Michael Hastings

Sooo………..

Aside from the horribleness of this development, is anyone analyzing whether what actually happened was definitely an accident?

I know it’s a bit melodramatic, and crazy accidents in which you go straight into a tree and the entire car explodes do actually happen from time to time, but it sure as hell seems to me worth looking into, given the fact that this is America in 2013.

“[That creative drive was challenged during his subsequent two years at Rice.] In my first three months there, I was banned from the school paper for a controversial editorial that they never published about permission to chew gum, … I described the principal in an unflattering way.” Micheal Hastings

farewell dear man

One of the better of us is gone. It is some comfort to know that we have such on our side.

“That stretch of Highland Avenue is notorious for its late-night crashes involving DUI drivers, though Tuesday at 4:25 a.m. would probably stick out as an unusual time for such a case.”

in Michael Hastings Probed the CIA Before Fatal Hollywood Crash.

That part of Highland is one of the routes out of Hollywood. It’s not hard to imagine someone partying in Hollywood, then finally heading home along that route.

I guess by now the only people who can speak truth to power without having their heads wind up on virtual spikes are jesters and relative outsiders.

I think the fact that the engine was torn off it’s mounts and thrown 60 some yards shows that the “professionals” in charge of this affair need to pull their horns in little…way too obvious bros…tone it down, the media can be kept in line with a dog whistle, no need to shout for all to hear.

@ Celsius 233 June 20, 2013

Oh that’s alright I collectively blame you too – and so do lots of other people. Yes about a generation ago at the same time as the American ruling class started to remove your economic security (and thus the basis of your freedoms) they started to remove or invalidate the legal framework of those freedoms. Both processes are well underway America still has the form of a liberal republic but it’s only in form.

What I find alarming is how far and how fast this cancer in the American body politic has spread.

There was a fine example of it here recently – with no less than three putative progressives arguing recently for the removal of one of the last (and most effective) defenses of civil liberty which is that somebody can only be convicted on the basis of evidence in a court of law or to put it simply a jury may NOT convict on the basis of any other information and that any attempt to introduce and consider information from outside the criminal proceedings is both a contempt of court and a miscarriage.

Given how far the social, intellectual, and ethical decay has advanced I wonder how long it will be before the modern day equivalents of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus make their appearance and form a triumvirate.

mfi

@ markfromireland June 21, 2013

“… wonder how long it will be before the modern day equivalents of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus make their appearance and form a triumvirate.”

Lets look. David Rockefeller, Koch Bros. Pete Peterson, Sheldon Adelson, Rupert Murdock, Richard Mellon Scaife, just off the top of the head, must be several others as well – Walton Fam. Oh! wait! … how many are needed to make one of those triumvirates? Are we there yet?

I see MFI is raising this canard once again without ever having answered my discussion of the realities of any legal system. Legal fictions are swell so long as reality does not give the absolute lie to the fiction raised.

MFI also insists on mischaracterizing my position. I would not dismantle the purely aspirational goal of deciding a case based on only the facts presented in the court room. I believe that all of the in court proceedings should support that endeavor. The reality, however, is that neither jurists or jurors arrive in court as a blank slate. Gag orders on public discussions of cases do little or nothing to assure that participants enter the court room in MFI’s blissful state of purity. What they do is assure that the only viewpoint on a case that enters the public consciousness is that which the State allows. I will not trade an uninformed public for the remote possibility of MFI’s blank slate court room. We provide for voir dire plus a number of other procedures to eliminate jurors whose prejudices (no matter how arrived at) make it impossible for them to actually hear and decide based on the evidence presented. That should be enough to protect the court room.

Having said that, I will now send tremors of discomfort through MFI by noting that the dismantling of the American legal structure has taken place largely through the insidious insistence on glorifying legal fictions narrowly conceived, narrowly argued and utterly divorced from the realities surrounding them and the acquiescence of the “progressive” legal community (and community at large) to this Talmudic debate over form totally removed from the underlying social and economic realities. The recent SCOTUS opinion, American Express Company v. Italian Colors Restaurant, is a good example although it does contain a rare, principled, dissent.

..I think the fact that the engine was torn off its mounts and thrown 60 some yards shows that the “professionals” in charge of this affair need to pull their horns in little…

According to eyewitnesses, his car was flying down Highland before he crashed.

… wonder how long it will be before the modern day equivalents of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus make their appearance and form a triumvirate.

IMO, it will become more formally recognized, and institutionalized by the end of this decade. Whoever wins in 2016 or 2020 is going to ask for, and get, what amount to dictatorial powers. Of course, they’ll say it’s only temporary. There’s a significant portion of the public that really, really wants fascism, and longs for a leader who will get this country out of its mess. They’re going to get one.

The engine weighs approximately 350 lbs, the attaching steel is about 5 inches^2 [not counting the transmission and other metal attachments] and has a tensile strength of approximately 120,000 psi. The force required to break this link is 600,000 lbs, or 1,714 g’s, now the engine is free but not moving.

Now to move the engine 60 yards, will assume an initial trajectory of 45 degrees to get max distance for minimum energy input which simplifies the formula to R=V^2/32, R= 180ft so Vo = the square root of 180*32…or 51mph after de-accelerating at 1714 g’s…only a fool would believe such a thing plausible. Only an explosion would produce that kind of energy to break, then throw an engine 60 yards.

@S Brennan – interesting physics, I’m just not qualified enough to evaluate it. It just seems plausible to this unschooled mind, that crashing into a tree at such high speed would be enough to catapult the engine. I’m a lot more interested in why he was so recklessly racing out of Hollywood.

@ alyosha
June 21, 2013

There’s a significant portion of the public that really, really wants fascism, and longs for a leader who will get this country out of its mess.

And There always has been – what people crave is security and the sense that there are others lower down in the pecking order than them. It’s even money which of those they crave more.

mfi

@ S Brennan June 21, 2013

will assume an initial trajectory of 45 degrees

A quibble (and it is no more than a quibble) is that 30° based on what I’ve seen of car bombs in Lebanon and Irak might be a more reasonable assumption.

mfi

Sbrennan, you clearly know nothing about engine and transmission mounts. These mounts rely on gravity to keep the engine in the car (i.e., rely on the fact that they’re cupped into pockets on the frame), they’re not designed to provide the hundreds of thousands of pounds of tensile strength you attribute to them. Typically they utilize low-grade grade 5 bolts of approximately 1/4″ to 1/2″ diameter to attach them to the frame, which have significantly lower tensile strength than you mention, as in on the order of 15,000 lb — and note that most of the force in this case would have been shear strength, which is about 60% of tensile strength. I have had broken engine mount bolts based on nothing more than the torque provided by a 225 ft/lb 4.0L Jeep engine operating through a transmission and transfer case. Compressed oatmeal, bah. At least the engine didn’t fall out (gravity, remember?), it just started clunking back and forth as I accelerated and decelerated.

In the car in question, the engine/transmission assembly weighs about 500 pounds, so yes, being thrown a significant distance away from the car is quite possible if the car slams into a tree at 60mph and the engine mount and transmission bolts would not have stopped them. Even the CV joints on the driveshafts would not stop the drivetrain from going AWOL, since ball-and-race CV joints are notoriously weak on extension.

Finally, regarding diesel burning, diesel fuel is similar to kerosene in consistency and in fact I’ve burned diesel fuel in kerosene lanterns during hurricanes and their aftermath back when I lived in hurricane country. So yes, it burns. What it doesn’t do is explode like gasoline, but if something happens to make it catch fire (such as, say, a white-hot catalytic converter touching a pool of diesel fuel), it will decidedly burn.

In short, nothing about the accident scene seems unusual given the time of day and the location (a notorious spot for that kind of thing happening). If the car had exploded during the day just after he had gotten in, I’d be thinking conspiracy. But at 4AM? At a spot *known* for this kind of thing happening? Nope. Sh*t happens, that’s all.

As for the fact that the best reporting is happening at places like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, that’s one reason why I continue my subscription to Rolling Stone Magazine, helping pay Matt Taibbi’s salary. I think the deal is that these magazines don’t consider themselves news magazines, they consider themselves truth magazines. Thus they don’t abide by the unwritten rules of “news”, such as “never say which point of view is true.” If interviewing members of the Flat Earth Society, the New York Times headline would read “Opinions of Shape of the Earth Differ” without ever, like, actually letting you know that the world is *round*. But what if you *want* to know whether the world is round or flat? With the NYT, you’d be SOL. With Vanity Fair, they’d laugh and say “the world is, of course, round” and tell you why we know that’s true. Because they’re not “news”, so don’t live by the rule of “never tell the reader who’s telling the truth” like “news” does. But truth is something that most people *want* to know, at least if it agrees with their preconceived prejudices (heh!). Hmm, a blog post in that last sentence all in itself…

-BT

markfromireland “a Sulla would be too blatant for the American ruling class to be comfortable with and that they’ll go for some form of commission/triumvir”

I’m skeptical, generally, of the “analytic power” of analogies to particular narrative sequences. The triumvirate wasn’t the preferred path of the Roman oligarchy, either; it was the invention of the politically and economically weak, but young, supremely clever and ambitious Caesar: a political kludge that created the misimpression that civil war was safely past, and the Senate was working, again, as a forum for a broadly-distributed oligarchy and a working governing body, while Caesar pursued his self-designed cursus honorum to supreme power.

It was the politics of assassination, practiced by the Optimates, culminating with Sulla and his bloodbath (that barely spared Caesar), which destroyed the Republic. That kind of political violence has not happened in the U.S., Al Gore notwithstanding, though it is hard to look at Michael Hastings going up in a Hollywood-scripted ball-of-fire and not feel profoundly squeamish. That guy in Britain, who blew the whistle on Murdoch phone-tapping, was murdered by the police, and no one said a thing; still less do I expect any investigation of Hasting’s death.

The present American “ruling class” appears to be aiming at corporate neo-feudalism — not that they have an actual, deliberately chosen design or plan; I am writing “as if” to economize on narrative complexity, not to deny that there’s a large element of evolutionary chaos at work. The “fief” in this neo-feudalism is corporate privilege and rent-seeking, pursued in globalization and “free trade” agreements, the next steps of which Obama will try to push thru as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a similar agreement with Europe.

It seems to me that the established pattern to date in desired political leadership has not been government-in-commission, as Walpole delivered it for the 18th century English Whig magnates, but, instead, the spokes-model politician and crowd of useful idiots, who are willing to abandon public power for personal celebrity status, and to take dictation from lobbyists and P.R. messaging experts, combined with the corrupt technocracy of central banks and supra-national institutions, able to impose a neoliberal order of options and ideas, to further handicap the legacy institutions of liberal democracy, just in case one of the spokesmodels tries to pull a vestigial lever of power.

Caesar rose to power at a time, when centralization of political power, conquest and expanding the scope of peaceful trade could yield an increasing surplus to a growing urban civilization. Being highly organized politically, as the Romans were, paid big dividends in war, and in post-conquest peace, in building cities and trade. The Pax Romana and the Augustan and silver ages of Rome followed Caesar’s establishment of a well-functioning imperial administration. The U.S. appears to be in the quite different position of being on the lee side of our civilization’s crest — it’s all downhill from here, with hegemony fading rapidly and the prospect of peak oil and ecological collapse depressing economic output and disposable surplus at an accelerating pace.

Just based on the established patterns, I expect U.S. Power to stumble on for most of this decade, aided perversely by increasing chaos over the next few years, in China and possibly other BRICs as well as crisis in the EU. Power is relative, and just when you think U.S. hegemony would be gone forever, it may enjoy an Indian Summer, especially in Western Europe, where failing leadership may go looking for their good American daddy. [Good luck with that!] In domestic American politics, political violence will increase over the next seven or eight years, as the scope of despair envelopes a broader swath of young people, who have the energy and motivation to revolt, and the huge prison complex cannot keep up. I think Obama will manage to destroy the Democratic Party, along with the remnants of the New Deal. When voter faith, interest and participation are very low, political strategies that mobilize large numbers of the disaffected, paradoxically, begin to look more appealing to the innovative outsider, and more plausible in comparison to grooming one’s self as a despised spokesmodel for WalMart heirs, Kochs and the like. GenY upper and middle-class youngsters grew up in remarkably regimented, programmed childhoods, compared to the latchkey boomers; they will organize. I’d expect some big generational turnover, and some very young politicians to emerge at the end of the decade.

Economically, an economy of paper (economic) rents is just too tempting an opportunity for even spokesmodel politicians. A President can “jawbone” as they used to say, and deliver radical changes in living standards within the course of an hour or two, when vast swathes of income distribution depend on intellectual property and bad financial debt. A populist could become very popular just cutting the price of songs in the iMusic store from $1.29 to $0.10, and there’s no practical obstacle to such gestures, and even more substantive ones, affecting health care or student debt. In the same circumstances, a well-armed fascist could turn on his erstwhile plutocratic masters and extort vast sums, or could try to mobilize mass support with, say, subsidies for gasoline for personal vehicles or even internet connections.

By the same token, American hegemony will be over for good by 2020, and domestic political violence endemic. The consequences of way too much private debt, and the years of delay on peak oil and climate change, will combine with the loss of hegemonic “tribute” to create real problems and real cause for desperation. Overpopulation worldwide and the acceleration of economic change means crises can mushroom to continent-shaking levels in a half-decade, easily. Eeking out a surplus of resources to apply to adapting or responding will seem to put a premium on effective political authority; how that squares with any newly emergent sense of political solidarity, I cannot guess. The plutocrats dominate American politics, because there’s no competition from mass-membership organization — that could change, but I do not now see how or when.

Political dynamics without some foundation for mass solidarity require, as Ian politely reminds us from time to time, a certain almost murderous enmity toward the ruling class. I think the 1/10th of 1% are acutely aware of the pending crises of peak oil, climate change, etc., even if their selfish stupidity is leading them to favor policies, which are self-destructive to the societies on which they depend, whether they remember that dependence or not, while the masses are in denial of various forms, about the predatory hostility of the upper class much more than any details of developments vis a vis the natural world. Along with the loss of mass solidarity, we have lost a lot of political consciousness in the developed world, especially in the U.S. History suggests that when it comes back, it may carry a lot of irrational id. When Public Opinion first began to emerge in France in the 18th century, it was as mercurial and irrational and superficial as it is today, in its dotage, and beneath the veneer of rhetorical sophistication applied by the salons of Paris, was the Great Fear of aristocratic conspiracy, which tore down the Bastille in a day, and ended a 900 year dynasty. Someone quite unexpected may bypass the powers-that-be and take a chance on becoming leader by getting in front of the stampede.

I’m deeply pessimistic about the long run, but I’m old and don’t expect to live to see much of it.

I have no idea what mental fart prompted that long rant. I plead temporary mental illness, and if our gracious host thinks it too long and off-topic, and wants to delete it, I offer no objection.

@Bruce Wilder
I read it all with interest. I was impressed that you went that long without saying anything that struck me as stupid. I may disagree with parts and the parts we agree on, we may both be wrong, but well done.

@ Bruce Wilder

Such a well-thought out piece deserves some discussion. It is what I would want at least.

“not that they have an actual, deliberately chosen design or plan”
I agree. I actually shy away from the neo-feudal analogy because I think it vastly overestimates the degree of elite coherence. 1st world elites now have some ability to come together to protect their elite status, but little more vision or historical perspective than that. (China is still somewhat different.)
On the other hand, I think you over-estimate the amount of autonomy remaining to the “spokesmodels”. Precisely because the elites have no vision or purpose and function solely to increase and maintain their own power, they no longer have the will or the capacity for reformist concessions. They also no longer have the internal discipline required for a majority of the elites to force concessions on other parts of the elites (as was done in the New Deal). The effect is that each shard of the elites has effective veto power over any changes that would harm what it considers its interests.
There is also what Jesse at Jesse’s Cafe Americain calls the credibility trap: The elites can not allow any reform because reform would expose the complicity of the elites in the problems that would be reformed.

I agree that if the current social system continues, then global warming and peak oil are causes. But I think something important only comes into view if we see them as effects. What ties together the decay of the elites and the absence of solutions to energy needs and global warming is that we have basically monopoly (late stage) industrial elites presiding over an economy whose core has shifted to a large degree to knowledge production. This evolutionary mismatch of future and past works about as well as having feudal lords in charge of industrial development.
Basically, the emergent knowledge worker class has been turned on its head. Its primary task, the one that absolutely must be fulfilled under the current system, is the creation of the artificial unknowing required to maintain current hierarchies even in the presence of powerful communication technologies.
It is important to understand that our sense of our own individual capacities and our sense of our collective capacities, both technical and moral, are vastly diminished by the sea of unknowing currently produced by the self-throttling knowledge worker class on behalf of those they serve. We are capable of much more than is apparent now.
I think you know this. It is part of why you have made the effort of learning and thinking that shows up in what you wrote.

Jessica, thank you for your insightful comments.

” the sea of unknowing ” — a provocative phrase

Rhett o rick,

I did the calculation above early in the thread, the obscurist [badtux] that plague this site quickly jumped in to bury it behind their quacky conjecture.

“Now to move the engine 60 yards, will assume an initial trajectory of 45 degrees to get max distance for minimum energy input which simplifies the formula to R=V^2/32, R= 180ft so Vo = the square root of 180*32…or 51mph after de-accelerating at 1714 g’s…only a fool would believe such a thing plausible. Only an explosion would produce that kind of energy to break, then throw an engine 60 yards.”

Since idiocy of a few ruins it for all, this is all I’ll say on the matter. I tire of fools raising falsehoods and then when you call them on it pretending they didn’t say it. Go above and read on how Badtux states he knows for a fact that Diesel burns with great vigor when coming contact with a catalytic converter…which, ironically the picture show away from the fire…tired of the idiocy.

What will the neighbours think?

Indeed.

I don’t think this has been posted here yet:

Exclusive: Hastings Sent Colleagues Email Hours Before Crash

. . . Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs told KTLA that he received an email from Hastings on Monday.
Biggs had known Hastings since 2008, when the journalist was embedded in his unit in Afghanistan.
“On Monday morning, I woke up and I got an email, and it’s very panicked,” Biggs said.
He was blind-copied on the email, which was sent to Hastings’ colleagues.
In part, it said that the feds were interviewing his close friends and associates, and that he was onto a big story and needed to get off the radar.

http://ktla.com/2013/06/21/exclusive-hastings-sent-colleagues-email-hours-before-crash/#axzz2X82wGwUJ

Hello Dave,

I like the panache of the person who left this sign at the site of Hastings fiery accident. I’m sure they’ll take it down in a hurry. Salon, the publication who hosted Glenn Greenwald, has asked its readers and commentary to quit speculating about his death. I never read that trash entity anyway, I just happened to catch it elsewhere. Yet another nothing to see here, move along. Shit, there’s so much to see these days, the only way not to see it is to have a lobotomy, and I’m having difficulty getting up the nerve to schedule mine. I bet it’s covered under the Affordable Care Act though.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BNY15SvCQAA0bNP.jpg:large

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/hastings_death_what_we_do_and_dont_know/singleton/

Regards,

Carol Newquist

PS: This is what Hastings old pal, Stanley “Death Squad” McChrystal, is up to these days. If you have children as I do, he wants them to be forced into compulsory public service described as follows:

http://www.aspeninstitute.org/about/blog/gen-mcchrystal-calls-universal-national-service-wall-street-journal

Of course, they call it “voluntary” in the initial discussion phases, but you and I both know what it will become. What an interesting name too, when you think back about the Franklin Scandal (Conspiracy of Silence). Such hubris and in-your-face taunting with that title. Normally, I’d say that if and when that day comes I will get the fuck out of here, but then I think, “yeah right, where to?” They’re setting the whole world on fire. No where to run to, no where to hide, and really no way to fucking fight in the conventional sense of that word.

One final note. I don’t want to come off as a Hastings fanboy, because I’m not. In fact, I never heard of him prior to this. What’s interesting is his wife’s background. The first wife, or maybe it was fiance, was killed in an alleged roadside bombing in Iraq during the occupation. The second wife, Elise Jordan, get this, was Condoleeza Rice’s speech writer. These rabbit holes go so deep. I don’t think we’ll ever find Alice …if she exists at all. I know one thing; I’m beginning to feel ten feet tall and the men on the chess board are telling me where to go in a metaphorical sense, and I haven’t dropped acid in 25 years.

Good addition Lisa, the thought had crossed my mind, as this methodology has been a prime suspect aviation “accidents”. If instruments tell the pilot the wrong thing at critical juncture, a “pilot error” will ensue…and that can be a tidy end to a “trouble maker” rival “presidential candidate” et al.

Been inclined to not get too paranoid about Mr. Hastings’ demise, but you’ve posted some provocative stuff, Simeone.

Yes, of course, if Richard Clarke says so, then it must be true. My opinion on the matter in no way will rely on anyone connected to the Panopticon. Appeals to Authority and so-called “expertise” are yet another Achilles heel of the good-intentioned on the so-called “Left.” I don’t need Clarke telling me what my instincts already know, because if you do this enough, and most “Liberals/Progressives” do it more than enough, you have no instinct. Clarke is one of them. His opinion means nothing to me. He is nothing to me. It’s a disgrace that taxpayers are FORCED to pay his pension and the salaries and pensions of all those inside the Beltway who imprison this world.