If an ordinary citizen lies to a federal agent, he commits a crime for which he can be prosecuted and punished by incarceration.
When the federal government lies to all of us, which it often does, there are no consequences at all, not even for the liar or the agency for which he works.
I read somewhere that the number of classified government documents is proliferating at such a rate now that there is an indexing and storage problem.
Is the double standard and the amount of secrecy reflective of a fair, just and democratic society?
Off-topic but important. Fortunately, we had JFK to prevent a planet killing nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. Now we are facing the same threat, and we have no one near the caliber of JFK to save the world. Instead we have a mentally incompetent outgoing president and an elderly man of questionable judgment waiting in the wings.
Trump was elected in part because he promised to end the war in Ukraine and ease the tensions with Russia. Did he lie to and mislead the American people just to get elected?
Here's a MUST-SEE interview with former weapons inspector Scott Ritter on how close we are to nuclear war right now:
Biden (or whoever is running the government) has already started a direct shooting war with Russia. Americans, not Ukrainians, are firing missiles at Russia. It's no longer a proxy war. What was JFK's most important advice which Biden (or whoever) is not heeding? Prof. Sachs quotes from JFK's most important speech:
I often wonder. If you hired an accountant to monitor you finances and discovered he was withholding large amounts of information on you revenue receipts and at the same time withholding all expenditures and then billing of increasing amounts for their services especially if you owned several corporations, how would you respond?
Jack Reid has made a definitive point related to the graph! I missed this for sure.
This graph is very frustrating to me, with the order of sources flip-flopping around. Once a source appears on the graph, its order should not change so you can easily see its relative magnitude over time. New sources should be layered on top of preexisting ones. Perhaps there is a data reason to do this layer flip-flopping, but if there is, incorporating it into this graph makes it harder to read, and including it should be questioned. I have never ever seen this type of graph do this.
The value of displaying these data in a ribbon chart is that the order flip flops over time based on the rank of documents handled by the various groups within the CIA. Note that Counterintelligence was in third or fourth place in the number of documents handled from 1960 until the end of the summer of 1963. Although interest in Oswald accelerated throughout the CIA in the fall of 1963, it was Counterintelligence that vaulted to the top spot in the number of documents handled, and by a fairly comfortable margin. The people working for James Angleton always had their collective eye on Oswald, but they were watching him like hawks in the weeks leading up to the assassination. There were around 10 different graphs of these data points that we considered - this was the only one capable of clearly revealing that important finding.
Thanks for your reply, Jack. I don’t want to get into a nitpicking debate. I value your work and this is not the most important takeaway of it. However, let me make one more comment, and then Leave the last word to you if you choose to make one.
If the rank of documents is purely quantitative, that should be obvious as the bands swell and shrink, and the trend over time is more intuitively obvious if you don’t have to use your finger to trace the line over time while also trying to differentiate between similar shades of a color in the legend. In other words, the variable that the switching of the bands’ ordering is supposed to represent should already be more easily available to the viewer without the switching.
A corollary note on a quantitative ranking: the differences between the numbers of documents per the top four groups is small. 84 unique docs over 3 years, and there’s only a 7 document spread between the top 4 groups. It’s hard to tell the magnitude of the differences between the ordinal rankings of the groups. Clearly there are differences at the end with the Support and, is it Foreign Intelligence?. But to the naked eye, the differences between the blue, black, and pink bands look marginal, particularly when they’re flip-flopped around.
Again, I’m not trying to nitpick, just trying to give feedback re the difficulties of gleaning takeaways from the graph, which is supposed to make trends in the data more obvious.
Your turn, if you choose to take it. Irregardless, Thanks for your work. Just trying to help.
One of the challenges with this dataset is that the range of the x-axis was ~1,400 days, so stacked bar charts invariably had spaghetti thin bars, what with ~30 unique documents that we can verify were handled (many documents were handled by more than one group within the CIA). I tried switching the axis to months, but a lot of the effect went away. If I got rid of days in which no documents were produced, again, the time effect disappeared. I built a regular line chart and a shaded line chart, but with that many CIA groups and so (comparatively) few documents, the visual result was a mess. For me, second place to the published graph was a series of mini graphs that showed each group separately. It was easy to read, but it didn't tell much of a story. In the end, we had to choose from a selection of imperfect graphs. I think this one made the most sense, but your points are all valid. My sense was that the published graph was the most sinister of all the versions we evaluated because it is difficult to imagine a non-nefarious reason for Counterintelligence to be so interested. And CI's interest was most evident on this graph.
Hopefully this is just the start of what we can do with Analytics to tease out more details around the assassination.
I said I wasn’t going to comment again, but hopefully this is just a conversation rather than nit-picking. I definitely hear what you’re saying about the quantitative mismatch in time vs # of docs. I didn’t mention it, but that was clear looking at the chart. I wonder if you tried breaking the data into different time frames corresponding to what Oswald was doing in his life. I also wonder if, given how few documents there are, whether graphing the data is the right option. Maybe just presenting the data is best. Lots of comments. (my last one would be a suggestion to resist the urge to be sinister. If the data doesn’t easily “speak for itself”, maybe this is not the right path). In any case, I wish I had the data to play with, to see if any of my ideas help, but I’m not in the class, so this is all just mind games from an interested, and hopefully supportive, ally.
If an ordinary citizen lies to a federal agent, he commits a crime for which he can be prosecuted and punished by incarceration.
When the federal government lies to all of us, which it often does, there are no consequences at all, not even for the liar or the agency for which he works.
I read somewhere that the number of classified government documents is proliferating at such a rate now that there is an indexing and storage problem.
Is the double standard and the amount of secrecy reflective of a fair, just and democratic society?
Or is it reflective of tyrannical government?
The American people need to wake up.
The JFK assassination is the red pill.
90 SECONDS FROM MIDNIGHT ON THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK!
Off-topic but important. Fortunately, we had JFK to prevent a planet killing nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. Now we are facing the same threat, and we have no one near the caliber of JFK to save the world. Instead we have a mentally incompetent outgoing president and an elderly man of questionable judgment waiting in the wings.
Trump was elected in part because he promised to end the war in Ukraine and ease the tensions with Russia. Did he lie to and mislead the American people just to get elected?
Here's a MUST-SEE interview with former weapons inspector Scott Ritter on how close we are to nuclear war right now:
https://www.youtube.com/live/o1mCWo9_hCU?si=AUoNJU7rinxxWFNZ
What if JFK had lived?
https://youtu.be/R2ihsXq0pv0?si=vIZg1zFizvm8Alrb
The generals are saying America is "ready" for a nuclear exchange with Russia. We'll only lose 100 million Americans.
We may not be around much longer to worry about getting the JFKA documents released.
Biden (or whoever is running the government) has already started a direct shooting war with Russia. Americans, not Ukrainians, are firing missiles at Russia. It's no longer a proxy war. What was JFK's most important advice which Biden (or whoever) is not heeding? Prof. Sachs quotes from JFK's most important speech:
https://youtu.be/YcMJFhym8X4?si=g4FthihLPxvLUbzx
I often wonder. If you hired an accountant to monitor you finances and discovered he was withholding large amounts of information on you revenue receipts and at the same time withholding all expenditures and then billing of increasing amounts for their services especially if you owned several corporations, how would you respond?
Jack Reid has made a definitive point related to the graph! I missed this for sure.
This graph is very frustrating to me, with the order of sources flip-flopping around. Once a source appears on the graph, its order should not change so you can easily see its relative magnitude over time. New sources should be layered on top of preexisting ones. Perhaps there is a data reason to do this layer flip-flopping, but if there is, incorporating it into this graph makes it harder to read, and including it should be questioned. I have never ever seen this type of graph do this.
The value of displaying these data in a ribbon chart is that the order flip flops over time based on the rank of documents handled by the various groups within the CIA. Note that Counterintelligence was in third or fourth place in the number of documents handled from 1960 until the end of the summer of 1963. Although interest in Oswald accelerated throughout the CIA in the fall of 1963, it was Counterintelligence that vaulted to the top spot in the number of documents handled, and by a fairly comfortable margin. The people working for James Angleton always had their collective eye on Oswald, but they were watching him like hawks in the weeks leading up to the assassination. There were around 10 different graphs of these data points that we considered - this was the only one capable of clearly revealing that important finding.
Superb work , all roads lead to JJ. And Helms! Leaves us lots to think about. Thanks
Thanks for your reply, Jack. I don’t want to get into a nitpicking debate. I value your work and this is not the most important takeaway of it. However, let me make one more comment, and then Leave the last word to you if you choose to make one.
If the rank of documents is purely quantitative, that should be obvious as the bands swell and shrink, and the trend over time is more intuitively obvious if you don’t have to use your finger to trace the line over time while also trying to differentiate between similar shades of a color in the legend. In other words, the variable that the switching of the bands’ ordering is supposed to represent should already be more easily available to the viewer without the switching.
A corollary note on a quantitative ranking: the differences between the numbers of documents per the top four groups is small. 84 unique docs over 3 years, and there’s only a 7 document spread between the top 4 groups. It’s hard to tell the magnitude of the differences between the ordinal rankings of the groups. Clearly there are differences at the end with the Support and, is it Foreign Intelligence?. But to the naked eye, the differences between the blue, black, and pink bands look marginal, particularly when they’re flip-flopped around.
Again, I’m not trying to nitpick, just trying to give feedback re the difficulties of gleaning takeaways from the graph, which is supposed to make trends in the data more obvious.
Your turn, if you choose to take it. Irregardless, Thanks for your work. Just trying to help.
One of the challenges with this dataset is that the range of the x-axis was ~1,400 days, so stacked bar charts invariably had spaghetti thin bars, what with ~30 unique documents that we can verify were handled (many documents were handled by more than one group within the CIA). I tried switching the axis to months, but a lot of the effect went away. If I got rid of days in which no documents were produced, again, the time effect disappeared. I built a regular line chart and a shaded line chart, but with that many CIA groups and so (comparatively) few documents, the visual result was a mess. For me, second place to the published graph was a series of mini graphs that showed each group separately. It was easy to read, but it didn't tell much of a story. In the end, we had to choose from a selection of imperfect graphs. I think this one made the most sense, but your points are all valid. My sense was that the published graph was the most sinister of all the versions we evaluated because it is difficult to imagine a non-nefarious reason for Counterintelligence to be so interested. And CI's interest was most evident on this graph.
Hopefully this is just the start of what we can do with Analytics to tease out more details around the assassination.
I said I wasn’t going to comment again, but hopefully this is just a conversation rather than nit-picking. I definitely hear what you’re saying about the quantitative mismatch in time vs # of docs. I didn’t mention it, but that was clear looking at the chart. I wonder if you tried breaking the data into different time frames corresponding to what Oswald was doing in his life. I also wonder if, given how few documents there are, whether graphing the data is the right option. Maybe just presenting the data is best. Lots of comments. (my last one would be a suggestion to resist the urge to be sinister. If the data doesn’t easily “speak for itself”, maybe this is not the right path). In any case, I wish I had the data to play with, to see if any of my ideas help, but I’m not in the class, so this is all just mind games from an interested, and hopefully supportive, ally.