www.thornwalker.com/ditch/morley_short_takes_10.htm
April 3, 2024
Short takes, no. 10
By EDWARD MORRISON MORLEY
Editor’s note (a real one): Our posting of this installment was delayed by a severe outage on the part of our electronic gear last month. The blame for that catastrophe lies not with Nefarious Enemy Forces Bent on Our Destruction but with the weather (in the form of a lightning strike). On behalf of the Forces of Nature, I tender apologies to Mr. Morley and all TLD readers.In any event, the Truth is ever fresh!
1. Fall of the mighty? Really? C’mon. Dr. Sherita Golden was chief diversity officer of Johns Hopkins Medical School. According to The College Fix, in January 2004 she sent an email to JH employees with a list of “privileged” people. These included: white people, Christians, English-speaking people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people, middle- or “owning”-class people, and middle-aged people. Ms. Golden is (wait for it) none of the above, though lucratively employed at Johns Hopkins. She also alleged that “privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want that privilege or not, and regardless of their stated intent.”Following an online uproar, Ms. Golden apologized for her “overly simplistic and poorly worded” missive, but didn’t specify where this oversimplification and poor wording occurred. She was subsequently sacked. But (wait for it) she was sentenced to become a faculty member at Johns Hopkins (professor of endocrinology and metabolism) and will do diabetes research.
2. Say it again, Sam. Justice Sam Alito hasn’t attended a so-called State of the Union address since 2010, according to the Wall Street Journal for March 7, 2024. This is partly because when then-Prez Barack Obama made an outrageous and false statement (actually one among hundreds) about the Supremes, Alito was caught on camera mouthing, “That’s not true.” He didn’t realize that the people broadcasting the affair had (and have) copies of the speech and so their cameras were trained on the Supremos when Obama impugned them. Justice Clarence Thomas, for his part, hasn’t attended since 2006.
Our current demagogue-in-chief used the occasion in 2024 to give a prolonged campaign tirade so full of lies, misrepresentations, and fantasies that only people with fewer functioning synapses than said demagogue-in-chief were able to listen for more than four or five minutes. (Your humble reporter was one of those.) People who began with the intention of “fact-checking” what was being purveyed actually were seen running screaming from their television sets into the night.
What did the prez actually say about the State of the Union? Nothing as far as I could tell. I’m not making this up. Unless the fact that Sleepy Joe could give such a speech and get away with it tells us something disastrous about the state of our union (not to be confused with the state of our democracy).
So here’s a thought I borrowed from a 1960s hippie acquaintance: What if they gave a State of the Union address and nobody came? Reader comment is invited. Ol’ EMM is willing to make a prediction here: If Orange Man is elected president in November, look for the legacy networks to drop their freebie coverage for his first SOTUA as of no interest or use to the body politic. A pretty safe prediction, if reduced coverage of the alleged presidential nominating conventions in 2020 is any indication.
3. Surprise! Headline! In the Wall Street Journal! This came in the March 7, 2024 issue (a real hotbed of great stuff): “Chinese National Indicted in Theft of AI Secrets.” Spoiler Alert: I am not making this up. The suspect, Linwei Ding, AKA Leon Ding, had worked at Google and was charged with stealing Google’s “artificial-intelligence trade secrets as part of a multiyear scheme to compromise sensitive American technology and boost Beijing in the high-stakes global race to dominate the booming industry.”
Said Attorney General Merrick Garland, well-known AI expert and rule-of-law superhawk, “The Justice Department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advance technologies that could put our nation at risk.” Or that might undermine business opportunities for Hunter Biden and other members of the extended Biden family or ... Garland actually couldn’t think right off the bat of anything “that could put our nation at risk” unless it is that feisty Roanoke, Ind., Paragon of Truth, The Last Ditch.
Ding (who holds the patents for that little “ding” noise you hear when your don’t fasten your seat belt or close your refrigerator door quickly enough) spent time in China purportedly handing over sensitive information to his ChiCom bosses. He tried to cover this up by having a fellow Google employee scan his work badge at the office to hide the fact that he wasn’t at work. After booking a one-way ticket to Beijing in December 2023 for a couple of weeks later, Ding resigned from Google, but did not make the flight since with all the stolen files his carry-on luggage was 355 pounds overweight. A misguided attempt to chew up and swallow the materials failed dramatically when he puked them all up anyway.
In unrelated news, Google’s new AI program, named “Gemini,” which Ding Ah Ling was stealing from them proved a complete fiasco in March when its imaging function proved incapable of producing any white faces on its images-request page, including “Show images of the Pope” (it came up with two blacks, one male and one female), and “Show images of Vikings” (it came up with two women and two men, all non-white, despite the paucity of non-white Scandinavians). When asked specifically for white images, Gemini refused, saying that such would perpetuate racist memes. No white images, presto, no racism. BTW when asked to portray the leadership of TLD in Roanoke, Ind., all Gemini could come up with were pictures of various farm animals, usually taken from the south end of said animals looking north.
4. McConnell retires as majority leader; endorses Trump. Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2023. SPOILER ALERT: It was later revealed that this was a slightly misplaced item from the Babylon Bee and is not true.
5. N.Y. governor plans to send National Guard to New York subway. The laughably incompetent governor of New York, Kathy Hochul (who makes her predecessors, one or more Cuomos, look like geniuses) said, according to the Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2024, that she plans to send 750 members of the New York National Guard to help the NYPD with searches at the entrances of busy subway stations. The resulting additional time a subway trip will now take should make aggravated, self-important New Yawkers even more testy than usual.
“For people who are thinking about bringing a gun or a knife on the subway, at least this creates a deterrent effect,” Hochul said. Guess that’s why Nancy Pelosi turned down Orange Man’s offer to bring in National Guard forces on January 6, 2021. Who would want to deter insurrectionists? Hochul was not asked by the alert N.Y. press if she had considered arresting troublemakers on the subway and prosecuting them even if Alvin Bragg doesn’t want to. Hochul didn’t mention deterring subway riders carrying portable nuclear devices. Just to avoid any misperceptions, the Guard troops will not be allowed to carry firearms, speak in an unfriendly tone of voice, or make fun of alternative shoppers who fall down trying to make a getaway.
6. Don’t kill the bear: She’s only the piano player. Liberate the Bears! Free them from Chicago! Oh, not those bears, eh? These are real bears that attack you for no reason at all when you let your dog out into the wilds of your backyard, who then proceeds to threaten the mater and her three cubs. Long story short, a mama bear has injured a Pennsylvania woman who had unleashed said vile canine. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2024, Pennsylvania Game Commission officers speedily resolved the “problem” by killing the mother bear and tranquilizing the cubs. Alas for the nameless mama bear, who confusedly thought “game commission” people were there to protect game. Ha, ha. In Pennsylvania, that merits the death penalty for Mum.
7. These are not the Houthi you are looking for. Meanwhile in the same number of the WSJ we find that our favorite Near Eastern terrorists, the Houthi — last seen in “Star Wars” appropriately hanging around Tatooine, that “wretched hive of scum and villainy” — managed to kill three sailors on a bulk carrier owned by “True Confidence Shipping of Libya” carrying Chinese “steel products” and trucks to Saudi Arabia and Jordan. So much for “true confidence.” The Houthi (not to be confused with Hochul) attack moving objects in the Red Sea at random using drones constructed of pâpier maché, rubber-band-driven propulsion, and 10 pounds of plastique explosives available at the Houthi Costco. The U.S. Game Commission declined to shoot the Houthis or even tranquilize their leaders on the grounds that fatalities totaling less that eight in such an attack do not constitute a danger to humans — or bears, for that matter — and released a dozen persons of interest so that they (the persons of interest) could resume their studies at Bob’s School of Aviation in Florida. They have almost completed Part I: How to Take Off and Steer an Airplane, and benefited from a 45 percent discount by not taking Part II: How to Land without Crashing Your Plane or Running into Tall Buildings.
8. When is a weapons transfer not a weapons transfer? One last tidbit gleaned from the March 7 Wall Street Journal is that “The U.S. has sent tens of thousands of weapons including bombs and precision guided munitions to Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks using procedures that have largely masked the scale of the administration’s military support for Israel, current and former U.S. officials said. The administration has organized more than 100 individual transfers of arms to Israel, but it has only officially notified Congress of two [sic, “two”] shipments.”
It turns out there is an “emergency rule” that can avoid the process. Administration spokesperson, Vladimir Ilych Strakon, when asked about the emergency rule, said only that such materials are classified so — neener, neener — they don’t have to tell what the rule is other than it is not harmful to most mammals other than bears ... most of the time. Meanwhile prices at local Army-Navy stores on weapons and ammo continue to inflate, even though President in Chief J. B. Dim-bulb, claims otherwise.
9. Another success for the Lizard People. A headline in the March 9-10, 2024 issue of the Wall Street Journal informs readers, “U.S. Report Finds No Evidence of Extraterrestrials.” According to the story, Defense Department officials reported on March 8, 2024 that they had “found no evidence that any UFO sightings have been of extraterrestrial space-craft.” That is a statement virtually Clintonesque in the ways it can be parsed:
• Does this mean that non-UFO sightings might be of an extraterrestrial nature?The report said that “many of the reported sightings were of ordinary objects such as drones, rockets, and birds.” Possibly also flying pigs, too much stuff swirling around the Bermuda Triangle, and specks of dirt on camera lenses. It also confidently reported that “Though the sources of many UAP [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena] remain unidentified ... it is likely — given additional information — that they could be classified as ordinary phenomenon [sic].”
• Or does this imply that there are UFO sightings of an extraterrestrial nature, but just didn’t seem like spacecraft? Why limit this to “spacecraft”?
• Or does it mean that extraterrestrials might have arrived here, just not in a spacecraft?
• Does the egg in Mork and Mindy qualify as a spacecraft?
• What about extraterrestrials that arrived before we started tracking UFOs (if we ever did). Wouldn’t their progeny (i.e., lizard people) be all over the place but could truthfully say that they are not extraterrestrials since they were born here and, owing to generous Biden immigration policies, not only get free cell phones and medical care including transitioning to the gender of their choice, but also have been provided with a “pathway to citizenship” if they needed one?
“Remain unidentified” is right, you bozos: what do you think the U in UFO and UAP stands for? “Classified as ordinary phenomenon” such as flying pigs, too much stuff swirling around the Bermuda Triangle, and specks of dirt on camera lenses. The scope of this “comprehensive investigation” was further limited to “any UAP investigatory effort since 1945,” a loophole big enough to drive the Graf Zeppelin through.
The report was produced by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Anybody out there honest enough to admit you never heard of such a body?
Lastly, “In response to allegations of a government coverup, investigators interviewed people who claimed the government possessed and tried to reverse-engineer 
alien spacecraft. These people, however, misidentified authentic and sensitive national-security programs as UAP and had incomplete or unauthorized access to necessary information, the report said.”
Egad, Sir. I’m not even going to try to parse that one, but fun allusions and weasel words abound. What? If your claims concerning a government coverup were based on “unauthorized access to necessary information,” they are invalid, false, or confused? I’m confused and I don’t even have “unauthorized access to necessary information,” presumably secret gummint
April 3, 2024
Published in 2024 by WTM Enterprises.
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