Word: babylonia
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Instead, we should insist on a U.S. foreign policy that supports Israel for Israel's sake--not because of a cost/benefit analysis, but because it's the right thing to do. Jews have been persecuted by Babylonia, by Persia, by ancient Greece, by ancient Rome, by the Ottoman Empire, by Nazi Germany and yes, by its Arab neighbors. The U.S. shut its doors to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. It has a duty to resist future attempts at the systematic annihilation of this perennially oppressed people...
...Mark Bryant. "It may come as some surprise to those who have only encountered riddles in the guise of jokes," he notes defensively, "that this skittish footnote to the austere chronicles of our folk-culture heritage has itself an ancient and learned history." As proof, he ventures back to Babylonia to unearth an early example: "Who becomes pregnant without conceiving? Who becomes fat without eating?" Answer: Clouds. In ancient Greece, Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx: "What is it that goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?" Answer...
Humans, true, have tried to evade or minimize risk ever since man first ducked into a cave to elude the sabertooth. Ancient Babylonia invented marine insurance, but notoriously litigious Americans have always wanted more than mere insurance. As soon as the automobile became popular, the motoring public began to develop what San Francisco Liability Lawyer Scott Conley calls the belief that "there must be a pot of gold at the end of every whiplash." Now the old litigious spirit has become almost a reflex. Malpractice suits against doctors are epidemic. The volume of damage suits, doubling in some jurisdictions...
...Combine Babylonia and the Bicentennial with a Baptist church interior and you may have something approximating this...
...responses. The world's oldest art works, the primitive animal paintings in the cave at Lascaux in southwestern France, for example, were Stone Age man's magical invocation of success in the hunt. The astrology so many millions follow today is a direct legacy from the astronomer priests of Babylonia. Even when Christianity spread through Europe, many in the countryside kept their rustic rites along with the new religion. ("Pagan" stems from the Latin paganus meaning "country dweller" and "heathen" from "dweller on the heath.") For centuries, magical arts and Christianity lived in uneasy coexistence, as they still...