“The killing of Salwan Momika is an outrage. He seems to have been executed for criticising Islam, for daring to desecrate the Koran. It is medieval savagery to kill a man for mocking a religion. We must defend the right to blaspheme, says Brendan O’Neill”

A classic Terrible Middle Ages attribution of a 21st-century act based on a 7th-century religion for no reason except Medieval is the worst word they can think of, in the teaser to an article on Spiked [which to be fair did not contain this tortured analogy] on X Jan. 30, 2025

“REMEMBER/ PERFORM HAND HYGIENE”

Sign I encountered just outside “DAY SURGERY WAITING ROOM” in Ottawa Hospital Riverside at 6:30 AM on a January 2025 morning, then a graphic of someone’s hands getting either soap or sanitizer to clarify this atrocious jargon [to be fair followed by the French plain-language “RAPPEL/ LAVEZ VOUS SOUVENT LES MAINS”]

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

Douglas Adams, emailed by a friend and attributed to “Mostly Harmless, 1992”

“G.K. Chesterton – there was a bright guy – said, ‘I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my work seriously’”.

Chuck Jones, the animation legend from Warner Bros. who cocreated Bugs Bunny etc., at age 80, quoted in Maclean’s June 14, 1993

“Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.”

Jeremiah 10:11 [KJV].

“delivered with the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt competition.”

Eli Lake in The Free Press November 3, 2024 [with specific reference to Donald Trump’s political flimflam that does not so much lie on purpose as deny the very possibility of truth]

“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Moral decay contributed to the dissolution [of the Roman Empire]. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rub themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed. The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [the greatest of historians is of course Edward Gibbon - but it is not immediately obvious that Christianity caused any of the things Durant just listed including unbelief or sex running riot]