12/13/2019
01m32s A dark anniversary. (Crazy Muslim shoots up military base.)
08m31s Pensacola postscript. (Let’s dump the Saudis.)
14m06s Close but no SIGAR. (The criminal folly of our ruling class.)
21m34s Not reporting race. (The rubes might notice.)
28m26s Person of the Year. (And the British election.)
34m51s A happier anniversary. (Why can’t we still do this?)
36m01s Not living up to his name. (Nigerian onomastics.)
39m00s The time of wolves. (Blog post of the week.)
41m54s A memorable headline. (Flesh-creeper of the week.)
42m55s Signoff. (On the Erie Canal.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your appealingly genial host John Derbyshire, here to bring you all the news fit to podcast.
Here at VDARE.com we are now into Week Four of our year-end fundraising appeal. This year’s appeal is not only for funds to cover our normal operating costs, but also to finance our lawsuits against PayPal and the Mayor of Colorado Springs for their attempts to silence us. Do please contribute to whatever degree you can, to keep VDARE.com a going concern and to help us assert our rights — and your, and his, and her, and their, and xer rights — under the Constitution. Thank you in advance!
And now, the news. I'll begin with the slightly belated noting of an anniversary.
02 — A dark anniversary. The anniversary is, or was, a tenth, a ten-year anniversary. On November 8th, 2009 — and so ten years and thirty-five days ago as I speak — General George Casey, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, went on Meet the Press to discuss the Fort Hood shooting of three days earlier.
In that incident a crazy Muslim, Army Major Nidal Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrant parents, had murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood Army base in Texas. General Casey, on nationwide TV, told us that, actual quote:
The military benefits from diversity … Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.
End quote.
I span an entire angry 37-minute Radio Derb podcast out of that bit of lunacy, archived on my website. It was rather dark, I’m afraid. I'll just replay for you the signoff segment, which gives the general tone of the thing. Here was Radio Derb, November 13th 2009:
[Pips.]There you have it, listeners. Twilight in the American empire. But let’s look on the bright side: We have our toys, our cell phones, our twitters, and our flat-screen TVs.
And we still have our ideological purity. When that great glowing mushroom cloud rises over some American city to cries of "Allahu Akbar!" from the bombers, we shall be able to reflect that however many casualties there are — ten million, twenty million — at least diversity was not among them.
Yes, they can murder our soldiers, fly planes into our buildings, terrorize our capital with sniper shootings, but they can never call us racist! Reflect on that, citizens, and glow with pride … while waiting for the day when you'll be glowing with something different.
[Pips.]
Still, let’s give thanks for small mercies: At least the killings last Friday, December 6th, at Pensacola Naval Air Station by a native Saudi airman did not prompt any comments from the Joint Chiefs as bone-crushingly stupid as General Casey’s remark ten years ago.
Possibly our ruling classes learned from that occasion that it is politically unwise to state the articles of their ideological faith out loud on nationwide TV at certain times and places. Better to keep quiet about them right after they have been so obviously exposed as false.
Or possibly not. Whatever caution our rulers may have acquired about airing their ideological dogmas too publicly at inopportune moments, their faith in those dogmas remains unshakeable. From the military.com website, December 11th, headline: Congress Wants More Diversity in the Ranks of Military Generals. Sample quote from the story, quote:
Members of the House Armed Services Committee’s personnel subcommittee told leaders from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps that they fall short when it comes to minorities serving in leadership positions, especially in the senior officer ranks.[Inner quote.] "Despite the significant efforts made by the services, there are still areas for improvement, specifically the services must redouble their efforts to improve diversity among the officer corps," [end inner quote] subcommittee ranking member Rep. Trent Kelly, R-Miss., said during the Dec. 10 hearing.
Executive summary: We need more Major Nidal Hasans!
One more time: I’m going to keep repeating this in the hope that one day it will sink in. Large-scale diversity is not a strength or a blessing: it is a blight and a curse. Anyone whose eyes are properly set opposite the holes in his face can see that plainly.
A little diversity does no harm. It may actually improve things, like salt in your stew. If you dump a whole box of salt into your stew, though, you no longer have stew. You no longer have anything you'd want to eat.
Some nations, like ours, have been cursed with diversity from their founding. As civilized people, we must just do the best we can to accommodate that original diversity, while cleaving firmly to the Prime Directive not to make things worse.
This isn’t hard to see; it isn’t hard to understand … unless, for social or psychological reasons, you are resolutely determined not to see it and not to understand it.
03 — Pensacola postscript. The perp in last Friday’s Pensacola shooting was Royal Saudi Air Force 2/Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani. He opened fire in a pilot-training class, killing three classmates and injuring at least eight before being shot dead himself by sheriff’s deputies. The king of Saudi Arabia has expressed his sincere condolences to the bereaved.
There are a number of things to be said about all that.
The first thing to be said is of course: "We're training Saudi pilots? After what happened on September 11th, 2001? When the people who made it happen were — Hel-LOOOO!"
I have been remarking for years that, quote from myself remarking it in March 2017, quote:
The most astonishing statistic of our age is that our country admitted more Muslims for settlement in the fifteen years after 2001 than we did in the fifteen years prior.
End quote.
I didn’t state the half of it. We haven’t just been admitting them, we've been admitting them for pilot training! That rumbling sound you hear under your feet is Satan and his daemons rolling around on the floor of Hell laughing uncontrollably at our stupidity.
The second thing to be said, although this one’s kind of personal, is that 2/Lt. Alshamrani’s foul deed denies me one more opportunity to float the word "absimilation," which I coined in my world-wide best-seller We Are Doomed, also ten years ago.
Just to remind you, although I know that faithful listeners of course need no reminding, absimilation is the opposite of assimilation. When the second and subsequent generation from immigrant stock learn to conform to the host society, that’s assimilation. When the second generation is even more crazy and alien than the first, that’s ab-similation.
Absimilation is awfully common, especially among Muslims. First-generation Pakistani Muslims in England did factory and clerical work, opened little stores, bought row houses in old working-class neighborhoods, and respected host society values. The jihadi cells and the suicide bombers are second- and third-generation. Absimilation.
Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, is a case of absimilation. 2/Lt. Alshamrani, the Pensacola shooter, is a Saudi native, so no absimilation here. That doesn’t stop me trying to float my word again.
And third, the Saudi king’s gracious condolences. "Sincere"? Yeah, right. We all know the game the Saudis are playing. Show a smiley face to the American public; splash money around in Washington, DC, wining and dining our congresscritters; give those big fat contracts to our defense industries; and all the time very quietly pass money and information to the jihadists in the hope the crocodile will eat the Saudi Royal Family last.
Why don’t we just cut the Saudis off, chopping our relationship down to the most minimal of diplomatic relations? Old friends from my Wall Street days tell me there could be dire economic consequences. Not oil — we've got that nicely covered for ourselves now — but second-order stuff to do with the Saudis being major players in the capital and currency markets.
Eh, maybe. How bad could it be, though? As bad as 2008? We weathered that all right. Fiat justitia ruat caelum, I say: Let justice be done though the sky falls. Let’s dump the Saudis.
04 — Close, but no SIGAR. The rottenness and stupidity of our ruling classes, most particularly of those in charge of our nation’s military affairs, is most nakedly and obviously on show in Afghanistan.
I know, I know. Stifle your yawns, please. I know: I've been grumbling about us still being in Afghanistan for this entire past decade, and half the previous one. To register my disgust and shame at our atrociously stupid Afghan policy, I can just cut'n'paste Radio Derb segments from ten or a dozen years ago. Have I actually done that? I'll never tell.
There was some actual news about our Afghan war this week, though. No, not triumphant victories or shattering defeats — it’s not that kind of war. The news is, that the Washington Post newspaper has, after three years of lawyering, succeeded in a Freedom of Information request to get full access to a set of internal U.S. government documents about the war.
Here’s the backstory.
Back in January of 2008, rattled by news reports of waste and corruption in our Afghanistan operations — which were then starting their seventh year — Congress created a new agency, independent of executive departments, especially of the military, reporting to Congress: the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, "SIGAR" for short.
SIGAR was charged with, among other things, submitting quarterly reports to Congress. The 45th of those reports was duly delivered six weeks ago. You can read it online, though you need a high level of tolerance for bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo.
That was 2008. Forward to 2014. This agency, SIGAR, is now well established and is churning out these quarterly audit reports written in gov-speranto for perusal by our elected representatives, who I am sure read them with unflagging attention.
In 2014 the head of SIGAR, a bloke named John Sopko, established a side project to supplement those reports to Congress. This side project is called "Lessons Learned." Its purpose is, quote from the Washington Post story:
to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.
End quote.
The Lessons Learned staff have interviewed hundreds of people and trawled through oceans of government records. They have produced seven reports, the latest one this past September.
However, these reports are all edited summaries from all that interviewing and data mining. There has been a strong suspicion that the Lessons Learned staff have been putting a lot of lipstick on the Afghanistan pig, carefully not reporting on what was coming out at the pig’s other end.
So the Washington Post sued to get a look at the source materials for these reports, especially the raw, unedited interview transcripts. That’s the fight they just won.
So now we have a clear view of what our most senior military and political people were saying about the war in Afghanistan. It ain’t pretty.
Random sample. This is three-star Army General Douglas Lute, chief military point guy on the war for both the Bush and Obama White Houses, interviewed in 2015. Quotes from him, slightly edited:
We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost …
End quote.
Yep: two thousand four hundred young American lives. My own son might have been one of them: his unit was deployed to Afghanistan in 2017, just before he left the service.
For nothing, all for nothing. In fact, for a lot less than nothing — a lot less. Our damn fool government spent close to a trillion dollars to snuff out those twenty-four hundred young lives. Those were government dollars, of course; which is to say, your dollars and my dollars, and dollars belonging to the loved ones and friends of the twenty-four hundred.
There should be public executions for this — bureaucrats, generals, congressvermin, and yes, a couple of ex-Presidents swinging from lamp-posts up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. I'd be glad to pull on the ropes myself.
And still it continues …
05 — Not reporting race. We have a tag here at VDARE.com with the title Not Reporting Race. Our ruling classes are terrified that we, the Great Unwashed, might notice that blacks are massively over-represented in every category of crime — yes, including white-collar crime. Our news media go into painful contortions to avoid telling us the race of perps and suspects.
This wastes a fair amount of my time. It’s my fault; I shouldn’t let it; but it does.
Like this. I was reading the New York Post over my breakfast cereal Wednesday. This was the print version, whose headlines differ slightly from those online.
OK, page 2, headline: Council might sue one of its own. The story is about New York City Councilman Andy King failing to pay a fine for various low-level misdeeds. His colleagues on the Council are thinking of suing him. The story comes with a picture of Councilman King, who is black.
Right below that is another story about a city functionary abusing his power. This is Erick Green, a supervisor in the city’s Department of Homeless Services. Lieutenant Green — yes, they have military-style ranks in the city bureaucracy — is accused of using his staff like a private taxi service, ordering them to drive him home, to his girlfriend’s house, grocery shopping, and even to the airport.
Minor metropolitan stories, to be sure. That second one, though, carried no picture of Erick Green. The online version had no picture of him, either.
Is he black? The slightly eccentric spelling of "Erick" — E-R-I-C-K — is suggestive. Did the Post think that two pictures of black bureaucrats misbehaving, on the same page, would be one too many?
I tried Google Images for Erick Green. I got about two million pictures of athletes bearing that name, all of them black. I tried some smarter Googling, adding "Department of Homeless Services" to the search string and so on, but the results from Google Images were weird. I got an image of a black guy over that same New York Post headline; but when I clicked on it I got the same dumb story with no picture. Then I got an image of a white guy over the same headline. Same deal: click — no picture!
I still don’t know whether Erick Green is black or not; and while I try not to be paranoid, I’m left with the rather strong impression that Google and the New York Post would rather I not know.
Bored at last, I turned the page of my newspaper. Pages 4 and 5 were a double spread, all about the killings at a kosher market in Jersey City. In six hundred words of reportage, there was no mention of the race of the gunmen, though the whole thing happened at midday in front of numerous witnesses.
All the other media were silent, too, leaving cultural gatekeepers like TV commissar Joy Behar and congresscommie Rashida Tlaib to the default assumption that the killers were white supremacists. In fact, it emerged eventually, they were black, members of a cult called Black Hebrew Israelites.
Frontpaged on this morning’s New York Post is the awful story of an 18-year-old student at Barnard College, adjacent to Columbia University, up there in Harlem. The girl was stabbed to death in broad daylight crossing Morningside Park, a few blocks from her college dorm. This morning’s Post had no description of the killer or killers, although it tells us there is, quote, "a trove of video surveillance footage."
Checking later today I see that a 13-year-old boy has been arrested and charged with the murder. He lives on Lenox Avenue, we are told, a few blocks from the park. Lenox Avenue actually names a short stretch of what, for most of its length, is called Malcolm X Boulevard. It’s right between Marcus Garvey Park and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard.
This late news story says the boy attends, quote, "nearby Middle School 180." That can’t be right: MS 180 is on Baychester Avenue in the Bronx, eight miles away. The nearby middle school is MS 149 on West 117th Street, student demographics just 2 percent white. On the off-chance they really do mean MS 180 in the Bronx, though, that’s a bit whiter: three percent.
So … plainly another white supremacist atrocity.
06 — Person of the Year. This is what we highly-trained, seasoned professional journalists call a portmanteau segment. I know I should say something about the British election result; and I know I should say something about Ms Greta Thunberg being Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
The problems are that, one, the election is massively over-reported. Anything my age-degenerated drink-sodden brain can come up with has already been said fifteen times over by other hacks.
On the other front, I am mildly surprised to learn that Time magazine is still in business. Who reads it? It’s like hearing that Reader’s Digest is still around. Ha ha ha ha! And where Ms Thunberg is concerned, I can’t summon up any interest in either topic or person.
My attitude to global warming is cold indifferent fatalism. My attitude to Ms Thunberg might be warmer if she were halfway cute; but she just reminds me of every vinegary thin-lipped finger-wagging schoolmarm I ever had screeching at me to sit up straight and stop picking my nose.
So how am I going to get copy out of these stories by yoking them together in one segment? Watch me.
I’m glad Boris Johnson won his election. A victory by anti-white communist Jeremy Corbyn didn’t bear thinking about.
I have no great hopes of Johnson, though. He’s a liberal globalist who will bend his efforts to getting the weakest, most EU-compliant Brexit deal he can.
He is also a ruthless power-seeker. The best thing he could have done for his country would have been the thing John O’sullivan suggested: Cut a deal with Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage. Withdraw Tory candidates from the forty-odd seats where Farage’s party did really well two years ago. Let Farage win those seats, or most of them, and go into Parliament in a coalition with Farage, letting Farage pull the Tories away from the squishy, feeble Brexit they want, and will now end up with, towards something better for Britain.
Johnson gambled that he could win a majority in Parliament without having to share power with anyone. He won that gamble. Nigel Farage’s party won no seats at all. Fair enough, I guess: politics is about power.
Then, reading about Ms Thunberg, I got to wondering who I would nominate as my Person of the Year.
Looking back through Radio Derb transcripts, I was half inclined to nominate eleven-year-old Joshua Trump of Delaware. This was the lad invited to the State of the Union address by the First Lady because he'd been bullied at school on account of his surname. Quote from my Radio Derb report, February 8th, quote:
Parked in the gallery there while the President droned and the congresslackeys cheered, young Joshua soon lost interest and fell asleep.Joshua is a true hero of the republic. All patriotic citizens should follow his example.
End quote.
However, turning my mind back to Britain’s election, I came up with a better choice: Nigel Farage.
Yes: Farage didn’t always play his cards well. In particular, he fell into the old Third Party trap of being too tolerant of weirdos and grifters joining his campaign.
He did, though, give a stirring example of how a political outsider, pressing hard on a single crucial issue, can keep that issue in front of the public until the sluggards and parasites of professional politics have to pay attention and respond. For that, in what is left of British democracy, and as an example to American democracy, Nigel Farage is a hero — even more of a hero to his countrymen than Joshua Trump is to us.
So that’s my Person of the Year — of the decade, really: Nigel Farage.
If you are ever out Long Island way, Nige, drop me a line care of VDARE.com. There’s a nice pub in the village here where we can have a quiet pint together, perhaps a game of darts. The beer’s on me.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Here’s a happier anniversary coming up: This Sunday, December 15th, is the 80th anniversary of the first premiere in Atlanta, Georgia, of the movie Gone with the Wind, one of the best movies ever. One of the most successful, too: to date it has pulled in close to three and a half billion dollars, adjusting for inflation.
At this point, everything that can been said about the movie has been said a dozen times over. I don’t have anything original to add. I only want to register the event; and to state my own fondness for the movie — and also for the book, a first-rate middlebrow novel; and to wonder aloud why our popular culture no longer brings forth movies and books of that quality and appeal.
Item: I have, as regular listeners know, a mild onomastic fixation. That is to say, my attention is easily snagged by odd, curious, or suggestive names.
For example, I got some good mileage out of Goodluck Jonathan, who was president of Nigeria for the first half of this decade. Mr Jonathan conceded electoral defeat in 2015 and I’m happy to say is still alive.
Apparently that auspicious forename has preserved Mr Jonathan from the fate of some of his predecessors — for example, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, first prime minister of independent Nigeria, last seen lying face down in a ditch outside Lagos with a very nasty case of lead poisoning.
(Why do I still remember Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who went to his reward 54 years ago? Because of his wonderfully mellifluous name. Just roll it round on your tongue a few times: Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. See if you can forget it.)
Well, here’s another auspiciously-named Nigerian: Joseph Adeyem Wisdom Ogunbanjo, nineteen years old, a sophomore at UC Berkeley planning to major in engineering.
Mr Ogunbanjo, who is 6ft 3in tall and weighs 240 lbs, was a linebacker on the University of California football team until being dropped last weekend.
What was he dropped for? Nothing you'd associate with wisdom. Last Sunday midday he flagged down a police car, then tried to hijack it and steal the officer’s service weapon. Fortunately other officers showed up and took Mr Ogunbanjo into custody, where he remains.
From Nigeria. So there are two hundred million more where Joseph Adeyem Wisdom Ogunbanjo came from. Open those borders!
Item: Blog post of the week comes from my old friend Razib Khan at the Gene Expression website. Razib is a close competitor with Steve Sailer for the title Smartest Gink I Know. Indeed, it was at Steve’s original HBD listserv twenty years ago that I first got acquainted with Razib.
This blog post, title The End Of The Scientific Culture was posted December 9th. It’s not that long — less than a thousand words, which means shorter than an average broadsheet newspaper op-ed. I earnestly commend it to your attention.
Razib’s topic is the politicization of science. Sample, quote:
I see few [scientists] standing up to speak for science in the way that Norman Levitt and Paul Gross did in the 1990s [in their book Higher Superstition]. The reason is simple: Anyone of similar stature that spoke for science’s special objectivity would be accused of racism, sexism, classism, etc. And such accusations, especially against white males, stick. Who wants to go through that? Better to keep conducting research and let the cultural currents exhaust themselves.
End quote.
Absolutely no offense to anyone at all, but I'd rate what Razib is writing about there roughly ten thousand times more important than some halfwit congressroaches banding together to impeach some not-very-attentive President.
I can’t forbear quoting a few words more from Razib — a very few, and they are the closing words of his post. Quote:
I believe the time of wolves is at hand. Science will become magic. Prepare yourself. Who has the power? Shelter with them.
Item: Those closing words of Razib’s post were going to be my Flesh-Creeper of the Week; but then I saw this headline at Global News, a Canadian website. Headline: A million cannibal ants have been unleashed from a nuclear bunker in Poland. End headline. If that didn’t have you running for your own bunker, I don’t know what will.
The story itself is not actually all that alarming. It even has a bit of uplift at the end: the cannibal faction of the ants have been persuaded to give up cannibalism.
Just as a headline, though, I thought that one deserved recording for posterity here at Radio Derb.
08 — Signoff. That’s all I have for you this week, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening; and just one more reminder that VDARE.com is now in the fourth week of our year-end fundraising appeal to support not only our regular operations but also legal actions to push back against deplatforming. Please help to whatever degree you can.
Back in my November 29th podcast I rhapsodized about the Erie Canal, which I had just been reading about: what a stupendous engineering accomplishment it was in its time, what a great story of American imagination and achievement. I asked Radio Derb listeners for more information; and listeners, bless you all, replied.
Here’s one contribution from a listener to supply this week’s sign-out music. It’s a song about the Erie Canal. Kind of a spoof song, actually, as I shall let my listener explain. Quote from him:
It’s a parody of sea shanties, which so often tell of storms and disasters at sea. Canal work, in contrast, was dead boring: your barge was slowly pulled along by mules walking beside it, you didn’t even need to steer it. So canal workers came up with this song about an imaginary disaster. It’s quite witty.
End quote.
Many thanks for that, Sir. Here are The Weavers with The Erie Canal Song. I generally try to keep my signoff music down to about a minute; but I like this one so much I’m giving you the full two and a quarter.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: The Weavers, "The Erie Canal Song."]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
