Alternet asks: Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?
The headline pretty much speaks for itself; the article is amusing if you believe that special pleading is funny, as most skeptical rhetoricians do. Plus, the author claims "I'm certainly not a conspiracy theorist", while immediately writing "months ago, I felt that Paul Wellstone's life was in danger". I don't make this stuff up, folks; that's what he wrote.
If the convenience for his enemies of the death of Paul Wellstone in a small plane in bad weather is enough to make us start thinking about murder, what are we to make of the deaths of Aaliyah, Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the Big Bopper, much of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ritchie Valens, or Randy Rhoads? My own personal take is, when I'm running for President in a few years, they ain't gonna get me up in no small plane.
William of Ockham proposed a famous logical theoreom which instructs the logician to avoid the unnecessary multiplication of entities; i.e., to choose the simplest theory from among those that explain the premise. Ample evidence demonstrates that small planes carrying no one that anyone would want to kill are prone to crash, due to weather, pilot error, overloading, mechanical failure, and all the other sins that CAP is heir to. In the absence of other convincing evidence, that's enough to explain the crash of a small plane carrying someone whose death would benefit others.
Posted by Greg at October 28, 2002 3:51 PM