Friday, and the hills and the pond are alive with the sounds of columnists squawking ...

(Above: some nice Scopes trial material here).

First, let's pause to celebrate our "loon of the month" award, which provides plenty of status points for a lifetime loonacy achievement award, and it's presented after Obama felt the need to reveal his fully detailed birth certificate, and Texan state rep Leo Berman didn't feel to inclined to buy the stunt:

Among the questions Berman still has, the Tribune reported:

Why doesn't the hospital listed on the birth certificate have a "plaque on the door" commemorating Obama's birth there?

It doesn't?

Ipso facto! Res ipsa loquitur!! Kenyan Muslim!!!! (here, and for more Berman nonsense here).

As the pond's trip to America approaches, and signs of a deep, racist inspired, national insanity continues - with Donald Trump, who managed to bankrupt a casino, considered decent Republican water cooler chit chat - the only relief is that this time we'll be visiting New York, not Texas.

Meanwhile, over at the Daily Terror Miranda the Devine celebrates a sinister tale of immigrant queue jumping, and the terrorising of nativists enjoying the peace and quiet of their native land by foreign intruders.

Yes, it seems the Devine loves enemy aliens who turn up at the drop of a hat, without speaking the English and without any money, and worse still, who then proceed to escape from the lockup wherein they've been interned.

Next thing you know the damned squatters, foreign lingo intruders in a noble land, have bought some land, and settled down to live the life, making maple syrup, honey yoghurt and beef, and running a brewery, and irritating the locals with hideous noises presented as some kind of singing.

Dammit, even worse they had a bloody movie made about them, a celebration of a refugee family who had nothing but love and music to help them survive, which somehow means the damn thing will resonate for all time.

Yep, it's all here in The Sound of Magic Music History, and it's about as sinister a leftie greenie celebration of a bunch of wretched, boat-catching queue jumpers as we've read in recent times.

Oh wait, they were nice Austrian white folk, with a scattering of blondes. Phew, that's all right then. Just make sure the music is sloppy and saccharine and sentimental and sugar laden enough to appeal to the Devine, and she's apples mate.

By the way, let's hope Nicholas Hammond's proposed documentary on the family (he played Friedrich in the movie) is less carefree with the facts than the Devine manages. For an interesting, if anal retentive, comparison of reality and movie, why not head off to Joan Gearin's Movie vs. Reality: The Real Story of the von Trapp family. Thank the lord for the intertubes for real information.

Poor thing, is this the final sign that the Devine is sliding into terminal tabloid irrelevance? The hills are alive with the sounds of yawning ...

She really needs to step up to the Donald Trump and Leo Berman school of insanity if she's to make her mark.

But enough of that. It's Friday and the pond is feeling light headed, and so it's time to assault Elizabeth "a longish short-black is the thing, rather than shortish long; the demitasse full rather than the tasse half-full" Farrelly, and if you think she's being silly there, how about her being entirely silly in Mystery dies when we don't see ourselves as part of eternity.

To wit, as she broods about Adam Smith and Darwin and rampant materialism:

It is rather Darwin who, in constantly stressing competition as the fundamental condition of nature but never mentioning empathy or co-operation - and so filtering out half of Smith's thesis - is more truly our forebear. And although Darwin had no intention of killing Christianity, that has been his effect.

It would have taken Farrelly only a half second of googling to have discovered that Darwin did consider and mention matters of co-operation and sympathy and its implications for society, on a number of occasions in a number of publications, as in The Descent of Man:

With mankind, selfishness, experience, and imitation, probably add, as Mr. Bain has shewn, to the power of sympathy; for we are led by the hope of receiving good in return to perform acts of sympathetic kindness to others; and sympathy is much strengthened by habit. In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.

Beware deploying the "never" bomb.

It's incredibly irritating when a columnist for a broadsheet paper, who should know better, doesn't bother to know better, or imagines somehow that Darwin - a child of the Victorian era - didn't understand or consider the contradictions between a highly structured society and other aspects of his thesis, the competitive tooth and claw struggle for survival bemoaned by Farrelly:

So remarkable an instinct as the placing sentinels to warn the community of danger, can hardly have been the indirect result of any of these faculties; it must, therefore, have been directly acquired. On the other hand, the habit followed by the males of some social animals of defending the community, and of attacking their enemies or their prey in concert, may perhaps have originated from mutual sympathy; but courage, and in most cases strength, must have been previously acquired, probably through natural selection.

Here's the thing. If you don't know enough about a writer and his thoughts, shut up about him, enough already.

To blame Darwin for the death of Christianity is to leave out any number of decent rivals and contenders - Nietzsche anyone? - and it gets worse when verbal sleight of hand is invoked:

Darwin's perceived reduction of humanity to primate allowed scientism's zombie triplets - materialism, egalitarianism, populism - to suck the juice from our lives.

So it's not just what Farrelly misperceives about what Darwin said, it's enough that Darwin is "perceived" as having produced "a reduction of humanity to primate" for the man to be hanged. Or drawn or quartered, according to your preferred Christian Inquisition torture this month.

Farrelly would deny it, but she's not much better than the folks who assembled in the Scopes trial to bemoan Darwin for reducing humanity to the apes.

As for egalitarianism and populism, why ping Darwin for the French revolution, which celebrated liberté, égalité, fraternité long before Darwin headed off to the Galapogos islands to take a look at the tortoises in 1854.

Along the way, Farrelly takes a slam dunk at modernism, because there's a mass of colours in a church stained glass window, and gets nostalgic for the medieval days, and rabbits on about the merely beautiful or the merely worshipful, and before I reached the end, I longed to shout at her, why don't you just shove a demitasse full up your ill-informed nose ...

Sheesh, enough already, but on she goes, and you understand why her children mounted a revolt against a drive to Canberra to partake in sundry and diverse religious celebrations of Easter, though in the sundry services she did attend:

... even those ornate and exotic palaces with their icons, their cantors and head-dressed, bearded priests have far too many lumens for my taste, making it all too civic; too much self, not enough Other. Not enough - for want of a better word - God.

Yes, that's what we need, a demitasse god. The rest of the piece is a wispy, dreamy, ethereal kind of wankery mysticism, including standard rant against materialism, and the modern world, and the race to the bottom, and a complete confusion between practical issues of a liberal kind, and the church selling out:

As to church, it makes me weep that it must court popularity by stripping itself of all mystery, depth and texture, installing mammoth plasma-screens in the nave, salesmen in the pulpit and ATMs in the foyer just to get bums on misericords, as yet another casualty of the flat-out zombie race to the bottom.

Actually the flat-out zombie race to the bottom comes with the kind of ignorance Farrelly displays throughout her piece. I never thought I'd be saying this, but if this is the best liberal thinking in the Herald has to offer, then roll on fascism.

You get something of the flavour of the whole in the very last par:

At this rate it may soon be last supper time for us all. But what's worse, if we're reducible to primates, is how hard it is to care.

Bugger me dead, as we used to say in Tamworth, without understanding anything of the meaning of the phrase. Or should I say, well I'll be a monkey's uncle?

What's so hard about being a bloody primate?

A primate is a member of the biological order Primates (Latin: "prime, first rank") the group that contains prosimians (including lemurs, lorises, galagos and tarsiers) and simians (monkeys and apes). With the notable exception of humans, who inhabit every continent on Earth, most primates live in tropical or subtropical regions of the Americas, Africa and Asia. (here for the wiki).

Yes, primate actually means prime, or of the first rank. So somehow we're being reduced to the status of first rank? Sure we share the status with others, but hey we share a lot of the DNA too.

Yep, and monkey's uncle gained widespread use after the Scopes Trial, as you'll discover, along with some choice synonyms if you head off here.

The only advice for Farrelly, who seems to have suffered some kind of post-Easter depressive fit? Get back on the chocolate easter eggs, or resume the medication, or do whatever it takes to regain an even keel. Hey, why not order some demitasse, and as you sip away, why not actually read what Darwin wrote.

Finally, in case y'all missed it, just a brief note about Rod Benson, the ABC's online religion and ethics editor, expressing disapproval for Jim Wallace and the Anzac Tweet Firestorm, while muttering along the way about vitriolic homosexual activists, their close supporters, and Islamists (as if they somehow go together), and the whole lot of the disbelieving secularists and liberal-minded Christians taking pot shots at poor hapless Jim Wallace, who never claimed to speak for all Christians, except he runs a thing called the Australian Christian lobby, quite a grand territorial title ...

Benson finally arrives at these splendid insights:

Nor is it a secret that, especially in past generations, a large majority of Australian servicemen and servicewomen conscientiously served "God and country" under the Australian flag, and understood "God" as the traditional Christian God of the Bible.

They may not have been evangelical Christians, but I doubt they thought they were fighting for the right of homosexuals to marry or the right of Muslims to establish legislative and institutional beachheads in Australian society.

Yep, they weren't fighting for odd fangled notions of freedom, and especially not for perverts.

There's nothing like doubling down on a couple of deuces, especially when it comes to freedom:

Everyone is free to express ideas of every kind, within the limits set by law. Those who advocate otherwise are enemies of freedom. The irony is that many political liberals and libertarians, as well as some who privilege the state over individual rights, appear to want to silence legitimate debate and dissent when it comes from Christians. This was, unfortunately, Jim Wallace's experience on Monday.

Except if you believe in actual freedom, it's also the right of everyone who cares or could be bothered to call Jim Wallace a twittering twit. It's called freedom of speech and the freedom of everyone to express ideas of every kind within the limits set by law - and now the same thing can be said for Rod Benson, who seems to think it's a good idea to silence legitimate debate and dissent when it comes to vitriolic activist homosexuals, and dangerous Islamists if they attack paranoid Christians ...

My ABC online?

Don't think so. Must be your ABC. Spend your eight cents a day wisely ... or else you might have the unfortunate experience of reading Benson on a Friday, and cop a full hefty dose of righteous xian paranoia ...

(Below: now on with the substantive issues).