www.thornwalker.com/ditch/morley_short_takes_9.htm
February 19, 2024
Short takes, no. 9
By EDWARD MORRISON MORLEY
Editor’s note: It turns out that Mr. Morley may or may not be back. Reliable sources tell TLD that there are reasonable suspicions that Morley’s last Short Takes column (No. 8) was entirely written by AI while Morley lolls around a beach in a jurisdiction without U.S. extradition agreements. That raises the question ... WE INTERRUPT THIS PARAGRAPH FOR THIS WARNING: “raises the question” is correct here, not “begs the question.” Bonus Points for Morley. Because at least99 percent of the legacy media think the two are synonyms, this misnomering is now actually considered correct in some online dictionaries. IT ISN’T. GOT THAT? “Begging the question” is the logical fallacy of assuming the truth of the conclusion instead of demonstrating it, i.e., circular reasoning. It is not the same as “raises the question” as ignoramuses among our elites seem to think. WE RETURN YOU NOW TO OUR REGULAR PROGRAMMING ... raises the question (whether or not anyone cares) whether any of the following was written by an actual human, presumably Mr. Morley, or by an “AI” Morley. You, or your “AI” persona, be the judge.
1. Actually No. 2, since the above was clearly a short take. So here goes: 2. More big government in action. According to the Wall Street Journal,
POP QUIZ TIME: WHAT’S YOUR BEST GUESS?
The Pentagon said that the upgrading “was more complex than anticipated, challenging efforts to make them operational by 2029.” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall (hah! Betcha didn’t know who he was 30 seconds ago) said the replacement program was “struggling” and said a bunch of other things that were a) promptly jotted down by ChiCom military analysts for reasons unknown, and b) promptly jotted down by U.S. defense contractors and congressional hawks in preparation for the upcoming defense budget hearings. So whaddah ya think? A. The ChiCom supreme leader what’s his (other pronouns: her, him, its, they, them, zir, zieself) name will give his Air Force secretary the go-ahead, but make sure it’s before
3. And even more big government in action. Remember the Neutron Bomb, the capitalist bomb that supposedly kills people without destroying buildings and other valuable real estate? Well, now we have the humane Hellfire R9X missile, which was used to take out Wissam Muhammad Sabir al-Saadi, known as Abu Baqir Al-Saadi, known as “Dead Man Not Walking,” and leader of the Kataib Hezbollah in Syria (known as the Harvard Alumni Association here in the United States) as he was tooling down the downtown Baghdad Expressway in his car. Instead of blowing up the target, which might risk killing civilians and other innocent passersby as well as disrupting business at the Baghdad Starbuck, the missile utilized, according to the Wall Street Journal,
Apart from not raising the question (see above) of why “defense officials” would be fabricating offensive missiles, the report tells us that “[t]he Ginsu, also sometimes referred to as the Ninja bomb, is designed to plunge more than 100 pounds of metal through the tops of cars and buildings to kill its target without harming individuals and property close by. Instead of exploding, it has telescoping knives that eject out of its nose at the moment of impact.”
Speaking of exploding knives, it is believed that Monty Python is suing the Pentagon over the concept, which they say was copyrighted in their skit about the Piranha Brothers and “rotating knives.”
“Some U.S. defense officials,” the story goes on, “say they believe al-Saadi may have been in a crowded part of the Iraqi capital because he though he was safer among so many civilians.” Ha ha, the joke certainly was on him. Meanwhile,
4. News flash! just in from the International Criminal Court. On the heels of the ICC’s recent decision on South African charges that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to the Wall Street Journal
5. Guilty of being proven guilty until proven guilty. It was reported by Yahoo News on
“After initially allowing people to lay flowers at monuments to victims of Soviet-era repressions in several Russian cities, police sealed off some of the areas and started making arrests. [Authorities were concerned that this might create a flower shortage.] About 30 were detained in St. Petersburg, according to local media, and more than a dozen — including one with a sign reading ‘Killer’ — were rounded up near a Moscow memorial to political prisoners, according to the OVD-Info monitoring group. It said arrests occurred in several other cities.... Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported Navalny felt sick after a walk Friday and lost consciousness at the penal colony.... An ambulance arrived but he couldn’t be revived; the cause of death is ‘being established,’ it said. Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.”
Meanwhile, Fox News ran a video showing Navalny grinning and laughing in a courtroom just hours before Russian officials alleged he collapsed and died. Any takers on a wager as to whether his family will get to do an autopsy?
Several points here:
— the guy arrested with the sign reading “Killer” protested that he hadn’t mentioned any names, but was put in his place by arresting officers: “Don’t give us guff like that, buddy. We know who ‘Killer’ is.”
— cause of death being established. Here’s a clue: Navalny went for a walk in 40-below-zero temperatures with a wind chill of 100 degrees below.
— it’s the old “the prisoner was poisoned while trying to escape” trick.
— Navalny was pretty old (for a Russian) and in poor health (how healthy would you be after multiple poisonings and an arctic penal colony diet?). And isn’t “he stopped breathing as I was stepping on his windpipe” naturally going to cause death? QED he died from natural causes.
— the laughing in the FOX video could just be Navalny’s reaction to his recently arrived Babylon Bee subscription.
— when will anybody in the U.S. legacy media notice that their most-hated dictator, Orange Man, hasn’t bumped off (at least as far as we know) any of his fiercest foes?
6. It had to be coming. We all know that Gen Whatever college students are “snowflakes,” i.e., incredibly sensitive to perceived insults and less resilient to handling criticism and humor. But it turns out that your average TLD reader (you know who you are and so does the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, and Kamala Harris) is blooming into snowflakism. According to the Wall Street Journal,
A director of the Greeting Card Association, the largest industry trade group, credits this new found sensitivity to millennials: “They want the embellishments [sic]. They want the message that is like ‘My condolences that your Chihuahua named Susan had a kidney stone.’” I kid you not, you useless old geezers. On the other hand, if Kamala Harris is right, said millennials don’t really feel bad about killing babies as long as the deed is done before they are able to escape their somewhat restrictive habitats. (OK, sure, we’ll give you several hours more if you need it.)
There is also a Denver-based anti-ageism group called Changing the Narrative that is behind an “Anti-Ageism Birthday Card Campaign. On their website you can wallow in a multi-cartoon depicting What a World Without Ageism would look like. Dr. Kevorkian, call your office.
I specify the name here because “Dr. Death” is a pseudonym for more than one doc. Another is apparently the basis for a recent TV series: Dr. Christopher Duntsch is a neurosurgeon who severely maimed or killed most of his patients. (C’mon, the guy was trying.)
There is a whole genre along this line, but apparently, unlike Dr. Kevorkian who mainly helped the elderly to shuffle off this mortal coil more rapidly than they would have otherwise, Dr. D and others don’t age-discriminate. Their role model might be Vlad the Impaler Putin, whose greatest hits have included principally the middle aged. (“Nerve agents, poison, and window falls. Kremlin foes have been attacked or killed over the years,” AP News,
February 19, 2024
Published in 2024 by WTM Enterprises.
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