07/03/2020
05m10s Pandemic report. (Fatalism, insouciance, and the 2nd Amendment.)
10m35s Herman Cain gets the virus. (I was impressed and charmed.)
12m24s The caucasity of hope. (One of theirs gets stomped.)
17m37s The war on policing. (Cops vs. prosecutors.)
22m43s News from Central Asia. (The price of hair.)
27m05s ChiCom population policy. (Gangsters, but at least not hypocrites.)
32m15s Betting on Trump. (A lot of people are.)
34m24s The curse of diversity. (Ethiopia’s and ours.)
37m40s Signoff. (Happy Fourth!)
01 — Intro. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March Number Two rendered in a musical genre called "progressive metal." Thanks to the listener who provided that.
And please don’t take offense at the word "progressive" there. In this context it is an entirely musicological term, nothing to do with progressive politics. Rest assured, this episode of Radio Derb will be just as deplorably reactionary as you have come to expect, nothing progressive at all. Progressive? Ptui, I spit.
Last week I promised you an update on our efforts to get Derbistan enrolled as a fully independent sovereign state in the catalog of nations. I am sorry to report that things did not go well.
Our strategy was, to obtain formal diplomatic recognition from one other sovereign state, in hopes others would then follow. Naturally we settled on Turkmenistan as our first prospect, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov of that country having been a patron and supporter of Radio Derb for more than ten years now.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov was entirely on board with the project, and named his choice as ambassador. Unfortunately the choice was not acceptable to Mrs Derbyshire. The proposed ambassador was in fact my former research assistant Brandy. As I reported to you back in 2016, after I had to let the girls go, Brandy moved to Turkmenistan and assumed a position — in fact, I believe, several interesting positions — under President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov.
For reasons I cannot fathom, Mrs Derbyshire nurses strong negative feelings towards my former research assistants. When she learned of Brandy’s proposed ambassadorial appointment, threats of divorce were in the air, along with sounds of breaking glass — though fortunately only some minor items of stemware.
As a great American President said, quoting the founder of the Christian religion: A house divided against itself cannot stand. Rather than see the house of Derbistan thus divided, I rejected President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov’s choice of ambassador. This displeased the President, who has threatened economic, and possibly even military, retaliation.
Under those threats we have no choice but to abandon our secession project and throw ourselves on the mercy of Uncle Sam. Appropriate appeals were made to the authorities in Washington, D.C.
I am thrilled and flattered to report that within just a couple of days of my writing to the White House I received a reply from President Trump himself! His name was right there on the envelope, and on the letterhead inside. The letter was addressed to me personally: "Dear Mr Derbyshire," was the salutation. It was signed off with the President’s own actual signature in smart blue ink! Imagine my feelings of pride and gratitude!
The letter itself was rather wordy, and made no explicit reference to Derbistan or to our reliquishing our sovereignty. In a couple of places, in fact, it seemed to be asking me for money — the sum of $25 was explicitly mentioned, payable to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. Some mix-up there in the White House mail room, perhaps.
I am none the less confident that we are now once again American citizens in good standing, just in time for the July 4th celebrations.
02 — Pandemic report. I haven’t had much to say about the coronavirus pandemic. That’s mainly because of a deep congenital fatalism on my part, fortified by the belief — for which I can claim both scriptural and medical authority — that I am already living on borrowed time.
There is also, it seems to me, a lot of ambiguity in the numbers we're given. The famous IFR, for instance, the Infection Fatality Rate, requires knowing both number of deaths and number of persons infected.
The first number is fairly robust, although with some fuzziness around the edges due to whims, errors, local fashions, and revenue-seeking chicanery about how cause of death is recorded. The second number requires widespread random testing to uncover mild and asymptomatic cases. We still haven’t done such testing.
Probably we should, but, as a recent President was wont to say, that’s not who we are. This is a big, disorderly country in which the adjective "ornery" is a term of approval. We are not very good at massive assaults on citizens' privacy by governmental authorities.
Without large-scale random testing, the numbers we're getting might be wrong by an order of magnitude. That’s not me speculating; that’s the Director of the Centers for Disease Control speaking at a June 25th presser, quote from him:
The estimates that we have right now, that I mentioned … is that it’s about ten times more people have antibody in these jurisdictions than had documented infection.
End quote.
"Documented infection" is the number you read about as "number of cases." Having antibodies means you are, or have been, infected but don’t necessarily know it. The second number there, the CDC Director tells us, may be ten times the first. Oh.
It is true that the authorities of our country have managed the pandemic with all the skill, efficiency, and effectiveness of the proverbial monkey attempting to get intimate with the proverbial football. That’s what we're like, though, especially at the federal level. It’s the trade-off we make for our liberties. The feds make a pig’s ear of everything they touch. The word "Iraq" mean anything? How about "Obamacare"? "No Child Left Behind"? Et cetera, et cetera.
And yes, I know: From frustration at their own cluelessness, the clowns who run our national affairs are right now stomping all over our liberties. The fact that we're letting them do so suggests that our traditional blessed orneriness may be in decline. But then, the recent surge in gun sales suggests that we are aware of that at some level. It'll sort itself out, I’m thinking.
Tongue-clicking friends tell me that Taiwan dealt with this pandemic the right way — massive testing and contact tracing — with the result that there have been just seven (I think it is) deaths from coronavirus in Taiwan.
All right. I love Taiwan; but it’s a smaller, more homogenous society than ours with authoritarianism in its quite recent past. When I lived there in 1971 there was a campaign against long hair on young men. Police would stop a lad in the street and cut his hair on the spot if they thought it too long. Taiwan’s loosened up considerably since then, but it is still way more disciplined than the U.S.A.
So that’s Radio Derb on the coronavirus: fatalism, insouciance, and the Second Amendment.
03 — Herman Cain gets the virus. Just a footnote to the previous.
I was sorry to read these news reports that Herman Cain has been hospitalized with coronavirus.
I had some brief intercourse with Mr Cain back in 2011, when he was running for President. I wrote a column about our encounter for Taki’s Magazine, from which, quoting myself:
I do recall being impressed and charmed by the man. Impressed: Cain gave off that aura of capable busy-ness that foreigners — I mean, people like myself, born and raised elsewhere — think of as "very American." Charmed: Cain was relaxed, easy-going, quick-witted and funny. He is clearly comfortable in his own skin. Seen up close, that skin is very black — much blacker than Barack Obama’s. I'd guess Cain’s ancestry as no more than one thirty-second nonblack, perhaps entirely West African. Whatever it is, the man is not bothered about it one way or the other.
End quote.
And, come on, how can you not warm to a politician who expresses unembarrassed indifference to the affairs of poop-hole nations like Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan?
Get well soon, Herm.
04 — The caucasity of hope. Cancellee of the week was twentysomething Harvard graduate Claira Janover.
Ms Janover’s story began when she posted a video clip to a social medium. Soundtrack:
[Clip: The next person who has the sheer nerve — the sheer entitled caucasity — to say, "All lives matter," I’m-a stab you. I’m-a (stabbing sound) stab you; and while you're struggling and bleeding out, I’m-a show you my paper cut and say: "My cut matters, too."]
Ms Janover’s LinkedIn account listed her as a, quote, "incoming government and public business service analyst," end quote at Deloitte, a big accounting firm. She just started the job in May, we are told.
That sounds like a solid, well-paid job, at a time when solid, well-paid jobs aren’t easy to get, even for Harvard grads.
Well, Ms Janover doesn’t have the job any longer. Deloitte fired her because of the video clip.
Ms Janover reacted to her firing by posting more videos in which she emotes over the unfairness of it all. Deloitte had, she says, dismissed her from a job she'd worked really hard for, in spite of a corporate commitment — she shows a screenshot of Deloitte’s diversity boilerplate — a corporate commitment "against systemic bias, racism, and unequal treatment."
This story has generated a lot of nyah-nyah out here on the dissident right, and that’s entirely understandable. Of course there is some satisfaction in seeing one of theirs get stomped on for a change. Those follow-up video clips in which the precious, entitled little snowflake melts down in self-pity just add to the fun.
There may be an affirmative-action angle here, too. Ms Janover’s physiognomy is racially ambiguous, but I'd guess there’s some blackness there, perhaps with East Asian admixture. Her attempt at ghetto diction — "I’m-a stab you" — while not very convincing, suggests that if she’s not actually black, she’s definitely anti-white. So, some species of wigger, perhaps. This could be another Rachel Dolezal.
I can’t see that any injustice was done here. As a freedom of association absolutist, I believe private companies have the right to fire any employee at any time for any reason, or no reason. I've been fired myself a few times, for incompetence, sloth, and political incorrectness, but no-one’s ever heard me complain.
All that said, I'll give the lady some points for rhetorical agility. Substituting "caucasity" just where a listener is expecting to hear "audacity" is rather clever.
The parallel she’s making, too — the discrimination blacks endure is like a stab wound, while the corresponding suffering of nonblacks is a mere paper cut — is ingenious and well-structured. It’s nonsense in its substance of course: blacks are the spoiled brats of American society, given every kind of leeway and allowance. That’s to speak of content, though; Ms Janover has at least put some effort into form.
My recommendation to her would be to put these rhetorical skills to better use. She might try being a poet; or a preacher; or a writer of advertising copy. Looking at that Deloitte job title again — "government and public business service analyst" — it sounds awfully damn boring.
You can do better, Ms Janover. The world is your oyster!
05 — The war on policing. My June Diary included the following observation, quote:
Our courts are choc-full — I think that’s the right expression — of black judges, black DAs, and black prosecutors pushing for anti-white outcomes.
End quote.
That was inspired by reading, in my June 27th New York Post, about a nasty little spat between the New York City Police Department’s detectives union and 56 Bronx prosecutors — assistant district attorneys, to be precise.
These 56 prosecutors — 35 named and 21 anonymous — sent a joint letter to their boss, Bronx DA Darcel Clark, urging the DA to make, quote, "an unequivocal condemnation of the [police department’s] unwarranted use of violence." One other prosecutor, name of Paul Rosenfeld, published a dissenting letter describing the police officers he’s worked with across 39 years as, quote, "decent, hard-working, and committed."
A couple of things about all that. First, to complain about the police using violence is absurd. Policing necessarily entails violence. It’s a violent profession. How is a police officer supposed to arrest a refractory suspect, other than by applying violence?
The police need to conduct themselves in a professional and disciplined way, of course, and almost always do. The occasional exceptions get punished, often more than the offense justifies. To pretend that police work can be done without violence, though, is absurd.
When there is a fatal outcome for the refractory perp, you always hear someone say or tweet: "It’s not a capital crime to sell cigarettes without a license," or "… pass a counterfeit bill," or whatever it was the perp was getting arrested for.
The obvious answer to that is: "No. It’s also not a capital crime in any jurisdiction to fall asleep on the railroad tracks. If you do so, though, and the outcome is fatal, no-one’s at fault but yourself."
One more thing to be said. That dissenting prosecutor in New York, name of Paul Rosenfeld, 39 years on the job. There’s an age gap there. The 56 prosecutors complaining to the Bronx DA about police violence all have way less time on the job than that. Says the president of the detectives union in an angry rebuttal letter to that same DA, quote:
Most of the signatures on that letter [the letter, that is, from the 56 prosecutors complaining about police violence] are from the class of 2019, which had a mere matter of months in your office before being quarantined.
End quote.
There may be another gap in play here, too. The dissenting prosecutor, Paul Rosenfeld, is plainly Jewish. Steve Sailer has noted that, quote from Steve:
Two previous eras of black supremacist ideology — the late 1960s and the early 1990s — both came a cropper when they got too many Jews peeved at black anti-Semitism.
End quote.
That’s a good point. Black Lives Matter, and the Antifa likewise, can’t resist throwing anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian rhetoric in with their calls to end white supremacy and defund the police. For keeping the media on your side, guys, this is not good strategy.
06 — News from Central Asia. If you think we have troubles with the coronavirus, the Moscow Times reports that Mongolia has quarantined its western region, near the border with Russia, after identifying two suspected cases of bubonic plague, a/k/a the Black Death.
The infections appear to have been zoonotic, which is to say, transmitted from animals to humans. The guilty animals here are marmots — a kind of squirrel — which the Mongolians have been eating.
No surprise there with the squirrel-eating. The peoples of Mongolia are famously carnivorous. Quote from my review of Steve Bodio’s 2003 book Eagle Dreams, which is about that neck of the woods:
Mongolians in general, the author tells us, "barely know what vegetables are. One of the most sophisticated ones I met told me that they all 'tasted like dirt' to him. … Their entire diet consists of animal products, washed down with tea and vodka, in cheerful indifference to the proscriptions of their principal religions, Buddhism and Islam."
End quote.
And yet more news from Central Asia: I’m having a fire sale on Central Asian items this week. This one is not from Mongolia, or Turkmenistan, or Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan; this one is from East Turkestan, currently under ChiCom occupation as the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, the autonomy being of course perfectly fictitious. East Turkestan is the home of the Uighurs, of whom you may have heard.
Report from Breitbart News, July 2nd, quote:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed Wednesday that it had seized a shipment in Newark, NJ, containing $800,000 worth of human hair originating in Xinjiang, China, where the Communist Party maintains concentration camps.
End quote.
CBP identified these thirteen tons of human hair as being the property of Lop County Meixin Hair Product Co. Ltd., which is of course a Chinese outfit. I’m curious to know how CBP valued the shipment. At $800,000 for thirteen tons, assuming this is the American short ton, I make it $31 a pound.
That seems a lot for hair. Is there actually a market for human hair, with a publicized price structure? If so, can I get in on it? With lockdown and all, I haven’t been to the barber for four months.
Mrs Derbyshire: "You really should. You're starting to look like Albert Einstein."Me, glancing at self in mirror: "More like Mrs Einstein."
My first question: Anybody got an email address for Lop County Meixin Hair Product Co. Ltd.?
My second question: Did this company get its start in 1971 Taiwan?
07 — ChiCom population policy. And still one more, also from Xinjiang. I told you there’s a fire sale this week.
In Chapter 10 of my world-bestriding bestseller We Are Doomed I wrote the following thing, quote:
The United States, like every other nation, has a population policy. You can’t not have a population policy. To not have any laws at all concerning immigration and settlement, for example, to train yourself and your fellow citizens never to think about such matters at all, would itself be a population policy — in the case of a rich and stable nation like ours, it would be a policy of very fast and unlimited population growth. That Americans are embarrassed to be heard talking about our national population policy, doesn’t mean we don’t have one … You have a population policy whether or not you know you do, and whether or not you feel comfortable talking about it.
End quote.
Well, the ChiComs have had an explicit population policy since the 1970s. You've heard, I’m sure, about the One-Child Policy, in force from 1979 to just recently. The name of the policy is a bit misleading. All sorts of exceptions were allowed. It was a strict one-child policy for Han Chinese people living in cities and big towns; elsewhere, in rural and ethnic-minority areas, the rules were soon relaxed somewhat.
From the middle of the last decade, those rules were turned right around. The ChiComs began to worry about (a) an aging and declining Han-Chinese population, and (b) an increase in ethnic-minority numbers: Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongolians, and others.
Under the intense, data-driven surveillance totalitarianism of the Xi Jinping era, the second issue there is being dealt with punitively. Associated Press claims to have confirmed a report that of 484 labor-camp inmates in one Xinjiang county, 149 — that’s thirty percent — were there for having too many children.
That’s what a totalitarian population policy looks like. It ain’t pretty.
On the other hand, looking across at events in Europe and the U.S.A., you can understand why the ChiComs would want to maintain a Han-Chinese supermajority in their nation. Multiculturalism is a bust; large-scale ethnic diversity is a simply terrible idea.
In my ideal world the Chinese people would dump the communists, who are just corrupt gangsters, then withdraw from the occupied territories back to metropolitan China. They'd leave the Uighurs and Tibetans to govern themselves and concentrate on building up China as a free, proud, busy commercial nation with a Han supermajority un-threatened by rising minority populations, joining the other un-diverse nations of East Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.
Hey, I can dream. In the meantime the ChiComs, for all their cruelty and brutality, are at least not pretending they have no population policy. They are gangsters, sure: but in the matter of demography, they are not hypocrites.
One more time: You have a population policy whether or not you know you do, and whether or not you feel comfortable talking about it.
08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: I still doubt Donald Trump can win a second term, for reasons I have laid out at length in previous podcasts. My confidence in my own powers of prediction took a jolt this week, though.
The jolt came via email from an old friend, a super-smart and worldly guy who enjoys taking a gamble now and then. Here is what he wrote. Quote:
I just took a quick look at the election odds. I was hoping Trump would look like a long shot and I could put down a few hundred bucks and make some money. I discovered that he’s favored to win on every single online gambling site — from a five percent to a forty-five percent advantage over Biden.It’s one of the axioms of my life that if you want to know what people think, ignore what they say, and watch what they do. Apparently anyone who wants to do something — wager actual cash — thinks Trump will win. Which would mean four more years of bobbing around the ocean in a lifeboat, but it beats sinking.
End quote.
The bit I particularly like there is the last sentence: "four more years of bobbing around the ocean in a lifeboat … but it beats sinking." Exactly.
If 2016 was the Flight 93 election, this one coming up will be the lifeboat election: either four more years of bobbing about in static futility under Trump, or getting eaten alive by anti-white, anti-American sharks.
Item: For more insight on the dreadful curse of diversity, direct your eyes to Ethiopia.
A popular singer of that nation, name of Hachalu Hundessa, was shot dead on Monday last, apparently in a targeted assassination.
The killing had something to do with ethnic rivalries in Ethiopia between the Omoros and the Amharas. It has something else to do with Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia for 44 years until he died under mysterious circumstances after a coup against him in 1975. And it has something else to do with the stealing of some horses back in 1886.
Yes, it’s real complicated. I read through two or three news stories about it, but my eyes kept glazing over. Steve Sailer had a go at it here on the VDARE.com site, July 2nd, but I get the impression Steve’s eyes were glazing over too.
There were consequences beyond Ethiopia’s borders. In St Paul, Minnesota a mob of several hundred Ethiopians blocked an expressway to protest the singer’s death.
In London, meanwhile, a different mob of Ethiopians destroyed a statue of Haile Selassie that had stood in a Wimbledon park for eighty-odd years. Haile Selassie had lived briefly in Wimbledon during a spell of exile after Italy invaded his country in 1936.
Summary: Not only is Ethiopia itself roiled by ethnic conflict, we have allowed them to export their differences to our nations, too, via uncontrolled mass immigration. I don’t have numbers for London, but Fox News gives this for Minnesota, quote:
According to the U.S. Census, in 2018 one of the largest groups of foreign-born Minnesotans were born in Ethiopia, making up about 21,900 people. However, census officials say this is likely an underestimate and the total does not include U.S.-born children of these immigrants.
End quote.
And I cannot leave this topic without mentioning, what I am sure many listeners know, that there is nowadays a revisionist school of historians arguing that Haile Selassie was, in point of fact, only somewhat selassie. [Boo, hiss.]
09 — Signoff. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention; and special thanks to our President for his prompt response to our request for re-admission to the warm bosom of the Motherland.
This weekend of course embraces July 4th, when we commemorate the United States' declaration of independence. Here’s a patriotic song to see us out. I have special affection for this one because its tune is the same as the one for Britain’s national anthem, "God Save the Queen."
The first time I ever heard this played in the U.S.A., in fact, was in a public park in Westchester County, New York, circa 1974, when I was still a subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. When the band struck up, I thought: "How nice of them! Someone must have told them I was here!"
I am now wiser, of course. The tune may be the same, but the words are perfectly American. And in fact this same tune was used for the Kaiserhymne, the anthem of pre-WW1 imperial Germany. Probably elsewhere, too: the number of tunes thought appropriate for patriotic songs is considerably smaller than the number of nations. I would not be surprised to learn that Azerbaijan, or Laos, or Costa Rica use the same tune to celebrate their nationhood.
In this version, though, it belongs to us, to Americans. In the words of the song itself, "My country, 'tis of thee."
God bless America! And thank you, thank you, America for taking in this poor straggler. May all our conflicts be resolved, all our strengths fortified, all our weaknesses vanquished!
There will be more from Radio Derb next week!
[Music clip: The Soldiers' Chorus of The United States Army Field Band, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
