Smitty’s Loose Change #19

Ding-dong!  The wicked witch of COVID lockdowns is dead – or at least mortally wounded.  Someone threw a pail of hand-sanitizer on her.  Earlier in August, I spent an exciting weekend.  On Saturday, we attended the celebration of the wife’s aunt/godmother’s 100^th birthday.  Now I have a goal to shoot for.

On the Sunday, I attended an al fresco meeting of the Free Thinkers, in the park.  Damn the Woke Generation!!  In conversation, as I do in my blog-posts, I mentioned, “The Wife.”  A feminist jumped all over me for using that expression, “like she was just some object.  You should refer to her as, ‘My wife”

A male, unasked, unwanted and unneeded, came to my rescue by saying that the term ‘My Wife’ could indicate ownership and control.  Damned if I do.  Damned if I don’t!  Whatever happened to ‘Just keep your damned mouth shut?’

***

An overnight success, after twenty years in the business

Musical archeologists, searching for the lost Ark of the Goldie-Oldies, recently dug up what may be one of the earliest examples of PC/Woke.  They unearthed the 1961 novelty song, My boomerang won’t come back by Charlie Drake.

“My Boomerang” is not exactly a paragon of political correctness, even by 1961 standards. In the song an Aboriginal meeting is described as a “pow-wow”—something more appropriate for Native Americans—while their chanting sounds more African than Aboriginal. (Oddly, many of the Aboriginal speakers in the song have either American or British accents.) Most of all, Drake raised eyebrows with the chorus: “I’ve waved the thing all over the place/practised till I was black in the face/I’m a big disgrace to the Aborigine race/My boomerang won’t come back!”

After the BBC refused to play the tune (despite its popularity in record shops), a new version was recorded, substituting “blue in the face.”  When the song was initially released in the USA it also contained the “black in the face” lyric which was shortly changed to “blue.”

***

The word “monosyllable”…. has five syllables.

***

The problem with religion right now is that it hasn’t evolved.  Instead of being open and searching for ways to be relevant in today’s world, it’s gone all defensive and protective, and it has regressed into lowest-common-denominator sound bites – and fundamentalism.

***

I recently saw a picture of a washroom at Tim Horton’s, Canada’s national coffee and doughnut shop.  The toilet brush holder was a Starbucks mug.

Tim’s provided the coffee and donut balls for the recent outdoor meeting in the park.  They sent two 1-gallon, plastic-lined cardboard flasks of coffee, two boxes of Timbits, a bag of plastic cups, lids, stir-stix, sugar, and creamers.

Down at the bottom of the bag, unasked for, and unexpected, they included a dozen metal lapel pins that read

 O Canada
Right the wrongs

apparently referring to current, Indigenous atonement proceedings.  All very commendable but – when I go to a coffee shop, I want coffee and donuts – not political statements.

I do not see as wrongs, things that Snowflakes, afflicted with White Guilt, claim as wrongs.  When Europeans came to Canada, they operated under the same legal system that the Indigenous did – Take what you need – Hold what you can.

No-one owned the land, until a government, representing several nations and cultures, laid claim.  “Survival Of The Fittest” says that those most able to adapt, are most likely to endure.  Natives were expected to join the changing society.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Many of the wise ones adapted, and became modern, productive Canadians.  The rest want to wear buckskins and feathers, whine that progress has passed them by, and party like it’s 1799.  😥

WOW #44

This is MY definition of ‘Griffonage.’

Doctors have learned to use computers, and no longer hand-write prescriptions. Pharmacists give thanks for modern technology. That brings us to the Word Of this Week

GRIFFONAGE

Careless handwriting: a crude or illegible scrawl

The art of cursive writing is going the way of the Dodo VCR. Generally, the more someone writes, the more rushed the writing is, and the worse – the more illegible – it becomes. If you are fortunate enough to get a celebrity to autograph a book or a program, they vaguely wave a marker over it.

What results, could not be proven in a court of law – or anywhere else – to be an actual signature. You might as well have had one of the roadies scribble something. You could sell it at a neat profit, and no-one would be any the wiser.

This old –but new-to-me – word, brought me to another new-to-me synonym…. Cacography, who is related to cacophony, which means
harsh discordance of sound; dissonance:
a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds

So, where one infects the ears, the other afflicts the eyes. Give your eyes a rest on Monday, with a post with a few jokes.   😉   😆

How Not To Solve A Problem

Yet another example of how legal Canadian gun owners – and not the criminals – face all the hassles

If you’re a legal gun owner in Canada, you’ve probably heard the buzz about how the Liberal government would like to ban all handguns. Maybe you’ve even begun to wonder why it is that every time there is a high profile shooting, “progressive” politicians come after you, rather than targeting criminals with illegal guns.

After all, over the last 25 years you’ve enrolled in (and passed) the government’s lengthy courses on the safe handling of firearms. You’ve applied for, and been granted a licence to possess firearms, and to buy ammunition.

For a time, when it was required, you registered every old gun you had, and every new gun you bought. You acquired (at significant expense) all the trigger locks and gun safes needed to comply with safe storage rules. You informed the government of your new address every time you moved. And when you went to renew your firearms licence, you dutifully informed the government of any changes in your marital or employment status.

You even went to the trouble of acquiring a transport permit to carry a gun from your home to an approved shooting range, locked in a case, locked in your trunk. And rather than stopping for a pee at a gas station, you held it on the way home because, technically, that’s what Canadian law requires.

If you are an official gun collector, you’ve even agreed to let police search your home randomly, without notice, once or twice a year. In other words, you’ve jumped through every new hoop that Ottawa could think up to burden law-abiding gun owners, in the name of solving gun crime.

Now you learn that’s still not enough. If they can figure out a way to do it, the Liberals want to take away any handgun that you own altogether. All of that is frustrating enough, but there’s something that you didn’t know, that will blow your lid: No-one who has ever been banned by the courts from owning firearms is subject to the same scrutiny.

Neither Canada’s criminal justice system, nor its police information computers, keeps track of the whereabouts of people subject to weapons prohibition orders. The federal firearms center reports that there are nearly 450,000 convicted criminals prohibited from owning firearms, including thousands who should be “monitored closely because of their high risk to acquire firearms illegally and use firearms in the commission of a subsequent offence.”

The Federal Government doesn’t keep track of people who have been banned from owning guns, as closely as it keeps track of ordinary duck-hunters, and target shooters. Here’s the ultimate irony – or is that hypocrisy? We know that the banned 450,000 already have criminal records, and we also know that crime rates among law-abiding gun owners are lower than for the population as a whole.

Governments who want to ban, restrict, or register legal guns in the name of reducing crime, are truly going after the wrong people. Of course, to justify this unwarranted targeting of legitimate gun owners, governments and police services have recently begun spinning the tall tale that legal owners are the No. 1 source of guns used in crimes, either because they have carelessly stored them and the guns have been stolen, or because they have sold their legal guns on the black market.

This is utter bullshit! Little by little, over the past few months, Public Safety Canada, the Toronto Police Service, and others, have been forced to admit that they have no data to support their contention that most crime guns start out as legal guns in Canada.

This is just another way that legal gun owners in Canada are being blamed for a problem that they have not caused. If governments want to reduce gun crimes, they need to stop wasting so much effort on the good guys who own guns.

Because I Wrote About It

Because I wrote about it, because I slipped it into several posts, because I even had a post titled “Oleo Olio”, I felt that I should set the record straight, and honor a local almost-hero.  The following is a reprint of an article in the Waterloo Region Record about margarine in Canada.  It is presented without their knowledge or permission, so, if I suddenly open a Patreon account for bail and lawyers, I hope that you will contribute generously.

THE MAN WHO MADE MARGARINE “SAFE”

Kitchener’s William Daum Euler championed butter substitute

Psst!  Want to buy some margarine?  Seventy years ago, that wasn’t a simple question.

As Canadians celebrate the legalization of marijuana this month, they may be forgetting that, just a few generations ago, this country was having a fierce debate about another controlled substance – that’s right, margarine.

Banned in Canada between 1886 and 1948, the oil-based butter substitute was once labelled a serious public health risk.  Its opponents vilified it, calling the spread a “compound of the most villainous character, which is often poisonous,” according to W.H.Heick, who wrote a book on the subject back in 1991.

Many people may remember mixing color packets into their margarine, since Ontario law used to require margarine only be sold in its natural white state.  But they may not know it was a tenacious politician from Waterloo Region who led the campaign to finally legalize it after the Second World War.

Margarine has had a complicated history since it was first created by French chemist Hippolyte Mėge-Mouriės in 1868, by churning beef tallow with milk.  Dairy producers, concerned about a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to butter, lobbied hard to have it banned.

For decades, they succeeded, convincing law makers it was unsafe and unhealthy for consumers – and bad for their rural economy.  William D. Euler, a Liberal senator and former mayor of Kitchener, had the support of urban organizations like churches, unions and Boards of Trade, as he went to war for margarine.

As part owner of the Kitchener Daily Record, he pushed for editorials supporting the end of the ban.  In 1947, he introduced repeal legislation, and was met with fierce resistance from the dairy lobby.  He wrote letters to newspapers across Canada, pushing his position.  Polls suggested that half the country was behind him – and he leaned on women, veterans, and hospitals for support.

Many Canadians were already using and cooking with margarine, bought on the black market.  Often it was smuggled in from the Dominion of Newfoundland, where it was made from whale, seal and fish oil, by the Newfoundland Butter Company.

Newfoundland, which was still a British colony then, was busy churning out bootleg margarine at about half the price of butter.  Euler, who became the first chancellor of Waterloo Lutheran University, used legalization of margarine as a key bargaining chip in the negotiations with Newfoundland to enter into Confederation.

In November 1947, he got helped by a butter price increase, from 53 to 66 cents a pound, which only reinforced his campaign for a more affordable alternative.  In newspaper pages, town halls, and on Parliament Hill, the debate raged.  Senator James Murdoch accused the butter lobby of using “Communist tactics.”

“The wishes of 150,000 producers of milk had to give way to the desires of 13 Million consumers,” Heick wrote in his book, “A Propensity to Protect Butter – Margarine and the Rise of Urban Culture in Canada.”  The fight went to the Supreme Court, which struck down the ban, and left the control of margarine to the Provinces.  By this point, a poll suggested 68% of Canadians supported legalization – a shift in opinion owed in large part to Euler’s public relations campaign.

Ontario didn’t repeal its Oleomargarine Act until 1995, which made it illegal for companies to make or sell margarine that was colored yellow.  Quebec didn’t follow suit until 2008.  Margarine finally had equal footing with butter, at least in the eyes of the law.  And consumers had a senator from Kitchener to thank for it.

***

What??!  Businessmen would lie, and politicians would support them, for financial gain?  Tell me it ain’t so!  FAKE NEWS!  FAKE NEWS!  You can butter me up by stopping back again soon.  🙂

StOp! Ed

GAZA TRAGEDY A WAR CRIME

Re: President Trump has squandered his chance for Mideast peace

What’s the appropriate response to Israel’s s shooting dead, of dozens of unarmed civilians in Gaza on May 14 – a total of over 100 such killings since March 30, when the March of Return began(with 2700 injured, 1300 being shot, none of them Israelis)?

These are essentially state executions.  They constitute war crimes against humanity.  The victims have both the right to return to the land from which they were dispossessed by Israel, and the right under international law to resist the illegal, oppressive and life-threatening occupation and siege to which they are subjected.

The correct response is for the United Nations to raise a force to arrest the killers, charge them with murder, and bring them to trial before the International Criminal Court.

In contrast, our Prime Minister calls for an investigation of these admittedly ‘inexcusable acts,’ knowing full well what happened to the investigations into the 2008-9 and 2014 Gaza massacres.  The United States rendered them inoperable.

The Record says Israel ‘should be making a far greater effort to mitigate the loss of civilian life.’  That is, aim the dumb-dumb bullets at the legs, not the heads.

Thus do the Canadian government and media continue to enable Israel’s 70-year campaign to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians.

Ed Eglin

***

PALESTINIANS COULD HAVE PREVENTED GAZA TRAGEDY

There were two tragedies in Gaza, on May 14.  The first was that Palestinians died.  The second was that Israel, its security wall, and its army were threatened with obliteration, and were forced to take such measures.

Militant, terrorist Palestinian leaders cynically incited a vulnerable mob to attack a secure fortification, with no concern for the lives and safety of their fellow-citizens, just to make a political statement.  The heavily-armed leaders remained mostly safe, well behind their cannon fodder.

Just because none of those killed possessed guns, they were far from unarmed.  They had stones and slings, like David killed Goliath with.  They had Molotov cocktails.  The defenders were not to know who had guns – or rockets, or high explosives.

“Dum-dum bullets” fragment on impact.  I believe that Ed meant mushrooming bullets, though, other than his letter, I have read no mention of their use in this fray.

Any police officer will tell that they are trained to fire at center of mass.  When a screaming mob, intent on your death and destruction attacks, there is no time for the niceties of aiming for rapidly-moving legs.  All shots are to be toward the center of the mob.  Even if hundreds of legs were maimed, apologists like Ed would probably complain about the number of cripples created.

Israel was created by the United Nations, in an area that they had been dispossessed from by the Arabs, and it has the right to protect its existence.  ‘Under siege’ means to be surrounded.  Palestinians are not under siege by Israel.  They may move back at any time.  Israel is surrounded by, and under siege from militant Muslims, whose rallying cry is to kill all Israelis, and drive them into the sea.

There are two sides to every story. Both sides of this one were regrettable, but to blame Israel for something that Palestinian leaders created, is biased and wrong.

(Both sides now)

Archon

A LARGE DROP IN THE BUCKET

I am agog – not to be confused with a fool, a nerd, or a nosy parker – although I’ve successfully been all of those. I have been within 8 feet of Queen Elizabeth.  I have seen and touched Her Royal Yacht, Britannia, when it put into the harbor at my home town for fuel.  I had a brief, 5-second conversation with the singer, Roger Whittaker, and I got a hug, and a kiss on the cheek, from the female Canadian Minister of the Exterior.

These all pale into insignificance. I recently got an invitation from BrainRants, to come and visit him and his wife this summer.  Actually, all that happened was that he made a casual inquiry as to whether the wife and I intended to be in his area this year, and when – but I’m treating it like a Royal Summons, and it snowballed from there. I’m So Excited (click to hear the Pointer Sisters tell you how much)

He’s the one responsible for unleashing me on an unsuspecting blogosphere, but don’t blame him for that. He was distracted at the time with saving the world and the American Way Of Life.  It was the Law of Unintended Consequences.

A couple of years ago, when we were doing the ‘Doctor Ericson, I presume’ tour, I asked if we might drive down for a quick visit.  Rants was preoccupied with a son going off to college, and a few other pressing domestic situations, and said ‘no,’ but not necessarily “NO” forever.

Last fall, I asked again about the possibility of an eventual visit, just to know whether or not to remove it from my bucket list. Rants took this as an indication that I wanted it to happen soon.  Apparently not a lot of people make plans years ahead, especially old geezers like me.  It’s happening sooner than I anticipated.  Rants and his lovely wife are welcoming us this summer.  Not only are we visiting, but we are being put up in a guest room to save motel costs –and, Rants is booking some well-earned and needed vacation time to be with us for several days.

I asked if it was some kind of competition between him and his wife to be nice to us, but apparently this is what kind, intelligent, generous people do. Aside from visiting my parents for weekends while they were alive, I have never been a house-guest in my life. Dear Miss Etta Kett; How do I conduct myself??

It is well that the wife’s birthday is in mid-Feb. This year she had to renew her Ontario Health Card, and her driver’s licence. One of three photo ID options recommended to do this, is a passport.  When I dug hers out and she was transferring information, she realized that both our passports had expired.

Apparently the bureaucrats do not send an email renewal reminder, and since we didn’t travel outside the Province last year, we had not noticed. It would have been a catastrophe to make all these delicious plans, and be turned back at the border for incomplete documents.  We had the time to get them reissued.

I am so giddy that I’m twirling around the house like a little pixie….or maybe a wolverine on meth. We’re going to Rants’! We’re going to Rants’!  I’m taking along our digital camera, but there’s no promise that any photos will show up here on the blog-site.  I’ve already had to sign a non-disclosure security document, and a black helicopter will pick us up at the Virginia Welcome Center.

Surprisingly, the wife warmed to the idea quite quickly, to the point that, if we can’t put aside enough to pay for the trip in the next couple of months, she’s willing to raid her cache of Loonies and Toonies coins that she’s been stashing away for years.

If she’s warm now, just wait and see how warm DC is in August. We may drive past the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Pentagon in an air-conditioned car, but this visit is all about meeting two people who have been so very nice to me for years.  We can do that with a shady back deck and some cold beer.

More to come, I will reveal all as much as I can.  Be happy for me….and maybe a little jealous.   😎  🌯

Childlike Grace

When I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Blogger Barry, in a recent post, said that he’d halted on his path to becoming an Atheist. He does not say that it was because he was taught that Atheists are evil, nasty or sinful, but that is the reason that many ex-Christians won’t admit that they have become Atheists.

Tired of the judgemental, accusatory, denominational bureaucracy and hypocrisy, he still wished to identify as ‘spiritual.’ It is quite possible to be spiritual, without being a member of any Christian sect.  His last stop before getting off the Christian bus, was at Mormon.

He still visited Atheist websites, and admitted that he had remained a Christian. He was amazed at the vehemence of some militant Atheists, who insisted that any and all religions were harmful.  He admitted that, being ‘inside the box,’ perhaps he did not understand the claim.  He asked, if he was not harming himself, or anyone else, how could his being a Christian be harmful?

When we tell small children that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy exist, are we harming them, or society in general? Probably not, or only a minuscule amount.  However, when children get to be 7, 8, 9 years old, we tell them the truth, and show them reality.  To allow them to grow into adults who still believe in things like the Tooth Fairy, can cause harm in a variety of ways.

If an individual or sect is allowed to treat their particular and peculiar superstition as reality, then both the believers and society are harmed. It also inserts the thin edge of a wedge.  If one is, then all religious opinions must be accepted, no matter how strange or unreal.  The more people there are, who treat fantasy as fact when dealing with life and the general public – the fewer people who cannot and/or do not, deal with secular reality – the more harm is caused, both to the believers and to society.

Critical thinking is incredibly hard, but also incredibly important. We can’t learn and grow without it.  We have to question our own ideas and motivations, so that we don’t get stuck on there being only one correct, acceptable idea.

Next comes the slippery slope. Once strange unprovable beliefs are allowed, the holders quickly try to turn acceptance into licence.  If politically powerful enough, they try to pass laws enforcing membership in their sect, and making disagreement with their views into heresy and apostasy.  Kindly old George H. W. Thousand Points Of Light Bush once said that Atheists should not be allowed to be American citizens, or patriots.

My opinion of Blogger Barry’s intelligence and mental strength, based only on reading a few of his posts, is that he is not, and probably won’t ever be, directly harmful to society. Sadly, he’s one in 10,000 – or maybe a million.  There are countless hordes, who are only too willing to use their religion as a justification to inflict physical, mental, emotional, social, or financial pain and damage to countless other victims.

God is for the wise. Religions are for fools.  If only more people would grow out of the childish need for an imaginary friend to protect and guide them, and become adult enough to face the universe and life as it really is, and not just how they wish it were.   😦  😯

A To Z Challenge – W

Whoo-whoo, you’re almost eligible for parole from this letter-perfect piffle.  But first, a word from – my dictionary, starting with

Too many Fundamentalist (with the accent on mental) Christians play the definition game, whereby they decide what a word or name means, and use it as justification for hatred and harassment of those who don’t precisely agree with them.

One of the words that sets many of them off, is ‘Witch.’  Their infallible Bible tells them, “Suffer not a witch to live.”  They all know what a witch is, what they look like, how they act, and what they do. (Evil, evil evil!)  Ignoring Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, they focus on the ugly hag, the crone, who is stirring up a batch of bats’ brain, newts’ eyes and frog warts, to cast evil, harmful spells.

My daughter is a witch, and I’m proud of it.  Actually, she’s only kinda, sorta, Wiccan – but there’s many a Good Christian who’s only prevented from having her burned at the stake by strong, secular laws.  She believes in a unifying force of the universe, only she doesn’t believe that ‘It’ is male, and she doesn’t call it ‘God.’

If you’ve read my Rylah Reblog, you know that she’s as loving and caring a person as any judgmental Christian. She gets her morals and ethics from her heart and her mind, not from some list drawn up by a bunch of frightened old men, also listing what you can wear, what you can eat, and who you have to hate, because they’re different.

The witches that ‘they’ believe in, didn’t really exist in the past, and they don’t exist now.  Any witch that I know now, is usually a better, kinder, nicer person, and productive, loving, accepting member of society, than most of these superstitious buffoons.

Flash Fiction #99

Thanks to Piya Singh for this week’s photo prompt

BIG BLOWHARD

When the Big Bad Wolf blew down the house of straw, that Piggy ran to his brother’s house of sticks. The Wolf blew down the house of sticks, and they both ran to their older brother’s house of….??!

“Bricks are too expensive; I used free fieldstone; it’s much stronger!”

The Big Bad Wolf said, “I’m going to huff and puff, and blow that house down.”

The third Piggy replied, “Not today, bitch!” He stuck a 12-gauge SPAS shotgun out the tiny window and blew the wolf away.

They all lived happily ever after, with their feet on a wolf-skin rug.

***

I wanted to include a line about, “This State’s got a Stand Your Ground Law.”, but a word limit is a word limit.  You’ll just have to imagine it.  😆

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple website and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

 

Cognitive Dissonance II

A California lawyer has submitted a referendum proposal to outlaw homosexuality in the famously liberal western US state, on pain of execution.

“The abominable crime against nature known as buggery, called also sodomy, is a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha,” reads the proposal, registered for comment on the attorney general’s website.

“Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath against us… the people of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method,” he wrote.

When I read this, I couldn’t understand why this man’s head didn’t explode, I know mine almost did. In seven words in the second line, this lawyer goes immediately from “freedom and liberty” to “commands us to suppress.” The arrogance of this religious Fundamentalist, is matched only by his ignorance.

Only the night before I read this, had I reluctantly watched with the wife, a National Geographic TV documentary about ‘homosexuality’ among animals. In a one-hour show they listed seven examples, including coyotes, dolphins and Canada geese, and mentioned that there were several more. So much for his imagined “crime against nature!”

I don’t know where you’d store an Ego large enough to make you think that you have the right to speak for God. Perhaps in the same twisted, dark corner of the brain where you believe, without proof, that homosexuality is ‘evil’, or that God deigns to command you to do His work, and suppress it.

The Bible does speak against homosexuality, but I have never heard or read of anyone who claimed that ‘God ordered’ them to do something, who could point to anywhere other than their fevered religious imagination, for validating ‘proof’ of their Crusade. These delusions can be suppressed with proper medication and therapy.

This man seems to fear death from a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah destruction. The self-believed expert on the subject even managed to misspell Gomorrah, in his application. If God didn’t take out various 17^th century Italian cities, 18^th century Paris, or 19^th century London, He’s not going to stir himself about a bunch of fags in San Francisco.

Even were such a destruction to occur, does he not believe that the God of Love would forgive him, and the other innocent Lots, and condemn only the sinners? Does he feel that God is too stupid or venal to judge each of us individually?

Like many of his religiously judgemental confreres, his very zealotry proves that he is not actually familiar with the Bible, instead, relying on what he thinks it says, or what someone else told him that they thought it says. I can recommend several good short passages.

Love one another.
Love thy neighbor as thyself.
As ye have done unto these, the least of my brethren, ye have done unto me.
Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.
Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s.

I feel sorry for depressing, narrow-minded, opinionated, supposedly-religious assholes like this….no I don’t! If they all died tomorrow, I’d stand in line to volunteer to load them into trucks with a pitchfork.

Amen means a soft, accepting ‘let it be’, not ‘use fire and sword to force your superstition on the infidels.’ We leave that to the likes of ISIS, who recently bulldozed down historic, artistic Iraqi Assyrian statuary. I feel sorry that the rest of us kind, loving people, like Job, are afflicted with them.

#497