What is scary enough to justify decades of FBI scrutiny?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Folk music.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's a familiar story. The FBI investigates -- and often persecutes -- a broad range of people for often capricious reasons (and sometimes no really identifiable reason).

And the idea that the experiences and expressions of people in general are worth collecting, archiving, publishing, and promoting, is an extremely radical one, anyway, don't you know.


edited because I missed a letter. Laptop withholds letters from me unless I beat it hard enough, and sometimes I don't catch the passive-aggressive creature at its shenanigans in time.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me I may be on file.

I used to have ideas and mail them to suitable authorities.

One was for a very small nuclear power plant that reuses old fuel for higher steam pressure and greater efficiency, swapping them back and forth annually until the rods are dead. (Woulda worked, too. Still would.)

One was for a hybrid booster, solid fuel and liquid oxidizer, much more stable than either a standard liquid-fuel/oxidizer or the slowly-exploding bombs they later strapped onto, e.g., the Challenger. (Ignored. I put it into a novel*, at least.)

But it was the query about using an air-breathing liquid-fuel booster for model rockets that got me a visit from the Suits.

I was eleven. It was 1971. NASA was already a closed shop when it came to putting stuff into orbit, and nobody wanted to believe me when I said I hadn't been told about it by someone working at Goddard. (It was nearby.)

(Am I the only person who thinks the team on CRIMINAL MINDS resembles nothing so much as seven James Bond villains?)

EDIT:

*I forgot to put this in. THE GOLIATH STONE, Larry Niven and Matthew Joseph Harrington (tadaa), Tor Books, hits the stands June 25, buy a copy and make all your friends do it too. I also put an airbreathing booster in. Didn't have a place for the reactor. I'll find something.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the heads-up. I'd have picked up a copy because of Niven's name, but reading your small-minded diatribes here has convinced me to save my money for less odious authors.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Just as well. There's some big words.