Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, was once presented with evidence of the Holocaust by a friend. Justice Frankfurter said he couldn't believe it had happened. His friend responded incredulously, "Are you telling me you don't believe the Holocaust happened?" Frankfurter famously replied, "That's not what I said. I said I can't believe it happened." Meaning he couldn't bring himself to believe it.    
     That's why I don't go in for conspiracy theories.
     For almost eight and a half years, I've been biting my tongue and refusing to blame Bush and Cheney for pulling off 9/11 with their PNAC pals who less than four years earlier in a letter to President Bill Clinton brazenly said we needed another Pearl Harbor-type of calamity to get this country back on the right track. The narrative regarding 9/11 fails to fit the facts in roughly a thousand and one different ways. The forensic evidence doesn't add up when held side-by-side with the narrative told to us by the government and the so-called 9/11 Commission.
     However, the absence of facts and square pegs and round holes only produces conspiracy theories and I do not traffic in those. The absence of provable facts is not proof in and of itself. I have a hard enough time keeping the last of my readership from going to Reddit or Instagram or whatever happens to be hotter than blogs right now. I don't want to kill off what little credibility I have left by peddling conspiracy theories as fact.
     Because there are just some scenarios that are too horrible to even contemplate, more horrifying scenarios than anything cooked up by an Alex Jones fever dream after eating 11 Gorditas and 8 Chalupas. Our own government pulling off 9/11 is about the most unbearable thing I can imagine outside of something happening to any of my loved ones.
     This is why I do not believe Hunter S. Thompson killed himself but stop short of saying someone offed him because he was supposedly working on an expose of 9/11. This is why I do not believe the DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, hung herself yet I dig in my heels well before saying out loud that some piano wire artist offed her just before she was about to name names.
     Nor do I believe Michael Connell, Sen. Paul Wellstone and other people dangerous to the current corrupt establishment died in normal, unavoidable plane crashes but you will not hear me say they were murdered by a person or persons unknown. That is because I do not have proof and I would need about a millennium to wrap my mind around the fact that my government could be that murderous and cold-blooded.
     But then I see things like the death of Rolling Stone and Buzzfeed journalist Michael Hastings, a throwback to the days of real journalists who wouldn't accept bullshit in exchange for access to hear more bullshit and the facts speak for themselves. Hastings was murdered and anyone who knows the first thing about automotive mechanics, accident reconstruction and basic physics can tell his death in a massive ball of flames on a residential street in Hollywood yesterday simply doesn't subscribe to conventional common sense.
     And when I hear about a journalist of Hastings' stature dying so young, the first question that pops into my head is not, "What had he worked on?" but "What was he working on?"
     Whatever it was, his confidential sources aren't going to start singing unless they want to be nervous pedestrians for the rest of their lives.
     Hastings was murdered by people who knew how to make it happen and certainly had the money, the technology and the motivation to pull it off. Don't look to the LAPD, the LA Coroner's Office and the LA Fire Department to give you any straight answers. They'll tell you after the car's been combed over and the autopsy results take weeks to come in that it was a tragic and needless accident that was caused when Hastings ran into a utility pole after traveling 100 mph down a suburban Hollywood side street.
     Do not look for them to tell you why the transmission suddenly dropped out of the car about 50 yards from the impact site and that several people, including one woman, said they heard a sound like a bomb going off, one powerful enough to rattle their house and shake their windows. I've seen plenty of car accidents and heard others. No car striking a light pole is going to create a concussive envelope powerful enough to do that and a car hitting a solid object at any speed is going to result in a sickening crunching sound, not a boom like a bomb.
     And it still wouldn't answer why Hastings, a responsible journalist, was traveling 100 mph in a residential neighborhood and why he thought it was a good idea to wrap the front end of his late model Mercedes around a light pole.
     So here's a much more plausible theory, one formed around the facts anyone can see in the video above:
     A bomb is planted in the rear of the car, something most of us wouldn't bother checking for before getting in the car even if we wrote something that got Stanley McCrystal shitcanned by President Obama. The transmission gets blown out, it lands in the street and rolls onto the sward of grass, leaking red training fluid into the gutter. The bomb detonates the nearby gas tank also in the rear of the car. The car's already in flames if not fully involved, stunning or killing Hastings in front and a postmortem twitch makes his right foot depress the gas pedal, making the car accelerate and swerve out of control from the right side of the street to the left until he hits a solid object, which in this case was first, a fire hydrant then, secondly, a utility pole.
     But don't listen to me. Look at where the training lies, observe the red fluid in the gutter, note its distance from the crash site, its orientation to it, listen to the witnesses explain they heard a sound like a bomb go off. Then judge for yourself whether or not my scenario strays from the facts or that I've wrenched the facts in this raw footage to fit my theory.
     In some late model cars, the engine is engineered to drop before a front end impact so as not to go through the dash and crush the driver. Transmissions aren't.
     So when you start hearing in the news about how Hastings liked to drive fast and as the official narrative begins to filter its way to your favorite news sites, just remember this video and this post then tell me accidents like this happen every day of the week.
   Then again, James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, died the day after Hastings did. Coincidence?????