Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Hunter » Wed Jun 19, 2013 5:18 am

Nordic » Wed Jun 19, 2013 5:04 am wrote:This is bullshit and is freaking me out. I read about this crash earlier today, before they had released the identity of the driver. And it struck me then as just being bizarre as hell. Then when I found out who it was I was very disturbed.

I've driven down this street a million times. You don't lose control of your car going down that street. It's not a highway. It's as straight as an arrow. And it was 4 am on a fucking monday night. Possibly the only time there's no traffic in LA. Let's just discuss the odds of this freak accident happening when and where it did TO A GUY WHO HAPPENED TO HAVE BROUGHT DOWN ONE OF THE MOST BRUTAL GENERALS IN ONE OF HISTORY'S MOST EVIL EMPIRES.

Walks like a duck, talks like a duck .....

I am very disturbed by this also, it just leaves me with a chill up my spine man, Hastings had his fingers in a lot of shit and he pissed a lot of people off because of it. If the guy saw wrong doing he would report it, that is what he was all about, there were no coverups with Hastings, he called it like he saw it.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby 82_28 » Wed Jun 19, 2013 6:29 am

He was Bill Hicksed. Same age (for the most part) and everything. Gotta get em shuffled off when they're young.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Elvis » Wed Jun 19, 2013 6:42 am

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Elvis » Wed Jun 19, 2013 6:49 am

In that video above, is that the engine of the car on the curb across the street?

Across the street, down the block?

I guess a gas tank explosion could do that -- right? :(
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby 82_28 » Wed Jun 19, 2013 7:18 am

I was trying to figure that out too.

It is "likely" his car was hacked. Going all the way back to 1994, Mercedes has had a history of including comprehensive computers in their cars. Shit that can get hacked:

Check out its recent "Intelligence Drive System":

http://www.gizmag.com/mercedes-benz-int ... tem/26028/

This wreck/explosion doesn't seem as though it was "enabled" -- in fact it seems the Intelligence Drive System was reversed to do what it was designed to do. Too bad for the incendiary to be there too because the state of the Mercedes computer at the time will never be known. .02.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby MinM » Wed Jun 19, 2013 7:37 am


...While listening to Fisher speak, you may find yourself thinking about the strange case of journalist Michael Hastings, who died in a single-car crash that has yet to be fully explained. However, to suggest a link would be the epitome of irresponsible journalism.

So whatever you do, don't think that way. ...

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2013/06/ ... video.html
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 19, 2013 7:44 am

So whatever you do, don't think that way.


thanks M
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Hunter » Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:03 am

82_28 » Wed Jun 19, 2013 7:18 am wrote:I was trying to figure that out too.

It is "likely" his car was hacked. Going all the way back to 1994, Mercedes has had a history of including comprehensive computers in their cars. Shit that can get hacked:

Check out its recent "Intelligence Drive System":

http://www.gizmag.com/mercedes-benz-int ... tem/26028/

This wreck/explosion doesn't seem as though it was "enabled" -- in fact it seems the Intelligence Drive System was reversed to do what it was designed to do. Too bad for the incendiary to be there too because the state of the Mercedes computer at the time will never be known. .02.

Probably means nothing but hasnt it been posted in the Snowden thread that the US has recently started a cyberwar against other nations and that it supposedly does include individual targets inside the US?


Hmmm, a hacked car, could that be one of the NSA reveals, that they can hack automobiles?

Was this a message to Greenwald to back off?

Maybe a car crash is just a car crash but I am keeping my open on this one, Hastings was a real threat with his pen and paper.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:08 am

Bruce Dazzling » Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:01 am wrote:Here's an interesting stat from the website of a Miami lawyer:

Fires occurred in 0.1 percent of the vehicles involved in all car accidents in 2003. For fatal car accidents, however, fires occurred in nearly 3 percent of the vehicles involved.


I wonder what the 2013 stats are for drivers who have recently ended the careers of very powerful generals.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Canadian_watcher » Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:18 am

Alchemy » Wed Jun 19, 2013 8:03 am wrote:
82_28 » Wed Jun 19, 2013 7:18 am wrote:I was trying to figure that out too.

It is "likely" his car was hacked. Going all the way back to 1994, Mercedes has had a history of including comprehensive computers in their cars. Shit that can get hacked:

Check out its recent "Intelligence Drive System":

http://www.gizmag.com/mercedes-benz-int ... tem/26028/

This wreck/explosion doesn't seem as though it was "enabled" -- in fact it seems the Intelligence Drive System was reversed to do what it was designed to do. Too bad for the incendiary to be there too because the state of the Mercedes computer at the time will never be known. .02.

Probably means nothing but hasnt it been posted in the Snowden thread that the US has recently started a cyberwar against other nations and that it supposedly does include individual targets inside the US?


Hmmm, a hacked car, could that be one of the NSA reveals, that they can hack automobiles?

Was this a message to Greenwald to back off?

Maybe a car crash is just a car crash but I am keeping my open on this one, Hastings was a real threat with his pen and paper.


interesting..
I have to wonder why Greenwald hasn't published the new info yet. If it were me I'd want it out there asap.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:29 am

Some of the big hits on Rigorous Intuition for Hastings:

CIA's Hollywood Coup

from the Petraeus thread, linked by seemslikeadream.
American Auschwitz in Kabul
Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban
Wikileaks Question
And of course myriad McChrystal sources.

My girlfriend seems to think this is a warning shot, and possibly could be meant to chill Scahill since they were just physically in the same space just before the accident. I think that the atmosphere in America is kinetic if enough people were to be exposed to just the right combination of information post-PRISM. I just watched "Dirty Wars" last night right before finding out about Hastings' death and feel quite angry.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 19, 2013 9:48 am

Michael Hastings' final article was on Democrats & the NSA stories :shock:

Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans
Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide.
posted on June 7, 2013 at 12:10pm EDT
Michael Hastings

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.
Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.
“Everyone should just calm down,” Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly.
That’s right: don’t panic.
The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems — including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.
Recall what Senator Levin told CNN in 2005, demanding to “urgently hold an inquiry” into what was supposedly President Bush’s domestic wiretap program.
Levin continued, at length: “It means that there’s some growing concern on Capitol Hill about a program which seems to be so totally unauthorized and unexplained…The president wraps himself in the law, saying that it is totally legal, but he doesn’t give what the legal basis is for this. He avoided using the law, which we provided to the president, where even when there is an emergency and there’s a need for urgent action can first tap the wire and then go to a court.”
There are two notable exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely lonely, frustrating battle against Obama’s national security state.
As Mark Udall told the Denver Post yesterday: “[I] did everything short of leaking classified information” to stop it.
His ally in Oregon, Ron Wyden, was one of the first to seize on the Guardian’s news break: “I will tell you from a policy standpoint, when a law-abiding citizen makes a call, they expect that who they call, when they call and where they call from will be kept private,” Wyden said to Politico, noting “there’s going to be a big debate about this.” The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he’d mislead Senator Wyden at a hearing earlier this year, revising his statement yesterday to state that the NSA didn’t do “voyerustic” surveillance.
The state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional security oaths in order to warn the country of information that otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038, according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.
Now, we’re about to see if the Obama administration’s version of the national security state will begin to eat itself.
Unsurprisingly, the White House has dug in, calling their North Korea-esque tools “essential” to stop terrorism, and loathe to give up the political edge they’ve seized for Democrats on national security issues under Obama’s leadership. The AP spying scandal — which the administration attempted to downplay at the time, even appointing Eric Holder to lead his own investigation into himself —was one of the unexpected consequences of one of two leak investigations that Obama ordered during the 2012 campaign.
It’s unclear where a possible third leak investigation would lead. However, judging by the DOJ’s and FBI’s recent history, it would seem that any new leak case would involve obtaining the phone records of reporters at the Guardian, the Washington Post, employees at various agencies who would have had access to the leaked material, as well as politicians and staffers in Congress—records, we now can safely posit, they already have unchecked and full access to.
In short: any so-called credible DOJ/FBI leak investigation, by its very nature, would have to involve the Obama administration invasively using the very surveillance and data techniques it is attempting to hide in order to snoop on a few Democratic Senators and more media outlets, including one based overseas.

Outside of Washington, D.C., the frustration that Wyden and Udall have felt has been exponentially magnified. Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.
Jacob Appplebaum, a transparency activist and computer savant, has been repeatedly harassed at American borders, having his laptop seized. Barrett Brown, another investigative journalist who has written for Vanity Fair, among others publications, exposed the connections between the private contracting firm HB Gary (a government contracting firm that, incidentally, proposed a plan to spy on and ruin the reputation of the Guardian’s Greenwald) and who is currently sitting in a Texas prison on trumped up FBI charges regarding his legitimate reportorial inquiry into the political collective known sometimes as Anonymous.
That’s not to mention former NSA official Thomas Drake (the Feds tried to destroys his life because he blew the whistle ); Fox News reporter James Rosen (named a “co-conspirator” by Holder’s DOJ); John Kirakou, formerly in the CIA, who raised concerns about the agency’s torture program, is also in prison for leaking “harmful” (read: embarrassing) classified info; and of course Wikileaks (under U.S. financial embargo); WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (locked up in Ecuador’s London embassy) and, of course, Bradley Manning, the young, idealistic, soldier who provided the public with perhaps the most critical trove of government documents ever released.
The attitude the Obama administration has toward Manning is revealing. What do they think of him? “Fuck Bradely Manning,” as one White House official put it to me last year during the campaign.
Screw Manning? Lol, screw us.
Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby nashvillebrook » Wed Jun 19, 2013 10:34 am

I was watching the my alt.jouro twitter feed last night when the news was released. I definitely sensed a chill beyond grieving. regardless of if it was meant to send a chill -- I think he was so loved in the community, that it will have the opposite effect. at least, that is my hope.

we already know that the military has no compunction about offing journos "in theater" in Iraq and Afghanistan. wouldn't surprise me at all if they've just "changed the definition of 'in theater'" the way they've changed the definition of "collecting data."
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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Wed Jun 19, 2013 11:11 am

Quotes from Cenk Uygur are used below to create what will undoubtedly become the lynchpin of the official version of events.

Don't drive while nervous, paranoid, tense, and/or agitated.

Journalist Michael Hastings Dies in Fiery Hollywood Crash
KTLA

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (KTLA) — The investigation continued on Wednesday into a fiery car crash in Hollywood that killed award-winning journalist Michael Hastings.

Hastings, 33, was perhaps best known for a Rolling Stone article that led to the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

The coroner’s office had yet to identify the victim, but both Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed, where Hastings worked most recently, reported that it was him.

The solo-vehicle crash happened near the intersection of Highland and Melrose avenues around 4:15 a.m., according to the LAPD.

Hastings’ Mercedes-Benz slammed into a tree and caught fire.

“I was just coming northbound on Highland and I seen a car going really fast, and all of a sudden I seen it jackknife,” said Luis Cortez, who witnessed the wreck.

“I just seen parts fly everywhere and I slammed on my brakes and stopped and tried to call 911,” Cortez added.

The engine of the vehicle was found in a yard about 100 feet away.

The driver was pronounced dead at the scene. Coroner’s officials said the body was too badly burned to make an immediate identification.

Police were investigating the possibility that speed may have been a factor in the crash.

Meantime, friends, family and colleagues were trying to come to terms with the news, and to offer some insight into Hastings’ life.

BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith issued a statement on Tuesday, saying his team was “shocked and devastated by the news.”

“Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered, from wars to politicians,” Smith said.

“He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold,” he said.

Friends said that, because of the nature of Hastings’ work, he often led a very paranoid lifestyle.

A lot of his friends were worried that he was in a very agitated state, yes. No question, people were concerned,” said Cenk Uygur, host of “The Young Turks.”

He was incredibly tense and very worried and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,” he said.

I don’t know what his state of mind was at 4:30 in the morning, but I do know what his state of mind was in general, and it was a nervous wreck.

In addition to his work for Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed, Hastings was also a contributor for GQ and Newsweek. He leaves behind a wife.
"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

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Re: Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 19, 2013 11:20 am

small planes and shooting oneself in the back of the head is so yesterday

just scare the living shit out of them
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Wed Jun 19, 2013 11:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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