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Scott Getzinger, 46, of Newtown was killed after his pickup truck was struck by a 1999 Lexus driven by an 18-year-old that had spun out of control in the oncoming lane and crossed the median divider, according to published reports.
norton ash » Wed Jun 19, 2013 10:28 am wrote:From the link provided:Scott Getzinger, 46, of Newtown was killed after his pickup truck was struck by a 1999 Lexus driven by an 18-year-old that had spun out of control in the oncoming lane and crossed the median divider, according to published reports.
So they robo-controlled the 18-year-old's Lexus to cross the median and kill Getzinger? Diabolical.
nashvillebrook » Wed Jun 19, 2013 11:38 am wrote:the thing that Cenk says -- that Hastings was paranoid about the government possibly spying on him -- to me this correlates with the idea that his death wasn't an accident, because it seems like it would take a lot of evidence (circumstantial or not) for a journo as seasoned as he was to be shaken.
Famed Non-Automotive Journalist Michael Hastings Turns A C250 Into A “Bomb”
By Jack Baruth on June 19, 2013
The writing-about-writing crowd is abuzz with discussion about the rather unusual death of Buzzfeed/RollingStone/Gawker writer Michael Hastings. Mr. Hastings, whose name is never mentioned in the press without the immediate mention that he was “the fearless journalist whose reporting brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal”, died in a single-car accident in Los Angeles yesterday morning. This in and of itself is not unusual, but the circumstances of the crash and its aftermath won’t do anything to quiet the conspiracy theorists who are already claiming that the military-industrial complex found a way to cap the guy.
The definitive video of the incident can be found here. It features everything you’d want in a crash story, including:
• The ejected motor and transmission (seen above)
• Video of the car burning with the fury of a thousand suns
• A man holding a goat in his arms and stroking it to keep calm as someone else discusses the incident
• The mention of Mercedes-Benz
That last bit is the critical part. Mercedes-Benz USA is no doubt sweating bullets over this one. An eyewitness report says that Mr. Hastings was driving at an excessive rate of speed down a suburban street when his car “suddenly jackknifed” and hit a tree “with the force of a bomb”. The Benzo, which by the wheels and quarter-panel appears to be the relatively prosaic but cheerfully stylish C250 four-cylinder turbo coupe, proceeded to throw its powertrain out of the engine bay, immediately catch fire in a manner typically reserved for episodes of “Miami Vice”, and burn its driver until said driver was charred beyond recognition.
This isn’t good. The official ad copy for the C-Coupe states
Like every Mercedes-Benz coupe, it wraps four sport seats and passion for the road in sleek style. And like every C-Class, it’s a paragon of engineering virtue and extraordinary value. Put it together, and it’s like nothing else.
Nowhere in there does it say anything about “then this sucker is going to jackknife out of control and char you like a steak ordered by a high-school dropout at Ponderosa”. No wonder the guy in the video is stroking his goat to keep it calm. If I owned a C250 I’d be outside staring at the thing wondering if it was safe to drive it at 100mph in a suburb.
(snip)
...I’m here to state that I’ve seen dozens of cars hit walls and stuff at high speeds and the number of them that I have observed to eject their powertrains and immediately catch massive fire is, um, ah, zero. Modern cars are very good at not catching fire in accidents. The Mercedes-Benz C-Class, which is an evolutionary design from a company known for sweating the safety details over and above the Euro NCAP requirements, should be leading the pack in the not-catching-on-fire category.
Nor is the C-Class known for sudden veering out of control into trees and whatnot. My father’s been running a C350 of that generation around Hilton Head for a while and if anybody could make a C-Class veer into a palm tree without warning it would be him. If you happen to see my father on an airplane somewhere, please don’t tell him I said that, and also don’t tell him that I always call the C-Class the “Cheap-Class”. Thanks.
Mr. Hastings’ aggressively Democrat-friendly storytelling has the Internet already considering the idea that his death was engineered somehow. I can’t say it’s totally unlikely. As noted above, the reported (and videotaped) behavior of the C250 was not in line with what we’d expect. On the other hand, surely it’s expected that a respected, mature writer on non-automotive topics won’t be barreling through a suburb so fast that any tree he hits will cause his car to burst into flames, right? We’ll keep an eye on this to see what, if anything, develops.
New York Times columnist David Brooks managed to get away from the GOP Senators trying to place their hands on his inner thigh at dinner long enough to pen a column shaming a real journalist for having the audacity to break the etiquette rules that govern the precious relationship between elite media personalities and those in power. His target this time is freelance journalist Michael Hastings, whose profile in Rolling Stone of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his inner circle brought down McChrystal almost instantly.
What offended Brooks was that Hastings had the audacity to report--for public consumption (gasp!)--the "kvetching" that powerful figures like McChrystal apparently engage in with their friends in the corporate media. "The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters," Brooks writes. "The system is basically set up to maximize kvetching."
Hastings, who clearly skipped out on one too many classes at the Joe Klein/David Brooks/Peggy Noonan School for Caviar Correspondents, committed the mortal sin of making "the kvetching the center of his magazine profile." Brooks declares: "By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him."
That Hastings exposed what McChrystal and his boys really think of Obama and civilian leaders or that he uncovered disturbing views held by McChrystal regarding loss of life in Afghanistan--in other words, information that the public and civilian leaders probably should have--goes unmentioned by Brooks. What Hastings did was to act too much like a journalist and not enough like an ass-kissing kvetcher. Professor Brooks breaks it down like this for young Hastings: "Military people are especially prone to these sorts of outbursts. In public, they pay lavish deference to civilian masters who issue orders from the comfort of home. Among themselves, they blow off steam, sometimes in the crudest possible terms. Those of us in the press corps have to figure out how to treat this torrent of private kvetching."
So much of what is wrong with journalism today can be gleaned from a simple RSS subscription to David Brooks's columns. In his world, those who have access to the powerful guard their darkest secrets--not their affairs or infidelities or alcohol problems, but the kinds of views McChrystal and his aides expressed in Hastings' article, the kind of conduct they condone and order in US wars. In a responsible society, one with a vibrant and independent press, the job of journalists should be to hold those in power accountable. Part of the job of journalists is to do precisely what Hastings did--catch powerful figures in their true element, not simply portray their crafted public personas and loyally transcribe their prepared public statements. "McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched," Brooks writes. "And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter."
To Brooks, Hastings's conduct was a part of the decay of the private, sacred relationship between the press and the powerful. During World War II, Brooks writes, "Reporters suppressed private information."
Then, during Vietnam, all hell broke loose, according to Brooks: "[A]n ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances."
Fast forward to today. Oh, don't get Lord Brooks started on today. "Now you have outlets, shows and Web sites whose only real interest is the kvetching and inside baseball," Brooks complains. "In other words, over the course of 50 years, what had once been considered the least important part of government became the most important."
The irony of what Brooks is saying is that it is he who is the ultimate inside baseball junkie, the king of kvetching with the powerful. He is the gatekeeper for the stupid, undeserving public who wouldn't be able to handle the truth if they knew it. In our infotainment society where the kids from Jersey Shore are "reality" and the deaths of innocent Afghans and Iraqis are, at best, statistics, David Brooks fits in perfectly.
The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down.
nashvillebrook » Wed Jun 19, 2013 7:59 am wrote:i've been all wound up about the fact that a modern car would eject the engine and drivetrain, and catch fire...oh yeah, also just "jackknife" out of control for no reason. I'm not the only one...
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2013/0 ... ce=twitterFamed Non-Automotive Journalist Michael Hastings Turns A C250 Into A “Bomb”
By Jack Baruth on June 19, 2013
The writing-about-writing crowd is abuzz with discussion about the rather unusual death of Buzzfeed/RollingStone/Gawker writer Michael Hastings. Mr. Hastings, whose name is never mentioned in the press without the immediate mention that he was “the fearless journalist whose reporting brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal”, died in a single-car accident in Los Angeles yesterday morning. This in and of itself is not unusual, but the circumstances of the crash and its aftermath won’t do anything to quiet the conspiracy theorists who are already claiming that the military-industrial complex found a way to cap the guy.
The definitive video of the incident can be found here. It features everything you’d want in a crash story, including:
• The ejected motor and transmission (seen above)
• Video of the car burning with the fury of a thousand suns
• A man holding a goat in his arms and stroking it to keep calm as someone else discusses the incident
• The mention of Mercedes-Benz
That last bit is the critical part. Mercedes-Benz USA is no doubt sweating bullets over this one. An eyewitness report says that Mr. Hastings was driving at an excessive rate of speed down a suburban street when his car “suddenly jackknifed” and hit a tree “with the force of a bomb”. The Benzo, which by the wheels and quarter-panel appears to be the relatively prosaic but cheerfully stylish C250 four-cylinder turbo coupe, proceeded to throw its powertrain out of the engine bay, immediately catch fire in a manner typically reserved for episodes of “Miami Vice”, and burn its driver until said driver was charred beyond recognition.
This isn’t good. The official ad copy for the C-Coupe states
Like every Mercedes-Benz coupe, it wraps four sport seats and passion for the road in sleek style. And like every C-Class, it’s a paragon of engineering virtue and extraordinary value. Put it together, and it’s like nothing else.
Nowhere in there does it say anything about “then this sucker is going to jackknife out of control and char you like a steak ordered by a high-school dropout at Ponderosa”. No wonder the guy in the video is stroking his goat to keep it calm. If I owned a C250 I’d be outside staring at the thing wondering if it was safe to drive it at 100mph in a suburb.
(snip)
...I’m here to state that I’ve seen dozens of cars hit walls and stuff at high speeds and the number of them that I have observed to eject their powertrains and immediately catch massive fire is, um, ah, zero. Modern cars are very good at not catching fire in accidents. The Mercedes-Benz C-Class, which is an evolutionary design from a company known for sweating the safety details over and above the Euro NCAP requirements, should be leading the pack in the not-catching-on-fire category.
Nor is the C-Class known for sudden veering out of control into trees and whatnot. My father’s been running a C350 of that generation around Hilton Head for a while and if anybody could make a C-Class veer into a palm tree without warning it would be him. If you happen to see my father on an airplane somewhere, please don’t tell him I said that, and also don’t tell him that I always call the C-Class the “Cheap-Class”. Thanks.
Mr. Hastings’ aggressively Democrat-friendly storytelling has the Internet already considering the idea that his death was engineered somehow. I can’t say it’s totally unlikely. As noted above, the reported (and videotaped) behavior of the C250 was not in line with what we’d expect. On the other hand, surely it’s expected that a respected, mature writer on non-automotive topics won’t be barreling through a suburb so fast that any tree he hits will cause his car to burst into flames, right? We’ll keep an eye on this to see what, if anything, develops.
Retired Army officer, author Mark Weber, dies
June 14, 2013
...
He was a rising star in the Army just three years ago, tapped by the top commander in Afghanistan to join the effort to turn around the war there in 2010, after Gen. Stanley McCrystal was relieved of command.
...
"And then two weeks later, not only do you have cancer, but it is bad."
McChrystal’s New Mission
By Joe KleinMay 31, 2013
General Stan McChrystal made an important statement in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
He announced an ambitious new plan for serious national service. The plan—the Franklin Project—was hatched under aegis of the Aspen Institute and it’s about the best I’ve seen in many years of lobbying for a robust form of service—and I make a distinction between service, which is full-time, tough and challenging, and volunteerism, which is admirable but not all-consuming.
In the coming weeks, I’ll elaborate on the many reasons we need a rigorous progam to provide a coming-of-age ritual that will transform boys and girls into men and women (and it’s especially important for boys). There will be a summit to discuss the implementation of the Franklin plan in late June.
For the moment, congratulations are in order for McChrystal who, I’m told, has been pushing for the most intense form of service in the Franklin Project’s internal deliberations. This effort is, I believe, crucial to the future of our democracy.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/31/mc ... z2WggYQmon
Aspen Institute Launches the Franklin Project
The Franklin Project, a new initiative at the Aspen Institute, held its first meeting on November 30, bringing together a diverse mix of leaders from national service, military, business, and philanthropic organizations to marshal the best case for a voluntary civilian counterpart to military service in the United States. Inspired by General Stanley McChrystal's call for large-scale civilian national service at the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer, more than 40 participants met for the day to discuss new ideas to expand national service to be a civilian counterpart to military service. The meeting was led by John Bridgeland, Alan Khazei, and Harris Wofford, and hosted by Walter Isaacson and Elliot Gerson of the Aspen Institute.
We believe engaging leaders in the military offers a fresh perspective, together with leaders in business, nonprofits, faith-based institutions, academia, and communities to support large-scale civilian service at a time of national division when the entrepreneurial energy of citizens must be harnessed to help solve our public problems and bring people of different perspectives together. The project will have key milestones, including a Civilian Service Summit on June 25, 2013 as the signature lead-in event to the Aspen Ideas Festival from June 26-29.
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