From comments to Steve Sailer:
* Further to Steve Sailer’s point about social media titans, from the NY Post:
Sheryl Sandberg has not made a public statement or commented about her husband’s death. The family is expected to hold an invitation-only celebration of Goldberg’s life on Tuesday at Stanford Memorial Auditorium in California.
Men looking to attend have been told to ditch the ties “in keeping with Dave’s lifelong hatred of ties,” according to an e-mailed invitation sent to friends of the couple.
Mourners have also been urged to not take pictures or make social-media posts related to the event “out of respect for the family.”
* Everyone should refrain from using Facebook, forever – out of respect for Sandberg’s family.
* This is getting fishier.
I bet his head trauma forensics are clearly criminal in nature. So you get the long delay in cause of reports and the hasty evacuation of the family.
Just because the body was found in the gym doesn’t mean the trauma occurred there.
Bungled ransom or perhaps mundane murder by a local or another guest.
* The rich and powerful suffer and die just like the rest of us. Mr. Goldberg was both, and relished speaking power to truth. It didn’t save him from an ugly and unfortunate death.
The things Mr. Goldberg apparently worshipped- wealth, power, and the peculiar combination expressed in upper-class feminism- are brief, fleeting illusions. One minute you’re enjoying a Four Seasons resort, the next the bag of meat, blood, pus and tears we call our body begins its return to its constituent elements.
It may seem hard to pity these people, but they live on the edge of the abyss, and they know it. The less fortunate have their small comforts, of religion or a better mortal existence, for themselves or their children. Things may not be good now, but they may get better. For the rich things cannot get better, they enjoy everything that can possibly be enjoyed, and they quickly tire of the pleasure. But to indulge in such peasant comforts as belief in God or an afterlife would be gauche, so they double down on the hedonism and the social justice activism.
We know not the day nor the hour.
* Even if Goldberg’s death wasn’t directly caused by cartel violence, it’s possible that the closing of roads by violence may have prevented him from getting medical treatment for a severe accidental injury.
* According to the Mexican medical report, it was head trauma and accompanying hypovolemic shock that caused Mr. Goldberg’s death.
This means he lost over 20% of his blood from a 4cm head wound, which was a severe, crushing wound that broke the skull. How you get that from falling off a treadmill beats me. That’s the kind of wound you’d expect someone who got hit full force on the head with rebar to have. Or perhaps hit with a dumbbell… The skull is pretty hard. Typically, if you fall and hit your head, it bounces, giving you a concussion. This can be deadly, but it doesn’t involve a “pool of blood” or open skull fracture. The kinds of impacts that create those wounds are seen in auto and occasionally bicycle accidents, which involve considerably more velocity and force than a fall off a treadmill, which operates at a maximum speed of only 10mph, and in Goldberg’s case probably more like four or five.
The details here, the reticence about revealing the cause of death, the sudden departure of the family and the crazy events in Puerto Vallarta on May 1 raise a lot of questions about Goldberg’s death.
“He is also a private person — 99.995% of Americans don’t give a FF who the husband of the COO of facebook is.”
No, he is not a “private person.” Sheryl Sandberg has used her family as the model for the contemporary American woman, pushing her “lean in” concept all over the country. She has sponsored events for girls and served as the public female face of Facebook. She calls herself a feminist. She actively pushes her ideals on the rest of us. Goldberg was a part of that package. He was no recluse, but rather very much a part of the debate about the role of the contemporary husband and wife.
Whenever public figures seem to be hiding something, it’s worth following up on it to see why.
Maybe he did die in an accident. Maybe the treadmill really did fling him headfirst into some corner at a high velocity, breaking his skull. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we know how on earth treadmills can do that so as to prevent more of these accidents?
And if he was murdered, shouldn’t that inform Americans’ decisions when it comes to travel destinations? Shouldn’t it give us more reason to monitor our border for potential criminal fugitives from Mexico?
* Sheryl Sandberg is a scold and a busy-body. She is also, as it appears, a bit of a hypocrite – in that her fortune is based on Facebook, an internet platform which encourages its members to broadcast their lives on the internet. That is not incidental to Facebook’s business. It IS Facebook’s business. If you are on Facebook, then YOU are their product – they sell information about you to marketers and data-miners.
Wealthy, powerful people who very publicly tell other people how they should live end up with the public scrutiny they deserve.
* A grown man went to the gym at a luxurious Four Seasons resort at 4pm and is discovered by his own brother almost 3 hours later alive but in a pool of his own blood with a 1.18 inch gash to the skull. State officials and the general manager of the resort giving conflicting statements about at what resort the fatal fall even occurred. Pretty classic scenario we have here.
* Steve is onto to something, Goldberg could have been a easy target of opportunity, rub out a el hefe in a exclusive resort to send a message that all are fair game for the cartels. And it would explain why his wife ran off like a scalded cat – she was probably informed the cartels did it or were nearby.
* Perhaps Dave Goldberg’s family was initially silent on the cause of death … precisely so people would NOT draw the possibility that iSteve describes. If Dave Goldberg’s death was an accident, his family certainly knew of the cartel’s co-temporal terrorist attacks that, regardless, seems to explain their quick departure from the area. Of note, the family also remained silent about the terrorist attacks. iSteve, as he so often does, connected the dots (of logical possibility) that others were systematically avoiding out of respect for political correctness. Good job Steve!
* A random act by the cartel per Sailer’s theory?
Goldberg’s the unluckiest bastard in the world. There have to be witnesses, something will come out.
A targeted kidnapping gone bad?
Cartel (or others) saw that he exercised alone and tried to nab him. He resisted. Again, there have to be witnesses.
A crime of passion?
Goldberg’s wife and brother are having an affair and/or some other attempt to extort Goldberg. Young boys and/or underage prostitutes are involved. The brother sees his chance, provides deep comfort to the widow. Unlikely that we’ll ever know anything.
Association of Tie Manufacturers is behind the deed?
Goldberg’s hatred of all things ties is well-known, a clear threat to the ATM. Goldberg must go.
An overweight dweeb slips and falls?
I’m rather uncoordinated and lack a lot of balance. I can easily see myself dying like this poor bastard.
There’s a Cohen brothers movie in this somewhere.
* Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation for an overweight middle aged guy dropping dead next to a treadmill is that the treadmill had something to do with it and Mexican drug cartels did not.
It was admittedly a freak accident – treadmills don’t kill many adults. But freak accidents happen now and then – that’s what makes them freak accidents. Sometimes the very richness of super-rich people ends up hurting them. If Goldberg was an ordinary Jewish rich guy instead of a plutocrat, he would have been staying next door at the Four Seasons and using the hotel gym and as soon as he slipped off, someone else in the gym would have called for help. But he was so damn rich that he didn’t have to pant in the presence of even other moderately rich people, he could afford his own private gym where he could bleed to death alone. Karma is a bitch.
If the cartel wanted to kidnap him, they would have gotten farther than just leaving him in place. If they wanted to send a “no one is safe” message, they would have machine gunned him or cut off his head or something – they are not subtle kind of guys.
That being said, I can understand why the surviving Sandberg/Goldbergs did not want to stick around and complete their beachside vacation, even if the $11,500/day was prepaid to the end of the week and was non-refundable.
* I have been to quite a few gyms and I have never seen sharp, pointed metal objects near the treadmills. I am sure that there were no uncapped valves on radiators nearby.
There is usually a large open space behind a treadmill, often covered with rubber-like padding, because gym operators know that people fall off treadmills quite often and they want to cushion the impact. Because of the treadmill’s motion, people fall off the treadmill in one direction only, and then they land on the padding. In an expensive resort’s gym, I would expect to see extra space and extra padding.
The whole deep-headwound-from-falling-off-a-treadmill story is not credible. The flimsiness of this story is evidence of the panicked state of the people who concocted it.
* The only thing that would make the apparent cause of death interesting to me is if the reason he fell off the treadmill was because he was distracted with Facebook on his phone. Which actually doesn’t seem that farfetched.
Indeed, the most interesting part of this story is, I think, the request for no Facebooking at the funeral. These people sense, deep down, the vulgarity of social media. I guess this is just the white collar version of “don’t get high on your own supply.”
