Good news! Martin the tortoise reunited with owner

In this week when all the talk -- in the (((controlled media))) at least -- has been about families being ripped apart by the people who don't want America to be inundated by third-world immigrants, it's nice to have a good news story. This one is about a pet being returned to his/her/its owner after having run away from home and been missing for 11 months.

The tortoise named Martin went missing from his Oakville ON home in July 2017, and was just recently reunited with his owners, Rachelle Green and her husband Daniel Kneblewski recently.

Ms Green, who plastered the small city west of Toronto with flyers when her beloved pet escaped by crawling under her backyard fence, said she received a phone call from the Oakville and Milton Humane Society, asking whether Martin had ever been found. "It kind of shocked me since it had been such a long time," she said.

According to the report on the Inside Halton website, the caller told Ms Green that Martin "was found by a man gardening about two blocks down the road from where we live."

One of the tortoise's shell sections had a small birth defect, and as she looked him over, she saw that first old scar in his shell and she burst into tears, realizing this was indeed Martin. "I vividly remembered certain markings that only my little Martin had," she told the press. "After 11 months of some sort of adventure that only Martin will ever know, his journey brought him home. If only he could talk!"

Although Martin was unable to tell what happened to him, a gentleman called Ms Green four days after the joyous reunion to say that he was the man who had dropped Martin at the humane society. He told her he found Martin while he was gardening in his backyard, about two blocks away.

The man's son had wanted to keep the tortoise, but when he took Martin to the humane society for advice on feeding and care, they immediately seized him. He shared the story with friends at a neighbourhood bar, and that's when he heard the story of Martin, and phoned the number listed on the flyers that had been distributed during the lengthy search. (The missing tortoise story had also appeared in a local newspaper -- the Oakville Beaver -- and that's all I'll say about that!)

Ms Green said she and her spouse had searched the neighbourhood for months. Initial reports when he first went missing stated that a man had been seen scooping him up from the lawn of his Bridge Road home, and apparently headed to the lake to release him. It's a good thing that report was unfounded, as Martin is a desert tortoise and can't swim.

Ms Green reckons that Martin managed to stay warm this past winter, perhaps under someone's deck, close to a heating source, where he would have hibernated until the warmth of spring hit. Her husband believes differently, thinking someone took him in, then later Martin escaped, or was set free. Whatever the case, Ms Green said her newly fenced yard, and a GPS tracking device, will prevent him from going missing again, and she’s just thrilled that Martin is back home, ready for another season of gardening.

Should the West be meddling in the Middle East? Good question!

"East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." So wrote Rudyard Kipling, well over a century ago. He was talking about culture clash, and the folly of multiculturalism, long before the term was even invented. His point was that, no matter what the preachers tell us, people are different. Different peoples have different cultures, different belief systems, different ways of looking at the world and at other peoples.

Our "civilized/progressive/modern" Western ways may not be the best ways for all peoples. We may judge such cultural norms and practices as beheading infidels and shunning homosexuals "old-fashioned/barbaric/heathen" or maybe "just plain wrong". But if some people -- Arabs, for example -- see those things as right, according to their lights, shouldn't we just leave them to it? Who are we Westerners to impose our notions of democracy, our culture, our beliefs or anything else on them?

Walt is not the only one posing such questions. On the CBC News website today, ace Middle Eastern correspondent Nahlah Ayed asks "Should the West stop intervening in the Middle East?" Ms Ayed has thought the question through thoroughly, but for some reason [Because she works for the CBC? Because she doesn't want to betray any pro-Muslim bias? Ed.] doesn't come to any conclusion beyond "Though all these options are debatable, we are now almost beyond the question. The West has intervened, and is intervening, and the pushback has now touched Canada at home. Agree or not, we have entered an indeterminate period of turbulence."

Well... yeah! Duhhh.

In the Globe and Mail, Patrick Martin tells us "There are consequences to joining the war against the Islamic State". [Sorry, no link for this one; it's behind the Groan and Wail's stupid paywall. Ed.] Again, duhhh! Didn't Walt say just that two days ago, in "Harper's Islamic chickens come home to roost"? You betcha!

What's surprising to me is that the hard questions are being asked, and the folly of Western intervention in a Muslim vs Muslim conflict pointed out, so quickly. We are already hearing acknowledgments from the US military leadership that the war against ISIS [They're still saying "ISIL". Ed.] is not going well.

Sober and thoughtful people are already reminding the Prez and his hangers-on (like Canada's Steve Harper) to remember the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Their war -- for it is their war, not to be blamed on previous administrations -- is not only unwinable, but based on a bad premise, namely that we should impose the values of our "civilization" on a people who clearly don't and won't believe that "the Western way is the best way."

Walt asks how many more lives will have to lost and how many billions of dollars wasted before we finally learn?