08/31/2018
01m12s Trump v. Sessions. (Disease of the skin, disease of the heart.)
07m05s Ideology v. reality. (Trying to square the meritocratic circle.)
12m55s Senator Invade the World, Invite the World. (Maverick? Pah!)
19m07s Offense archeology. (The view from Ireland.)
20m54s Don’t take this if you're allergic to it! (We are being over-warned.)
23m22s Not the perfect murder. (Better stay home.)
24m32s Turkmen President rides out. (Close the trike gap!)
26m51s Peak crazy yet? (In your dreams.)
29m34s The lesbian smirk. (It’s been field tested.)
31m42s Birthright citizenship in retreat. (We'll get all the obstetric tourists.)
34m17s Shooting for the Moon. (With a Goodwhite twist.)
36m33s Bobbies leap into action. (And not a Muslim in sight.)
37m52s Ancient enemies. (Britain and France go to war.)
39m21s Signoff. (Good night, Toby.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your elegiacally genial host John Derbyshire, here to bring you selected snippets from the week’s news.
There will be a slight variation from our customary format in this week’s podcast. I have been nursing quiet guilt about short-changing listeners on my closing miscellany of brief items. To assuage my guilt, this week’s miscellany contains a bumper crop: ten, count 'em ten brief items for your instruction and amusement.
First, though, the main segments.
02 — Disease of the skin, disease of the heart. I get queries and sometimes complaints from listeners asking me why I don’t give more time to the Special Prosecutor investigation, the intelligence-service scandals, Mrs Clinton’s shenanigans and possible crimes in the 2016 campaign, and so on.
I also get listeners asking me — always, I must say, politely — where I stand in the feud between our President and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions. I’m not sure that "feud" is the right word. Certainly the President has strong feelings about Sessions and has expressed those feelings with his customary pith and vigor. Jeff, however, has kept shtum, unless I missed something. It takes two to tango, and also to feud.
Whatever: There is a real, serious disagreement there. Arguments on both sides are substantive and nontrivial. You can make a case for Trump’s side; you can make a case for Sessions. So which side am I on?
Answer: I’m with Sessions. I understand the arguments on the other side; and they are, as I said, nontrivial. You can certainly make the case that in recusing himself from anything to do with the Special Counsel, and failing to let the President know his position in a timely-enough manner, Sessions was being too punctilious.
I’m with Jeff none the less because of the underlying issues: on the one side, Special Prosecutor Mueller’s efforts to reverse the result of the 2016 election; on the other side the A-G’s firming up and enforcing our country’s immigration laws.
Permit me to draw an analogy.
Eighty years ago China was in a sorry state. The titular government of the country had lost key parts of its territory to Japan; and in other parts, Mao Tse-tung’s Communists were challenging the central government’s authority.
Chiang Kai-shek, China’s military dictator, made it known that eradicating the Communists was his main priority. When people responded, "What about the Japanese?" he had a stock response. "The Japanese," he would say, "are a disease of the skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart."
I feel the same way about those two underlying issues. I can certainly see the President’s point of view. Mueller and his squads, aided of course by their media allies, must be as much fun for the President to live with as a cloud of mosquitoes at a summer picnic. They are, though, I believe, a disease of the skin. They can’t kill our Republic, or transform it into something its citizens don’t want it to be.
Our foolish immigration policies, and lackadaisical enforcement even of the feeble laws we have, can do those things. Our immigration folly is a disease of the heart.
Jeff Sessions knew this — and spoke fearlessly about it, and tried to legislate about it — when he was in the Senate. Now he’s at the Justice Department, he has done more to halt the creeping catastrophe of demographic replacement than any public official of the past half century. Read Neil Munro’s August 27th piece at Breitbart.com, title: Six Reasons Why AG Jeff Sessions is Trump’s Hammer in the Fight Against Illegal Immigration.
The rumor going round is that Trump wants to fire Jeff Sessions after the November midterms. The only way that would not be a disaster for the U.S.A. would be if Trump were then to appoint Sessions Secretary of Homeland Security and give the Justice Department to Kris Kobach.
To dismiss Sessions and put some milquetoast seat-warmer in his place, just for some leverage over Mueller, would be to turn all the government’s efforts towards fighting a disease of the skin while leaving a disease of the heart unattended to continue its silent, deadly progress.
03 — Ideology versus reality. Staying in the Justice Department for another segment: In a court filing on Thursday this week — to be precisely technical about it, a "statement of interest" — Justice ruled that Harvard University has failed to demonstrate that it does not discriminate on the basis of race in its admissions policies.
The context here is a 2014 lawsuit by Students for Fair Admissions, which describes itself as, quote: "a nonprofit membership group of more than 20,000 students, parents, and others who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional," end quote. The group is suing Harvard for discrimination against Asian-American students.
Harvard has offered a neat riposte. The Asian-American population of the U.S.A. is less than six percent, they point out, while Harvard’s class of 2021 is 22 percent Asian-American. How can that be discrimination against Asian-Americans?
Answer: It can be if, on a purely meritocratic basis, Asian-Americans would be more than 22 percent.
Which they indisputably would be. At CalTech, for example, where admissions are as meritocratic as we know how to make them, Asian-Americans are 43 percent. That’s not just a bias to STEM subjects, either: at Berkeley, which is likewise meritocratic, last fall’s admissions were 42.2 percent Asian-American.
This is a circle that cannot be squared. Different races present different statistical profiles on all kinds of abilities, including cognitive ones. The reasons for this are rooted in evolutionary biology. Our currently regnant ideology in the Western world is that this is not so: that given the right social and educational interventions, all races would present identical statistical profiles.
We — we in the Western world — are living a lie. This is not a matter of right versus left, or of moral versus immoral, of good versus bad. It’s a matter of ideology versus reality.
In a multiracial society Asians will be massively over-represented in the universities, just as blacks will be massively over-represented in the jails. That’s not anyone’s fault, other than Mother Nature’s.
It follows that for a stable, harmonious society you want to have a supermajority of one race. A society with big minorities of different races — and to judge from the Asian-American case, more than five percent is big enough to cause problems — is going to exhibit disparities in outcomes. The only way to counter those disparities is to put a big fat thumb on the scales, which of course is what Harvard is doing.
I sometimes find myself idly wondering what it’s like to live in a country that does maintain a supermajority of one race: China, Japan, Finland, Korea, Iceland. Those places aren’t perfect, I’m sure — in the case of North Korea, way not perfect — but there is a whole set of issues they don’t have to bother with, presumably freeing them up to deal with other problems.
The U.S.A. was in that blessed company sixty years ago. To a good approximation we were ninety percent white, ten percent black, others at trace-element level. Blacks were treated unfairly in a lot of precincts, to be sure: but there was a growing willingness among whites to own this problem and do something about it.
Might we have made some fair, sensible, realistic accommodation between whites and blacks if we hadn’t opened the borders and veered off into multiculuralism and ideology? I guess we'll never know.
04 — Senator Invade the World, Invite the World. John McCain’s passing has been revealing in all sorts of ways.
Perhaps the most entertaining of those ways is the way McCain’s passing exposes the hypocrisy of so many prominent Democrats. Chuck Schumer, for example, who back in the 2008 campaign jeered at McCain as an out-of-touch plutocrat who, quote, "wears $500 shoes, has six houses, and comes from one of the richest families in his state," end quote. Last week Schumer proposed renaming one of the Senate’s office buildings in McCain’s honor to commemorate, quote, "his sacrifice, his patriotism and his fidelity to do the right thing," end quote.
There is a good collection of these hypocrisies at Laura Ingraham’s Lifezette website.
Well, well, politics ain’t beanbag; and as Dr Johnson said, quote from him: "In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath." These small hypocrisies aside, what can we say about John McCain?
So far as the man himself is concerned, we're dealing with two figures: McCain the war hero, and McCain the professional politician.
I'll give the guy benefit of the doubt where his status as a war hero is concerned, only pausing briefly to acknowledge that there is doubt.
And while we should celebrate our war heroes as a group, being a war hero is no guarantee of individual moral worth. Alcibiades was a war hero; Coriolanus was a war hero. When I mentioned those two instances to Peter Brimelow in conversation Peter parried with: "Hitler was a war hero." Was he? It’s been disputed; but yes, he did get the Iron Cross.
As a professional politician, though, McCain was a disaster.
I come at this with prejudice, in the exact dictionary sense. As a fan of strict term limits, I dislike professional politicians on principle. I do allow a very small number of exceptions to that principle, notably the late great Calvin Coolidge who once, when asked if he had any hobbies, replied: "Yes, running for office."
Coolidge was a very special case, though. As H.L. Mencken noted in his obituary of the 30th President, quote: "There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance."
John McCain the politician did have ideas and he was a nuisance. In fact he was a menace, to the peace of the world and the integrity of the Republic.
McCain’s ideas were perfectly captured by Steve Sailer’s phrase "invade the world, invite the world." That was McCain’s philosophy precisely. He was the proponent of perpetual war and open borders.
To call him a "maverick" is preposterous. Within the parameters of his philosophy as just stated, he was the willing tool of every special interest that knocked on his door: agricultural bosses looking for cheap labor, ethnic lobbies looking for set-asides, and that "military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower memorably warned us against — manufacturers looking for big government contracts.
There have been mavericks in Congress, even in the Senate. Tom Tancredo was a maverick, Steve King still is one. Dave Brat has some good maverick-ish tendencies. Jim Webb was a maverick in some ways — more of one than McCain, anyway. And then of course there was (drum roll please [drum roll]) Jeff Sessions.
John McCain was not a maverick. He was an reliable shill for the establishment. When, in the 2008 campaign, the establishment told him he'd better not try to make political capital out of Barack Obama’s long and close association with a black nationalist preacher, McCain complied obediently.
I'll leave the truth about John McCain’s military service to the historians. Concerning John McCain the politician: We are well rid of him.
05 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. As promised, this week’s is a cornucopia.
Imprimis: Neologism of the week: "offense archeology." Lilly Diabetes — whoever they are, or she is — has pulled their, or her, commercial sponsorship of NASCAR driver Conor Daly because Daly’s father, 35 years ago, used the n-word in a radio interview.
His father. Thirty-five years ago, when Conor Daly wasn’t even born. "Offense archeology," coming soon to a witch-hunt near you.
Daly Sr. excused himself by noting that at the time he uttered the Deplorable Word he had just arrived from Ireland, where race talk was much looser.
That put me in mind of one of Dominic Behan’s stories. This one:
Walking down a street in the Dublin slums, I passed two old biddies scrubbing their front steps and gossiping. The main subject of their gossip was a young neighborhood woman who had married a black man. As I passed them, one of the biddies delivered herself of the following judgment, quote: "Sure I wouldn’t have one o' them black fellers on top o' me, no, not if his arse was studded with diamonds!"
Item: The FDA, that’s the Food and Drug Administration, is considering a change to the rules for advertising drugs. It’s come to their attention that consumers are being "over-warned" about drug side effects.
Being a gubmint agency the FDA is of course several years behind the times here. I've been hearing comedians joke about this for ever. Still, better late than never, I guess.
You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. A two-minute ad comes up on your TV for some new drug to control your psoriasis, or whatever. You get ten seconds of upbeat talk about how psoriasis need never more blight your life and your romantic prospects.
The remaining one minute and fifty seconds of the commercial is given over to warning you that if you take this wonderful new medication you might, as a side effect, find yourself afflicted with nausea, dizziness, headaches, numbness, breathing difficulty, weight loss, hair loss, stomach pain, hypertension, night sweats, insomnia, diarrhea, narcolepsy, sexual impotence, hallucinations, screaming fits, bloody stools, uncontrollable vomiting, paralysis, lymphoma, or suicidal impulses.
My favorite ad along these lines — it comes up in the middle of Tucker Carlson’s show — is one that warns you, actual quote (though I've changed the name of the drug), quote: "Do not take bimborol if you are allergic to bimborol."
How dumb do they think we are? Are there really people stupid enough to dose themselves with a product they're allergic to?
As a matter of fact, to be fair to the drug companies, yes, there are. And there are citizens even dumber than that. Next item.
Item: May 8th this year Sanjay Stewartson of Lithonia (that’s a suburb of Atlanta, Ga.) shot dead Peter Johnson in a dispute over marijuana. The shooting took place at 10:30 a.m. in the parking lot of a busy shopping plaza.
This was not the perfect murder. It may in fact qualify as the least perfect murder ever. Stewartson left his passport at the scene of the crime. He was arrested a few days later when he went to the police station to report the lost passport. A grand jury just indicted him for murder.
Moral of the story: If you're as dumb as that, probably best to just stay home. Don’t go out. Added advantage: you won’t need a passport.
Item: [Clip: Turkmen national anthem.] Yes, time for an update on events in Turkmenistan. It’s been a few weeks and I know listeners are hungry for news of developments in the world’s most advanced, most progressive republic.
Well, Radio Derb’s dear friend and business associate Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, President of Turkmenistan, has made a movie. It’s a documentary movie, meant to inspire Turkmenistan’s military personnel.
The lead character in the movie is of course President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, seen in combat uniform performing various kinds of military feats, mainly shooting at targets, which of course he hits dead center every time.
Ever the creative innovator, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov is shown arriving at the event on a motorized military tricycle.
Military and political analysts world-wide are puzzling over the significance of this. Is it an attempt to upstage neighboring Russia, whose President Vladimir Putin is known to be fond of regular motorcycles? Two wheels bad, three wheels good?
I advise these analysts to stop wasting their time. A mind as powerful and subtle as that of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov cannot be fathomed by mere ordinary intellects. If he is investing in military trikes, there must be an excellent reason.
I hope the Pentagon is taking notice. Where are America’s trike-borne battalions? Are we going to let a Trike Gap develop?
Item: Just when you think we've reached Peak Crazy, something comes along to tell you: "No, we're still in the mere foot-hills of craziness. The peak is a way off yet."
So I opened my New York Post the other day and found myself looking at a news picture of three persons. The center person in the picture was a middle-aged white guy of professional appearance with a look on his face that said, "I don’t believe this." The guy’s hands were secured behind his back, presumably with handcuffs.
At left and right of the guy, each holding him by an arm, were two plain-clothed but embadged officers of the New York Police Department, wearing grim expressions.
Who was this dangerous criminal they had apprehended? It was 57-year-old Dr. Thomas Friedan, former director of the Centers for Disease Control.
What was he arrested for? Misdemeanor counts of third-degree sexual abuse, forcible touching, and harassment of an unidentified 55-year-old woman.
What had he actually done to the lady? Quote:
She and another couple were at his apartment on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights for a get-together on Oct. 20, 2017, and he allegedly squeezed her behind as the group was getting ready to leave at around 11 p.m., sources said.The woman filed a report about the incident on July 7.
Note that she waited nine months before filing her report. Filed it with the police. A report about a guy who grabbed her bum. A guy she had known for more than thirty years.
Peak Crazy? You wish.
Item: Whether or not there is a gay voice is still being argued, but researchers seem to agree that there is a gay face.
I confess I am mostly clueless about this kind of thing. I just have really poor gaydar, I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s some neurological defect, like color blindness or a speech impediment.
There is, though, a certain variety of lesbian I can spot at a hundred yards distance. It’s the smirk.
Whether there’s a gay voice or a gay face, I'll leave to the researchers; but I am absolutely sure there is a lesbian smirk. The best example of it — the Platonic ideal, in fact — is Rachel Maddow. I've never watched her TV show, but I've caught glimpses when channel-surfing and it’s always there, the smirk.
Am I just exhibiting cognitive bias here, working backwards from after-the-fact knowledge? I don’t think so. I have field-tested my theory of the lesbian smirk. At a dinner party a couple of years ago I sat across from a lady — a rather attractive young lady — with the smirk. I didn’t know her at all, and didn’t get to know her across the table; but making inquiries afterwards I learned that, yes, sure enough…
"There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face," says one of Shakespeare’s characters. He was wrong, at any rate where lesbians are concerned.
Item: I have mentioned before, rather often I think, that, to quote the Center for Immigration Studies, quote: "Of advanced economies, Canada and the United States are the only countries that grant automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens," end quote.
In an age of cheap and easy international travel, birthright citizenship is, for prosperous and stable nations, an invitation to obstetric tourism. For nations that do not carefully control their borders and track foreign visa holders, birthright citizenship is also one more incentive to illegal immigration.
All that is perfectly obvious. We have argued the case many, many times here at VDARE.com. So what’s up with the U.S.A. and Canada, keeping up this foolish policy?
Whatever you think is the answer to that, it may not be the U.S.A. and Canada much longer. Last weekend at the biennial convention of Canada’s Conservative Party delegates passed a resolution changing the party’s policy book to say, quote:
We encourage the government to enact legislation which will fully eliminate birthright citizenship in Canada unless one of the parents of the child born in Canada is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada.
This is not a fringe party. The Tories had a majority in Canada’s parliament from 2011 to 2015. They are currently the second-biggest party in Canada’s lower house, with 96 seats, and likewise in the Senate with 32 seats.
Birthright-citizenship-wise, it may soon be America alone. Then we'll be getting all the obstetric tourists instead of just half of them.
Item: Long after you and I are dust, gentle reader, and the petty squabbles and controversies that fill today’s news outlets are forgotten, one thing of our time will be remembered for as long as there are sentient beings to remember it: the first landing on the Moon, July 20th 1969.
The fiftieth anniversary of that tremendous event is coming up over the horizon. Hollywood has stepped up with a movie about it, title First Man, starring Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong.
This being Hollywood the producers have of course put some Goodwhite spin on the movie. Now, if there is one thing Goodwhites know for sure, it is that pride in one’s country and its achievements is a shameful, reactionary, and probably racist emotion. First Man therefore includes no reference to Armstrong planting the Stars and Stripes on the lunar surface.
Asked about this, Ryan Gosling extruded the following, quote:
I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement [and] that’s how we chose to view it. I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible.
End quote. Practically all of those 400,000 people were of course Americans.
Let’s be grateful for small mercies, though: At least they didn’t cast a black female as Neil Armstrong. I bet the casting director had to put up a fight over that.
Item: If you follow outlets like VDARE.com you might have got the impression that the police in Britain have now withdrawn from all law-enforcement activities except combing through social media to track down anyone saying negative things about Islam.
Things aren’t actually quite that bad. Here’s a news story from Carlisle, up in the far northwest of England by Hadrian’s Wall.
August 11th the police in Carlisle were alerted that a sheep had got loose and was running wild in the city center. The bobbies leapt into action. The rogue sheep was apprehended and Carlisle city center returned to its customary placid tranquillity.
One of the officers involved later tweeted his thanks to citizens for, quote, "assisting in detaining the subject who is now safe and sound behind baaars."
Item: Finally, one more from across the Pond: war has broken out between Britain and France.
This is not quite war in the old style. If memories of Crécy, Agincourt, Ramillies, Quebec, Trafalgar, and Waterloo are rising in your mind, push them down. This new round of hostilities is known as the Scallop War. It is being fought over fishing rights for scallops off the Normandy coast in the English channel.
Battle fatalities so far stand at zero, unless you count the scallops. This is not for want of trying, though. Quote from a combat participant, quote: "There were about 40 boats. One boat got petrol bombed, others had windows smashed. I can’t believe that someone wasn’t killed." End quote.
Sir Francis Drake would have made short work of these upstart French, I am sure; so would Admiral Nelson. Where are the heroes of yesteryear? Who will stand up for the rights of Englishmen to enjoy a tasty dish of scallops? Alas for national decline!
06 — Signoff. There’s your cornucopia, ladies and gents. Let’s have no more grumbling that I short-change you on the miscellany.
Thanks to all for your time and attention. Special thanks to all who have offered condolences on the passing of Toby. The little fellow left us at noon last Sunday, August 26th, peacefully and in his own little bed here at home. My son, who has somehow retained an army entrenching tool from his recent military service, dug a good deep grave for him. Toby is now sleeping there next to Boris, under the trees in our back yard.
I'll have more to say about Toby’s passing in my VDARE.com monthly diary this weekend. I put out a tweet Sunday evening; last time I looked there were 39 replies, all sympathetic. Considering I am only a very occasional, reluctant, and minimalist tweeter, that’s a lot. Many, many thanks to all you kind people.
I hope nobody will take it as impertinence or disrespect on my part — I most certainly intend none — to send off Toby military-style. British military-style, actually: "The Last Post," functionally equivalent to, but not musically identical with, "Taps." Toby never did military service himself; but I am sure that if called, he would have served, with honor and distinction.
Goodnight, old friend. Thank you for ten years of unconditional love, loyalty, and companionship.
[Music clip: British Legion bugler, "The Last Post."]
<
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.