05/08/2020
01m52s Mumming for goodwhites. (The morality play of our time.)
06m51s Our politicized courts. (Instruments of the CultMarx establishment.)
13m10s White lives don’t matter. (Massive hypocrisy.)
14m42s Losing our turbulence. (Pressure cooker, or sheep?)
20m46s ChiCom virus numbers, cont. (Statistics with Chinese characteristics.)
23m00s What happened to Table 42? (Why doesn’t the administration restore it?)
26m55s "Anti-white messaging" banned in Alaska. (Next: The New York Times?)
28m53s Working from home. (Some love it, some hate it.)
30m39s Disney’s empire in lockdown. (Cry me a river.)
31m56s Baby names: Boris Johnson. (Resurrects a fine old English name.)
33m38s Baby names: Elon Musk. (Zpf* qr$-nkl 67.Æ tss_Λ)
35m40s Signoff. (With Millie.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your inflammatorily genial host John Derbyshire, podcasting to you this 8th of May — VE Day, seventy-five years on from the end of WW2 in Europe. If you know a veteran of that war — there are tens of thousands still among us — seek him out and shake his hand … No, as you were: Seek him out and give him an elbow-bump … while keeping six feet away … Aw, the hell with it: buy him a drink, if you can find a bar that’s open.
News-wise, I've been beginning to get desperate. It’s been coronavirus, coronavirus, coronavirus, for weeks now. I've been getting bored with it, especially as every expert brought forward to tell me what’s happening, what’s going to happen, what should happen, contradicts the previous expert. The hell with the damn virus and the stupid experts. Isn’t there anything else happening?
Well, this week we got relief, of a sort. We got an Emmett Till.
02 — Mumming for goodwhites. You know the script. Evil, gap-toothed, leering badwhites, secure in their white privilege, most likely resident in some state of the old Confederacy, hunt down and murder an innocent young black guy.
It’s the core fantasy of goodwhite Americans, and has to be acted out every so often for their moral satisfaction, like a medieval mumming play: a clear narrative restatement of the eternal conflict between good and evil. Black Americans can participate in the festivities, too, by burning stores and shooting each other. That’s epiphenomenal, though; nobody cares what blacks do.
We haven’t had a good Emmett Till re-enactment since the Freddie Gray business in Baltimore five years ago, so it’s time. And yes, here it comes. Headlines from the increasingly woke Drudge Report:
FATHER, SON CHARGED WITH HUNTING BLACK MAN
MURDER SHOCKS NATION
GEORGIA TOOK MONTHS TO MAKE ARRESTS
So, yes; I got a break from reading about the tiresome coronavirus and the fool politicians tying themselves in pretzels trying to look as if they're managing it somehow. For this relief much thanks.
That said, I've lived through so many of these Emmett Till re-enactments now, they're getting to be as boring as Xi Jinping’s virus. This particular one, if you haven’t been keeping up with the news, concerns a father-and-son team in Brunswick, Georgia.
There'd been burglaries in the neighborhood, which is pretty white; at any rate, the local elementary school is 76 percent white. Dad, who is a former police officer, saw a black guy running down the street, who he thought matched a description of the burglar; Father and son, not knowing whether the black guy was armed, grabbed their guns and got in their truck to make a citizens' arrest — all perfectly legal in Georgia. A friend in another vehicle followed them.
When they caught up with the black guy, they got out to make the arrest, the son holding a shotgun. The black guy tried to wrestle the shotgun from him. Three shots were fired, the son presumably fearing for his life if his opponent got the gun. The black guy died.
All this happened on February 23rd. The District Attorney who investigated the case saw no grounds for an arrest.
Last week some cellphone video of the event went public. It was taken by the friend who'd followed father and son. I presume he released it to show they acted within the law — which, the DA had concluded, they did.
All the goodwhites saw on that video, though, was two white guys with guns and a black guy getting shot. Just like Emmett Till!
So now we are getting the full Emmett Till narrative, dressed up with all the usual cant threadbare formulas: "jogging while black," "modern lynching," and the rest. There are rallies; there are protests; there are Twitter handles, … you know how it goes.
Under pressure from the goodwhite establishment, which of course includes practically all of the media and social media, father and son have now been arrested and charged with murder.
How’s it all going to play out from here? Next segment.
03 — Politicized justice. Whatever happens at trial in this case, the father and son, the McMichaels, will never again have normal lives. Their home address has already been made public; so even if acquitted, they'd be in danger if they ever went back to live there.
And they will be full-time professional defendants. Even if they're acquitted in state court, there'll be appeals and calls for federal Civil Rights and "hate crime" prosecutions. If a Democrat wins the Presidency in November, those calls will be answered with a vengeance by some anti-white Eric Holder clone at the Justice Department.
So get used to being homeless and unemployable, guys, and to spending all of your free time in lawyers' offices, and all of your net worth in lawyers' fees. This is what happens to Americans who bring the wrath of the goodwhite establishment down upon themselves as a result of trying to do their citizenly duty. You could ask George Zimmerman about it.
As with the Trayvon Martin case, I’m expecting some degree of narrative collapse. The deceased in this case, name of Ahmaud Abery, has so far been presented to us just as a high-school football star. That’s nice; but the guy was 25 years old when he died. What’s he been doing since high school? None of the news reports I've seen want to tell me. Could it be that he was the burglar who'd been plaguing the McMichaels' neighborhood? I guess it could, but no-one seems interested in finding out.
We have learned that Abery has a rap sheet. He was indicted for bringing an unlicensed handgun to a basketball game six years ago, and he has a shoplifting conviction. Not major criminal activity; but Abery, like Trayvon Martin, seems to have fallen somewhat short of the model-citizen standard. I’m expecting more narrative collapse in this area.
George Zimmerman was at least acquitted at state trial. Can McMichael father and son expect the same grace?
I doubt it. That was nearly seven years ago. The political temperature is way higher now than it was back then, and our courts are heavily politicized. Robert Bork wrote about being the only conservative on the faculty of Yale Law School sixty years ago; does anyone think the law schools have become less liberal since then?
The Zimmerman verdict was, I think, a fluke. The establishment will do all they can to prevent that happening again. For the future of American jurisprudence, compare and contrast the cases of James Fields and Jose Garcia-Zarate.
Intent-wise, I can’t see much difference between those two cases. Outcome-wise, however, Fields got a colossal prison sentence after a year and a half in custody followed by a very brisk trial, while Garcia-Zarate’s state conviction was thrown out on appeal over a technicality, and federal proceedings against him, now five years under way, are to be dragged out until everyone’s forgotten about the case, with a couple of years in the funny farm as the most probable outcome.
That’s our courts: instruments of the goodwhite CultMarx establishment. White guy kills white gal, intent unclear: four hundred years in jail. Illegal alien kills white gal, intent unclear: We're still working on it, don’t rush us, may let a gun-possession charge go forward.
Equal justice under the law? [Laugh.]
04 — White lives don’t matter. As a footnote to all that: I can’t leave the case of the Georgia shooting without registering my anger and disgust at the usual establishment hypocrisy on display here.
Black people kill white people at a pretty fair clip, often with plain malice and horrific cruelty. Our own Paul Kersey and James Fulford post regular reports on this, as does the indispensable Colin Flaherty. None of these killings ever makes the news.
There are no demonstrations on behalf of those named in Paul Kersey’s or James Fulford’s posts, or Colin Flaherty’s books; no Twitter handles, no indignant denunciations by politicians and TV talking heads … nothing. If you are murdered by a black or other sacralized minority — an illegal alien, say — your death will at most be a few column inches on page fifteen of your local newspaper, if your town still has one.
So far as our establishment elites and media bubbleheads are concerned, white lives don’t matter.
05 — Losing our turbulence. Whatever the outcome in Georgia, the fate of the McMichaels — four centuries in jail at worst, a lifetime of poverty and fear at best — has to be a big deterrent to anyone thinking of carrying out a citizen’s arrest.
There is, I’m sorry to say, a connection from here to the coronavirus hysteria.
One thing we have seen this past few weeks is the willingness of most Americans to do as they're told by their superiors. It’s really been quite striking.
The USA was once known as the land of individual initiative and localism. Americans, de Tocqueville noted, didn’t wait around passively for the king or the local baron to get something done; they up and did it themselves. Concepts like citizen’s arrest and neighborhood watch are in that tradition.
That all looks frightfully old-fashioned nowadays. The guiding principle of good citizenship in 2020 is the one of ancient imperial despotism: Tremble and obey! Don’t try to take any initiative; wait for the police, the courts, the politicians to tell you what to do.
Perhaps I’m taking too dark a view here. There have been some pockets of resistance: Thursday last week, for instance, when armed protestors — lawfully armed, I should say — stormed the Michigan state capitol, to the frothing outrage of the state’s strict governess Gretchen Whitmer.
Watching those protests, I recalled a column I posted at Taki’s Magazine back in 2012 under the title: "Losing Our Turbulence. "
The occasion was, I'd been reading George Bowker’s 2003 biography of George Orwell. A thing that caught my eye in the book was something that Orwell, according to Bowker, had said after attending gatherings of coal miners in northern England during the 1930s Great Depression. Orwell wasn’t impressed by the miners, who he described as "sheeplike." He returned to London concluding that, quote from Orwell:
There is no turbulence left in England.
End quote.
I chewed over that for the rest of my column, of course taking proper note of the fact that in the matter of turbulence, there is a be-careful-what-you-wish-for element in play. Turbulence … riot … revolution … Things can go too far.
Still and all, I wrote, quote from self:
Democratic government’s plodding regularities are certainly superior to despotism or prolonged anarchy, but one can’t help feeling it would be character-building for our political classes if a mob were to come around and break their windows now and then. The Duke of Wellington had "about thirty" of his broken in 1831. (His servant "fired two blunderbusses in the air from the top of the house, and [the mob] went off.")
End quote.
That was during the Reform Riots of the time. The Reform Riots were, yes, riots, and windows were broken — probably a few arms and legs, too. Still, there was no threat to the integrity of the nation; and the outcome at last was real constitutional reform towards more representative government. Score one for turbulence.
Have we Americans lost our turbulence? Well, not all of us, not in Michigan at any rate.
Will the establishment succeed in stamping out these last pesky traces of turbulence? Or will the protestors inspire more turbulence? To borrow the subtitle of Stephen Balch’s fine April 29th essay at the American Greatness website, quote:
In describing these days will future historians employ as metaphor a pressure cooker about to explode or sheep being led to slaughter?
End quote.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Two weeks ago I passed an indirect opinion in response to people who ask me how much credence we should give to the virus-related numbers coming out of China.
A listener directed my attention to an April 7th Washington Post op-ed by China expert Isaac Stone Fish. Opening paragraph, quote:
The Chinese Communist Party manipulates its statistics. This is neither an opinion nor a revelation: it’s a simple fact, critical to understanding China today. Chairman Xi Jinping demands that Chinese journalists prioritize loyalty to the Party over truth or accuracy. Li Keqiang, who now runs China’s economy as the premier, once smilingly told the U.S. ambassador that most Chinese statistics are "for reference only," and that statistics on gross domestic product especially are "man-made."
End quote.
In the particular matter of GDP statistics, I noted when reviewing Gordon Chang’s book The Coming Collapse of China nineteen years ago that, according to Gordon, "China’s official GDP numbers for year 2000 were issued on January 1st, 2001."
The numbers we're dealing with here can best be described as "statistics with Chinese characteristics."
Item: Also on the subject of statistics, this time America’s crime statistics, the current administration has done nothing to restore the famous Table 42 in the Bureau of Justice Statistics website.
If you don’t know about Table 42, it is the one headed "Percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender" in the "Victims and Offenders" list at the BJS web page "Criminal Victimization In The United States — Statistical Tables." The data in it comes from the National Crime Victimizations Survey, which is conducted every year. So this is victim reports, nothing to do with arrests or convictions.
On Table 42 you can look up, for example, how many reports of rape and sexual assault there were in a year, broken out by the race of the victim and the perceived race of the offender. In 2008, for example, I see that 16.4 percent of the white victims of rape and sexual assault reported a black perp. That’s around nineteen thousand victims.
How many black victims of rape and sexual assault reported a white perp? Well, Table 42 says zero. Only one household in three thousand gets sampled for this survey, though; so that zero just means the number reported is too small for the sampling math to get anything meaningful from.
With that and some other slight qualifications aside, Table 42 is a pretty nifty reference on interracial crime … Except that the "is" there should be "was": The Bureau of Justice stopped publishing Table 42 in, let me see … oh, 2008 was the last year. How strange!
The BJS still publishes tables from the NCVS data, but it seems that all sexual offenses have been thrown in under the general heading "violent victimization," with no separate tabs for the type of violence.
We can, of course, never know — nor even guess! — why that particular table, Table 42, was discontinued in that particular year. The public at large lost a useful source of information there, though. Will the present administration restore it to us? Or, if they will not, will they tell us why they will not?
Item: An item here from the world of education — a non-crazy one, for a change.
The Matanuska-Susitna School Board in Palmer, Alaska has voted to ban five books from the list of approved texts for high school English teachers this fall. Among the five is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, one of the seven, count 'em seven, autobiographies put out by the semiliterate black female windbag Maya Angelou, who went off to join the Choir Invisible six years ago.
The book was banned by this Alaska school board, quote from this Fox News report I’m reading, "because of a graphic description she wrote about being molested as a child and for 'anti-white' messaging."
I don’t care about the self-reported molestation, which the old fraud probably made up anyway, but "anti-white messaging"? Hallelujah! In a town in the USA, in the Year of Our Lord 2020, a school board has banned a book for "anti-white messaging."
Is it too much to hope that they will proceed logically from here to banning The New York Times? Baby steps, baby steps.
Item: It is of course no news that a great many people are now working from home who were not doing so four months ago. Will this be a permanent change to our working lives, or not?
I don’t know; but I do see an interesting division of opinion about it. A lot of people love love love the idea of working from home. A lot of other people hate hate hate it.
The Lion of the Blogosphere posted on this the other day. His comment thread exhibits both points of view. Comment:
I have been [working from home] here in California for last 6 weeks (absolutely loving it) …
End comment.
Comment:
As someone who mainly works from home, it is not that great. After a while you crave human interaction.
End comment.
The comment I liked best was this one. Comment:
Interacting with attractive young ladies is my favorite thing about going to work. I don’t come close to sexual harassment. The interaction is mutually enjoyable.
End comment.
I'd like to hear the attractive young ladies' side of that, but I'll give the guy full marks for honesty in his first sentence there at least.
Item: This news story I've filed away in the folder labeled "World’s Smallest Violin."
It’s from dnyuz.com, which is some kind of news aggregator website. Headline: For Disney, a Stricken Empire.
Disney is of course the Disney mega-corporation. The coronavirus lockdown has been devastating to them. Their fourteen theme parks are all padlocked; their eight movie studios are empty and silent. Mickey and Minnie are out there on Riverside Drive begging passers-by for scraps of cheese.
Cry me a river. This is the company that fired its computer staff and replaced them with cheap H-1B guest workers from India. Suck it down, you bastards.
Item: A couple of items of baby-name news. First item: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his significant other Carrie Symonds have announced the name of their new baby boy, born April 29th in, of course, London. The baby’s name is Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson. Wilfred and Lawrie are grandfathers of the parents: Nicholas is the Christian name of both the doctors who saw Johnson safely through his bout of COVID-19 last month.
That last is a nice touch. The name that pleased me most, though, is Wilfred: a fine old English name that people hardly use any more. I just went on Google and asked for "famous people named Wilfred." Most of them are dead.
Perhaps the parents won’t think it impertinent of me to welcome their child into this strange world using some lines from a poet I love.
For their boy, I hope that, quote:
God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
Item: Second item of baby-name news: African American tech billionaire Elon Musk and his significant other Claire Boucher, a pop singer who goes by the stage name Grimes, acquired their new family member on Monday.
I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce the baby’s Christian name. I'll just spell it out for you, with the meanings given by the mother on her Facebook page.
X, the uppercase letter "X" followed by a space. This signifies the unknown quantity.A-E ligature, which is to say uppercase "A" and uppercase "E" squinched together as a single symbol, as you see in old spellings of words like "Encyclopædia," and followed by another space. That’s Mom’s way of spelling ai, the Chinese word for "love" (?). Also something to do with artificial intelligence, one of Elon Musk’s interests.
A-12, that’s uppercase "A" hyphen 12. That’s the name of a warplane, the Lockheed A-12; "great in battle, but non-violent," Mom tells us. That is some kind of aeronautical in-joke that I can’t be bothered to research.
Hey, guys: Didn’t you even consider "Wilfred"?
07 — Signoff. That’s it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening; and please take a moment this weekend to pause and think of those who endured, suffered, and died in the war that ended in Europe 75 years ago.
Tuesday this week we lost Millie Small, a pop singer from Jamaica who was a one-hit wonder back in 1964 with the song "My Boy Lollipop." The song belongs to some category of black-Caribbean pop music: reggae, ska, jah, one of those things … Don’t ask me. I’m pretty sure it’s not calypso, anyway.
Millie never had another big hit, but that doesn’t seem to have bothered her. Nothing much seems to have bothered her, in fact.
Reading the obituaries of Millie, dimly remembering news stories about her from that time, and watching a TV interview she did in 1987, what came to my mind was Jared Taylor’s classic 2015 column titled "What I Like About Blacks." Sample quote, speaking of the down-and-out blacks Jared met in the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s worst ghetto, quote:
I admired the way they got every possible drop of amusement out of their lives.
End quote.
I know what Jared meant. Now it is true that, as I wrote in my infamous "The Talk" column in 2012, quote:
A small cohort of blacks — in my experience, around five percent — is ferociously hostile to whites.
End quote.
And yes, under particular circumstances that small cohort can whip up an anti-white mob among blacks at large.
Still, most blacks, most of the time, are good-natured and easy-going. I’m not at all surprised to see that blacks have low rates of suicide — around forty percent of the rate for non-Hispanic whites.
All that is double true for Caribbean blacks. In the USA there is a huge white majority to remind blacks of their collective failure. Millie Small’s Jamaica, on the other hand, is less than one percent white. Trinidad likewise. Grenada likewise again. Barbados is a bit whiter, around five percent.
On the whole, in their daily lives, black Caribbeans have no-one to compare themselves with but other blacks. They don’t resent whites because there are hardly any to resent.
I lived for a few months in a black-Caribbean household in London, right back then in my college days in the mid-sixties when Millie was topping the charts; and in summer vacations I did factory and construction work alongside Caribbean blacks. They were cheerful and friendly people, fun to live and work amongst.
And yes, there’s an immigration angle to Millie’s story. After Enoch Powell made his famous speech against mass nonwhite immigration in 1968, Millie recorded a song titled "Enoch Power." Wikipedia describes the song as "politically-inspired and defiant." Really? Reading the lyrics, I can’t see anything ill-natured in them. They're actually quite cheerful and optimistic. Sample, quote:
One day there'll come a time
When all men will be brothers
They'll talk as well as dance
And live and love with each other.
That was Millie Small. She made one brief contribution to the public stock of harmless pleasure, then skipped along in good spirits for 56 years, in spite of being destitute at one point, until dying this week of a stroke at the much too young age of 72. Rest in peace, Millie.
[Music clip: Millie, "My Boy Lollipop."]
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