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John (@bynkii) noted that Roger Ebert reviews the “Intelligent Design” defense flick “eXpelled” which is apparently a “documentary”:

Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

How does it make you feel to have followed a reasoning through, been convinced of the arguments and then be compared to the Nazis just because you don’t believe in invisible Sky Masters?

It makes you angry.

Intelligent Design is a lie. During my third year at Grammar School, we were taught Religious Education by Sister Mary-Jo, a Catholic nun who was never far from her guitar. She explained to my class, by all accounts a group of god-fearing but intelligent fourteen-year-olds, that Genesis was a parable – an explanation of the creation of the world which could easily be understood by ignorant goat herds and fishermen more than two thousand years before the first moon landing. Some things, she reasoned, were not meant to be taken literally.

Intelligent Design, at the root, restores the concept that Genesis is the literal truth. And that’s fine if you’re trying to raise a nation of goatherds. But I’d like to hope we’re raising nations of thinkers, scientists, engineers, user interface experts, socio-economic advisors, hairdressers and call-centre salespersons.

Nonny de la Peña writes about blame for the finance crisis being heaped on the poor:

Are they kidding? Peddling loans to the uneducated and convincing them they could GET RICH too was every day business. (I seem to recall being taught in high school history that it wasn’t the fault of the poor for the spiraling easy credit mantras of the 1920’s. It was the fault of the lending machine.)

I absolutely agree.

Let’s be frank here. There is no remorse on the parts of the banks for their actions and responsibility for the current crisis. Blaming some poorly educated schlub who was bamboozled into taking a mortgage they couldn’t afford long term (due to interest rate hikes) is revisionism at best and makes me loathe the banking institutions that dot our landscape – and yes, there’s a certain amount of self loathing due to the year I spent at $BIG_COMPANY which, for all intents and purposes, should shoulder more of the blame than others due to the exorbitant reward paid to their irresponsible, self-serving senior officers. They should be ashamed.

You think I’m being too harsh? Nonny continues.

Take for example, Nicholas Sossidis and Stephen Partidge-Hicks. These two sold the world the idea of the Structured Investment Vehicles (SIV), and since they originated the idea while they were at Citibank

I rest my case. $BIG_COMPANY should be torn apart and fed to the wolves for this.