In our post-truth world, ignorance about Medicare has reached avalanche proportions. The greatest and most secure health care system in the world is now suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the form of babbling malcontents whose ignorance of Medicare is only matched by their outrage at it. Just go to Facebook or some other social media cesspool and you will see a lot of such heat, but precious little light. Medicare complainers, please heal yourselves and do a little, or preferably a lot, of research. Please!
Listen to this audio version of my Youtube video explaining the “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination, and WHY IT IS TRUE. Many conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination discredit themselves by disputing this thrice-confirmed theory first revealed by the Warren Commission in 1964.
In many ways, I regard this as my best recording of a chapter from “The American Yawp” yet. I have deleted nothing from the text edited by its editors, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright. I have added passages of my own where I think additions were needed to clarify what the original authors were trying to say. I have also added passages that connect the era of “The New Nation” with the trials and tensions America is experiencing today. For example I connect the majesty of America’s example in displaying the peaceful transition of power in the “revolution of 1800” which saw the Democratic-Republican Party receive power in 1800 from the Federalist Party without violence, and the more than 200 years of like examples to follow, with the disgrace of January 6, 2021, when President Donald Trump despoiled this legacy and broke that legacy so important not only to the United States but the whole world. These allusions between past and present are mine, and they are also true.
In the course that covers the first half of American History, the chapter on the Sectional Crisis of the Union, also sometimes called “The Impending Crisis,” leading to the American Civil War, is the penultimate such chapter. Next to the magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the crisis written by the great historian David Potter, that one audio narrated by Eric Martin, this chapter from the Open Educational Source textbook, “The American Yawp,” narrated by me, Dr. Rick Reiman, surveys the crisis well in capturing succinctly its fateful highlights. Listen, learn and enjoy. An historian myself I have added a few sentences of my own to improve, I firmly believe, on the chapter’s effort to make the Sectional Crisis more understandable.
History Speaks again! My audio narration of “The Great Depression,” chapter twenty-three from the blockbuster Open Resource textbook, The American Yawp, is now out. As an historian myself, I have enhanced this recording and narrative by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright with a few additions of my own, in keeping with the democratic principles of Open Educational Resources (OER), which this document is. My contributions to this document, freely distributed as all OER are, are dedicated to the preservation of democracy in these United States, a dedication here that is mine and mine alone, not to be confused with the purposes of the authors of this textbook. My hope and my contributions to this recording, including my edits and narration, represent a plea that all listeners vote for the Democratic nominee for President this November, to save our splendid Democracy. America… to thee, I sing.
Motive. It is the thing that all juries want but do not need, in our system of justice, to determine guilt or innocence, The Warren Commission did not hazard a hypothesis on the question of Oswald’s motive, seen singularly. But they did list a series of potential motives, seeded by his early life, and seen by his comments and those of others, that might have played a part in the formation of motive. Here I summarize this penultimate chapter in The Warren Report, and argue that there is much to praise and much to critique about the Commission’s handling of this critical phase of the life of the assassin.
A recent podcast episode by the excellent historians of the JFK assassination, Gerald Posner and Fred Litwin, prompted this podcast episode of mine. Given the need to speculate about so much that is important about the behavior of Oswald on November 21 (pre-assassination) and November 33 (post-assassination), is it possible to employ speculation as a technique for getting at the truth of why Oswald assassinated JFK, and what his post-assassination purposes might have been? Can informed speculation ever rise to the level of good evidence? And if so, what are the standards that such evidence must meet to achieve this state? Questions, questions, questions. I hope that Messers. Posner and/or Litwin respond to these questions, which are expanded upon in this episode of Audibly Speaking.
It’s core findings remain untouched. Its conclusions have stood the test of time. In this episode we see the tour de force that lies at the foundation of this seminal chapter in The Warren Report: Chapter Three. While subsequent research has expanded on the insights we gain from this chapter, which distilled the most important work of the Warren Commission, nothing has seriously contradicted its fundamental conclusion. What has deteriorated is not the Warren Report conclusions. No, those have stood the test of time. What has deteriorated is the American people’s ability to separate fact from fiction and to accept fact even when it is staring them in the face–as it is here. Will Americans continue to follow the carnival barkers of conspiracist thinking? Americans through “Their government,” as FDR would say, has, with the Warren Report, done them the favor of representing them well. Will the Americans people in the age of Trump accept the truth or follow the carnival barkers?
The Warren Commission’s Warren Report, at 888 pages, is a long slog. For those for whom it is too long, I begin here a series of summaries of each of the chapters in the Report. Each chapter exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of the Commission’s investigations. The Commission’s faults can be exaggerated and it accomplishments overlooked. This series opens with “Summary and Conclusions,” including one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial, sentence in the entire Warren Report.
We have an intermission episode in this series on the JFK assassination, with a personal view of the memories of the host on the assassination and why he was not taken in by conspiracy theories, in contrast to so many of his boomer cohorts along the way.
Today, Audibly Speaking reviews the magisterial book by famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We revisit the things that make it unique and utterly unanswerable as a riposte to the crazy conspiracy theories that still pollute the writings about the 35th US President.
This is your host, historian Rick Reiman. Go to my YouTube Channel, “JFK Demystified,” to view the first episode of a series of short videos called “On Background: Seeking the Hidden JFK Assassination.” The series is on the evidence that is hiding in plain sight, namely the factors that block our view from the evidence that makes the assassination a simple thing to understand. We look at the confusion regarding standards of evidence and proof, the con-men- conspiracy theories that lead people astray, the historical context that sends us back to the real world, and the accumulated evidence confirmed again and again by a series of investigation, each one clearing up the few original questions that arose from a legitimate concern that some of the evidence was hidden. It was, but it is hidden no more, a simple fact that speaks volumes about how history really works. Join me on YouTube for this series, “On Background.” See you there.
Continuing the series of JFK assassination episodes in this, the 60th year since the assassination, we look not at the thinking of the CIA, FBI, Warren Commission, Mob, Cuba, Russia or any of the other institutions that have been falsely imagined as being behind it, but inside the mind of the man who actually did it, and did it alone: Lee Harvey Oswald. It may not be the most popular theory, but facts don’t have to be popular. They only need to be true. This is an essay by myself, Rick Reiman, and narrated by myself, in response to the excellent insights of Burt Griffin, who wrote the new book, JFK, Oswald, Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth. A staff member on the Warren Commission (1963-1964). Griffin challenges historians to take the assassination seriously as history, something that is simple to understand once contextualized in history. Frankly, historians have not recognized their responsibility in this regard. Historians, when are you going to do your jobs, and take this intersection of the Cold War and cvil rights, which is what the assassination was, seriously as history? Until they do, this will continue to be a blot, a stain and a disgrace for the historical profession, as it has been for sixty years.
Here is my review of the blockbuster movie by Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer.” It is a tour de force for so many reasons, but gaps in Oppenheimer’s biography still remains, as I try to show in this review.
The Georgia Indictment against Donald J. Trump may be the first indictment against Trump to go to trial. It also may be the only trial of Trump to be televised, and televised live. Unabridged audio narrations of the indictment are numerous online, but to my knowledge, this unabridged recording by your host, Rick Reiman, which still clocks in at nearly 75 minutes, is the only one that limits the attention to the charges against Trump and the narrative of the acts of which he is accused in the indictment. For those with limited time, this may be the ideal narration to which to listen. Of course, all listeners are encouraged to read or listen (or both) to the complete indictment, widely available online through a simple Google search.
This is an addendum to my latest episode, “Trump in Trouble: The Mueller Memo on Michael Cohen, December 7, 2018.” Events are moving more rapidly in the investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to hijack to the 2016 US Presidential election. Discussion about impeachment is ramping up. “Hijacking History” looks today at the questions of indictment and impeachment of the president. Will either be on the table when the new Congress begins in January 2019?
While many spin the Special Council’s latest memorandum in the Russian collusion case in order to hide and occlude its meaning, I try here to highlight its potential multiplier effect on the number of charges of obstruction of justice facing the president.
In the wake of the American Midterm elections in November 2018, “Hijacking History” looks at how the elections are likely to be viewed in the light of history. In order to understand how, we have to see them in the context of the rules of the Constitutional process in America. What to outsiders may have seemed like a mixed verdict on the Trump administrations, looks very different when framed by the structure of America’s political system. Some knowledge of how America’s electoral system is structured give Democrats reason to hope in 2020, based on the outcome of the Midterm elections of 2018.
