Ziggy Smalls posted:

so why'd they shoot down a commercial airline flight?

gradenko_2000 posted:

code:

https://twitter.com/lakefieldmoscow/status/1652855844810137600

Ziggy Smalls posted:

so why'd they shoot down a commercial airline flight?

Passenger List: TWA Flight 800 posted:

* Gray, Charles H. III, 47, president and chief operating officer of Midland Financial Group, Inc., of Little Rock, Ark.

Flight 800: The Arkansas Connection, 266 views, Jul 19, 1996 posted:

Two twists of fate placed a former University of Arkansas track athlete and an Arkansas native who managed a Memphis insurance firm among the 230 people killed on the ill-fated TWA flight that exploded Wednesday night over the Atlantic.
...
The businessman, Charles Henry "Hank" Gray III of Memphis, initially wanted to fly to London from Hartford, Conn., but sped to New York after he missed his flight because his limousine driver took a wrong turn while going to the Hartford airport. In New York, Gray boarded the doomed flight.

Gray, president and chief operating officer of Midland Financial Corp., was scheduled to fly from Hartford to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday afternoon. He was to fly on from there to London to raise money for a merger.

Elena Barham, Gray's secretary for 13 years, said her boss called her at 5 p.m. Wednesday and said the limousine driver had missed a turn in Hartford, and Gray had to drive to New York to catch another flight.

"He was waiting in the TWA lounge, saying how they had missed the connection and this was the best flight they could get," Barham said. She said that after arriving in Paris, Gray and other executives planned to board a plane for London for an early morning meeting. She said the trip was the only international leg of a three-week tour to raise $40 million in common stock at institutional banking houses. Gray was due back today or Saturday, she said.

Gray was the son of Charles Henry Gray II, chief federal probation officer in Little Rock.

"Knowing that it was a wrong turn that brought this on makes it doubly hard," his stepmother, Bequita Gray, said Thursday.

The elder Gray said his son was in Hartford to negotiate a merger with Danielson Holding Co., an insurance company in New York City. Other executives traveling with Gray to promote the merger were Danielson President C. Kirk Rhein Jr.; William R. Story, president and chief executive of Danielson's main insurance subsidiary; and Gadi Notes, 29, an investment banker with
Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette.

A spokesman for Danielson Holding declined to say what affect the crash might have on Danielson Holding's agreement to buy Midland Financial for $78.2 million.
...
In the late 1980s, Gray, in association with Phillip Zanone, formed Midland Insurance, which went public in 1992.

"He was a brilliant businessman and the best friend anybody could have," said Mack Norton, an attorney with Wright Lindsey & Jennings in Little Rock. Norton, former chairman of the Arkansas Public Service Commission, is married to Gray's sister, Gretchen.

"He had a lot of friends here in Little Rock and around the state," Norton said.

gradenko_2000 posted:

quote:

On 19 September 2022, the families of 15 victims filed Krick et al v. Raytheon Corporation (case 1:22-cv-11032ck, U.S District Court of Massachusetts), alleging the cause of the flight's explosion was the testing of the Aegis Combat System. The lawsuit alleges that the defense system fired RIM-66 Standard SM-2 missiles at aerial targets in close proximity to flight paths, resulting in a friendly fire accident. The lawsuit then alleges that the Dept. of Defense and the FBI covered up the incident.[39][40]

On 12 October 2023, Judge Angel Kelley Boston denied the defendants' request to have the case dismissed.[41]

hamas ftw posted:

who knows, maybe that lawsuit will turn something up

mawarannahr posted:

that's one red Clinton leering at the lady gh

Dokapon Findom posted:

lol look at this poo poo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2lb0_vnJ_A

Endman posted:

Look, if it was a missile the missile would know because the missile knows where it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ

RBC posted:

its the weird conspiracy nut containment zone. really needs a name change

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/matthewkassel/status/1752154270055403894?t=T_h5FLf_OpMukDYFJTjESg&s=19

Dokapon Findom posted:

Macklemore

my bony fealty posted:

song lyrics about 9/11 are well and good but what about just straight poetry??

quote:

Yes,
Us people are just poems
We're ninety percent metaphor
With a leanness of meaning
Approaching hyper-distillation
And once upon a time
We were moonshine
Rushing down the throat of a giraffe
Yes, rushing down the long hallway
Despite what the p.a. announcement says
Yes, rushing down the long hall
Down the long stairs
In a building so tall
That it will always be there
Yes, it's part of a pair
There on the bow of Noah's ark
The most prestigious couple
Just kickin' back parked
Against a perfectly blue sky
On a morning beatific
In its Indian summer breeze
On the day that America
Fell to its knees
After strutting around for a century
Without saying thank you
Or please

And the shock was subsonic
And the smoke was deafening
Between the setup and the punch line
Cause we were all on time for work that day
We all boarded that plane for to fly
And then while the fires were raging
We all climbed up on the window sill
And then we all held hands
And jumped into the sky

And every borough looked up when it heard the first blast
And then every dumb action movie was summarily surpassed
And the exodus uptown by foot and motorcar
Looked more like war than anything I've seen so far
So far
So far
So fierce and ingenious
A poetic specter so far gone
That every jackass newscaster was struck dumb and stumbling
Over 'oh my god' and 'this is unbelievable' and on and on
And I'll tell you what, while we're at it
You can keep the pentagon
Keep the propaganda
Keep each and every tv
That's been trying to convince me
To participate
In some prep school punk's plan to perpetuate retribution
Perpetuate retribution
Even as the blue toxic smoke of our lesson in retribution
Is still hanging in the air
And there's ash on our shoes
And there's ash in our hair
And there's a fine silt on every mantle
From hell's kitchen to Brooklyn
And the streets are full of stories
Sudden twists and near misses
And soon every open bar is crammed to the rafters
With tales of narrowly averted disasters
And the whiskey is flowin'
Like never before
As all over the country
Folks just shake their heads
And pour

So here's a toast to all the folks that live in Palestine, Afghanistan,
Iraq, El Salvador

Here's a toast to the folks living on the pine ridge reservation
Under the stone cold gaze of Mt. Rushmore

Here's a toast to all those nurses and doctors
Who daily provide women with a choice
Who stand down a threat the size of Oklahoma City
Just to listen to a young woman's voice

Here's a toast to all the folks on death row right now
Awaiting the executioner's guillotine
Who are shackled there with dread and can only escape into their heads
To find peace in the form of a dream, peace in the form of a dream

Cause take away our PlayStations
And we are a third world nation
Under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
Who stole the oval office and that phony election
I mean
It don't take a weatherman
To look around and see the weather
Jeb said he'd deliver Florida, folks
And boy did he ever

And we hold these truths to be self evident:
Number one, George W. Bush is not president
Number two, America is not a true democracy
Number three, the media is not fooling me
Cause I am a poem heeding hyper-distillation
I've got no room for a lie so verbose
I'm looking out over my whole human family
And I'm raising my glass in a toast

Here's to our last drink of fossil fuels
May we vow to get off of this sauce
Shoo away the swarms of commuter planes
And find that train ticket we lost
Cause once upon a time the line followed the river
And peeked into all the backyards
And the laundry was waving
The graffiti was teasing us
From brick walls and bridges
We were rolling over ridges
Through valleys
Under stars
I dream of touring like Duke Ellington
In my own railroad car
I dream of waiting on the tall blond wooden benches
In a grand station aglow with grace
And then standing out on the platform
And feeling the air on my face

Give back the night its distant whistle
Give the darkness back its soul
Give the big oil companies the finger finally
And relearn how to rock-n-roll
Yes, the lessons are all around us and the truth is waiting there
So it's time to pick through the rubble, clean the streets
And clear the air
Get our government to pull its big dick out of the sand
Of someone else's desert
Put it back in its pants
And quit the hypocritical chants of
Freedom forever

Cause when one lone phone rang
In two thousand and one
At ten after nine
On nine one one
Which is the number we all called
When that lone phone rang right off the wall
Right off our desk and down the long hall
Down the long stairs
In a building so tall
That the whole world turned
Just to watch it fall

And while we're at it
Remember the first time around?
The bomb?
The Ryder truck?
The parking garage?
The princess that didn't even feel the pea?
Remember joking around in our apartment on Avenue D?

Can you imagine how many paper coffee cups would have to change their design
Following a fantastical reversal of the New York skyline?!

It was a joke
At the time
And that was just a few years ago
So let the record show
That the FBI was all over that case
That the plot was obvious and in everybody's face
And scoping that scene
Religiously
The CIA
Or is it KGB?
Committing countless crimes against humanity
With this kind of eventuality
As its excuse
For abuse after expensive abuse
And it didn't have a clue
Look, another window to see through
Way up here
On the hundredth and fourth floor
Look
Another key
Another door
Ten percent literal
Ninety percent metaphor
Three thousand some poems disguised as people
On an almost too perfect day
Must be more than pawns
In some rear end in a top hat's passion play
So now it's your job
And it's my job
To make it that way
To make sure they didn't die in vain
Ssh
Baby listen
Hear the train?

my bony fealty posted:

song lyrics about 9/11 are well and good but what about just straight poetry??

DR FRASIER KRANG posted:

I watched The Delta Force (1986) last night because of course I'm watching The Delta Force when I can't sleep.

anyway, the entire plot is just a dramatization/re-telling of TWA #847 where some Lebanese dudes took a 727 for a few days and got some hostages exchanged but this time Chuck Norris is involved.

anyway, there is a very specific scene where the terrorist is explicating his motive and he specifically calls out American attacks in Beirut to which a passenger on the plane (a Catholic priest even) responds with "The United States has never bombed Beirut!" and then the terrorist beats the heck out of the dude.

so then I looked up the bombings that happened around that time and, sure enough, there was a string of bombings in 1985 that were ultimately traced back to CIA-funded counter revolutionary groups.

lol

Scarabrae posted:

very funny movie to watch in retrospect

hamas ftw posted:

lmao

perfectly normal flight trajectory after witnesses see an explosion

perfectly

loving

normal

DR FRASIER KRANG posted:

three letter coincidences are a dime a dozen.

DR FRASIER KRANG posted:

Ted Cruz didn't even have a dad you absolute mark.