Radio Derb: Trump Vs. The RNC, The Slow Death Of Europe, And The Color Of Crime, Etc.

John Derbyshire

04/15/2016

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00m41s — Democracy versus politics. (When narratives collide.)

08m29s — Whither Trump? Whither Trumpism? (Not your Dad’s populism.)

14m20s — The slow death of Europe. (Getting creepy.)

21m30s — Happy birthday, ERII! (Blessings of constitutional monarchy.)

25m58s — The Jew Thing. (It’s not them, it’s us.)

32m24s — Point'n’sputter at The Federalist. (Beautiful bigotry?)

40m04s — Royal feet. (An issue for Hillary?)

42m58s — Octopus story. (They're no suckers.)

45m35s — To boldly go. (And take Zuck with you.)

48m57s — Valiant for truth. (The color of crime.)

52m01s — One more for Trump. (Celebrity endorsement of the week.)

53m11s — Making faces. (Like you wouldn’t think possible.)

53m35s — A modest boast. (Radio Derb speaks, the world listens.)

57m14s — Signoff. (The biggest what?)

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, from your vernally genial host John Derbyshire, here at the VDARE.com studio in the bosky purlieus of Long Island.

Lotsa news this week, so let’s get to it without further a-do.

02 — Democracy versus politics. The main theme in this week’s political news has been delegates, the apportioning of.

Two narratives have emerged here, a pro-Trump narrative and pro-Cruz narrative. I'll lay them out in turn.

First the pro-Trump narrative. To quote the man himself, speaking this Tuesday, quote: "Our Republican system is absolutely rigged. It’s a phony deal." End quote.

Because Trump is unpopular with the GOP establishment, this narrative goes, the establishment is playing every possible procedural angle to deny him delegates. Ted Cruz can’t win delegates the straight way, by getting actual Republican voters to come out and vote for him, so he’s getting them by a back-door method.

For a vigorous exposition of this pro-Trump narrative, see Ann Coulter’s column, posted here at VDARE.com this past Wednesday. Sample quote from Ann:

It’s as if Cruz and Trump are playing different sports: Trump keeps belting home runs, while Cruz is berating the umpire until he calls a balk, then prances to home base, telling everyone he hit a grand slam.

The pro-Cruz narrative — or perhaps I should call it the anti-Trump narrative, since it’s being promoted by people who don’t particularly like Ted Cruz, people like RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Rience Preibus, however the hell you say it — the anti-Trump narrative goes like this.

Delegate selection is decided by the states individually in all kinds of different ways. A serious candidate for the nomination has to master all that and get to grips with the process at local level, state by state. Ted Cruz did that. He put in the effort, the resources, the manpower. The delegates he’s gained are his reward.

Trump didn’t bother. He thought his personality, and speechifying on TV and in baseball stadiums, would get him delegates. For better or worse, that’s not the system we have. Ted Cruz didn’t game the system; he worked the system. Donald Trump didn’t work the system; he ignored the system.

The pro-Trump riposte to that is: We're supposed to have a democracy here. Politicians advance by winning votes, not by mastering arcane rules. We wuz robbed!

The anti-Trump narrative counters that with: This is a republic, not a democracy. The Founders didn’t want a democracy. John Adams, quote: "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." End quote. We're a republic, organized on a system. The phrase "electoral college" mean anything? You have to master the system. Sore loser!

By that point the two sides are pretty much down to "Nyah-nyah! Nyah-nyah!"

Who gets the better of this argument? I have to give it to the pro-Cruz narrative on logic.

Trump seems to agree with me, to judge by his actions. Take the critical California winner-take-all primary coming up on June 7th — last of the season, 172 delegates at stake. The rules here are more than usually complicated. Ted Cruz has been working the state for a year, getting his people in place and mastering all the details. Donald Trump, according to Monday’s L.A. Times, quote: "is hiring staff and inquiring about airtime on Los Angeles television stations," end quote. A little late there, Donald.

A pro-Trump answer to that might be: "The Trump campaign is all about challenging the system. What has the system got us this past thirty years, but one conservative retreat after another? Cruz can work the system because he knows it. He’s part of the system."

To which a Cruz supporter might say: "Sometimes you have to use the system to break the system. Before you can swing the wrecking ball, you have to get in position."

I think that’s true, and I wish Donald Trump had engaged better, and earlier, with the primary process.

On the other hand, I don’t believe Cruz is the agent of change that Trump would be. Frankly, I think that if Cruz makes it to the White House, he'll go native in D.C. How could he do otherwise? He'd be beholden to the GOP donors and their puppets in the party establishment, not only for his election, but for his re-election, and support for his candidates in the mid-terms. He'd be sending up amnesty bills and invading Libya before you could say "George Bush the Third."

To restore true national sovereignty, to stabilize our demography, to bring some sense to our national finances, and restraint to our international commitments, Trump is the better bet. I wish he was the better politician.

03 — Whither Trump? Whither Trumpism? Here’s a thing to ponder, though: If Trump loses the GOP nomination, which at this point looks like it’s going to be a close-run thing; or if Trump wins the nomination and loses the general, what happens to Trumpism?

This time may be different, though. There are at least two points of difference.

First point: The enthusiasm gap.

• January: Eight thousand people packed a stadium in Lowell, Massachusetts in subzero temperatures to hear Trump speak.
• February: At the other end of the country both geographically and culturally, a Trump rally booked into a stadium with capacity 20,000 in Huntsville, Alabama had to be re-booked to a bigger stadium when ticket sales went through the roof.
• March: Thousands of supporters came to see Trump at Fountain Hills Park in Phoenix, Arizona, many of them walking for miles to the venue because anarchist protestors had blocked the roads. By this point the mainstream media headlines were screeching about, quote, "violence at Trump rallies," but Trump supporters — overwhelmingly law-abiding middle-class Americans — were not deterred, as the media of course hoped they would be.
• April: Here on Long Island last week, the Donald packed ten thousand people into an old Grumman hangar … or it may have been 15,000, depending on which news source you read. This was, again, after weeks of propaganda about violence at Trump events.

Through the first 12 primaries of 2016, combined Republican turnout has been 17.3 percent of eligible voters — the highest of any year since at least 1980.

Second point: The anti-establishment enthusiasm is bipartisan.

There’s this weird mirror image of the GOP contest over on the other side. Bernie Sanders is addressing five-figure crowds while Mrs Clinton faces empty chairs at the local union hall. Hillary’s humiliation isn’t as complete as Jeb Bush’s; and as is the case with Cruz versus Trump, she’s got the system on her side, to the degree that the nomination is now a sure thing for her. Sanders has been a serious challenge, though.

And speaking of mirror images, there’s been an odd inversion of the old quip that in the matter of nominating Presidential candidates, Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. This time it’s the other way round. Nobody loves the lackluster Mrs Clinton, except for a handful of ditzy feminists and some public-sector union bosses; but Democrat voters will sigh resignedly and fall in line come November.

GOP primary voters, on the other hand, stubbornly refused to fall in line for the donor-funded glove puppets their party establishment presented them with. Even Ted Cruz is an outsider by GOP establishment standards, though the party honchos are now learning to stop worrying and love the Ted.

Establishment politics has a lock on the Democratic nomination, and a good shot at the Republican nomination. Even if Trump gets his party’s nomination, polling indicates a likely win in November for the political establishment, in the person of Mrs Clinton.

These insurgencies have been bigger and more passionate than anything we've seen in recent decades, though. Whatever happens to Donald Trump, I don’t see Trump-ism going gentle into that good night. Not this time.

04 — The slow death of Europe. Watching Europe’s illegal immigrant crisis has gone from being puzzling, through infuriating, over to horrifying, and out the other end to just creepily fascinating, like watching a snake devour a mouse.

The eastern route goes from Turkey to the Aegean Islands of Greece, mainly to Lesbos, which is just ten miles across the sea from the Turkish shore. Greece is a member of the EU, the European Union, and also of the Schengen Area, the 26 European countries that allow unrestricted travel among themselves.

The central route is from the shores of North Africa, mainly Libya, to Italy. There is way more water to cross there: from Libya to Sicily is 250 miles. Italy, like Greece, belongs to both the EU and the Schengen Area, so it’s attractive to illegals. The tiny Lampedusa Islands, much closer to Libya — less than 100 miles — are Italian, but not popular with the illegals now as it’s hard to get transferred off them to mainland Italy.

There is a western route too, from Algeria and Morocco into Spain, but the volume here is small.

The eastern route from Turkey to Greece was the subject of a deal between Turkey and the EU earlier this year, brokered by Angela Merkel, the Wicked Witch of the West. The deal allows some limited, qualified right for Greece to return illegals back to Turkey, balanced with the right of an equal number of genuine refugees to enter Europe. For this dubious concession, Turkey receives a bribe of three billion dollars and the right for Turks to enter the Schengen Area from this June, without passports or border controls.

As half-hearted as it is, the deal, which took effect March 20th, has been enough to deter people from taking the eastern route. Twenty thousand people took this route in the first half of March; in the first half of April, after the EU-Turkey deal kicked in, it was two thousand, a drop of ninety percent.

All the people-smuggling action now is on the central route. Middle Easterners don’t figure much here. The great majority of illegals taking the central route are sub-Saharan Africans, young black men in their twenties and thirties.

The numbers are swelling fast. The International Organization for Migration reports that in the three days up to this Friday, nearly six thousand illegals arrived in Sicily. Last year’s arrivals in Italy were 153,000. They're expecting way more this year.

The question gets asked a lot in the comment thread to these stories: Why don’t the Europeans just turn the boats back, as Australia does? Answer: The people-smugglers working the Australia route had to get their customers across 500 miles or so of serious ocean. They used real ships made of wood or metal, not easy to sink. The Mediterranean smugglers use inflatable rubber dinghies. If that Italian cruiser looks as though it won’t pick you up, or tries to tow you back to Libya, you just stick a pen-knife in the boat. Then you're all floundering in the water, some Italian crewman is catching it on his iPhone, and the captain can’t not rescue you, if he doesn’t want to find himself on TV news as a heartless assassin.

So Italy’s taking in two thousand Africans a day. What’s it doing with them? Shipping them north, for preference. That’s where the illegals want to be, in north European countries where the benefits are generous and the police not so corrupt.

The smugglers, always two or three steps ahead of the authorities, have been guiding the illegals along old donkey tracks through the Alps, from northeast Italy into western Austria. Austria’s skinny right there, so it’s just a hop and a step into Germany and the welcoming arms of Mutti Merkel.

A sidebar issue here is the extent to which the crisis of illegal immigrants is destabilizing the Balkan nations — Greece, Bulgaria, the states of the former Yugoslavia. Parliamentary democracy’s a new thing in these places, with no deep roots. Macedonia’s been in a state of political crisis for months. Croatia and Serbia are snarling at each other. Russia is mixing the pot with ethnic appeals to the Slav states. Greece’s problems are well known, and getting worse.

None of this is directly related to the crisis over illegals, but it isn’t helping, as we see with the recent clashes on the Greece-Macedonian border.

The Balkans, goes the old quip, produce more history than they can consume locally.

Eastern route, central route; the weather’s getting warmer. This will not end well.

05 — Happy birthday, ERII. Thursday next week, April 21st, marks the 90th birthday of Elizabeth, Queen of England and sundry other places. I offer Her Majesty my congratulations and best wishes.

Also a political one, of sorts. Constitutional monarchy is a pretty good system, as systems go. There’s been some talk of the English monarchy being scrapped after Elizabeth passes, but I doubt that. I suspect it'll be scaled down considerably; but a state needs a head of state, and to have one standing outside the party-political system gives you a stability you don’t see in presidential republics.

The trouble with constitutional monarchy is that its legitimacy rests to some degree on the monarch’s personality. Too much misbehavior in the palace discredits the whole business. From that point of view, Elizabeth’s been a perfect monarch: sober, dutiful, a model of bourgeois propriety.

There is a Dissident Right case against Elizabeth. She has a strong emotional attachment to the old British Empire, nowadays the British Commonwealth, and her influence likely contributed in some measure to the catastrophic flooding of Britain by Third World immigrants during her reign. Whether she constitutionally could have done anything to prevent that, I don’t know; but it would have been against her inclinations.

In that regard the First World’s other major constitutional monarchy, Japan, has managed its affairs much better, keeping itself resolutely Japanese in the face of various economic and demographic problems.

What accounts for the difference? Japan and Britain are both island nations, both constitutional monarchies, both old imperial powers. You can argue that Britain was better at imperialism, withe less tendency to run amok and massacre people; but the Brits did some of that, while as peacetime imperialists, in Taiwan and Korea and Manchuria for example — you need to discount a lot of Chinese communist propaganda here — the Japanese were mostly constructive and well-behaved. Both imperialisms, when not stressed by war, had similar attitudes to their subject peoples — mainly, racial paternalism.

The real difference here in social outcomes these past few decades, the real difference between these two island nations under constitutional monarchy, is in the character of their people. The Brits opened wide their borders, and the Japs kept theirs tight closed, because of different popular attitudes towards society and the outside world.

I’m going to circle back round to that point, after a detour through a different issue.

06 — The Jew Thing. First, a little housekeeping.

This drew some emails observing that Ms Sontag was Jewish, and therefore not white.

Radio Derb’s position here, which I am sure I must have stated previously, is a strong inclination not to engage with what I once, quite famously, called The Jew Thing. Mostly this is just a personal, temperamental aversion to monomania of all kinds. Once you engage with obsessives, you end up talking about nothing else but their particular obsession, their King Charles’s head; and there are a lot of other things I want to talk about.

Have Jews been over-represented in the forces pushing the great white ethnomasochist guilt trip this past fifty years? Yes, they have; but Jews have been over-represented in every kind of cultural and intellectual endeavor, owing to their high average intelligence. Have they have been running the whole ethnomasochist show? Not that I can see.

Case Study One: The 1965 immigration bill, formally the Hart-Celler Act. Did the Act have strong Jewish-American support? Yes, it did. Was Emanuel Celler Jewish? Yes, he was. Philip Hart, on the other hand, was Irish-American. So was Teddy Kennedy, the Senate floor manager for the bill. The House vote was 320 to 70 for the bill; the Senate vote was 76 to 18. To trawl through the 89th Congress counting Jews is more than I’m paid for; but I feel confident in asserting that the great majority of those 396 congresscritters who voted the bill into law were gentiles, as were the great majority of their constituents.

Case Study Two: The defenestration of Enoch Powell in 1968, the first big episode of white ethnomasochism to get my youthful attention. Powell was a member of the Tory Party shadow cabinet at a time when the Labour Party held power. He spoke out forthrightly against the mass Third World immigration into Britain that was just then building up real steam. For that, Powell was ejected from the shadow cabinet. The Tory leader of the time, Edward Heath, was not Jewish. Neither, so far as I can ascertain, were any of the other nine members of that shadow cabinet, with the one possible exception of Anthony Barber.

The usual counter to that is: Ah, yes, but while Jews may not have been instrumental in doing these things, they were manipulating events from behind the scenes — shaping public opinion and funding sympathetic politicians.

My response to that is the one I gave when reviewing Kevin MacDonald’s book The Culture of Critique, and many times since: If it really were true that 97 percent of the population is passively allowing itself to be jerked around by the other three percent, then the 97 percent would be the biggest fools in history, worthy of nothing but contempt. I personally don’t have that kind of contempt for my fellow gentiles.

Congressional enthusiasm for the 1965 Immigration Act and British public approval of Edward Heath, who was elected Prime Minister two years after sacking Enoch Powell, tell us that white ethnomaschism has for decades had deep roots among the European peoples.

Have individual ethnocentric Jews given a helping push to white ethnomasochism when they've seen a chance? Undoubtedly they have; and we at VDARE.com have called them out by name, I hope fairly and politely, when that’s happened.

The real heart of the matter, though, is widespread attitudes among Europeans at large, especially northwest Europeans and the societies shaped by them. That’s interesting to read and speculate about. Victimological whining about poor gullible gentiles being the helpless playthings of scheming Jews, is not interesting. Not to me, anyway.

07 — Point'n’sputter at The Federalist. I can’t leave this topic without noting that my name, and that review I did of The Culture of Critique back in 2003, make a cameo appearance in the latest push-back against that March 29th article about the Alt-Right by Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari. I mentioned that article, and VDARE.com’s response to it, in last week’s podcast.

So here is journalist Cathy Young, who writes commentary from a position somewhere in the borderlands where libertarianism meets neoconservatism. Her response to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari went up on the Federalist website this last Thursday. Title: You Can’t Whitewash the Alt-Right’s Bigotry.

We know where we are right away from that title. The word "bigotry" is only ever used nowadays by enforcers of the multiculti, ethnomasochist narrative. In the stylized diction of these enforcers, it’s standard to precede the word "bigotry" with the adjective "ugly." Sure enough, the first occurrence of the word "bigotry" in the actual text of Cathy Young’s article is preceded by "ugly."

This is a writer who thinks in clichés out of the leftist phrasebook. Unless, of course, she thinks that beautiful bigotry is a possible attitude. If she doesn’t think that, then the word "ugly" is redundant, isn’t it?

She’s very particularly concerned with antisemites on the Alt-Right, of which there certainly are some, along with plenty of Jewish writers and anti-antisemites like myself. Is Ms Young herself Jewish? Yes she is. Of all the people reading her article and nodding along in agreement, is the majority Jewish? I very seriously doubt it. There, once again, is your problem, according to me.

It’s in that context — of antisemitism, I mean — that Ms Young mentions me and my MacDonald review. Quote from her, after a paragraph and a half mocking Kevin MacDonald, quote:

Interestingly, back in 2003, MacDonald’s book "The Culture of Critique" was the subject of a scathing review in The American Conservative by John Derbyshire, currently another VDARE stalwart, who described its main thesis as not only anti-Semitic but, quote, "silly."

I think that the evolutionary psychologists are probably on to something, but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be improbable and unpleasantly nihilistic. Here, for example, is Kevin MacDonald in a previous book: "The human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals." This trembles on the edge of deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism, of the kind that … MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully in Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique. After all, if it is so, should we not suppose that evolutionary psychologists are pursuing their own "group evolutionary strategy"? And that, in criticizing them, I am pursuing mine? And that there is, therefore, no point at all in my writing, or your reading, any further?

To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as silly as that. The Culture of Critique includes many good things.

Sloppy journalism there, Ms Young. There are other sloppinesses too, logged by our own James Fulford here at VDARE.

The refreshing thing about that original Yiannopoulos and Bokhari article was its willingness to treat the Dissident Right as a legitimate object of inquiry, with a calm discussion of its ideas and its sociology. The far more usual approach by outsiders looking at the Alt-Right is just to point and sputter and reach for the Cultural Marxist phrasebook.

Yiannopoulos and Bokhari did their homework and pondered what they had found without, if you'll excuse the word, prejudice.

With Cathy Young, we're back to point'n’sputter.

08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

That got the telephones ringing at podiatrists' offices all over Britain as newspaper editors demanded expert opinions on the condition of the Duchess’s feet. The consensus was that the royal feet need work. Sample quote from the Daily Mail, April 11th, quote:

Cheshire-based podiatrist Charlotte Wood was … concerned by the condition of the royal’s feet, pointing out an enlargement of her big toe joint, which resembles a condition called functional hallux limitus.

One of the ongoing disgraces of civilized life is the condition of women’s feet. It’s rare to see healthy, attractive feet on a woman, even a young woman like Kate. The culprit is of course the awful shoes women wear.

The civilizational nadir for women’s feet was reached with foot-binding in old China, which is painful just to read about and quite startling to see. My first landlady in Hong Kong was an old Shantung woman with bound feet — not so much feet as hoofs, to look at. Things have gotten better since then, but not by much.

If I were advising Mrs Clinton I'd tell her to drop the bogus stuff about women being underpaid, which has been debunked a thousand times but keeps re-surfacing, and get some politics going on women’s poor feet.

Item: Here’s an octopus story. An octopus named Inky was being kept in a tank at an aquarium in Napier, New Zealand. Then one day he wasn’t there any more.

What had happened was, while some maintenance work was being done at the aquarium, the lid of Inky’s tank was left ajar. When no-one was around, he slithered out of the tank and down a drain into the nearby ocean. The drain hole is just six inches across. Apparently an octopus can squeeze down to almost the size of its beak, which is the only hard part of its anatomy.

Inky was actually following in a long and noble tradition of octopus escapes. Stories about octopuses — or octopodes, if you want to be pedantic — escaping from their tanks, or sneaking out of them at night to steal fish from neighboring tanks, go back well into the 19th century.

Octopuses are intelligent animals. That’s a highly peculiar thing, as every other kind of animal with anything you could call intelligence is in the phylum Chordata — animals with a spinal chord — which separated out from the rest of the animal kingdom half a billion years ago, way before intelligence had appeared anywhere on earth. So intelligence evolved twice.

Stranger yet: Octopuses don’t only have one big brain. They have smaller brains — brainlets — in each of their tentacles, that can figure things out independently of the main brain. I tell you, neuroscientists love octopuses. They'd hug them if they could, but … it’s tricky.

The wonders of nature! The octopus is the only squishy life-form that possesses intelligence … unless you count Senators from South Carolina.

Item: Also on the science beat: Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg, and some Russian dude with more money than sense have announced a plan to send robot spacecraft to the nearest solar system — nearer than our own, I mean, of course.

That would be the Alpha Centauri system, 25 trillion miles away. That’s about seven thousand times further than Pluto. The idea is to have a fleet of teeny cameras weighing a thirtieth of an ounce each, attached to superthin mylar sails, and to accelerate these sails through interstellar space by pressure of light beams shining on them from powerful lasers on Earth. That way the gadgets will get to Alpha Centauri in twenty years, these guys tell us.

Color me skeptical. s = (½)at², if I remember aright. Working in units miles and hours, s is 25 trillion, and 20 years is 175 thousand hours — that’s t. So t² is 30 billion, and a, the constant acceleration, will be seventeen hundred miles per hour per hour. Really? — from zero to seventeen hundred in one hour, just from light pressure?

And then, v² = 2as, which would be 34 hundred times 25 trillion, say eight and a half by ten to the sixteen. That’s v², so take the square root … final velocity at Alpha Centauri is three hundred million miles an hour. That would get you from Earth to Pluto between breakfast and tea-time. Talk about a bat out of hell! Won’t the pictures be a bit … smudgy?

And then, if they are seven thousand times further away than Pluto, by the inverse square law, their transmissions will be fifty million times weaker than the ones we've been getting from the New Horizons spacecraft, which is a whole lot bigger than these interstellar gizmos are supposed to be.

Have these geniuses and billionaires really thought this through?

I did like the comment threads on the news stories about this, though. Every one I saw had at least one comment saying, if the follow-up involves shipping open-borders fanatic Mark Zuckerberg to Alpha Centauri, the commenter would be fine with it. As would I.

Item: People sometimes ask me: Why do you folk at VDARE.com make such an issue of nonwhite crime? Are you just trying to stir up hostility to nonwhites?

Answer: Not at all. Our position is anti-anti-white. We seek to redress the balance against the blizzard of anti-white propaganda that blows daily through the Western world, from our schools and colleges, our print and broadcast media, corporate diversity programs, politicians' speeches, and leftist rabble-rousers. We want to speak truth, facts, and data to the anti-white propaganda machine.

We have now acquired a valuable new weapon in our battle against the anti-white lies and, yes, hate. Our own Ed Rubenstein, working with Jared Taylor’s New Century Foundation, has published an updated edition of their booklet The Color of Crime. It’s been ten years since the last edition; Jared’s friends have been nagging him to bring the data up to date. He and Ed Rubenstein have now done so.

The report has its own website, where you can read the whole thing: Google "Color of Crime 2016." You can also go to the American Renaissance website and put "Color of Crime 2016" into the search box, and read the report there. Make sure you're looking at the 2016 version: there have been at least two previous ones in the same format.

For a small donation to American Renaissance, they will also send you a well-produced 16-page printed version that you can leave lying around in airports and subway trains for people to read, if you feel subversive.

The data Ed displays has all been taken from federal and state statistics offices or peer-reviewed scholarly studies. These are ironclad facts, putting the lie to media obfuscation and politicians' cant. For the truth about race and crime in America all the way down to the "Ferguson Effect" at the end of last year, take an hour or so to peruse The Color of Crime.

Thanks to Ed and Jared for the effort they put into this. Magna est veritas et praevalebit.

Item: Latest celebrity endorsement for Donald Trump: Kirstie Alley.

Worldwide chorus from the under-30s: Who?

Ms Alley, who is now — Eheu! fugaces labuntur anni! — eligible for Social Security, won the hearts of us mature gents a quarter century ago as the bar manager in the TV sitcom Cheers. She played the part as a slightly unstable, not-too-tightly-wrapped thirtysomething gal who'd been round the block a few times — the kind of gal who gets a mature guy’s attention, although not for very long if he’s lucky.

If Ms Alley’s been doing anything since the Clinton inauguration, I missed it. I’m glad to know she’s still with us, and looking … not bad, for her vintage. Welcome aboard the Trump train, Kirstie.

Item: If you want to see something scary, go to YouTube and put "Face2Face" into the search box. That’s all one word, f-a-c-e-2-f-a-c-e. I say no more: Just try it, and start worrying.

Item: Finally, a boast. Radio Derb doesn’t do a whole lot of boasting. We are modest and restrained about our accomplishments, which we prefer to let speak for themselves. Boasting is like getting drunk, though: Everyone’s allowed to once in a while. It’s only annoying when it becomes a habit.

So here goes with a boast. Back in our January 1st podcast, speaking of the resistance to multiculturalism in the Eastern European nations of the former Soviet bloc, I emitted the following grumble:

[Clip: Why are we still saying "The Czech Republic"? That’s what we're supposed to say, "The Czech Republic." It’s what the country calls itself in English-language promotional materials. It’s what the State Department calls it. It’s what the CIA calls it. It’s what the U.N. calls it.

Why? Is there some other Czech nation it’s differentiating itself from, like back when Taiwan was officially "the Republic of China" and mainland China was "the People’s Republic of China"? Is there a Czech People’s Republic? A Czech Federation? A Czech Kingdom? A Czech Despotism? A Czech Empire?

When Czechoslovakia broke up 23 years ago last week — when the Czechs decided they'd prefer to be governed by Czechs and the Slovaks by Slovaks — the Slovaks set up Slovakia and the Czechs set up … the Czech Republic. Why not just "Czechia"?

It’s petty, I know, but it annoys me. I’m going to take a stand here. Henceforth Radio Derb will refer to the homeland of the Czechs as Czechia. With the awesome power of Radio Derb bestriding the opinion airwaves like a Colossus, I am confident that with us behind it, this usage will soon sweep the world.]

The Czech Republic wants to be known as "Czechia" to make it easier for companies and sports teams to use it on products and clothing. The country will retain its full name but Czechia will become the official short geographic name, as "France" is to "The French Republic." If approved by parliament, the name will be lodged with the United Nations.

09 — Signoff. That’s it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening; and to my fellow New Yorkers, those who are registered Republicans, please be sure to turn out on Tuesday to cast a vote for our one hope to restore national sovereignty, fiscal discipline, and military restraint to this blessed republic of ours. Join me, Kirstie, and America’s Newspaper of Record: Vote Trump!

[Music clip: Gracie Fields, "The Biggest Aspidistra In The World"]

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