Once again -- the Hastings accident

The second video contains an interview with an ignored witness. Unfortunately, you have to wade through a great deal of other stuff -- including selections from the Inception soundtrack -- before you get to that part.

In a previous post on this subject, I indicated (in a comment) that I did not want to involve this blog in a debate over the accident details. For me, it was enough to know that a man with a rep for driving like someone's grandma was suddenly speeding nearly a hundred miles an hour down a busy street that no-one in his right mind would confuse with a raceway.

The incident occurred on a lovely stretch of Highland Blvd. just south of Melrose. As I recall, there are lots of fancy-schmancy homes on that block. It's usually busy, busy, busy.

At first, I presumed that Hastings hit the gas pedal because he thought he was being chased. Then I saw a video featuring a DARPA expert who warned her colleagues about the possibility of outsiders commandeering a vehicle's computer controls.

That video -- coupled with the established fact that Hastings told associates that he was in fearful of the FBI and about to take a lower profile -- was all I needed. Ever since, I have operated under the presumption that this "accident" was probably not an accident.

Even so, my first instinct was not to mire this blog in the gritty, gruesome details of how car crashes occur and what we should and should not expect to see after such an event. Lots of other blogs went down that trail -- and some of those blogs cater to the Paultards and Alex Jonesians. I don't like to link to those guys. The analysis here is more...

Hm. I was going to say "up my alley," but that phrase may be inappropriate.

What intrigues me is not so much the CSI stuff but the links between Hastings and the mysterious tech firm called Endgame. (Similarly, while doing JFK research, I got bored with the forensics of Dealey Plaza, preferring to concentrate on Oswald's history and associations.) We'll have another Endgame post soon.

This post exists to prove that rules are meant to be broken. Let's play the CSI game, just this once.

Not long ago, a reader who knows a lot about cars sent me his take on what happened. On the same day, another reader in my beloved L.A. sent me photos from the accident scene.

Reader "Dan" supplied the words, while reader "Hal" supplied the images that pepper this post (except for the first one, which came from here).

Here's Dan:

MH was in the car, so the car did did not have to be steered remotely.

At 100 mph he would either be panicked to the point of inaction, or doing his best to keep it between the ditches.

In other words, all "they" had to do was take over 4 systems at most: the fly-by-wire gas pedal, the Start/Off button, the brakes, and the transmission.

They would then accelerate the car and let speed, time, and the odd all engulfing fire, IMO, do the rest.

I've run Slaloms, wheel to wheel, and driven like a maniac on the street for years. (But only late at night so I could see cars coming from a long ways off and in blind curves, and only way out in the country on isolated roads I knew like the back of my hand. Damn, is one sign of getting old feeling the need to apologize for stupid stuff I did years ago?) I know that it doesn't matter where you are, or who you are -- if your car starts to accelerate, and you can't turn it off, can't stop it, and can't knock it out of gear, you will eventually crash at a high rate of speed.

MH appeared to be going 50 to 60 mph when he ran the red light.

The street MH went down at what they guess to be 100 mph had a bump in it which would cause a car going that fast to lose grip. At 100 mph it doesn't take much to upset a vehicle's suspension, the bump alone could cause an out of control situation.

Any driver input into the steering wheel in a loose condition, such as after a bump, could result in losing the backend, and due to the confined space the car would most likely slam nose first into the nearest object.

If the driver was a world class driver, he would most likely slam one side of the car flat into the nearest object because he would have corrected the slide, but he would still hit the "wall".

Anyone who works on modern cars knows computers control these type of systems, and more I can't think of:

Ignition; Starting the car; Making it run; Turning it off; Timing; Lifters - am I a V8 or a V4?; Cam timing; AC and heating systems; Air Bags; Brakes; Throttle; Air/Fuel ratio; Automatic transmission shift points and overdrive; Steering if the car has a self-parking app; Stereo volume as related to speed; Automatic headlight dimmers; Door locks; Seatbelt tensioners; Warning buzzers of all kinds

All this is done through pulsed square waves, low voltage signals, and other double E mumbo jumbo I don't understand, and these waves tells one of your car's computers to turn on the Peltire thermoelectric seat modules to heat, or cool.. start your car, make it accelerate, etc...

Most all computers can be hacked because most computers are dumb, and the dumb ones always do what exactly they are told to do.

Computers: Every Authoritarian's dream...thing.

Okay, I know that computers run everything in new-ish cars. But what nobody (not even that nice lady from DARPA) has yet explained to me is why the system allows outsider access. I happen to have have a small, antiquated netbook: If the internet on that device has been disabled and the USB ports are empty, the only way to get into the thing is through the keyboard. And the computers in cars don't have keyboards. Why on earth do they have to put Bluetooth technology into a freakin' car?

A simple piece of legislation could solve this problem once and for all.

The video below was produced by Mark Dice. I really hate to promote this guy's work, because he believes in the existence of a secret society called the Illuminati, which is pure myth -- "a scarecrow to frighten the gullible," as researcher Morris Kominski once put it. But -- dammit, there really is some good stuff in this one: