bring back real debates

Yes indeed, I took a lot of liberties in my tale of the baleen whales,  I liked the idea of an animal freeing itself from the surly bonds of the work a day world of hunting for prey and headed into the deep indigo sea where they could just drift the wide and deep oceans absorbing krill as they went without having to really think about it so that they could think their deep thoughts.  Actually it turns out that they do have to seek out the swarms of krill.

I had liked to think that they're mouths had lost the capacity to open and close, and that they had abandoned the world of flashing teeth and blood in the water to just strain their food from the bountiful oceans as they went.  But I was at an uneasy loss as to how that would work, and it turns out that they do indeed open their mouths, wide, and gulp in great amounts of water and then they shut them and expel all that water and that is when the krill are trapped in the baleen net.  It would seem likely then that their great tongues, pretty much everything about a whale is great, to lick the baleen down into the depths of their great stomachs.  But at this point my interest in the subject has faded away


I am a little skeptical (naturally) of Beagles' documentary.  There is doubtless truth in it, but killer whales have no need of puny humans teaching them how to hunt whales, they have been doing it on their own since before we ventured out on our rickety boats.  A killer whale is unlikely to go off like Lassie after Timmy has fallen down the well (again, what is wrong with that kid?) and get the humans to join in because after all what do they bring to the party?  Sounds like maybe they were relating a whale of a tale to their gullible kiddies as adults often do, and then the kids were just relating that tale and adding some embroidery to it as kids often do.  The only part that rings true is how the killer whales finally came to their senses and stopped coming around.  Water mammals have long had a fascination with humans and their doings so maybe they just played along for awhile and then got bored.


Early on in the current procedure I posted a link to a New Yorker article on impeachment.  I thought it was well-written and when I came across a doorstop of a book on the history of the US by the author, Jill Lapore, I snapped it up, but I have to say it is has a lot of propaganda in it, good liberal propaganda, but propaganda nevertheless.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, well not quite we are into the Lincoln Douglas debates and it is about ten years before the guns of Fort Sumter will blast forth.  Anyway the Lincoln Douglas debates caught my attention and I am thinking how different they were from those endless hearings where every fucking rep got five minutes to have his say whether he had anything to say or not. 

I guess the dem primary debates (there will be no rep primary debates) were better, but the whole idea of moderators asking questions seems to me to be basically flawed.  If the candidates have something to say let them say it, and if other candidates disagree let them say why, and let the first guy reply to that and so on.

I was in a debate club at Tilden Tech before I got to Gage Park and I am pretty sure that Beagles was in the one there, and what I remember most was that there were rules.  I don't remember what exactly they were, but it was something like you started out announcing your points and then the two sides debated those points, and here is the thing that I think was most important, you had to keep on point, and you would lose points by going off by calling your opponent a loser.

We need to go back to something like that.