Extra-Feature - Arch Oboler - The Bathysphere

The Bathysphere 

Another classic from one of the best of the original generation of radio dramatists.  Originally a play in response to the megalomaniac dictators of the 30s and 40s.   Here's one online description of the original production of the play.

Aired on Arch Oboler's Plays soon after World War II broke out in Europe. Two outstanding acting performances (Hans Conried and George Zucco) lend crucial believability to a contrived premise in which the oppressed is allowed to confront the oppressor (a favorite device of Oboler's propaganda plays), clarifying their opposing views in the process.

This is a production from 1964.  

It's another one appropriate to the megalomaniacal  Trump regime we are going into.  

Second Feature - From A Story By George G. Toudouze adapted by James Poe - Three Skeleton Key

Vincent Price

John Dehner  

Ben Wright 

Not sure exactly why this seems to be such an appropriate story for the beginning of the Trump Pretendency, their paranoia, certainly, the absurdity of the merely plausible sense of fear it creates in its intended audience....

Anyway, it's considered a classic of radio drama, it was produced at least five times in different productions for radio,  I think Vincent Price was involved with most of them.  

Here's an earlier one that some people like better from 1950. 

Three Skeleton Key 

Saturday Evening Radio Drama - Harold Pinter - Victoria Station

Victoria Station 

Paul Rogers - Controller 

Martin Jarvis - Driver

I'm Sure You've Seen The Difference In Size Between Barack Obama's Inaugural And Trumps, Trumps Is The One With Lots of White Showing

Marxism Is As Dead As The Static Universe Theory

Someone apparently read one of my several archived posts in which I point out that not even the biggest Communist party in the world bothers to pretend it believes in Marxism anymore as China replaced it with Victorian era capitalism on steroids and more central planning.  Though I'm not sure that central planning component is what it's supposed to be, either.

It was said by some old scholars of the Soviet Union that by the regime of Leonid Brezhnev no one except the stupidest and most fanatical among the Soviet elite believed in any kind of Communism, anymore.  It was like American democracy here, under the Trump regime, something that is pretended by the guys who want to maintain their power through keeping such forms as the "peaceful transfer of power" under our system which legitimates the illegitimate.

About the only people I know of who pretend to believe in Marxism are idiot scholars and other such boobs who maintain that pose because it's way too late for them to start a whole new career, so they pretend it's scientifically inevitable.  Though there are some who maintain that as part of their febrile atheism, as well.  The "scientific" content of Marx is like that of natural selection, it's based in what is now obviously an absurd over-extension of claims of scientific method way past where it can be reliably applied, on grotesquely inadequate and often quite flimsy data available to the originator of the ideologies and maintained primarily for ideological and secondarily professional interests.  And, again, to those who maintain it out of a supposed utility for their primary interest, their faith of scientistic materialist atheism.

If 19th century physics and even early 20th century physics could maintain a theory as now clearly wrong as the belief that our universe was static and eternal, dealing with observable, reliably measured objects and reliably tested demonstrations of proposals about it, 19th and even present day alleged "science" dealing with things far more complex, impossible to observe and measure and, at every turn, vulnerable to the misunderstanding and, far worse, wishful thinking of those with an interest in a particular point of view stands a practically infinite chance of getting things entirely wrong.   I have no doubt that if we survive long enough and science is still being done, sometime in the future the present ubiquitous belief in natural selection will seem as quaint as a belief in spontaneous generation* does to us today.

We've already reached that stage with Marxism which, by, um......... "virtue" of its known effect of generating tens of millions of murders, slavery, oppression, denial of freedom of speech and, it would wish, thought, is a known and absolutely proven failure and, when insisted on by academic and political hacks, a  fraud.  Those well groomed, clean, even manicured and white collared Marxists are no less snake oil salesmen than Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, Chuck Todd and Lou Dobbs.  Marxism lies close on any honest mapping of political ideology with fascism and Nazism because they end up in the same place.  Those dear old lefties who pushed it even as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and even Pol Pot were murdering millions are no dearer than those dear old Nazis who pushed their brand were.  I say to hell with them all.

*  The alleged ally of natural selection, abiogenesis is all about spontaneous generation, much of it even more absurd than the old fashioned kind.  At least the people who believed that had actual organisms that they could see, most of abiogenesis is pure imaginary hooey.

Resisting The Agenda of Pretender Trump and His Republican-Fascists In The Congress

I don't think I've suggested that you read the pamphlet put out by Democratic congressional staffers about how to effectively pressure your members of Congress, House and Senate to not push the Trump-McConnel-Ryan fascist agenda.   If you haven't seen it yet, it is called 

INDIVISIBLE

A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR RESISTING THE TRUMP AGENDA

Things We Have To Wonder About Now

Reading Dahlia Lithwick's piece about Pretender Trump's speech made me wonder if we might see some strategic assassinations of journalists such as those that Trump's puppet master used to gain control of Russia.  A few strange deaths among journalists critical of Trump would probably send most of them scurrying to the hem of his garment to kiss it so as not to get on some imagined list of those to off.   Frankly, there is almost no one whose face you see on TV who, if that kind of assassination became a thing who I can imagine standing up and calling it out. Maybe Rachel, or Chris or Bill Moyers.   But, then, maybe I'm wrong about that.  The standing up part, there's good reason to suspect Putin would do such things.   

Would Putin, having pulled off the coup of all coups in putting his puppet in the American Presidency tolerate some American journalists who might threaten to undo it?   I don't know.  He had Alexander Litvinenko murdered in London, in what was a not at all subtle assassination using methods available to the Russian terror police.  Among the reasons for that assassination was the accusation by him and other former members of the Russian secret police that Putin was behind the assassination of Boris Berezovsky, also when he was out of Russia.  If Litvinenko was right, he used terror and assassination in Russia to gain control and I don't see any reason to not suspect it was the case that he'd go after Americans who threatened his major asset in the United States.  

I think it would be a really good idea for some of Trump's critics to be very careful about their personal security, if they aren't all ready.  Putin is just one possible source of danger, his domestic, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi supporters, not to mention those in the FBI, have a history of violence.  

Considering how he imposed Trump on the United States, Putin should be called 


.Vlad The Installer

Update:  OK, how about Vlad the Imposer of Trump the Imposter?

It Is A Sin And An Act Of Real Treason To Lend This Pretender Any Pretended Legitimacy

Trump is not a legitimate president, he was installed by a foreign despot working with the Fascist Bureau of Inquisition and the lying corporate media.

No one, from now on, who doesn't win the popular vote or, really, a majority of the real vote should be accepted by The People as a legitimate president.  

A government is only legitimate if it has the just consent of the governed, if that's not true we should be governed by the Brit government because the Declaration of Independence is founded on a lie.

Trump is a pretender, not a president.  

Charles Ives - An Election

It strikes me that
some men and women got tired of a big job; but, over there our men did not quit.
They fought and died that better things might be!
Perhaps some who stayed at home are beginning to forget and to quit.
The pocketbook and certain little things talked loud and noble, and got in the way;
too many readers go by the headlines, party men will muddle up the facts,
so a good many citizens voted as grandpa always did,
or thought a change for the sake of change seemed natural enough.
“It’s raining, let’s throw out the weatherman, kick him out! Kick him out! Kick him out! Kick him out! Kick him!”
Prejudice and politics, and the stand-patters came in strong, and yelled, “slide back! Now you’re safe, that’s the easy way!”
Then the timid smiled and looked relieved, “We’ve got enough to eat, to hell with ideals!”
All the old women, male and female, had their day today,
and the hog-heart came out of his hole; but he won’t stay out long,
God always drives him back!
Oh Captain, my Captain! A heritage we’ve thrown away;
but we’ll find it again, my Captain, Captain, oh my Captain!

Free Us From All Evil

Stravinsky, Our Father
Cambridge Singers
 John Rutter, Director

The Founders Cemented Slavery And Oppression Into Place Those Idols Should Be Knocked Off Their Plinths

A little remembered incident of the First Congress is as good an illustration as any as to how the Founders went from their pious declarations that "all men are Created Equal" to cementing even overt slavery into place through the Constitution is the handling of the petition Benjamin Franklin submitted for the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.  You don't have to take my word for the role that the idolized Constitution played in that, you can read it in the very excuse of the First Congress, peopled with Founders and their allies gave to not even consider that petition.  First what the U. S. Archives say about the documents.

Franklin did not publicly speak out against slavery until very late in his life. As a young man he owned slaves, and he carried advertisements for the sale of slaves in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. At the same time, however, he published numerous Quaker pamphlets against slavery and condemned the practice of slavery in his private correspondence. It was after the ratification of the United States Constitution that he became an outspoken opponent of slavery. In 1789 he wrote and published several essays supporting the abolition of slavery and his last public act was to send to Congress a petition on behalf of the Society asking for the abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade. The petition, signed on February 3, 1790, asked the first Congress, then meeting in New York City, to "devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People," and to "promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race."

The petition was introduced to the House on February 12 and to the Senate on February 15, 1790. It was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and sparked a heated debate in both the House and the Senate. The Senate took no action on the petition, and the House referred it to a select committee for further consideration. The committee reported on March 5, 1790 claiming that the Constitution restrains The committee reported on March 5, 1790 claiming that the Constitution restrains Congress from prohibiting the importation or emancipation of slaves until 1808 and then tabled the petition. On April 17, 1790, just two months later, Franklin died in Philadelphia at the age of 84.

First, well, better late than never for Dr. Franklin.  He, at least, made that much progress as Thomas Jefferson,  the author of that promise of equality was increasing his practice of slavery with the minutely sedulous scientific analysis.  I will also point out that it as those largely at the agitation of those pesky Quakers that he likely came that far, though they were hardly the only religious abolitionists of the time, many of whom were free Black People and Black People who were held in slavery.

If you want to read the report of the House Special Committe which disposed of the abolitionist petition, in that congress of Founders, you can read it in its depraved specificity, noting that the Constitution, itself, provided them with an excuse not to act for the next eighteen years.  Future congresses would resort to other provisions and the building body of slave-enabling law that was compiled by the judiciary at the same time.   Notice what Congress was forbidden by the Constitution from doing.

That Congress have no authority to interfere in the internal regulations of particular States, relative to the instruction of slaves in the principles of morality and religion*, to their comfortable clothing, accommodations and substance; to the regulation of their marriages, and the prevention of the violation of rights therefore, or to the separation of children from their parents; to a comfortable provision in cases of sickness, age, or infirmity; or to the seizure, transportation, or sale of free negroes; but have the fullest confidence in the wisdom and humanity of the Legislatures of the several States, that they will revise their laws, from time to time, when necessary, and promote the objects mentioned in the memorials, and every other measure that may tend to the happiness of slaves.

Considering that all of those things were things that States among the several States most certainly didn't regulate for the "happiness of slaves" which was the very reason they were brought up by abolitionists, the mealy-mouthed, lying hypocrisy of that House committee couldn't have been more obvious.  And their giving the object of our present day idolatry, the stinking, hypocritical Constitution as the reason for doing no more than lying about what was going on.

A few years back, I asked my very, very old mother and several of the other very old people I knew who were well read and who had always followed current events if they ever heard people going on and on about the "founders" and the Constitution when they were young.  All of them said they didn't remember it until about the time of the backlash against the civil rights agitation in the 1950s and 60s and on.  That was what I suspected, the cult of the Founders and the Constitution is part and parcel of the neo-Confederate reaction to equal rights.  Though, it should be noted, that most of the Northern States were also slave state during the First Congress and many of them would remain so.  I believe the "Mr. Foster" who issued that report was Abiel Foster, of New Hampshire, a member of the First Congress and, indeed, to the Continental Congress.   Though I can't find more documentation of that Special Committee on such short notice.  I would love to know what the gods of that idolatry might have said about it or the provision in the Constitution at the time it was adopted.

*  You can contrast the current de-religionized myth to what the early Black anti-Slavery agitator, David Walker said, mentioning the hypocritical Jefferson by name.   It is clear that slave holders didn't want slaves being exposed to the scriptures because the idea of slaves being freed is central to the entire thing.  They certainly didn't want them to learn to read so they could read such radical commandments of justice for themselves.


Update:  Oh, no.  No, no, no, no, no.  I don't mean that we should come out and attack the friggin' Founders and the corrupt anti-democratic Constitution by name.  We have to get rid of those by a more gradual process that shows people how they got suckered into deifying those in the first place. But the first step in that is for people who claim to be liberals and on the left to stop pushing that crap, themselves.  Even the ones who do it in Founders drag on stage.

I'd urge people to take up what Ishmael Reed and those he cited raised as a tacit challenge, to truthfully do with real abolitionists, Black people, people like Harriet Tubman (read what it said about her in the article I linked to from Reed), David Walker, Ida  Wells, who are real heroines and heroes what was done untruthfully for Hamilton.   Let's see if the friggin' New York Times would promote such a show into a $700 friggin' dollars a friggin' ticket show if it told the truth.  Openly challenge them to do it or to be considered the racist institution it is.  The NYT needs to be knocked off a plinth, too.

Hate Mail - I'm Not Sure Which Founders You're Upset With Me Dissing Those Slaver Crooks Or Lin-Manuel Miranda

If it's the distorter of history in that stupid musical, I can't say it better than Ishmael Reed did. 

If it's the others, my recent analysis is that they suckered a bunch of poor and what would now be called working class guys to fight their revolution for them so they'd be free to steal, pillage and enslave without getting taxed by the Brits.  The bait and switch that they pulled, going from the egalitarian claims of the Declaration of Independence to, once the poor and working class demanded what they got promised, endangering the wealth of the Founders class, to pulling the anti-democratic Constitution out of their foundations and foisting that on them.  
The "Hamilton" that is getting danced and rapped on stage, covering up his and the ruling classes' white faces with dark ones is a total distortion of history.   When you look at the fat, pasty white face of Trump under his troll-doll coif being saluted and celebrated by d-list talent tomorrow, you got him because of the real Hamilton and his buddies.  

You know, it's amazing how many college educated folk in the TV addled age don't understand that theater, the movies, etc. aren't real.  It's gotten so bad that they believe musical comedy is real. 

It's Time For Real Liberals To Stop Calling Ourselves "Liberals"

In my recent posts pointing out the two, incompatible things that get called "liberalism" I was saying that the ones I used to call "liberalish-libertarians" but have recently decided were better called "private-sector fascists" are the ones who have destroyed real liberalism.  The ideas of that liberalish-libertarianism are responsible for the privileging of lies, the idiotic and, to them,thrilling idea that the most proven of evil groups should not be prevented from spreading their intellectual and moral poison to gain influence, they were the ones behind the campaign to discredit the religion that was the strongest force and source of the genuine liberalism contained in the radical economic and social egalitarianism of the Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus.  I could add a myriad of other, subsidiary idiocies and evils that flowed from their 18th century alleged-enlightenment wisdom.   Much of it was based in ideology, though a lot of it was due to the kind of stupid grand-standing and attention getting that seems to go with that kind of stuff.

The political identity that should have comprised liberalism is based in a non-negotiable and absolute belief in equality of all people, perhaps its most radical form ever expressed is found in the economic content of the Mosaic Law.  It has a non-negotiable belief that the truth is to be valued above lies and that lies should never be privileged, for reasons I've pointed out endlessly.  Among the greatest reasons for that is that there is nothing more destructive of an attempt to establish equal justice than for lies to gain widespread or even merely effective influence - that is the meaning of American history over the past fifty years of attacks on what was won in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, the Great Society was an attempt to achieve that equal justice in reality instead of merely in courtrooms and intellectual abstraction and what is now an unfashionable pose in journalism.  It was destroyed through the "free speech-free press" absolutism which elevated lying to the supremacy it has risen to in 2016.

I think it is probably a good idea for people who believe that is to stop calling them and their political side "liberals" and "liberalism".  The word was burdened with such confusion by liberals and turned into a term of effective vilification under their regime of "free-speech, free-press" that it's a liability, anyway.  "Leftist" is hardly helpful either since it is associated with the Marxism, British style and French pseudo-socialism, anarchism and another bunch of junk that is really an even more obvious member of the fascism family.  That use of it has not only robbed the word of its clear meaning, it has associated it with some of the most murderous, oppressive figures in recent history and the ideas that led, inevitably, to those tens, even hundreds of millions of murders.   As an aside, I think here, safe in a quasi-democracy where they were under little to no real danger from those ideologies,  it was for the safe thrill of public display championing  of those thrillingly forbiden and violent Marxists among rich and connected pseudo-liberals that a lot of the "free-speech, free-press" junk arose.  There has been entirely more pose behind the pose of liberalish libertarianism than was ever good for doing actual good.  That it was their ideological cousins, American fascists, who benefited the most and triumphed under from that stupidity doesn't dissuade me into thinking I'm wrong.

I propose we find a new name for our politics, naming it with what it really is, egalitarian absolutism, fairness, monotheistic morality,  I would favor something that can't be divorced from that morality because, as the post-Marxist thinker Jurgen Habermas was forced to conclude by his decades of careful study and thought, there really is nothing else that nourishes it and its holdings, even today.   Atheism, especially the scientistic, Britatheism that has held so much influence on the alleged left, is poison to it.  You can study the British left to see the truth of that, as I have suggested before, look at the writings of the Fabians, including their star George Bernard Shaw who remained a Fabian in good standing even as he advocated the lethal chamber for the unproductive, unfit decades before Hitler and Hess began their program of applied science.

There is no more potent weapon for the political program to enact radical egalitarianism than the fact that the most widely held religion of Americans, Europeans and, I believe, Muslims, contains the belief that radical equality and, in many ways, the economic policies that would produce that equality are the will of God.  I've come to really believe that to be successful, to really overcome the worst in us with the best in us, nothing else can do it.  People have to really believe they are to do unto others as we would have them do unto us is what God wants them to do and that to not do that will have the kind of real, consequences of the kind we are about to see in the Trump-Republican-fascist governance of the United States.  To give that up for Brit style atheism, Marxism, Fabianism, and a host of other isms on the say so of decadent intellectuals was one of the stupidest things done by so many alleged liberals, most of it done out of the basest snobbery.  People who have either wisely rejected that from the start or who, like me, late in life have seen through the lies and poses should let them have the word, it's a meaningless term now, anyway.

Trump Will Be Impeachable As Soon As His Hand Leaves The Bible If Not Before It Does*

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

It will be his first act of perjury as president.

* Though one suspects he'll be sworn in on a copy of The Art of the Deal. 

Paul LePage Is A Piece of Crap, No Less Is The "Moderate" Susan Collins

The SHAME OF MAINE, the racist, lying scumbag, Republican-fascist "Trump before Trump" governor of Maine is again bringing shame to my state by lecturing John Lewis on the history of civil rights, claiming for the party which has made winning with racism one of its central pillars was .... well, here's what the lying scumbag, Paul LePage said:

"You know, I will just say this. John Lewis ought to look at history. It was Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves.  It was Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant that fought against Jim Crow laws. A simple ‘thank you’ would suffice.”

As others have pointed out,  Rutherford B. Hayes was the president who made a corrupt deal with the defeated Confederates to end the brief period when black people could vote in the former Confederacy, hold office and pursue equality.  It was under Hayes that Jim Crow started and got cemented into place until the 1950s, it was Republicans who used Lyndon Johnson forcing through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, to rally racists to join the Republican Party, by then the party of racism, reaction, and scum like Paul LePage.   

For the flaming racist, asshole, Paul LePage to presume to lecture John Lewis on the history of Jim Crow which he struggled to end is one of the most repulsive things that piece of slime has done as governor and the SHAME OF MAINE.  

There is no Party of Lincoln left, any Republicans like that left the party long ago.  A "Party of Lincoln" wouldn't have such scum in it like LePage and McConnell and pretty much the entire Republican caucus in the Congress.  It would not have elected the floridly racist Donald Trump.  Now you've got phonies like Susan Collins - a LePage supporter - who will go along with the racist Trump agenda because she wants to be Governor of Maine and the Republicans will probably recruit a millionaire egomaniac to run a spoiler campaign to put the piece of crap in the governorship.

If you think I am pissed off over this, I am because I just got done hearing this story on the Maine media which has done so much to give us both LePage and who have sold Collins to the gullible Maine voters as a "moderate" of the kind that doesn't exist anymore.  

The Liars This Time And The Buyers Who Bought Those Lies

A member of my family sent me a recent incident online of a guy who was going on and on about how he couldn't wait for them to repeal Obamacare.  Someone asked him what he had against the ACA.  He said he wasn't against the ACA he was against Obamacare.  When it was pointed out that they were the same thing he said, Nuh-uh, I got ACA and it isn't Obamacare.

I suspect the racism the Republican-fascists used against a lot of people to sucker them into total control is going to blow up when they find out that inconvenient fact.

I don't doubt that the Republicans are going to kill it, either outright or by destroying it.  They might listen to the health insurance industry and other industries which will face the financial disaster that doing either will cause,  they might, after they have an election disaster, listen to the people they suckered, but they won't do the latter before they destroy it and throw thirty-million people off of health insurance.   I think the resultant catastrophic failure to reimburse hospitals, emergency rooms, clinics, etc. will be a huge disaster but if there's one thing that Republicans have proven, beyond any possible denial, it is that they are willing to hurtle the country into a wall or off a cliff.  Remember, they're going to get rid of the things put into place to keep the banksters from doing what they did less than a decade ago, too.

Will we pull out of it in the Age of Lies our best and brightest have brought us to?   I don't know, I tend to doubt it.  Look how fast the media lied Obama into a fatally weakened president - with his help - and on into the disaster they are trying to acclimate the TV addled American attention span to accepting, passively.

Will reality override their propaganda?  It's hard to make bricks from the mud the media flings without the straw of truth and those who have to try to make it can't cut enough for the job.   The lies elected Republicans over and over again and alleged liberals haven't even been brave enough to face the necessity of ending those.  They think the best people won't think well of them if they do.  I'm as disgusted with such "liberals" as I am with the people conservatives suckered.  They're all cowards.

We were saved from outright, European style fascism by a rare combination of good luck and the residual wisdom of a decisive margin of the voters.  I'm not confident that's there anymore after a generation has been brought up on the lies of the media.  I hope I'm wrong but I don't think I am this morning.

The Day After

I wasn't going to touch the story about Martin Luther King III meeting with Donald Trump, but changed my mind after reading what Charles Pierce said about it.

I am not a fan of the surviving children of Martin Luther King jr.   I did have genuine admiration for the late Yolanda King in many ways but I think the present generation of the family seems to have done its best to tarnish and diminish the legacy of their father.  The numerous legal actions and lawsuits among them and other King family members,friends and colleagues to try to get hold of property to turn it into cash is sad and at times pretty trashy but, far worse, is their holding his words for ransom, going after anyone who publishes them without pay and their permission first.  His family has managed to do what racists during his lifetime couldn't do, silence him, diminish his influence to make change.

MLK III meeting with Donald Trump to get his support for a pretty far-fetched idea of a national ID, supposedly to prevent voting fraud that doesn't exist OR to prevent an accusation of voting fraud that doesn't exist was regrettable.   It lends Trump a credibility he doesn't deserve and which he won't earn by pushing Republicans to do such a thing.  It was a free photo-op for the most overtly racist candidate to have won the presidency in more than a hundred years.  John Lewis got it right, no one should lend Trump the credibility that he doesn't rightly possess and never will have.

Yolanda King made a speech twenty years ago in which she expressed disapproval of what MLK Day has turned into

King, 42, lamented what she called complacency and apathy among many Americans with regard to social issues. She exhorted the audience to service.

"My father would be disturbed if he knew that people were taking the day off in his memory to do nothing," she said. "Get involved. It's about service, not shopping."

When someone like Donald Trump can co-opt The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and there aren't any safely used words to counter him with from the man himself, it's clear his legacy has been jeopardized and eclipsed by the very people who should have most valued what he lived for.  Way too many people who have worked to destroy the progress he fought and died for have used him and turned him into a tool of their racism and bigotry.  I don't think it would be as easy for them to do it if his words had been freely available to represent the man.

If we're going to restore the legacy of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s-60s, we're going to have to do it without those words because we won't be able to afford to use them.

Why Are You Picking On Poor Peter Singer?

Peter Singer and his style of "Ethicist" prove that whenever someone wants to use Darwinism as a frame for an intellectual program that, eventually, the talk turns to who to kill.  My point about Singer, who sells his advocacy of killing disabled people and infants with his vegetarianism and supposed animal rights advocacy, is just carrying on in the most vicious line of eugenics.   

He is making the same arguments that the proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckle made in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (English translation, History of Creation) which Darwin endorsed and promoted in The Descent of Man.   Eventually, when the framing is Darwinism ranking individuals and entire ethnic or other groups, especially the disabled, on a scale of value will happen and the advocacy for killing them off will come not long after.  "Moderate" eugenics which consisted of sterilizing people was no less a proposal for removing people from the future than what the Nazis did, it was genocide by other means.  

That he had relatives who were murdered in the Nazi's eugenics program only adds to his depravity.  I will point out that his utilitarianism also, eventually, especially when pushed, tends to move in the same direction.  

If liberals fail to condemn that even as conservatives do, that it's certainly not anything to be proud of.   It does nothing to falsify my point about the confusion that results from calling private-sector fascists liberals instead of the libertarians they are.  That someone can advocate murdering people as an academic exercise in 2017 and it will get them the most desirable of academic appointments is a sign of depravity, not freedom. 

Update:  If Duncan's "Brain Trust" (they really do call themselves that) can't be bothered to read what I said, I don't care what they stupidly prattle to each other about.   Eschaton is just an example of what happens when the host of a blog gets lazy and runs a chat room for profit instead of thinking about things.  

Obviously, to guys like you it's a novel concept that when you read and look up citations instead of babbling about stuff without having done that, you're likely to come to other conclusions than ignorance is likely to produce.   I prefer to increase the odds of getting it right over those of the proverbial broken clock. 

Late hate:  I take back what I said about Derbes being one of the few there who aren't idiots.  Apparently you can teach Physics at the elite Lab School without realizing that in order to know what someone said you have to read what they said.  But, then, he was the one who claimed Inherit The Wind, a largely fictitious distortion of the Scopes Trial was historically accurate.  Seems a grad degree in physics isn't everything. 

Little Miss Higgins & The Winnipeg Five Heavy Train

I like Little Miss Higgins and the Winnipeg Five a lot.   This is my insomnia mantra these days, two months and counting .

Then there is this, the first of her songs that got my attention.  It's appropriate for the day and the week.

Hope You Don't Feel Blue