11/17/2023
00:43 Lessons from Britain. (With an election coming.)
11:43 The Deep State’s culture of defiance. (Shedding light on dark recesses.)
17:17 Genocide roundup. (Expulsions all over.)
22:48 Dinner with the Emperor. (The way we live now.)
29:03 The Mannichon Solution. (ChiComs keenly interested.)
31:46 The Little Sparrow will sing again. (Thanks to AI.)
33:34 Columbia faculty opine. (STEM for Israel, Humanities for Hamas.)
36:48 Renaming Galaxies. (For a woke cosmos.)
39:20 Demonstrating for algebra. (Suggested chants.)
41:43 Signoff. (With the actual Piaf.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played on harpsichord and kazoo; and this is your cleverly genial host John Derbyshire with some reflections on the week’s events.
First, news from the Mother Country.
02 — Lessons from Britain. I’m going to speak at length here about events in Britain, not because of lingering affection for the land of my birth, nor because I think it’s of world-shaking importance in itself, but because of the parallel tracks that recent British and American history seem to run on.
We Americans can learn something from watching Britain’s descent into the pit of national extinction, which has proceeded much further than ours. Britain’s present is our future … if we don’t make a serious course change.
Britain, like the U.S.A., has a wide-open southern border. It’s called the English Channel. Pay a sum of money to some coyote in France or Belgium and he'll put you in a boat and ship you north across the channel. On arrival you'll be perfunctorally checked in, then awarded three hots and a cot in a pleasant hotel, courtesy of British taxpayers, with lifetime settlement rights and welfare benefits.
See, it’s just like our system; only that the settlers swarming into the U.S.A. have to cross a few miles of desert, while over there it’s a few miles of sea.
There are other key similarities with wider scope. Since WW2 the Brits, like us, have spawned a class of metropolitan globalist progressives who manifest a quite open dislike of their country’s legacy white population.
They've got the race bug and have taken it even further than we have: a recent TV miniseries about 16th-century English Queen Anne Boleyn had a full-blood negress playing the part.
Britain, like us, has a two-party political system in which the two parties have essentially no difference of opinion on anything relating to the continuity and preservation of nationhood.
"Polyglot boarding house"? British elites are fine with it, so long as the loudest voices in the boarding-house speak some language other than English and practice some religion other than Christianity, with extra credit if they are some color other than white.
This week’s news from across the pond concerned Britain’s Home Secretary. That’s a high-level cabinet position in Britain’s Executive, more or less like the U.S. Attorney General.
Until Monday this week the Home Secretary was Suella Braverman. On that day the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, fired her. She'd been more and more openly critical of the boss, culminating last week in a blistering newspaper op-ed published without the Prime Minister’s approval.
Mrs Braverman’s portfolio included immigration. (There is a flunky with the title Minister for Immigration, but he reports to the Home Secretary. Not one Brit in a thousand could name him.)
Mrs Braverman is a strong immigration restrictionist. She has been frustrated, as all British patriots have, by the utter impotence of Britain’s government in the matter of those boat people flooding in across the English Channel. Last year nearly forty thousand of these settlers arrived. The total at the end of October this year was a bit less than 27 thousand.
It’s been going on for years. To add insult to injury, for the last thirteen of those years Britain’s government has been in the hands of the Conservative Party. Just as with our own Republican Party, it’s hard to name anything of importance that the Conservative Party has striven to conserve.
Legacy Brits thought that Brexit would solve the problem, or at least open the way to a solution. Resistance to mass immigration was a deciding factor in the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Still nothing was done.
In the 2019 election Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson faced off against globalist-progressive Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Voters thought Johnson was the better disposed to stop the invasion. They gave him a landslide victory. Even districts that had voted Labour for decades went Conservative — the so-called Red Wall. Still nothing was done.
Well, not quite nothing. These Conservative governments wagged their finger at France, which was obviously helping the Channel smugglers. Large sums of British money went to the French government to encourage them to do something. Nothing was done, though: the French are too keen to get rid of the aliens, a high proportion of whom are young male trouble-makers from the Third World.
And then, the Rwanda scheme. This was cooked up a year and a half ago by Boris Johnson, the last Prime Minister but three or four … I've lost count.
The idea there was that illegal aliens should be shipped to Rwanda in Central Africa to have their asylum claims processed. Rwanda would be paid to co-operate and there was an implicit assumption that detention conditions down there would be unpleasant enough to deter the illegals.
There was always something of gesture politics about the scheme. I mentioned the forty thousand invaders who landed in Britain just last year — in one year. Nobody believed that Rwanda would take illegals on that scale; a few hundred, perhaps, but not tens of thousands.
Boris Johnson’s Rwanda scheme wasn’t serious. He’s not a serious person. He just wanted to give the impression of doing something.
In any case the Rwanda scheme hit a rock and foundered. There were actually three rocks in its path:
So those rocks bear the flags of, respectively, the United Nations, the European Union, and Britain herself. That offers endless opportunities for globalists to litigate against the scheme.
They have been vigorously doing so. Just this week, on Wednesday, Britain’s Supreme Court struck down the latest attempt to implement the Rwanda plan.
There’s no fall-back plan; the working-class legacy-British voters who turned the Red Wall red four years ago have returned to the Labour Party in disgust at the Conservative government’s impotence; the Conservatives are polling at record lows; and there’s an election coming up.
Questions arise. First: Why hasn’t the British government withdrawn from the U.N. and E.U. treaties that prohibit Britain from securing its borders? Why don’t they tell Parliament to repeal the 1998 Act?
Answer in both cases: Whoa! What are you, some kind of racist?
And then, those Red Wall voters returning to Labour: Won’t they just be trading in a covert gang of globalist progressives for an overt one?
Yes they will. Hate is a stronger emotion than love, though. The opportunity to humiliate those who repaid their trust with lies and pretense will trump any fear of lefty domination, which their fathers and grandfathers all favored anyway.
I should point out, however, that there is a new party, the Reform Party, in direct line of descent from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. They're offering a patriotic alternative and they're polling well.
This next U.K. election may, with luck, be interesting.
03 — The Deep State’s culture of defiance. Just a footnote to that. This is on the same general theme: parallels between Britain and America. What’s running in parallel here is the two countries' Deep States.
On Wednesday the London Daily Telegraph printed a very interesting document. It’s an op-ed by an anonymous worker at the Home Office. Remember that the Home Office is presided over by the Home Secretary, until this week Mrs Suella Braverman, and has immigration as part of its portfolio.
What does this anonymous Home Office worker bee have to tell us? The op-ed is nearly eight hundred words, much too long to reproduce here, but I'll give you the first two paragraphs. Quote:
Despite our change in boss, when it comes to controlling Britain’s borders nothing will change. I know this because I have worked for some time as a civil servant on immigration policy, and — in my experience — no priority is further from the Home Office in 2023 than stopping the boats or cutting net migration.For all her strident bearing, Suella was cringingly apologetic in speeches to Home Office staff. Instead of instilling much needed discipline, she would tell us what a great job we were doing, not that this got her any kind of loyalty. She was mocked and insulted by London-based staff furious at the refusal to extend safe routes to an ever growing number of countries.
End quote.
The op-ed as printed in the Daily Telegraph is behind a firewall, but you can read the whole thing on Twitter. Go to the Twitter account of Steven Edginton. That’s "Steven" with a "v" then "E-d-g-i-n-t-o-n." A Google search will get you right there. Scroll down a bit to the November 15th tweet.
Just a couple more brief quotes. Quote:
When the Rwanda scheme seemed a millimetre closer to happening, staff message boards were filled with comments vowing they will not work on such an evil project.
End quote.
And then this one, actually the closing paragraph. It refers to James Cleverly, Suella Braverman’s replacement. Quote:
For my colleagues, I suspect James Cleverly’s ascension is merely an opportunity to run rings around an inexperienced minister in a new department. And for Britain, our borders will remain uncontrolled.
End quote.
It is of course shamefully racist of me, but I’m going to do it anyway, to point out that James Cleverly is a mulatto: legacy-British father, mother from Sierra Leone.
Of the other two main players here, Suella Braverman’s parents are both Indian, although of different confessions: Father Christian, mother Hindu. She herself is a Buddhist; her husband is Jewish. Faith-wise, Mrs Braverman has boxed the compass. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is a Hindu with Indian Hindu parents.
That aside, this op-ed sheds light on the dark recesses of the Deep State — ours, I am sure, as well as Britain’s. These functionaries the author is telling us about have their own agenda. They see themselves as the courageous resistance to a government of the radical Right. Final quote:
This culture of defiance is so widespread that any suggestion of border controls is sneered at or ignored.
End quote.
Tell me, if you can, that this "culture of defiance" isn’t as active in Washington, D.C. as it is in London.
04 — Genocide roundup. Just a brief roundup of recent mass population expulsions.
Washington Post, November 6th, quote:
Hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees are being forced to leave Pakistan as the country implements an order from its interim government to remove undocumented people from within its borders. Of the roughly 4 million Afghans living in Pakistan, about 1.7 million people are thought to be in the crosshairs of this "repatriation" plan.
End quote.
Time magazine, November 15th, edited quote:
War broke out in Sudan in April … the United Nations said. More than six million people have been displaced within and outside Sudan, according to the U.N., creating what has been described as the world’s largest internal displacement crisis in the world.The European Union, U.N., U.S. and U.K. have warned of human rights atrocities targeting the Massalit tribe in the Darfur region — echoing a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced more than two million between 2003 and 2008.
End quote.
New York Times, November 17th, edited quote:
The commander of the victorious army … was taking a victory lap last week around the Nagorno-Karabakh city of Stepanakert … a ghost town after its ethnic Armenian residents fled in fear as Azerbaijani troops captured the area.Azerbaijan seized full control over Nagorno-Karabakh, including Stepanakert, in late September after defeating separatist forces …
The territory has been transformed. More than 100,000 of its residents have fled since September, and Azerbaijanis have streamed in since last year to assume control over the homes and communities from which their families were expelled decades ago.
End quote.
Al Jazeera, November 17th, quote:
Indonesia is facing a renewed refugee crisis after the arrival of three boats in as many days with nearly 600 Rohingya people on board.Two of the boats, the first with 146 passengers and the second with 194, were able to land on beaches in Pidie on Aceh’s east coast on Tuesday and Wednesday, with refugees including women and children pictured collapsed on the sand after reportedly spending a month at sea.
End quote.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to spoil your breakfast. Just keeping you up to date on mass population expulsions.
If you are a who-whom type — one that always wants to know who are the oppressors, who the oppressed — well:
That’s the way of the world for you. All four of those mass expulsions are headline news somewhere in the world, so you can read about them in depth with a little research. Just don’t expect to see anything about them on your TV news.
If, on the other hand, you'd rather read news stories about Taylor Swift or Elon Musk, I can’t say I blame you.
05 — Dinner with the Emperor. In the ballroom of San Francisco’s Hyatt Regency hotel Wednesday evening there was a grand reception and dinner for Xi Jinping, the President of China. New York Times, November 8th, quote:
Tickets to the dinner and reception, hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the U.S.-China Business Council, cost $2,000 each, according to an invitation circulating online. For $40,000, companies can purchase eight seats at a table plus one seat at Mr. Xi’s table, a person familiar with the event said.
End quote.
Sitting at Xi’s table there were, according to Bloomberg News, our Ambassador to China, both our Commerce Secretary and theirs, a former dean of Columbia University, a former Governor of California, and a mighty host of CEOs: Amway, Apple, Blackrock, Blackstone, Boeing, Broadcom, … to name just the As and Bs.
The event seemed to go very well. I hope it did. Xi is of course a lawless despot; but we've dealt cordially with much worse, when it’s been to our advantage to do so. In any case, the relationship of our own ruling class to the law is not exactly spotless recently, so we're not well placed to cast aspersions.
As a fan of Victorian fiction, I couldn’t help being reminded of the dinner scene in Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now.
A central character in the novel is Augustus Melmotte, a City of London financier with political ambitions. In Chapter 23 we read that, quote:
The Emperor of China was to be in London and it was thought proper that some private person, some untitled individual, should give the Emperor a dinner, so that the Emperor might see how an English merchant lives. Mr. Melmotte was chosen on condition that he would spend £10,000 on the banquet.
End quote.
Melmotte, however, is a crook. Shortly before the grand dinner for the Emperor, a rumor goes around that he has committed a forgery, which indeed he has. Among the noble, wealthy, and important people who've signed up for the dinner, many hear the rumor and stay away. So in Chapter 59 we read that, quote:
But when the company was seated at dinner the deficiencies were visible enough, and were unfortunate. Who does not know the effect made by the absence of one or two from a table intended for ten or twelve, — how grievous are the empty places, how destructive of the outward harmony and grace which the hostess has endeavoured to preserve are these interstices, how the lady in her wrath declares to herself that those guilty ones shall never have another opportunity of filling a seat at her table? Some twenty, most of whom had been asked to bring their wives, had slunk from their engagements, and the empty spaces were sufficient to declare a united purpose. A week since it had been understood that admission for the evening could not be had for love or money, and that a seat at the dinner-table was as a seat at some banquet of the gods! Now it looked as though the room were but half-filled.
End quote.
The Emperor conducts himself with proper oriental dignity, apparently unaware of Melmotte’s looming disgrace.
I don’t think there were any empty places around the tables in San Francisco Wednesday evening. There has been no forgery scandal in High Finance recently, so far as I know. Even if there had been, I doubt Larry Fink or Tim Cook or any of those other titans of capitalism would have passed up the opportunity to chow down on Charred Asparagus and Broccolini with the world’s leading Marxist-Leninist.
Although … Newsweek reports that Elon Musk attended the reception but didn’t stay for the dinner. What was up with that? I hope the Emperor didn’t take offense.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: I rang the alarm on race-targeting bioweapons back in my Diary for July 2018. More precisely, I noted that Irwin Shaw had rung the alarm 51 years earlier in his short story The Mannichon Solution.
That was fiction, of course; and the author probably thought the premise of his story — that some drug might be lethal to one particular race but harmless to others — was far-fetched, in the realm of science fiction if not fantasy.
If you replace the word "drug" by "pathogen," however, a great many people have been taking the possibility seriously. I've been spotting occasional news stories for years in the mainstream press. Here’s one still in my files from the London Daily Telegraph, August 2019, headline: "World must prepare for biological weapons that target ethnic groups based on genetics, says Cambridge University."
It seems to me these stories are getting more frequent. Here’s one from Washington Examiner on Tuesday this week, headline: "Let’s stop paying Beijing to steal our gene code." Sample quote:
The Chinese Communist Party has seemingly developed a disturbing fascination with biological weapons that can target certain populations based on their genetic information. The CCP’s military has been pursuing the application of biotechnology to warfare for more than a decade, including with regard to [inner quote] "specific ethnic genetic attacks." [End inner quote.]
End quote.
The Chinese Communist Party, eh? That made me smile. To get the joke you have to read Irwin Shaw’s short story.
Item: Three weeks ago I noted the release of a new Beatles song featuring the voice of John Lennon, recreated by Artificial Intelligence.
That was apparently the first — if it was the first — of a trend. We should prepare ourselves for regular re-creations of that sort.
Here for example was the showbiz magazine Variety, also on Tuesday. The Warner Music Group, they tell us, is to produce a new biopic about legendary mid-20th-century French singer Édith Piaf that will use AI to recreate her voice and image. Quote:
The film will be narrated by an AI-generated facsimile of Piaf’s voice and promises to [inner quote] "uncover aspects of her life that were previously unknown." [End inner quote.]
End quote.
Given that Piaf’s life was even more of a train wreck than the average for pop singers from low origins — she spent her childhood in a brothel, although as a guest, not an employee — I think that probably those previously-unknown aspects might be better left covered. I’m curious to hear what they do with her voice, though.
Item: I am, as I have frequently confessed, a math snob. We math majors at college used to snicker and chuckle about students of the humanities. "Wait, they're giving you a degree just for reading novels? Hoo hoo hoo hoo!"
We took pride in the fact that when visiting the room of a non-math girl before going out, while she put on her face we could kill time browsing her textbooks, often with interest; but they never browsed our textbooks. Can non-math people even think straight? we used to wonder among ourselves.
Older and wiser now, I'd replace "math" by "STEM." You know: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. So I’m not a math snob any more, only a STEM snob.
It warmed my heart, therefore, to see this bar chart on Twitter the other day. It was constructed by analyzing the two open letters issued by faculty at Columbia University. One of these letters condemned the Hamas attack on Israel, the other supported it.
There are three pairs of vertical bars, one pair for Business, Economics, and Legal faculty members, one pair for STEM, one pair for Humanities. The height of the left-hand bar of each pair is the number of that faculty profile condemning Hamas; the right-hand bar’s height is those supporting Hamas.
Business, Economics, and Legal faculty members condemned in a ratio 7.4 to one; STEM faculty condemned by 22.4 to one. The Humanities faculty supported Hamas by 1.6 to one.
There’s a couple of quibbles you can make. In round-robin letters like this, some signers forget to note their faculty affiliation, so the numbers may not be totally accurate. And then, the Tweet is from a young guy — he looks like an undergraduate — at Tel Aviv University, surely an interested party.
The Columbia letters are public, though, so do your own tallies.
Item: Our Steve Sailer has reported on The American Ornithological Society renaming North American birds so that none of them bear the names of evil colonialist white supremacists or persons known to have picked their nose in public or split an infinitive.
Well, first they came for the ornithologists, now it’s the cosmologists. The National Pulse reports that there are galaxies that need renaming.
Glancing at the headline without much attention, I thought it sounded odd. Not many galaxies have names. The ones that do tend to be called after the constellation they are in — Andromeda, Cassiopeia — or else just to have bureaucratic tags like NGC 5011C or M82.
When I got round to reading the article, though, I learned that only two galaxies are urgently in need of renaming: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, named after Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. He was a colonialist, you see?
Wait: Wasn’t Magellan hacked to death by Polynesian savages? Shouldn’t he get a break on that account?
Shame on me! Those Polynesians were living in an idyll of harmony, wisdom, and peace until Magellan came along and made them field hands. They'd still be at peace today, plucking fruit from the trees for sustenance and playing delicate love songs on stringed instruments of their own devising if we white supremacist demons hadn’t broken into their little Pacific paradise.
So no, Magellan’s style of death doesn’t get him off the hook. The metaphorical hook, I mean; not the actual hook they hanged his corpse on before they cooked and ate it.
Item: A friend sent me this story from the Wall Street Journal. On Monday morning, it says, there was to be a demonstration on the steps of San Francisco City Hall.
What would the demonstrators be demonstrating about? Palestine? Ukraine? Free candy for transsexuals?
No: the demonstration was to be on behalf of … algebra. Quote:
A grass-roots alliance of parents, teachers, and concerned citizens known as the SF Guardians is gathering to support a ballot measure launched by Supervisor Joel Engardio. The initiative aims to restore eighth-grade algebra in the city’s public schools. Monday’s Rally for Algebra comes on the heels of a victory at the state level.
End quote.
If there’s to be a rally, though, they'll be needing some good rhythmic chants they can shout at City Hall. Too late now for Monday’s demo, but for future events I offer the following.
Two, four, six, eight: we just want to CALCULATE!CRT is for the birds! Teach us how to handle SURDS!
Make us clever! Make us wise! Teach us how to FACTORIZE!
Powers and series, we don’t fear 'em — We want the Binomial Theorem!
No justice, no peace, till we get Jordan Matrices!
From the river to the sea, give us Galois Theory!
Wait, though; that last one might get me into trouble. I shall stop here and, as math textbooks say, leave this as an exercise for the reader (or listener).
07 — Signoff. That’s all for this week, listeners. Thank you for your time, your attention, your emails, and your donations. Enjoy a warm gluttonous Thanksgiving with your families. My fruitcake is waiting for me in the kitchen cupboard.
Having heard that item about Édith Piaf, longtime Radio Derb listeners will have no trouble guessing who'll be singing my signoff music clip. I've been a fan of Piaf since my late teen years. I've given her a page on my personal website, and I've signed off the podcast with her twice before: in January 2012 and February 2014.
David Issokson tells us that this song is, quote: "about a French courtesan who secretly admires a higher-class English man," end quote. He translates the first verse as, quote:
Come on, Milord,
Sit down at my table.
It’s so cold outside;
It’s so comfortable here.
Relax, Milord,
Take it easy:
Your troubles on my heart
And your feet on a chair.
I know you, Milord;
You have never seen me.
I’m just a girl from the port —
Just a shadow in the street.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Edith Piaf, Milord.]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
