»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     [Sound of pig oinking.] No, hold on a minute here, I got the wrong barnyard sound. [Sound of turkey gobbling.] That's it. It's supposed to be a turkey, anyway. I think I need some new sound clips.

Well, here we are at Thanksgiving once again, ladies and gents. Prior to the barnyard sounds you heard one of Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, and this is your genial host John Derbyshire, ready to span the world once again on Radio Derb.

It's a bigger than usual Radio Derb this week, to see you through the long holiday weekend. Not too big, I hope; not too big to be allowed into New Zealand, anyway. I'll explain that in a moment.

Meanwhile, if you're ready, grab a drumstick and a slice of pumpkin pie and settle down with Radio Derb.

[Permalink]

A source inside the Romney camp has told me that there are rumors going around in the Giuliani campaign that staffers at the Thompson headquarters are whispering that John McCain's people are murmuring that one of Mike Huckabee's key aides was overheard repeating certain startling speculations about what Tom Tancredo's people are saying about Ron Paul.

Now, naturally I'm not in a position to confirm or deny what my source told me about the rumors of the whispers of the murmurs concerning the hearsay about the speculations on the insinuations. All I can tell you is that when I called Duncan Hunter's people, they said, "No comment."

Which I think speaks volumes.

[Permalink]

No; the meaning is that we descendants of Alfred the Great can't wait to get away from those misty islands to someplace with a decent climate, modern plumbing, and good dental hygiene. Then we can sit around moping nostalgically about the dear old homeland.

[Clip of Peter Dawson singing "The Miner's Dream of Home."]

Thank you. These fine traditions continue today, now much reinforced by strenuous efforts on the part of recent British governments to make their country uninhabitable.

There have been several prongs to their strategy. Knowing that English people dislike foreigners, the British government has imported several million of the devils, with strong preference given to foreigners who reciprocate the dislike.

Lest anyone should complain, "hate speech" laws have been enacted, so that if you find that, for example, your child is the only one in her class at school whose native language is English, and should you have the temerity to complain about it, you will soon find yourself breaking rocks on the Yorkshire moors while wearing striped pajamas.

And then, to pay for all the education and healthcare of all those Urdu-speaking kids — plus social security for their unemployable grandparents, along with jail space for the Jamaican drug-runners and the Romanian Gypsy cutpurses — should you be so foolish as to engage in full-time employment in order to pay for the aforementioned, you will be taxed until your eyeballs pop out and hang limply down your pale, pimply, sun-starved English cheeks.

So you leave, as I did; and as, according to Britain's Office of National Statistics, 207,000 other Brits did last year — the first year ever to record over 200,000 emigrants. Most of the Britons went to Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, or the United States.

Well, you know the old Bertolt Brecht quip about how the government, being dissatisfied with the people, has decided to elect a new people. In Britain it's coming true.

Thank goodness no such thing could ever happen in the U.S.A.!

[Permalink]

New Zealand, it says here — I'm reading from the November 20th Daily Telegraph — New Zealand is critically short of skilled workers and many large firms are intensively recruiting in Britain.

So far so good. The kind of immigrant they're looking for would be somebody like Mr Richie Trezise, a highly-qualified specialist in undersea cable work. Being a long way from anywhere, New Zealand has lots of undersea cables to tend, and expertise in this area is in short supply. So off goes Mr Trezise, waving Shakespeare's island goodbye to settle Down Under among the Kiwis.

Next thing, he naturally wants his wife to join him. Here, however, things went, as the British say, somewhat pear-shaped.

To qualify as an immigrant into New Zealand, you see, your body mass index, your BMI — that's your your weight divided by the square of your height, in kilograms and meters, please — your BMI has to fall within a certain range. If you're too thin or too fat, New Zealand won't let you in. The logic there is that too fat or too thin people are likely to be burdens on the health services.

Mrs Trezise is fat. She's not chubby; she's not well-upholstered; she's not cuddly, or zaftig; she's fat — too fat to settle in New Zealand, say the authorities.

None of the newspapers will tell us what Mrs Trezise's weight actually is, nor even her BMI for that matter; but it's obvious from the pictures that treadmills, stairmasters, and exercise bikes are not key appurtenances of Mrs Trezise's lifestyle.

Even Mr Trezise himself had trouble passing the immigration test initially, having a BMI of 42; which means, if you assume that he's the average British male height of 5'10", it means he was nudging 300 pounds.

Mr Trezise shaped up, however, and he has now been admitted as an immigrant to New Zealand; but poor Mrs Trezise is still stuck firmly in New Zealand's front door.

It's a sad story, but you know what? As unfair as New Zealand's immigration policies may be to fat people, at least they have immigration policies.

[Permalink]

Our problem is not not having an immigration policy. Our problem is that our immigration policy was written by the government of Mexico with the aim of shucking off their unemployment issues, their welfare costs, and their crime, race, education, and public-health problems onto us.

An illustration of this showed up last week and I shall share it with you.

Down on the Mexican border the U.S. Border Patrol has conducted a nine-week project named Fence Lab. Fence Lab — no, not dense flab; that was the previous story. Pay attention there in the back row! And spit out that gum … thank you.

Okay, Fence Lab. The objective here is to settle on a design for the border fence that our government is going to build any time now, possibly next year, or maybe the year after, but they are absolutely determined to build it — yes, siree. Congress told them they must, so of course they will … just as soon as they get the design figured out … which, you know, could take some time.

That's what this nine-week project, this Fence Lab, was all about: to settle on a design, or at least, you know, to get some preliminary ideas so that plans for a design could be begun to be discussed, when the appropriate working committees can be assembled and funds appropriated for their salaries and expenses, and clearance for their work got from the security agencies, the EEOC, the EPA, the Justice Department, the World Council of Churches and so on.

Yes, sir: This fence building is proceeding with all dispatch. No dragging of feet here. Absolutely not!

Well, back to Fence Lab. What are the design constraints? Quote from the U.S. government specs, quote:

The fence must be formidable but not lethal, visually imposing but not ugly, durable but environmentally friendly, and economically built but not flimsy.

End quote.

It has to be a nice fence, you see, because we are a nice country. Heaven forbid anyone should think we are not nice! If anyone were to think that — why we'd just shrivel up and die, whimpering quietly as we went.

[Permalink]

An analysis just released by the Census Bureau shows the frequency of various surnames in the United States, and compares the frequencies in 1990 with those of 10 years later. Guess what? The top ten surnames in the year 2000 included two Hispanic names, Garcia and Rodriguez, for the first time ever. It is in fact the first time ever that any non-Anglo names have shown up in the top ten.

What do people think about that? Well, here's Mr Luis Padilla, a 48-year-old banker from Colombia now living in Miami, quoted in the New York Times story I'm reading, quote:

It shows we're getting stronger. If there's that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it's a great thing.

End quote.

OK; but who is "we" in that sentence, Mr Padilla? We bankers? We people from Miami? We Padillas? We 48-year-olds? The Times story gives no clue and I'm darned if I can figure it out.

Another person quoted in the Times story was Rinaldo Valdez, a board member of the Miami-based Spanish-American League Against Discrimination — which, as an acronym, I couldn't help noticing, works out as SALAD, which is very nearly the Spanish word for "salty." Make of that what you will. Anyway, here's what Mr Valdez had to say, quote:

This gives the Hispanic community a standing within the social structure of the country.

End quote.

Well, what can one say? Speaking as a proud member of the cranky, uptight old Anglo white guy community, I welcome our new overlords, whatever their body mass index may be.

[Permalink]

Well, now Al's got another one. The doom-monger-in-chief got an honorary award at the International Emmys this week, quote, "in recognition of his work in broadcasting."

Just to give you a clue what kind of zone we're in here: Another one of the award winners was British TV channel More4's program Death of a President, which opens with the fictional assassination of George W. Bush. I bet it's one of Al's favorites — when he's not bloviating about the climate, that is.

Quote from Al on receiving the award, quote:

The climate crisis is by far the most serious challenge human civilization has ever faced, but this great powerful medium of television can be part of that solution because networks and channels all around the world represented here can help to get the word out while there is still time.

End quote.

Salvation by television, you see? Oh yes, that'll work. All you have to do is get a couple of billion people to switch channels from Desperate Housewives, the NASCAR special, Spongebob Squarepants, Monday night football, and whatever the favorite show is in the Muslim world — something like Killing Jews and Christians for Fun and Profit, something like that, I would imagine — to get them to switch from those to one of Al Gore's award-winning bore-a-thons.

After the award ceremony, the international stars of politically correct TV flew home in their private jets to their 100,000-square-foot air-conditioned chateaus to watch Al Gore's latest documentary about CO₂ reduction.

[Permalink]

Back in January of this year, a British TV station aired a program named Undercover Mosque. They sent a reporter into various mosques in the West Midlands city of Birmingham where my aunt Muriel lives — hello, auntie Mu! — to secretly record what the Muslim preachers were telling their flocks.

What were they telling them? Well, here are some samples.

Sample:

By the age of ten it becomes an obligation on us to force young girls to wear hijab. And if she doesn't wear hijab, we hit her.

That's the first sample. The hijab is that headscarf thing that Muslim women are supposed to wear, so that good Muslim males won't be driven into an uncontrollable frenzy of lust by the sight of a girl's hair.

Here's another sample:

Take that homosexual and throw him off the mountain.

Now, since the English West Midlands are as flat as a pancake,it's a bit hard to see how the faithful are going to carry out this injunction; but perhaps it's just symbolic, I don't know.

Another sample:

Whoever changes his religion from Al Islam to anything else, kill him in the Islamic state.

And, uh, I'm sure likewise with anyone who changes his TV channel from Al Gore.

Yet another sample:

There will be a House of Commons, but they will decide every issue in accordance with the Book of Allah and the example of the Prophet.

Well, they're pretty much doing that already, I think, aren't they?

One final sample of British mosque instruction:

The time is fast approaching when the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in a position of being uppermost in strength.

Wow. Sounds like that guy in Miami.

Well, as I said, all this was revealed to British TV viewers on this program called Undercover Mosque. Naturally, the authorities quickly swung into action.

The West Midlands police force, in response to many complaints, held a seven-month inquiry. At the end of that inquiry the Bobbies referred the offending parties to a regulatory authority named Ofcom.

What does Ofcom regulate? Why, they regulate TV producers. Who, in the minds of the West Midlands police, were the offending parties? The TV producers who made the program. What offence did the police believe that the program makers were guilty of? Quote: "undermining community cohesion."

And whose numerous complaints were the police responding to? Well, the complaints of local Muslims, of course. What on earth did you think? That local English people would complain? No Sir! The local English are too busy puffing their way through leg lifts and ab crunches — trying to lose weight so they can emigrate to New Zealand.

[Permalink]

Jihad Jane, you recall, is the Lebanese lady — her real name is Nada Nadim Prouty — who overstayed her visa back in 1989, contracted a sham marriage to get U.S. citizenship, and then went to work for the FBI and CIA, whose computers she hacked into on behalf of Hezbollah, with whose leaders she is friendly.

Well, now our terrific super-efficient security and immigration services are doing background checks on Ms Prouty. This is a tad late, but heck, these are busy people, you know. They have that fence to design, and, you know, Border Patrol agents to prosecute, and all sorts of stuff.

Well, their checks have turned up some interesting stuff. Ms Prouty belongs to the Lebanese Al Awa clan, known over there as a pillar of the Syrian National Socialist Party.

That's Syrian as in "pawn of Syria" and National Socialist as in, well, "National Socialist."

Furthermore, Ms Prouty, née Al Awa, has a cousin, Nidal Al Awa, who is a major lifelong terrorist trained in North Korea and the old U.S.S.R. Not only are all these things so, but everybody in Lebanon knows they are so. As they say in Ireland, even the dogs in the street know.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S.A., Ms Prouty's brother-in-law Talal Chahine is a crook who operates an immigration fraud ring over in Michigan, and also a money-laundering operation on behalf of Hezbollah. This has been known for years. The feds have actually been investigating the guy since 2003. Probably the dogs in the streets of Michigan know it.

Oh, did I mention that Ms Prouty's sister is an employee of the State Department? Very likely even the dogs in Foggy Bottom know about her.

And now we all know these things, too, thanks to the diligent inquiries of the FBI, the CIA, and the Homeland Security Department.

What a pity those inquiries come eighteen years too late!

[Permalink]

Tyler wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post last Sunday, spelling out just what a disaster for our country the Iraq war has been. Like me, Cowen started off supporting the Iraq invasion. Like me, he is now sadder and wiser, and dismayed at the negative consequences of this war.

There are, for one thing, the sheer financial costs: at least a trillion dollars, possibly 1.3 trillion. That would be somewhere well north of four thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child of us — close to twenty thousand dollars for my little family of four.

Then there are the human costs: nearly four thousand of our troops killed and twenty-eight thousand wounded, along with a thousand civilian contractors killed and some unknown number of Iraqis.

That's pretty straightforward. Then Cowen talks about opportunity costs, hidden costs.

Opportunity cost is a term of art in economics. If you decide to do A instead of B or C or D, the opportunity cost of doing A is whichever of B, C, or D would have yielded the most value. A was worth doing. If it yields more value than the opportunity cost.

What have been the opportunity costs of the Iraq war? Cowen spells them out. We still haven't secured our ports against nuclear terrorism. A trillion dollars would have funded the Homeland Security Department twenty-eight times over. We've done next to nothing to prevent terrorists and their helpers from sneaking into our country, as the Jihad Jane episode shows.

A failed war makes it harder — and you can read "more expensive" for that — to recruit and train quality troops and National Guard personnel. It makes it harder to get public support for any use of the military. It emboldens our enemies and reinforces their belief that their best hope for security is in getting nuclear weapons ASAP, thus speeding nuclear proliferation.

Quote from Cowen:

The projection of American power and influence in the future requires that an impatient public feel good about American muscle-flexing in the past. Since turning tail hurts our credibility so badly and leaves such a mess behind, we should be extremely cautious about military intervention in the first place. The case for hawkish behavior often assumes that the public has more political will than it actually has, so we need to save up that resolve for cases when it really counts.

End quote.

It didn't really count in Iraq. We know that now. Cue Mr Kipling, the greatest of all patriotic poets:

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

I really hope it will, for our country's sake.

[Permalink]

Item:  Happy anniversary to Betty and Phil Windsor over there in Buckingham Palace, married sixty years ago this week.

Phil's looking a bit the worse for wear, but Betty's going strong. Why not? Her mom lived to be 101, though it's true that she had an assist from the life-prolonging benefits of gin, while Betty is a teetotaler.

Still, Charles needn't be in any hurry trying on the crown for size. By the time he gets to be king, the place will be an Islamic republic, anyway, with a bunch of mullahs in charge.

[Permalink]

Item:  Here in New York's Suffolk County the local DMV is demanding that a guy return his vanity license plates. The plates bear the letters G-E-T-O-S-A-M-A. That spells "get Osama."

Bad! says the DMV, which has a rule that plates must not be quote, "obscene, lewd, or lascivious; derogatory to a particular ethnic or other group; or patently offensive." The DMV has not told us which of those categories GETOSAMA falls into.

No sign yet that they're coming after me for my GETSPITZER license plates.

[Permalink]

Item:  The President has carried out the pardoning of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey.

I'm sure he'd like to pardon Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, too, especially now that the guy whose testimony put them behind bars has been arrested for drug smuggling after being tricked back into the U.S.A.

However much our President might like to pardon Ramos and Compean, though, his boss in Mexico City isn't going to let him.

[Permalink]

Item:  You ever notice how some stories just disappear without trace?

Remember the Columbia University noose incident? Six weeks ago Madonna Constantine, a black professor at the Teacher's School, found a noose on her office door. The police investigated. They took all the campus surveillance tapes, though Columbia put up a fight about releasing those tapes, and the police had to threaten a subpoena. The police were also said to be running DNA tests on the noose itself.

This story was all over our newspapers and TVs; but yes, that was six weeks ago. Since then, nothing — not a peep. And no visible interest at all among our media people in finding out what, if anything, the police have turned up from all these weeks of investigating and testing.

Funny, isn't it?

I'm sure the culprit will soon be identified though. Any day now, I'm sure.

[Permalink]

Item:  News from the academy. Carole Simpson, a former ABC news anchor, now a Professor of Journalism at Emerson College in Boston, Mass., publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton for President at a rally in New Hampshire.

Gushed this professor of the journalistic arts: "I want to tell you tonight because I happen to be here with my students, that I endorse you for President of the United States. I wanted you to know that I think you are the woman and I think this is the time."

Well, it's nice to know that Professor Simpson's students were with her to get a direct lesson in journalistic objectivity.

Meanwhile, back at Columbia, if you can make your way through the throngs of police and detectives still trying to fathom that noose incident of six weeks ago, you will find Joseph Massad being considered for tenure as a Professor of Modern Arab Politics.

Massad teaches his students inter alia that Israel poisoned Yasser Arafat, that Palestinians who criticize Hamas are tools of Israel and that Zionism gets its name from a Hebrew slang word for "penis." The only book on Israel that Mr Massad has ever been known to assign his students was written by a French Marxist and has the title Israel, a Colonial Settler State.

Tenure? I would say this guy's a shoo-in.

[Permalink]

Item:  The United Nations IPCC — that's the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — has issued its final report.

The report has lots of lurid warnings, but it ranks them by probability, the most lurid being the least probable.

Worst case, which is actually not very probable: a six-degree warming by 2030, and extinction of a third of all plant and animal species.

Will that include turkeys? They don't say.

[Permalink]

It certainly won't put me off mine. I suspect Turkeys will be around for a while yet. We've certainly got a nice plump one to look forward to, so we're thankful for that. I just checked my body mass index. It came out at a pretty exact 25, which is not bad. I aim to raise it a couple of points over the Thanksgiving holiday.

We're thankful for much else, too. We're thankful for our health, for our kids, for our friends, for our pleasant middle-class lifestyle, for having got out of our countries and been taken in by good old Uncle Sam, for single malt scotch, almond cookies, the operas of Bellini, and much more.

I wish you all warm joy at your own festivities, united with your families in love and harmony. Thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting National Review. And a very pleasant holiday to all of you.

[Permalink]