Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.

Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Conspiracy theory

I happened onto a "911 truth" website, and promptly found out that it was an A-3 Skywarrior ("Whale") that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, not a 757 airliner. This A-3 Skywarrior apparently flew off the carrior U.S.S. George Washington, which was docked in New York Harbor on 9/11.

Where to start, where to start... okay. First of all, the A-3 was retired in 1991. There are none in military service. Secondly, this is a big-ass plane. Its nick-name was "Whale", because it was the biggest plane to ever be flown off a carrier flight deck. If one of them got pulled out of retirement, rehabilitated, and put onto a carrier, someone would have noticed. I mean, we're talking *big*. The damned thing weighs 38,000 pounds *without* fuel and bombs, it's twice the size of any current jet that flies off a carrier deck, you don't hide something that big! Thirdly, flying an unmanned "drone" off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier ain't happenin', and because the A-3 has no ejection seats (and no way to retrofit any due to the cockpit design), it's unlikely that any pilot would volunteer to fly a kamakazi mission. Finally, it takes dozens of people to launch a jet plane off the deck of an aircraft carrier. You can't launch a jet plane in secret. It has to be fueled, the deck crew has to guide it to the end of the runway and hook up the catapault hooks, the operations crew has to clear a flight path... you just can't hide it, and if there was a conspiracy of this size, someone would have leaked by now.

Which brings up what Karl Rove O'Brien called the Conspiracy Theory Conspiracy. That is, that whack conspiracy theories of this sort are generated as "black ops" by U.S. intelligence agencies (See: COINTELPRO) in order to hide the fact that there are real conspiracies out there. 25% of the world's prisoners are in the United States, despite the U.S. having only 5% of the world's population. We are swiftly becoming a prison state where an astounding 10% of adult males of some minority groups are imprisoned in the American Gulag, a vast decentralized system of county jails, state prisons, and federal penitentaries that is the fastest-growing industry in America today. There are currently eight million people caught in the claws of the American Gulag. How did this happen? Who is responsible for this? Alas, if I start speculating, I am merely putting forward a "conspiracy theory" -- which, thanks to the Conspiracy Theory Conspiracy, means it's automatically discredited.

-- Badtux the Conspiracy Penguin

Labels: 9/11, civil rights, conspiracy, politics

Posted by: BadTux / 2/24/2007 01:13:00 PM

Comments:

Automatically discredited?
So if I tell the truth I know I am called a paranoid. If I quote the Party line I am honored.
If I do what I am told all is well and I will have comfort. If I do what I think
I will be cast out into outer darkness and my issue will be slain before my eyes.
That about sum it up?
--ml
# posted by Martin Langeland : 24/2/07 5:10 PM

I think you pretty much summed it up, except for the "cast out into outer darkness" bit. The powers that rule us are happy to have us jabbering away on this "Internets" thingamabob. If we're jabbering, we're not acting. It is the thought of 150,000,000 Americans suddenly deciding "No mas!"and taking real action such as, say, swarming their offices and hauling them out and doing that whole rope-neck-tree thing, that scares our rulers. We can jabber all we want, and they'll just sneer "conspiracy theory" and otherwise ignore us. Because, in the end, power grows from the barrel of a gun... or a rope and a tree. Just ask Mussolini.

-Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin
# posted by BadTux : 24/2/07 6:25 PM

I passed on an opportunity to fly in an EA3, the Recce version. I was offered a Navy leather flying jacket, but then someone mentioned carrier ops and I passed. [late 60s on Shemya]

The Air Force version was the RB-66, which had ejection, another recce aircraft.

From what I can find, Raytheon are the only people left with A3s, which are used as test beds.

If these people had ever been to a site where an aircraft has splashed with a nearly full fuel load, they would know why the damage seems smaller than the airframe. Some airframes shatter, they don't dent like a car. With the kerosene [jet fuel] and liquid oxygen [cabin air] mixed you have an explosion.

Given the low point at which the building was struck, the engines may have made contact with the ground first and ripped the wings off. Inertia would have carried everything into the building, but not as a unit.
# posted by Bryan : 24/2/07 7:46 PM

Honor Roll

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"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

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