http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/belzer-misses-the-mark-with-hit-list/
McAdams starts by asking what if a high school student investigated whether Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or if Dick Cheney was involved in the 9/11 attacks, imagine the results if he relied on web-surfing. Well, every website has to be judged on its own merits, but if you ask me, in the aggregate, the web does offer substantial and convincing evidence about both those things. For some reason, McAdams thinks he has the right to assume that anyone who visits JFKFacts.org must dismiss those things. But, he is wrong: about the facts and about what he is entitled to assume. That ploy of his was totally devoid of substance.
Then, McAdams accuses Richard Belzar of relying on web-surfing (and note that McAdams, himself, has a very prominent web presence), but he admits that he (Belzar) also uses books for sources. But, he says that they are "fringe" books.
But, in this case, "fringe" simply means that they dispute JFK officialdom, and JFK officialdom is the thing being disputed. Therefore, that kind of smearing is completely vacuous. Fringe simply means that they don't spew statist pap, which is a good thing.
Then McAdams issues an unsubstantiated, unbacked opinion of his in which he distinguishes between "the vast majority of active conspiracy researchers" and people like Belzar. He implies that the former do not accept Belzar's claims. But is that true, and is John McAdams, who is an ardent lone-nutter, the best judge of that? Again: what McAdams said is totally devoid of substance. So far, he hasn't said anything the least bit impressive to a rational mind.
Next, McAdams says this:
He accepts, almost entirely at face value, the claims of Judyth Baker, James Files, James Fetzer, Dan Marvin, Chauncey Holt, Robert Morrow, Robert Morningstar and Tosh Plumlee.
Finally, McAdams got material about something. The names that are underlined were active links to his site in which he attacked those individuals. I am not going to go through them all, and I consider this an evasive tactic. The subject of Belzar's book is the mysterious deaths of individuals who were connected in some way to the JFK assassination. So, there is no basis to do a critique of Judyth Baker and think that it discredits Richard Belzar. Again: it is evasive.
As one might expect, given that list of witnesses and sources (and some with wider support among conspiracists, such as Jim Garrison and Richard Case Nagell), the book is a mish-mash of factoids.
The purpose of the above statement was to get in the word "factoid" which is a favorite word of McAdams. He thinks he scores a point every time he uses it. But, in fact, it said nothing; provided nothing; offered nothing. It was just empty smearing.
But worse than the factoids is the intellectual slovenliness of the entire enterprise – something that Belzer inherited from his predecessors Penn Jones (father of the “mysterious deaths” list) and Jim Marrs (who extended the list to 103 people in his 1989 book).
That is more smearing, totally devoid of content. Penn Jones was fabulous. Jim Marrs is magnificent. And putting Richard Belzar in the same company as them honors him.
The “mysterious deaths” are supposed to be from among “witnesses” in the case, but in the vast majority of cases it’s not at all clear that they “witnessed” anything important, and in none of them is it clear that the “witness” had any knowledge dangerous to any conspiracy. For example, Deslesseps Morrison, the mayor of New Orleans, is the subject of a short chapter. How is he connected? Well, Belzer explains, New Orleans was “the center-staging location for the assassination.”
Wait a second. That isn't right. Morrison wasn't the mayor at the time. He was appointed by Kennedy in 1961 to be the ambassador to the Organization of American States.
Morrison died in a plane crash with Hugh Ward, who was a private investigator and business partner of Guy Bannister, and Ward worked closely with David Ferrie. McAdams is either uninformed or he is just not being on the level.
The real criterion for being in the book seems to be that some conspiracy author, somewhere, considered you suspicious. Therefore, an absurdly large and diverse cast of characters gets a place. It includes mobsters, FBI people, CIA people, journalists, anti-Castro Cubans, Jack Ruby’s strippers, an orthopedic surgeon, etc.,
Some of those strippers reported seeing Oswald and Ruby together. One of the CIA people was Richard Case Nagell, and you know what he did and what happened to him. One of those journalists was Dorothy Kilgallen. The list doesn't sound so impressive when you leave the names out- which is why McAdams leaves them out.
From there, McAdams again says nothing of value- not even argumentative value. He doesn't even score any debate points. He said there couldn't have been a hit squad because then they would have needed a second hit squad to take out the first hit squad, and it would have gone on like that forever. That is very fanciful, John. It's also very childish.
Once we concede that this is implausible, we have to question the entire list. If we know that most of the people on the list must have died for reasons unrelated to any conspiracy, we begin to understand that no solid, objective criteria went into making it. Rather, it’s pretty much free association in the minds of conspiracy-minded researchers.
Forget the book’s ability to wow innocent neophytes. When it falls into the hands of people reasonably critical-minded (a mainstream media producer, journalist, textbook writer, or such) it tends to discredit conspiracy-oriented research.
No, John, the one who is engaging in free mental association is YOU. You failed to analyze even ONE of the suspicious deaths in an honest manner, having cited only one of the deceased by name, Deslesseps Morrison, and misrepresenting it. And you didn't say a word about the mathematical aspect of the whole thing- the science of probability- which was part of Belzar's thesis. Here are samples of mathematician Richard Charnin's analysis, which no doubt influenced Belzar:
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/jfk-witness-deaths-how-many-accidents-suicides-and-natural-deaths-were-homicides/
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/jfk-a-closer-look-at-the-convenient-deaths-of-warren-commission-witnesses/
The bottom line is that you did NOTHING but propagandize, John McAdams, just as you do concerning the Doorman issue. One doesn't have to be a tenured professor to realize that these are images of the same man. Let's see you apply your sophistry to this:
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