You can’t look at these things the same anymore:
Aubrey McClendon, a founder and former chief executive of Chesapeake Energy, died in a fiery single-car crash Wednesday, a day after he was charged with conspiring to rig bids for oil and natural gas leases.
McClendon, 56, crashed into an embankment while traveling at a “high rate of speed” in Oklahoma City just after 9 a.m., said Capt. Paco Balderrama of the Oklahoma City Police Department. Flames engulfed McClendon’s vehicle “immediately,” and it was burnt so badly that police could not tell if he was wearing a seatbelt, he said.
“He pretty much drove straight into the wall,” Balderrama said.
They are saying it clearly appears to be suicide, even though the evidence would also be consistent with stroke, heart attack, seizure, or even distraction. It is reminiscent of Scalia, who we were immediately told died of natural causes, even without an autopsy, or even a medical professional looking over his body cursorily. More and more, the news is not just reporting the facts – it is also telling us what to think, before we can think for ourselves. I can’t help but wonder, as the collapse approaches, how many people will decide to commit suicide by crashing their cars into walls, instead of using a gun.
In the movie Enemy of the State, Gene Hackman’s ex-NSA spook only drove 70’s era cars. I can understand why. With today’s drive by wire technology linked to wireless networks, anyone can see their life end in a fiery crash, at the hands of a computer geek somewhere looking at a computer screen and pressing the “up” arrow key. You have to wonder if this guy’s last moments were a desperate mental run-through of any possible ways to stop the car now that he had lost steering, braking, and acceleration control.
The real problem with the government taking so much control over everything is that they will not be the only people who will wield it. I could envision a future where the government’s tech-specialist wet-work guys quietly enter the private sector, hiring out to produce deaths like this for any hedge fund guy afraid of seeing his return diminished by an inconvenient investigation, or any rich executive who wants his CEO dead so nobody will follow the path of investigatory breadcrumbs that leads back to him. With this guy dead, who knows who will now escape investigation.
Think a former GS-9 computer geek would take a million dollars in cash to hack this guy’s car and run it into an embankment at high speed? That day is coming.
Fortunately, thanks to the news, we know it was a suicide, but someday I could see it happening.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
The question to ask is “if he were to flip, who would go down?”
Someone tampered with Nigel Farage’s car, not difficult to see the powers-that-be tampering with vehicles of those that could implicate them in grevious wrong doing. Mr. McClendond’s case was probably all the more urgent and less likely to arouse suspicion.
There’s a reason that when I bought a new house, the garage was non-negotiable.
Tangentially, Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion” makes a compelling case that highly publicized suicides, e.g Robin Williams, cause spikes in people committing suicide by car crash. Not a way I’d prefer to go. I seem to recall the WWII quip regarding morphine shots as, “One for pain, two for glory.”
The CNBC reporter who I watched giving the ‘breaking news’ around noon yesterday used the word accident three times in about as many minutes. Just before the third time –remember this is breaking news so they don’t know much about the event so how (or Why?) do they call it an accident? –just before the third time I thought, “if she uses the word accident again then that’s like a tell.”
Check out this clip from the movie Hot Fuzz: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=puK5CwThaq4
Funny but true.
Odd. I thought of the Mythbusters episode where they ran cars off of cliffs, to see if they could duplicate the movies’ fiery crashes. And they basically couldn’t. After the whole Pinto thing, cars are designed to prevent this from happening easily.
But this guy’s car “burst into flames immediately.” Even though I doubt it was going any faster than the ones dropping nose-down off cliffs. And burns so thoroughly that you can’t tell if he was wearing a seatbelt.
I wonder who wanted to murder him.
These business types kill themselves all the time rather than go to prison. Recently one guy actually swallowed a cyanide tablet in court, as they convicted him! Given that this guy was guilty of bribing people over gas leases (and not selling secrets to the PRC or something security related), it probably was his own actions that caused the crash.