The World's Favorite Conspiracy Theory

Since it's timely to do so, I've been thinking a little about the assassination of JFK. (Oh no! thinks the alert reader and promptly closes this web page.) I guess there are three basic viewpoints on this event:

1) A lot of people assume Lee Harvey Oswald did it alone, heck stranger things have happened. Ho hum, what's on TV tonight?
2) A lot of people assume there was some kind of complex conspiracy, we'll never know the truth about it any more than we'll know what was in Nixon's blank spots, whether Reagan remembered those meetings, if Bush was "out of the loop", or whatever. Ho hum, what's on TV tonight?
3) Then there's conspiracy nuts.

It's not exactly clear where the division between category 2 and category 3 lies. In my brief review of the current "literature" I see that one fellow claims he can prove that the Zapruder film was a very clever fake. As a former Super-8 afficionado, I find this credible. 8mm movie film (super or otherwise) is incredibly lousy and faking it would probably be well within the capabilities of government agencies; but why bother?

More disturbingly, Newsweek (usually the Democrat's answer to TIME) has an article calling for the CIA to finally disclose what it knows (and hasn't already shredded) about Lee Harvey Oswald. Fascinatingly, this is written by Gerald Posner, author of "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK" (which claims to definitively settle the matter). Indeed, the entire article is disingenuous. Posner claims that "the massive document release of the past decade reinforces the growing concensus that Oswald alone killed the president". A more accurate statement may have been: "following the massive document release ... many, including this writer, have concluded that..."

I am not aware of any such concensus, or even of anyone having changed their minds following any massive release of documents.

But what set me off was an article in the local free newspaper written by someone claiming to have once been a staunch conspiracy theorist who was converted along with his even more conspiracy-befuddled friends when he read "Oswald" by Norman Mailer. Aside from having gotten the title of the book wrong, he seems to have been convinced by a book that is not trying to do any such convincing. This seems like another highly suspect piece of persuasive writing. Mailer, as best I can judge without having read his book, has pieced together the life of Oswald. It's a character study.

The best face you can put on the evidence available is, as far as I can see, this:

Lee Harvey Oswald may have shot at the president, but it is highly unlikely he hit him. The evidence that Oswald actually took the rifle to the Book Depository that day is utterly implausible, so at minimum he moved it there earlier or had an accomplice.

It is highly likely that at least one other person may have shot the president, or at the president. It is highly likely that the fatal shot was fired by someone other than Oswald (from somewhere other than the Book Depository).

More shots were fired than are admitted by the Warren Commission. Probably far more.

It is highly unlikely that Oswald fired the fatal shot, since he fired from the wrong direction.

When it became obvious that some of the perpetrators had, most likely, escaped cleanly, the FBI arranged the evidence it had into a neat, tidy package. It would probably have stood up fine in most courthouses of the day, but falls apart under scrutiny. As anyone with a passing familiarity with the FBI under Hoover (and even perhaps now) would know, this was standard operating practice for the FBI, why change it for a presidential assassination?

Probably the favorite claim of conspiracy nuts is that the number of key witnesses to die of unnatural causes within ten years of the assassination is so large as to exceed any reasonable probability. Having looked at this list, I have a simple explanation: a huge number of the people who died were connected to the mafia. Remove them and the list seems much more reasonable. Now, for an explanation of why so many of the key witnesses to the assassination were mob-connected, I can only refer you to James Ellroy's excellent work of fiction, "American Tabloid". (As distinct from Posner's "non-fiction".)

My favorite dismissal of conspiracy theories goes like this: "Surely if there were some vast conspiracy, someone would have come forward by now and blown the lid on it." Of course, this is at best stupid and at worst disingenuous. So many people have come forward to blow lids on it that it's impossible to tell whom to believe. The problem isn't a lack of testimony, the problem is sorting signal from noise.

When I was a child, parents (including my mother) still told their children to eat carrots because carrots were scientifically proven to be good for one's eyes. In fact, no such scientific proof exists; it was the result of a disinformation campaign by the English during WWII to cover up the fact that their night fighters had radar (they claimed their pilots were eating carrots to improve their night vision).

Similarly, it appears that the "alien landing" at Roswell was a simple hoax perpetrated by the US Air Force to cover up the crash of a secret experimental aircraft. Of course, maybe it's possible that we've been reaping benefits from studying alien technology ever since (just look at our magnificent Space Shuttle!) and were it not for this the superior Soviet system would have "buried us" with its 200lb vacuum cleaners, etc.. Somehow, I think not.

So I guess I fall somewhere in category 2 (although some adherents of category 1 make no distinction between categories 2 and 3 -- you either believe in Oswald's magic bullet -- two magic bullets if you're Posner -- or you're a nut). To quote Southpark: "dumb dumb dumb".

What is copyright, exactly?

For reasons I may get into one day I recently downloaded an electronic text version of the complete works of William Shakespeare. (For the record, I obtained it from the gutenberg project -- www.gutenberg.net.) Anyway there's something darn peculiar about this particular piece of electronic text: it has a copyright notice (unlike most texts from Project Gutenberg).

Now, let's suppose that I use this text to publish my own edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare... am I in breach of copyright? Perhaps the creators of this text file have, like publishers of tables of logarithms in the past and of maps today, inserted errors in their text so that people selling copies can be detected and sued. But in this case, the only thing copied that was not in the public domain will have been the ERROR (whereas the implication of finding a copied error in a table of logarithms or a map is that the ACCURATE data has also been stolen).

It seems to me that technology creates opportunities for people to make money from intellectual property in novel ways (e.g. the recording industry), and that it is reasonable for governments to make and enforce laws for this to be conducted in a reasonable way. However, when technology destroys the basic underlying rationale for an industry (e.g. it is more convenient to make your own CDs now than to buy them) it behooves government to get out of the way rather than to create legal houses of cards.

Consider the film industry. Disney made Snow White a long time ago. 1939? I don't remember exactly. It came out the same year that Gone With The Wind and Citizen Kane came out, I remember that.

If it were a book, Disney's copyright would have expired, or at least it would be likely to expire sometime soon, and we could expect to see cheap copies of it coming out (including free electronic versions from Project Gutenberg) and of people making film versions without needing to obtain the author's estate's permission. This is the way copyright works and is intended to work: it provides a limited monopoly on created material to encourage its creation BUT it makes it free eventually because information should be free.

But, Snow White is a film, and so: (a) all the prints of Snow White in circulation were owned by Disney. They could never be legally copied or purchased, only "rented". (b) Disney has "remastered" the film, resetting its copyright clock (this is the main reason behind remastering stuff, as far as I can see; any thoughts of improving audio quality, or whatever, are purely secondary). In short, if the film industry were to remain theatre-centric there's no reason we could expect Snow White to ever enter the public domain.

But, the film industry is changing. Disney sells DVDs now. Maybe even DVDs of Snow White. Despite the region restriction system on DVDs (which should simply be illegal in my opinion) and MPEG-2 encryption, it's possible to "rip" DVDs to hard disk with a typical home computer in about 30% of the DVD's total content duration. From there it's a very simple process to convert the DVD more-or-less losslessly into MPEG-4 (so it takes up 1/4 the disk space) and burn DVD movies onto CDs. You can do this now (which is theoretically illegal) or when the copyright expires (which, if the film industry has its way, will be never).

It really doesn't matter. Let's suppose that we form a DVD club and pool all the DVDs we own. As long as only one of us is playing a given DVD at a time, we should be fine. Since a typical household might own 100 DVDs and have 0.25 of a DVD playing at any given time (do you watch DVDs more than 6h/day?), there's pretty much nothing the industry can do except raise the price of DVDs in some kind of death spiral.

In a few years, people will be recording movies and live concerts using the cameras built into their phones anyway (with CCDs offering resolution equivalent or superior to HDTV) -- and a fairly simple program will remove any perspective distortion (and shake) prior to distribution from web sites outside the influence of the RIAA; nth generation TiVos will rip TV shows to hard disk and automatically clip commercials from them (sometimes they'll be wrong and human intervention will be required -- so, at most one person will have to watch the ads); and for that matter electronic copies of books and comics will finally start to appear as digitally scanning paper documents gets more automated.

Lying Begins at Home

I've just finished reading Al Franken's "Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them". I read this book after considerable internal debate. I know I pretty much agree with Franken's point of view, since I've read snippets of "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot", and I really don't see the point of reading books that preach to the choir. In fact, I've seriously considered reading either Anne Coulter or Bill O'Reilly on the basis that one should "know one's enemy", but both of them just make me feel angry.

In general, it seems to me that the media treat Al Franken as being the "liberal equivalent" of Anne Coulter (a woman who claims all liberals are traitors to the USA, while conveniently forgetting that Ronald Reagan broke his oath of office and then perjured himself about it -- or was simply unfit for office -- and all in the interests of Hondurans and Nicaraguans having the right to work for $0.10/h in sweatshops). Aside from technical differences -- e.g. Al Franken is funny; Anne Coulter isn't -- I really don't think they're similar at all. The real difference is that Al Franken is actually quite "fair and balanced" -- he is reasonably well-informed (with a definitely liberal viewpoint) and has a grip on reality -- while Anne Coulter is either a bald-faced liar or completely nuts. Or both.

So where are the liberal liars? Or if liberal liars are less common or less popular, why is this so?

I have a theory!

The really nutty right wingers in the US seem mainly to be a peculiar form of Christian who thinks that Jesus Christ was in favor of tax cuts for the rich, upholding the establishment, and that anyone they consider socially undesirable should be locked up in overcrowded prisons. In other words, people whose core beliefs involve willful ignorance or self-deception. To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, part of the popularity of the Bible stems from its inconsistencies: it's possible to read into the Bible almost any set of prejudices. For example, it's easy to find excuses for sexism and racism and slavery and exploiting animals in the Bible (and many have). But there's really no way to read tax breaks for the rich into the teachings of Jesus. Jesus doesn't say "That thing about a rich man getting into heaven and a camel getting through the eye of the needle, well I was exaggerating." The only way to be a right wing Christian is to be (a) utterly ignorant of the Bible, or (b) self-deceptive. Or both.

It's just a theory.