Rocket Highway

As I said in a post last week, I got a smartphone. It’s been a fun little toy, and one of its more hilarious features has been its dubious capability to record voice and render it into a text message. It often fails at anything more complex than “Help I’m in my Suburban Pakistani manse and the NAVY Seals are in here,” (actually, it would screw that up)so Molly and I thought it would be fun to read a paragraph from a Serious Book.

The Serious Book chosen was The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, which I also mentioned in a previous post. If you don’t remember, it’s basically an account of Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri’s arduous journeys from “brave freedom fighters” in Afghanistan to terrorist masterminds of Al Qaeda. So, without further ado, here is the original quotation from the book.

In 1986, Bin Laden brought his wives and children to Peshawar, where they joined the small but growing community of arabs responding to Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s fatwa. it was clear by then that the Afghans were winning the war. admitting that Afghanistan was “a bleeding wound,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, offered a timetable for the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops. that was also the year that the American-made Stinger, the hand-fired missile that proved so deadly for Russian aircraft, was introduced, decidedly tipping the balance in favor of the Mujahideen.

Here’s what voice-to-text turned it into!

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Could Muslin Terror Mosks produce this highlight of Western Culture? No, I think not. America.