

 who says:

  "The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was a similar event in all regards except the president survived.  It was a smaller event in terms of its outcome so therefore we're satisfied with smaller expectations.  And so there have been almost no conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan either then or subsequently."

Of course there were no conspiracy theories  after Hinckley's attempt on Reagan. Why would there be?  It's a 'chalk and cheese' difference  which Brotherton would know if he'd done the least bit of serious research into the JFK assassination, instead of making facile assumptions. First, the  two events are not the same in any respect, contrary to Brotherton's bollocks.  In the Reagan attempt it was one lone punk trying to fire a handgun at his target.  In the Kennedy assassination three teams of snipers had taken positions in Deaely Plaza for a triangulated crossfire to take him out.   The chances of success were  essentially 100 percent.

Sketch of Dealey Plaza and 3 of the 6  shots  fired at JFK (from Robert Grodin's 'Killing of a President')

The above  sketch shows the trajectories of 3 of the 6 shots fired at JFK.  Another reason comparing this hit to the attempted assassination of Reagan is imbecilic. Again, just because a person is a professor doesn't mean he can't also be an imbecile.  Certainly in matters of deep politics which requires vastly more familiarity than 'shoot from the hip' takes from dime store psychology.

Let's also note the rifles which fired that day in Dallas featured bullets with full metal jackets.  According to one 2001 echo correlation analysis (by D.B. Thomas) published in the journal Science and Justice (Vol. 41, p. 21), no fewer than 6 rounds had been fired at JFK including the fatal head shot that blew his brains backwards and which exposed the back of his skull -  missing on a Parkland table:

This photo appeared in the David Lifton book, 'Best Evidence', and was supported by Parkland surgeon Charles Crenshaw who attended to Kennedy's wounds.  See the Preface of  his book 'Conspiracy of Silence', a pdf version of which is given below.  

http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Conspiracy_Of_Silence.pdf

Excerpt from Preface:

'Through the years, there have been a thousand instances when I have wanted to shout to the world that the wounds to Kennedy's head and throat that I examined were caused by bullets that struck him from the front, not the back, as the public has been led to believe. Instinctively, I have reached for the telephone many times to call a television station to set the, story straight when I heard someone confidently claim that Oswald was the lone gunman from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book De­pository, only to restrain myself-until now."

So no, with the high powered weapons arrayed against JFK he never had a chance.  With  the lone handgun pointed at Reagan, at least he did.  But I doubt either Brotherton or Oliver ever read a page of Lifton's book, or Dr. Crenshaw's. Why would they if they consider it on a par or spectrum with the piffle churned out by QAnon or the batshit crazy Covid quacks and deniers like Judy Mikovits?

Further, let's note the difference in enemies. Reagan was a hero of the military -industrial complex (MIC) as he proposed to spend trillions for new weaponry.  He did and by the end of his 8-year reign had run up a $2.7 trillion deficit. JFK was regarded as a traitor by the MIC  especially given his plans to pull out of Vietnam by calendar year 1965 under National Security Memorandum 263.

Add to that  his earlier rejection of Gen. Curtis Lemay's demand to bomb and invade Cuba during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when Lemay compared him to Neville Chamberlain.  As per the source article in The Baltimore Sun ('Bomb Cuba! Lemay Urged JFK',   based on the declassified tapes, where we read:


"Blasting Kennedy's cautious approach, the Air Force Chief, Gen. Curtis LeMay, told the President at a White House meeting on Oct. 19, 1962, ‘This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich…"

Kennedy also did something Reagan would never have done, i.e. to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev (in August, 1963)  which prohibited even anti-missile systems.  The Right wing and the military - national security complex went bonkers.   Finally, the coup de grace had to be JFK's effort at a secret rapprochement with Fidel Castro in the spring of 1963.  Key to this was ABC reporter Lisa Howard:
Lisa Howard III.JPG
Who had  offered herself as an intermediary for the first bilateral talks between U.S. and Cuban officials in April, 1963.  (This was soon after doing a fairly sympathetic TV special with Castro earlier in the month. )   Further, Ms. Howard offered her 5th Avenue New York apartment as a venue for meeting with the Cuban ambassador to the UN.  This was already accepted as a report by the UK Guardian notes, e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/nov/26/cuba.julianborger

Wherein we learn:

"The administration gave a nod to Ms Howard, who set up a chance meeting between Mr Attwood and the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, at a cocktail party in her Park Avenue apartment.

The apartment then became a communications centre between Mr Attwood and the Castro regime. Castro's aide, Dr Rene Vallejo, called at pre-arranged times to talk to Mr Attwood, and in the autumn of 1963 suggested that Mr Attwood fly to Mexico from where he would be picked up by a plane sent by Castro."


Does anyone believe Reagan would have allowed anything analogous? Say secret meets with Libya's Muammar Ghaddafi? Give me a break. Yet Brotherton is dumb enough to believe the attempted hit on Reagan and the JFK assassination are "similar in all regards" without remotely processing why JFK's enemies were ten orders of magnitude more formidable than the lovesick little loser who tried to kill Ronnie Raygun.  And, of course, given all this, no one would have expected to see thousands of 'WANTED for Treason' posters, e.g.


As JFK faced in Big D the day he was killed.

But John Oliver is so mesmerized by Brotherton's balderdash, i.e. that the two events are similar except in one there was failure, that he responds: 

"Exactly! That kind of makes sense. So one man suddenly changing the world is inconceivable.  But one man failing miserably is not the least surprising."

But again, "one man" didn't change the world.  A coalition of conspirators did, including CIA  assets who had a bundle of reasons (including the firing of Allen Dulles).  For the extensive backstory read:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/ike-jfk-also-hostage-to-national.html

 As I note, what most infuriated the CIA was Kennedy's willingness - after the Bay of Pigs debacle -  to exclude them from critical roles, assignments as well as reorganizing the agency, e.g. 

"Kennedy went further, creating a Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible to him, and soon mandating all overflights of Cuba be done by the Strategic Air Command, not the CIA. He also defined a list of directives on what the CIA could and could not, do. By the end of 1961, JFK's 'Special Group' had no less than 17 recommendations for the "reorganization and redirection of the CIA"."

Oliver's lack of preparation for his 5 minute blitz spot with Brotherton discloses a sad unwillingness to plow just a little into the background of the assassination, including the existence of Oswald's intel  (e.g. 201) files and connections.  Hence,  his arguing Hinckley  was  just "another lone gunman" but in an unsuccessful attempt, while Oswald (coincidentally)  happened to be successful.  Except one minor problem: Oswald never killed JFK.  No way in hell - not with the pathetic excuse for a WWII edition Italian carbine (Mannlicher-Carcano)  he was purportedly using, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-fhe-jfk.html

John Oliver's egregious assumptions  to do with 'proportionality bias' applying to the JFK hit include not only this conflation but trying to put Oswald into the same 'lone nut' mold as Hinckley.  (Who had fantasies of offing Reagan to please his imagined paramour, actress Jodie Foster)  In this way, Oliver also succumbed to what I call  the "A useless nobody kills big shot in random world" meme.  This trope is not new but has been peddled in various forms for nearly 55 years now.  For example, mathematician John Allan Paulos fell for it when he wrote in his book Irreligion,(p. 6):

"Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill-suited for the job of Giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators."

But again, in this (JFK)  case there were  'significant perpetrators'  - but not Oswald.  Further we now have all the files available (which we didn't in 1964-65 when the Warren Commission Report came out), to at least know the Kennedy assassination was based on a coherent conspiracy - and also that Lee Oswald was not part of it, e.g.

A Hard Fact: All Necessary JFK Files HAVE Been Rel...

 Problem is the mainstream media was muzzled on presenting the details. (Likely on account of the CIA's 'Operation Mockingbird nexus). As author Michael Parenti opens eyes in his book, The Dirty Truths, Lee Oswald was no John Hinckley:

Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a lone drifter but directly linked to the U.S. intelligence community. All of his IQ tests show that he was above average in intelligence and a quick learner. At the age of eighteen in the U.S. Marines he had secret security clearance and was working at Marine Air Control in Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, a top secret location from which the CIA launched U2 flights and performed other kinds of covert operations in China. The next year he was assigned to El Toro Air Station in California with security clearance to work radar. “

Parenti 's claims of an intelligence connection all emerged in John Newman's book, Oswald and the CIA - which I will bet neither John Paulos or John Oliver ever read. Though they feel themselves qualified to speak or write of Oswald:  a) being involved in the first place (other than a patsy) , and b) as a "nobody".   Indeed, examination of Oswald's CI/SIG file showed he had access to:

The locations of all bases on the west coast, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, strength of all squadrons, the number and type of aircraft in each, names of commanding officers, and authentic codes of entering and exiting all ADIZ radar ranges.”

If then Oswald was as lame as claimed by the likes of Paulos, Oliver  and also  CBS anchor Eric Sevareid  in a special 55 years ago, i.e.

"Who could believe power and majesty can be wiped out in an instant by a skinny, weak-chinned little character".

Then he'd not have been entrusted with the critical material and information noted above.  Here, of course, Sevareid can perhaps be excused for his unprofessional belittling of Oswald's import because the JFK Records Act was still some 25 years away when Sevareid made that remark. But the  two Johns -- Oliver and Paulos -  ought to have known better and at least should have done some minimal serious research before either writing Oswald off as a nobody, or comparing him to the loser John Hinckley or worse, imputing the assassination to him at all. 

Lee Oswald then was no kook but a bona fide intel operative. Most researchers who've delved into this in much more depth than superficial 'buffs' come away with the conviction Oswald was set up as part of ZR/Rifle. A classic decoy.  However,  with the plot now turned against Kennedy. Oswald was likely used as the dupe or decoy so the actual perps (likely Cuban exiles, and trained assassins - from the Army's Ft. Benning Assassin school) could escape .   We also know these assigned mechanics would have used the CIA Assassinations Handbook, available since Operation PBSuccess in 1954, see e.g.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

As noted in
Document 1:

"The idea of forming assassination teams ('K' groups) apparently originated with Castillo Arenas in 1952.  Adopting Castillo Arenas' concept the [  ] chief routinely included two assassination specialists in his training plans.  CIA training for sabotage teams in early 1954 also included creating a 'K' group trained to perform assassinations."

There is no doubt such a 'K' group was set to target Castro under ZR/Rifle (in 1962), but could easily be redirected to target Kennedy in late 1963.  The proof in the pudding was the letter ‘D’ – on the cover sheet of Oswald’s 201 file – indicating a  CIA Staff D  SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994): 

In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle.

When ZR/Rifle was turned from targeting Castro to JFK- probably in late 1962 or mid 1963, it was all over except for the triangulation of gunfire that took the 35th president out.  Far from being a case of 'Oh the JFK conspiracy theorists just couldn't handle a nobody taking out Kennedy' - it was instead a case of  'My God! What have we come to as a nation when a sitting president can be dispatched in a veritable coup d'etat?'  The latter was based on intelligent, energized researchers having the guts and will to dig deep into those earlier assassination templates and files. As opposed to taking the easy way out,  say by erroneously invoking a "proportionality bias" like John Oliver did.  

As Michael Parenti aptly put it (op. cit., p. 156):

“To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call into question the state security system and the entire politico-economic order it protects. This is why for over thirty years the corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers."

On the face of it, and in hindsight, Oliver would have done better in his main story on CTs to leave the JFK assassination totally out of his examples, and focus instead on the real nutso Covid crap like 'Plandemic'  etc.  

 The end result was that, while trying to focus on how the Covid conspiracy ideations are wreaking havoc on our pandemic response, the interjection of the JFK assassination needlessly muddied the waters via a useless conflation of real and unreal conspiracies.

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-pre-assassination-framing-of-lee.html

And:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-pre-assassination-framing-of-lee_1807.html

And:





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