On Mar 17, 4:16*am, mm wrote:
On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:29:41 -0700 (PDT), terry
wrote:
On Mar 16, 7:17*pm, mm wrote:
On Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:40:32 -0500, Dean Hoffman
wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/yeruhj7
* *The article is from Forbes. *The author is critical of the press
that swallowed the story hook, line, and sinker. * He says he found
several flaws that a newsman should've found.
As told in the article from Forbes, where it says he was afraid to
shift to neutral, afraid to turn off the car, if it's a hoax as it
sounds, how did the driver think he would get away with it? *
Maybe he didn't. I can easily imagine Toyota paying him 10, 20, 50G to
be a bogus complainer, to make all the other complainers seem more
likely to be bogus.
It seems somewhat paranoid every time some story that may have some
doubtful angles to suggest that thre is some as yet undiscovered plot?
Not to me. 50,000 is enough to buy an hour's time from a lot of
people, as well as any time he ends up spending with reporters later,
and any embarrassment he might feel by being called a hoaxster. *They
won't be able to charge or convict him of anything with what they have
now. *Even if they somehow find out about such a plot, and can prove
it, I think "filing a false police report" might be the most he is
guilty of. * Maybe he needs a new car now. *So they can throw in
40,000 more or whatever one of those costs.
At first this was for me just a mathematically derived possibility,
but on second thought it seems very possible. *After all, as some room
freshener's advertisement says, we don't just cover up bad odors (as
more advertising by Toyata would do), we make the odors disappear (as
discrediting complainers would do.) * For 10, 20, 50 thousand dollars
paid to Sikes, they can accomplish a lot more than a million dollars
of advertising would. *One such phony complaint can make the real
complaints seem a lot more likely to also be bogus. *
This reminds me of the Canuck letter, forged and planted by Nixon's
employees, to discredit Muskie, and lots of other things done by the
Plumbers for the benefit of Richard Nixon. * Or the break-in at Daniel
Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. *Most discussions of that fail to
mention the motive. *The motive was to find something humiliating
about Danel Ellsberg, that he told his psychiatrist, in order to
discredit Ellsberg, and in so doing, discrredit the Pentagon Papers,
which embarrassed the Nixon administration. *Even though nothing about
Elllsberg personally really makes the Pentangon Papers any less
embarrassing to Nixon and his administration. *But they still thought
it would help and in fact it probably would have. * All the things in
this paragraph really did happen.
How many more things like the things Nixon did have been done by
others, but not learned of because there was no investigation. * The
Canuck letter wasn't disclosed iirc until years later, after the
Watergate burglary and the investigation that came from that. * Had it
not been for Watergate, no one would have known about their role in
the Canuck letter or the other things that Nixon's Plumbers did.
Also, I can't recall details but I have a vague feeling there have
been other such attempts to discredit a manufacturer. *Maybe all my
recollections are from movies, but if movie writers can think of such
things (or copy them from true stories) , a Toyota exec can also. *It
also reminds me of inserting people who look like union picketers to
start violence on a union picket line, to discredit a union; or to
insert those who appear like violent radicals into left-wing groups,
to plan and execute violent acts, to discredit peaceful radicals.
IIRC, the FBI itself did that. * Again, I can't remember if those
things actually happened, if I saw them in movies, and if so, I
probably never knew if the movies were based on real life.- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
You're being way excessively paranoid. The downside of such a scheme
backfiring is so totally overwhelming as compared to the marginal
benefit that no one with any sense would consoider it for more than a
moment.
Clearly this guy has issues that existed long before the toyota
problems. When you put 300 million people in the mix some nut jobs
that own toyotas are going to crawl out of the works.
Most real cases of runaway cars can be traced to throttle confusion
when the post mortem can't find anything mechanically wrong. The high
percentage of elderly in these mystery runaway cases supports that.