In which "Ned" and the erudite Henry hold forth ...

 

 

Yeah, Joe ... SloMo is with you all the way on climate change and climate science. 

 Here, have an inauguration present, just to show how serious we are ...

 

 

Oh and while we're cutting the malarkey, have a lizard Oz editorial showing deep concern for climate science ...

 

 

Yes, burning heaps of gas will really help fix the planet ...

And so to the rest of the day at the lizard Oz ... and naturally enough there were a host of pundits poking at the entrails ...

 

Good old simplistic Simon, and already the Murdochian Seib to hand to raise saucy doubts and fears,  but as always the pond favoured nattering "Ned", because the main aim of the pond is to remind stray readers that old fogeys of the white kind still litter the lizard Oz ... (why they can even become President of the United States) ...

 

You see the pond is always bemused by, and always marvels at, the way that "Ned" never seems to remember that he's a Murdochian, a kissing cousin to Fox News, as soul-less an operation as has been seen since the days of Hearst ...

Sheesh, the pond felt the need for a cartoon just to pluck up the courage before plunging into the morass of verbiage ...

 

 

Ah, that's better ...

 

The evils of the age? Strong words, perhaps, but true enough when it comes to talk of the partisan dumpster fire unleashed on the United States by Chairman Rupert and his minions ...

 

 

Meanwhile, the pond is waiting for the slip that will reveal that deep in his heart "Ned" remains one of the tribe ... here no Jimbo Murdoch, no Jimbo Murdoch here ...

 

Oh please, credit where credit is due. The Donald didn't do it all alone ... he had enormous help from Fox and from journalists who just loved the train wreck, because you never had to wonder about where your copy was coming from ...

 

 

And so to the final gobbet, and proof that "Ned" remains at heart a devoted Murdochian ...

 

Oh fucketty fuck, already with the talk of identity politics, and blather about lies, when the Donald, and Fox News and the Murdochians are full of not just lies, but endless bullshit?

As for the Donald, and him being a political martyr, and talk of unity, fuck that horseshit, that's the oldest con in the book ...

 

 

Meanwhile, there was more Donald at the top of the digital page, but one figure stood out ...

 

 

 

No, not Troy harking back to JFK, in anticipation perhaps of a Cuban missile crisis, or perhaps a return to Vietnam to expand the war, or raise totally stupid and unrealistic expectations, it was the erudite Henry who caught the pond's eye, as he usually does on a Friday ...

Come on down hole in the bucket fixer, so that the pond might avoid all this talk of the Donald and Joe ...

 

 

Indeed, indeed, how wise to berate the Germans and steer clear of January 6th when talking of the fragility of freedom ... why it's even better than berating Boris for all the Brexit woes currently going down in the name of specious freedom ...

 

 

Indeed, indeed. The Germans had failed in a spectacular way to build a peaceful, loving empire of the British kind, which left the world with a tremendous respect for civilisation ... including but not limited to the wondrous mess in Africa and what is loosely termed the middle east by British folk, and the splendid partition which now sees a Hindu nationalist government inspired by Adolf in charge of proceedings in the sub-continent ...

But do go on ...

 

Indeed, indeed it is easy, erudite Henry, to forget that it wasn't Germany's academics that had kind words for Herr Hitler.

Why there were some down under who thought he would be labelled as the really great man of the century, and who also didn't give a rat's arse about Poland, and incidentally thought the Japanese might benefit from pig iron shipments.

And who was that visionary?

 

 

 

Ah the pond loves to revisit old bits of the pond, and for that, many thanks to the hole in the bucket man, and so to his concluding gobbet ...

 

The pond will resist the temptation to list all the western thinkers who were tempted by eugenics ... why down under we had our share, as noted here ... and at The Conversation here ... and let us not forget that it was racial segregation in the United States that inspired the Nazis, as noted in the eugenics wiki here ...

Let us not forget the deeply anti-Semitic Henry Ford, or the deeds of IBM or a host of other US companies that were comfortable working with the Nazis (just love a cleansing Fanta), nor forget the American First movement and slogan, so recently revived by the recently departed Donald, with good people allegedly on both sides ...

Indeed, as we look back on the few days that separate the United States from January 6th, we should remember that the Donald's relationship to the cause was noted long ago in The New Yorker, in an out of paywall 2016 piece here, which ended this way ...

...The culminating shock of “Imbeciles”—a book full of shocking anecdotes—is the fact that Buck v. Bell is still on the books and was cited as precedent in court as recently as 2001. Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that at least a hundred and forty-eight female prisoners in California were sterilized without proper permission between 2006 and 2010. Last year, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals.
Despite these contemporary remnants of America’s involvement in eugenics, and despite the fact that the movement shaped national policy and held sway in the upper reaches of society for many years, this chapter of American history is surprisingly absent from the common conception of the country’s past. It’s not that it has been ignored by historians or journalists. The New Yorker ran a lengthy four-part series on eugenics in 1984, and a number of books have been published on the topic. Many of these works approach the story of American eugenics as though it will be a surprise to the reader, which is probably a safe bet. Of the two other books on Buck v. Bell that have appeared in the past ten years, one has the subtitle “The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” while the other ends by noting that the history of eugenics in the U.S. is “often forgotten.” Cohen, too, writes that “Buck v. Bell is little remembered today.” Yet it seems that the collective forgetfulness is not a matter of some well of information remaining untapped but of our inability or unwillingness to soak up what is drawn out of it.
What is hardest to forget about “Imbeciles” is the stream of grandiose invective against the supposedly unfit—the diatribes concerning “germs of dependency and delinquency” and the “world peopled by a race of degenerates and defectives.” It’s a language that combines the detachment of scientific terminology with the heat of bigoted slurs. It’s clearly from another time, but, lacking any lip service to equality and opportunity and the other touchstones of American political rhetoric, it also seems to come from another country. This is not how we talk about ourselves. And yet there are passages that sound startlingly familiar. In the debate over the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded eugenically undesirable races from the U.S., a senator from Alabama declared, “We are coming to a pitiful pass in this great country when it is unpopular to speak the English language, the American language”—a lament that might have been taken from yesterday’s paper, except that he was bemoaning the proliferation of Yiddish.
It’s impossible, especially, to read “Imbeciles” without thinking of the current election cycle. Although the concerns of the eugenics movement don’t map neatly onto today’s political divides, patterns of thought are repeated: fears of procreation and infiltration still have force, although they’re directed not at “hopelessly vicious protoplasm” but at “anchor babies”; instead of the pure blood of the Nordic races, we hear invocations of that other superior species, the Winners. The 2016 Presidential campaign has reverberated with appeals to strength and victory and virility and contempt for weakness and failure and foreigners, hitting notes of blatant ugliness that we’re not used to hearing in the public sphere. The response in some quarters has been bafflement, as though this way of speaking had materialized out of nowhere. But perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to a friend, about his pleasure in writing the Buck decision, “Sooner or later one gets a chance to say what one thinks.”

Oh dear, so the pond couldn't resist remembering the Donald, and the culminating shock of remembering that the erudite Henry had a soft spot for the Donald, and would sometimes scribble in his defence ... and yet, speaking of evil men, as even a secularist sometimes must ...

 

Never mind, it's always worth remembering that each day in reptile hell, we shouldn't forget all that's gone down, and hope that, as happened with Hitler,  others will join Rowe in opening the cellar door, with more door-opening Rowe always to hand here ...