Michael Hastings: A Classic Conspiracy-Theory Fail

In June, when 33-year-old journalist Michael Hastings died in an unusual single-car accident, it quickly became a perfect storm for conspiracy theorists. Here we were at the apex of NSA paranoia, and a reporter famous for investigating the U.S. government and decrying the surveillance state was suddenly dead. Looking at the comments on HuffingtonPost, many ordinary liberals were highly suspicious of the crash, some outright assuming that of course he was murdered by the powers that be, yawn.

It did seem somewhat suspicious. Hastings died at 4 in the morning, driving an estimated 100 MPH on a residential street in Los Angeles before crashing into a palm tree, with enough impact to throw the engine block 50 yards away. What a weird way to die. I wanted to dig deeper, so I created a Google Alert and watched the news -- and the opinion -- come in.

During the long wait for autopsy and toxicology reports over a slow-news summer, various dubious "journalists" were happy to fill the void and keep people talking possible murder. One rose to the top quickly: Kimberly Dvorak, a Southern California freelance reporter whose stories on Hastings were bought by San Diego 6, a local affiliate of the CW television network based in Tijuana, Mexico.

So, not exactly the Washington Post.

In an early piece on Hastings' death -- which was reposted on dozens of "news" sites -- Dvorak wrote that:
1. An eyewitness saw the car going at maximum speed, then "heard a couple explosions shortly before the car crashed"
2. The explosion was so intense that it took the coroner's office two days to identify the body
3. Toxicology would reportedly take weeks to complete (even though "in stark contrast," James Gandolfini's toxicology in Italy had been completed in only a few days)
4. Shortly before his death, Hastings had sent an e-mail saying he was on to a big story
5. Hastings had said that he received death threats about once per year
6. "Accounts of the car crash" had contained "erroneous details" that "were hard to overlook" (like, the street was actually wide and straight, not narrow and curvy)
7. Even though the LAPD found no immediate evidence of foul play, the intensity of the fire, as judged by watching videos, resembles a thermite burn¹ -- "gasoline generally doesn't burn that hot" (in Dvorak's opinion)
8. The LAPD "refuses to release the accident and toxicology reports"
9. The LAPD refuses to make the vehicle available for inspection ("which only fuels speculation")
10. Although Hastings had a history of alcohol and drug abuse, "his family and friends say he kicked the habit."

Dvorak also mentioned an interview in which HuffingtonPost had asked counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke to weigh in on the Hastings case. Clarke -- ever the provocateur -- stated that the crash was "consistent with a car cyber attack" that could remotely control the speed and braking.

Further articles were routinely picked up by left-leaning news aggregators. Dvorak wrote that Hastings hadn't touched alcohol in five years and "drove like a grandma," according to his friend, Staff Sergeant Joe Biggs²; that the palm tree hit by the car showed "seemingly minimal damage" and only a scratch on the curb; that in TV interviews, Hastings' wife "kind of had a smile on her face and didn't seem like a grieving widow"; and finally, that according to her own analysis of a surveillance video (using a "mathematic equation" for speed supplied by "a University professor"), Hastings' car was going only 35 miles per hour at impact.

Well, when you consider all of these facts, I guess he was murdered! I mean, there were clearly explosions³ and stuff, and stuff burning that wasn't gas, and the car was being driven by someone on a laptop or something who could make it go 100 MPH, or, well I guess I mean 35 MPH. Simple physics says only an explosion would launch an engine 50 yards -- normal car accidents aren't like that, and I know, 'cause I've seen 'em on TV. And you can't trust the LAPD, remember OJ? All I'm saying is, keep an open mind by reading all of Kimberly Dvorak's articles, and then come to your own conclusions!




What are they hiding under that sheet, other than a grotesquely burned corpse?



Imagine the embarrassment when Michael Hastings' accident, autopsy, and toxicology reports were published.

Most of the headlines said that meth and pot were found in Hastings' system. While true, the drug levels were determined to be too low to have contributed to the crash. Other details were more telling: According to interviews with family members, Hastings had relapsed into poly-substance abuse about a month prior, and his brother was soon to arrive in L.A. to try to get him into a rehab program. Hastings had delusions that he was invincible. In 1999, he had been abusing Ritalin and crashed his car into a pole, and subsequently checked into rehab. Later we learned that Hastings had recently come to believe that his car had been tampered with and that helicopters over L.A. were tracking him.

No, drugs didn't cause Hastings to drive 100 MPH. But, he appeared to have a bit of a screw loose, and the addiction and delusion was just a symptom of that. Brilliant journalist, yes; pillar of the community who drove like a grandma, no. What's disturbing is that many of my fellow liberals picked up on the murder narrative, because, well the government with the NSA and everything just seemed so darn sinister.

Actually, the murder talk had already been largely deflated, once Hastings' brother and wife came forward to say that it was probably only a tragic accident. Even while the new "casual conspiracy theorists" were describing to each other a stable, responsible Hastings being remote-controlled toward his fiery, explosive murder at the hands of vengeful government agents -- great scene for a movie, huh? -- his family privately knew that he was simply advancing toward self-destruction.

Ouch. That's gotta hurt, when the victim's own family denounces the cinematic narrative of the journalist-hero getting cyber-gunned down. (Maybe the wife and brother were bought off by the New World Order global bank? Sure....)

I'm not saying for certain that Hastings wasn't murdered. It's just so unlikely, given what we know now. It's an Occam's razor thing: Either, sinister forces came together to commit a Black Ops high-speed murder on the gritty streets of L.A. using cutting-edge wireless cyber-hacking technology, ooh! Or, a very talented dude who was already unstable and had a sad history of psychiatric problems, early one morning just snapped.

Doesn't make for a great movie. Then again, reality seldom does.



1. Many 9/11 conspiracy theorists believe that the World Trade Center buildings were demolished using thermite, a notoriously difficult-to-ignite incendiary.
2. If you want to give your "expert authority" more credibility, add a title or two, or three ("physics Professor Dr. Steven E. Jones, Ph.D.").
3. The reporter Dvorak routinely conflated sudden fire with explosion. There is a difference; actual explosions shred vehicles. Plus, eyewitness testimony is unreliable and easily manipulated.

The "Multiverse" & Occam's Razor (12/27/2009)

This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.

Everyone is talking about the "multiverse" these days — the idea that our Universe is just one of many, that there may be billions of "pocket universes" as real as our own Universe but extremely far away, or in the form of isolated "bubbles," such that we may never be able to contact them. The cover story of the January 2010 issue of Scientific American is "Life in the Multiverse," and the illustrations depict universes connected to each other like grapes on a vine. Once pure speculation and a science-fiction device, this concept of multiple alternate universes is now front-and-center in mainstream physics as well as pop culture.

In part, the motivation has been to explain the "fine tuning" of our Universe: the handful of physical constants which, if any were different by a tiny amount, would disallow the existence of matter and therefore us. Some of these amounts are so minuscule, our Universe seems to balance on a knife-edge between various prohibitions to our existence. While theists consider this proof of an intelligent designer, the prevailing approach among physicists is to invoke the anthropic principle: We must find ourselves in a universe with conditions suitable for life, because if we weren't in such a universe, we wouldn't be around to notice.

This raises a couple of questions. Do we find ourselves in a life-allowing universe because ours ended up this way by accident? Or, is it because there must be many different universes, and we are here because, by sheer numbers, at least one of them must support life? The second has become the conventional explanation.

I wish to challenge this conclusion. It reminds me of a moment in Carl Sagan's Cosmos, during a discussion of past theories about life on Venus. "Observation: Can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs!" In this case, it's, "Observation: One universe and one universe only. Conclusion: Billions of universes!"

Imagine you are watching TV through a cable box that's broken (unbeknownst to you) and gets only one channel. You then learn that the cable company is providing hundreds of other channels, and that the signals are getting into your home, even though you've never seen any of them. So, you go searching for the hundreds of other cable wires passing through the wall, and finding none, you conclude that the cables must be there, and must be perfectly real, but they are coming in where you can't find them. Now, is that the only conclusion, or the best conclusion, that could be drawn from what you know? A more elegant solution is that the other channels are coming through the same one cable — the one that you know exists — but for whatever reason, you can see only the one channel.

Similarly, I believe a more elegant solution to the "multiverse" question is that all potential universes are interlaced with the one that we observe, but for whatever reason, we observe only our familiar Universe. In other words, the alternate universes are not real to us in the way that our own Universe is real, but rather, they coexist with ours in a state of potential.

This issue seems to be a good candidate for the conceptual tool known as Occam's Razor. It says that if one solution to a problem requires multiple things with special conditions and assumptions, and another solution has fewer of these requirements, then the simpler solution is preferred. If there is another explanation, why must billions of perfectly real universes "out there somewhere" be required to exist just for ours to be able to exist?

Physicists have no problem describing a light wave as a probability function, a summation of all potential locations for a photon. I don't see why our Universe cannot be viewed the same way as the photon in this example: one possible universe "filtered out" or "made real" among all potential universes, all of which make up one giant probability function. This just seems to be a far more elegant solution than an insane web of billions of individual, discrete "pocket universes." Stop the madness!