Re: A really great essay by Keith Cowing

"Eric Chomko" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

> : Garden-variety politics. NASA is a federal agency. And it's a federal
agency
> : that, despite repeated and very public failures, managed to meet its
> : objective on time. Bunch of smartass nerds...
>
> : I'm totally serious about that, btw. Once NASA met JFK's goal then the
> : knives came out bigtime. If you're the director of whatever HUD was
called
> : back then and you get all these billions to "solve" a fundamentally
> : unsolvable problem like poverty, or if you're teh FBI director and
you've
> : recently failed utterly to prevent the assassination of three hugely
popular
> : and influential political leaders, then you damn sure don't want any of
your
>
> Everything made sense up until you mention J. Edgar Hoover being some kind
> of victim. Yes, be needed Conress to fund his bureau. But don't think for
> one minute he sweated the Kennedy assassinations.

Oh, he didn't mind a bit that the man was dead, but he was shitting his
pants full every half hour because JFK was *assassinated* by someone the FBI
had a folder on. Makes the agency look *very* bad, not that competence has
ever been their strong suit in the entire history of the FBI...

> And as far as Martin
> Luther King goes, some say he was complicit. I won't, but I will say that
> the botched investigations weren't totally based upon incompetence. Read
> Anthony Summers book "Official and Confidential" about Hoover and his
> bureau.

well, I read enough of Summers's posts on alt.conspiracy.jfk (my theory: the
butler did it in the conservatory with a candlestick) to not even bother.

One thing you need to undertsand about conspiracy theories: they never pass
the sniff test of common sense, and they almost always build up this
elaborate theory based on a very flawed initial premise, and kind of wing it
from there.

So I can tell you without reading a word of that book that Summers starts
off with some easily-refutable factual errors, and then blends that with
lots of rampant speculation and a complete lack of understanding about human
behaviour.

-- 
Terrell Miller
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"Very often, a 'free' feedstock will still lead to a very expensive system.
One that is quite likely noncompetitive"
- Don Lancaster