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Assorted Stupidity #131

Apr 02, 2020 05:30 am | Kevin

This is a real-life, a/k/a true case/event/matter/situation that occurred fairly recently. While we’re all going nuts over several things that have been brought to our attention over the past three years or three months, laughter is necessary. And you will find this funny.

• • “You only get this chance once,” Eduardo Moreno allegedly said this week. The chance to do what, you ask? Why, to try to crash the train you’re driving into a Navy hospital ship to expose a government conspiracy, of course. I think it’d be more accurate to say that you will, at most, only get one chance to do that. In any event, Moreno seized his chance on Tuesday, when, prosecutors say, acting on the spur of the moment he deliberately ran a train off the tracks near the Port of Los Angeles in an effort to crash into the USNS Mercy. The ship is there so its 1,000 beds can help ease the burden on local hospitals—or is it? According to Moreno, the ship’s presence is “suspicious” and he doesn’t believe it’s for “what they say it’s for.” (He didn’t say what he says it’s for.) “People don’t know what’s going on here,” Moreno said. “Now they will.” But they don’t.

• • The report says Moreno was “charged with one count of train wrecking.” This seemed oddly specific, and I think it actually refers to 18 U.S.C. section 1992, which is entitled “Terrorist attacks and other violence against railroad carriers and against mass transportation systems on land, on water, or through the air.” According to the legislative history, the same section was once entitled simply “Wrecking trains,” so I think this is probably it. These days, of course, everything has to be larded up with extra words, most importantly “terrorist.” This is not an improvement.

• • If you’re thinking it would probably be hard to hit a ship with a train, one being waterborne and the other pretty much land-only, I think you are correct. Moreno, at least, did not even get close. “The train crashed into a concrete barrier at the end of the track, smashed through a steel barrier and a chain-link fence, slid through one parking lot and then a second lot filled with gravel and hit a second chain-link fence,” finally coming to rest more than two football fields away from the dock. Officials said security cameras”shows Moreno holding a lighted flare during the incident,” either because this wasn’t dangerous enough already or because he didn’t think anyone would notice otherwise.