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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. Groveling apologies, Radio Derb listeners. Due to an unforeseeable concatenation of contingencies, we failed to broadcast last week. As well as being a dereliction of duty, this was a dangerously antisocial lapse, as thoughtful conservatives all over the world were left helpless, not knowing what to think about the week's events. They could only sit staring glassy-eyed into space, hoping against hope that nobody would ask them the significance of the recent unrest in Bolivia or the state of health of Thailand's King Bhumiborn — or, if someone did ask them, falling into uncontrollable weeping. Our civilization ever teeters on the edge of a precipice, and only the constant vigilance of positive forces like Radio Derb prevent it from toppling into the abyss. We shall strive to be more diligent in fulfilling our responsibilites to NRO, to our listeners, to the United States, and to Western Civilization. Now then, where were we? |
| 02 — Who gets Hillary's senate seat? Well, we were watching our
President-elect put together his administration.
Mrs Clinton, I see, is to be our next Secretary of State, attempts to revivify Cyrus Vance having failed and Warren Christopher having refused to give up his place in line for the shuffleboard court. That's good news for us New Yorkers, as we may finally be shot of the Pants Suit Princess, who never seemed to like us much anyway, but I guess bad news for foreigners everywhere, as they'll have to put up with her flying in to harangue them on gender equality, vast right-wing conspiracies, and the correct way to dispose of inconvenient billing records. But hey, who cares about foreigners anyway? What we New Yorkers want to know is, who will our governor appoint to replace the lady as our junior senator? Since we now live in a nation whose political life is as dominated by powerful baronial families as was Plantagenet England, it's natural to expect that Mrs. Clinton's replacement will be from the Northeastern aristocracy. The Bushes are now definitely settled in their southern estates, the Jackson and Dailey dynasties can't be separated from their patronage networks in Illinois, and the Romneys are in temporary eclipse following Mitt's failed presidential run. That basically leaves us with just Kennedys and Cuomos. That's it for local political barons, isn't it? What's that you say? Clintons? Come on, our Governor is not going to name Bill Clinton to his wife's Senate seat. In fact he's already said he won't. So who are you talking about? [Hillary cackle.] Oh no! Not … Chelsea? No-o-o-o-o … [Scream.] |
| 03 — Islamists raid Bombay. The atrocity of the week was of course the
terrorist attack on Bombay, in India. And don't give me this "Mumbai" flapdoodle. I'll start saying "Mumbai" when TV news anchors
start saying "Moskva," "München," "Roma" and "Firenze," "Paree," "Xianggang,"
"al Kahira," "Baile Átha Cliath," and "Kroongthep."
Well, there we are in Bombay, where at least ten young Islamic fanatics murdered nearly 200 people last weekend. It was a typical raid, very much like 9/11 — the kind of raid that pastoralist herding people have been conducting on settled farming people for the past ten thousand years or so. You're never going to reduce the level of this kind of thing to zero, but there's a lot of control you can exert. One, you can have your covert-ops people keep chasing these little terrorist groups round and round the bushes so they can't get too big or too threatening. Two, they are fish who live in water — the water being populations of ordinary Muslims, almost all of whom are peace-loving and individually harmless people. If you let such populations develop in your own country, you are making life much easier for the terrorists. No Western country should permit large-scale settlement of Muslims. (This option isn't open to India, which is stuck with 150 million Muslim citizens. It's open to us, though.) Three, liberty! If you have a chronic terrorist problem in your country, citizens will demand surveillance, special measure, phone taps, and any number of other liberty-destroying measures. For maximum liberty within your country, keep terrorist fish and their water supply out of your country. Secure the borders, and once again, don't permit large-scale Muslim settlement. Four: you really, really don't want these guys to get a nuke. If you're observing my number one, there'll never be enough of them in one place to get manufacturing a bomb, so the peril comes from some sympathetic government handing one off to them. This is the big problem. Fix on this one. Don't let it happen! Hostile nation handing off nuke to crazy terrorists: No, no, no. OK, now how will the Obama administration shape up on my four points? One, relentless effort by covert ops? With Eric Holder in charge, our covert ops guys will spend most of their time huddled with their attorneys. Two, stop Muslim settlement. Yeah, right, President Barack Hussein OpenBorders Obama will be sure to do that. Three, liberty: Well, the right-left struggle is always fundamentally one of liberty versus equality. We just elected a leftist government, so liberty can go hang for four years while equality takes over. Four, hostile governments handing off nukes to terrorists? But in the Obamarrhoid world view there are no hostile governments, only ones we haven't talked to nicely enough. So I guess the Obama administration isn't on board with my program at all. Where did I put that sales brochure for fallout shelters? |
| 04 — Naming schools after Obama. Schools all over are changing their names
to
"Barack Obama School" — high school, middle school, elementary school, whatever. Ah, but which schools are
doing this?
Well, one in my neck of the woods just did it: Ludlum Elementary School here on Long Island, henceforth Barack Obama Elementary, by a unanimous vote of the five-member school board. Off to GreatSchools.net to look up the stats. The student body at Ludlum/Obama is 62 percent Hispanic, 36 percent African American, 2 percent other. Now, the school board undoubtedly has a right to name the school in any way they please. Is it unreasonable of me, though, to see this as yet another sad example of the re-segregation of our society, another wedge driven into the widening crack that separates citizens below the elite levels, with whites and Asians on one side of the crack, blacks and Hispanics on the other — Ice People and Sun People? Those student stats, which are by no means unusual, speak very eloquently to the quite thorough re-segregation of our public schools in recent years. I predict, with no joy at all, that we shall soon have Obama-named-school jokes to go with our Martin Luther King Boulevard jokes. You know those jokes: "What do you do if your car breaks down on Martin Luther King Boulevard? Run!" No non-Hispanic white or Asian Americans live on Martin Luther King Boulevard; no non-Hispanic white or Asian Americans name a child DeShawn or Tashika; no non-Hispanic white or Asian Americans will want to attend a school named after our President-elect. One nation, indivisible? Well, it was a pleasant dream, I guess. |
| 05 — Is virginity an "essential quality"? Here's a little
philosophical conundrum for you. Is a woman's virginity one of her "essential qualities"?
It sounds like the topic of a treatise by some medieval Scholastic, Duns Scotus or one of those dudes, but it was very much in play in a French court recently. See, the French Civil Code allows a spouse to seek an annulment if the other party has misrepresented his or her "essential qualities." One of that nation's Muslim citizens, finding that his bride was not intact, and having perhaps recently read Tess of the d'Urbervilles in an Arabic translation, had been granted an annulment on these grounds. On appeal, however, the annulment was annulled, and the couple now have to seek a formal divorce. An oddity of the case was that neither husband nor wife were parties to the appeal. Prosecutors had gone ahead anyway on feminist grounds, arguing that the original annulment discriminated against women. You know, nobody is checking the guy's virginity. So once again the "progressive" infatuation with cultural minorities comes crashing up against the actual beliefs and customs of those minorities. Celebrate diversity! |
| 06 — Obama's immigration priorities. Meanwhile, as unemployment climbs up
off the charts, opening up America's borders and flooding the country with $5 an hour high-school dropouts who can't speak English is naturally a very
high priority for the new administration.
President-elect Obama has set up an "Immigration Policy Working Group." Who's in it? Well, Let's see. We have a chap named T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a professor of law at Georgetown University. That's creepy to begin with. "Law Professor at Georgetown University" translates as "slightly to the left of Pol Pot," everybody knows that. Professor Aleinikoff, it says here on Wikipedia, has been a Senior Associate at the Migration Policy Institute. There's another red flag. Any time you see the word "migration" you know you're dealing with open-borders people. "Migration" is just people floating effortlessly and unobstructed from one place to another. Who but a snarling hate-filled bigot could possible object to that? Let's wiki this group, though. Migration Policy Institute … Quote: A non-profit think-tank dedicated to the study of the movement of people worldwide … funded by donations from numerous corporations and multinational organizations including the United Nations, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation. Oh boy. The Ford Foundation! I'm running out of red flags. Well, who else we got on this Immigration Policy Working Group? Stanford University's Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. Let's do a little googling on him. Oh, what's this? Under "Associations" he lists "La Raza Lawyers' Association of California." So he's a paid-up member of The Race. Hmm. Now, most Americans, every time we are polled, are opposed to high levels of immigration, and strongly opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants. Does our President-elect have anyone on his Immigration Policy Working Group representing that point of view, the point of view of most ordinary Americans? [Laugh.] Incidentally, speaking of The Race, a full-time employee of the National Council of The Race has been named Obama's Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. That is Cecilia Munoz. The chair-hombre of The Race put out a statement praising Ms. Munoz's service to, quote, "the Latino community." The statement assured us that, quote, "no one will work harder for her country and for the ideals and priorities of the Obama Administration," end quote. Well, that's nice. But … which country is her country? Perhaps someone should make it clear, as it's not at all clear from Ms Munoz's professional activities. |
| 07 — British MP arrested for whistle-blowing. Government efforts to
encourage mass illegal immigration aren't just restricted to the U.S.A. Across the pond in the land of my birth, illegal immigrants are elevated above
ordinary citizens in rights and privileges, and any criticism of them, or of government policies to encourage and coddle them, is regarded as
literally criminal.
Latest person to discover this: Damien Green, the Conservative Party's chief immigration spokesman in the House of Commons. The Conservative Party is currently out of power in the Sceptered Isle, the Labour Party being the party of government. As the party of government, the Labourites of course feel justified in siccing the police on Members of Parliament who commit gross violations of decency. That would be Mr. Green, who has been a strong critic of government policy towards illegals, and has uncovered damaging evidence of government stupidity and venality in this regard. For example, five thousand illegal immigrants somehow got through government checks and won jobs as security guards in public buildings in London. Mr Green has been investigating other similar blunders in British immigration policy. For this, he got his House of Commons office raided and his computer seized by the police. His London apartment was also raided, as was his permanent home down in Kent. Mr Green himself was arrested by a police squad, and had his cell phone and his Blackberry seized. That'll teach the bastard to toe the line on immigration policy! Anyone who objects to mass illegal immigration is a fascist and a bigot who deserves anything he gets. That's the rule in Britain. That'll be the rule here under our new administration. The slogan is rising all over the Western world: Celebrate Diversity — Or Else! |
| 08 — Do do that Wudhu that you do so well. This is a favorite of mine. I
blogged about it on the Corner, but I can't resist recycling it.
The heading here is Wudhu. Wudhu. I dhu, you dhu, he, she, or it dhu; we dhu, you dhu, they dhu. Wudhu. Wudhu is the Islamic cleansing ritual, to prepare the worshipper for prayer. Wudhu involves washing the face, hands, arms and feet three times each, gargling the mouth three times and washing the neck and inside the nose and ears. Some Muslims also wash their private parts. That's Wudhu. I have no problem with it, let me make clear. Nothing wrong with a little hygiene. To make sure they are ready for prayer, Muslims are supposed to perform Wudhu after using the toilet or breaking wind, it says here. So far so good. Now here come the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales. That's Catholic as in Roman Catholic, as in Christian, as in Charles Martel, Richard Lionheart, and Don John of Austria. The Catholic bishops want Muslim prayer rooms to be be opened in every Roman Catholic school in England and Wales. They also want Wudhu facilities in their schools, so that Muslim students can observe the proprieties. Naturally British Muslims are thrilled about this. They are already putting forward specs for the new facilities. Quote from a chuckling Muslim: Catholic schools will need to install bidets, foot spas and hoses to facilitate the cleansing rituals. End quote. Thin end of the wedge, if you ask me. Wait till they start asking for stoning rooms. |
| 09 — Miscellany. Just a few short items to see us out.
Item: Never mind renaming schools: Perry County, in central Alabama, has gone one better than that. The county supervisor has declared that the second Monday in November will henceforth be Barack Obama Day. So pretty soon you will be able to walk down Barack Obama Boulevard, past Barack Obama School, on Barack Obama Day, perhaps looking to buy a set of Barack Obama commemorative chinaware — they have already gone on sale. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but shouldn't we wait till the guy's actually, like, you know, done something? Item: A cop in Boston, Massachusetts issued a traffic ticket to a woman in labor, who was being driven to the hospital by her husband. Not only did the cop issue a ticket, he made the woman wait while he finished filling out a ticket for another motorist. We're not told what shape the other motorist was in. Dying of a heart attack, possibly. Item: Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the Chinese central bank, lectured Hank Paulson, our Treasury Secretary, in Peking the other day. Quote: Over-consumption and a high reliance on credit is the cause of the U.S. financial crisis. As the largest and most important economy in the world, the U.S. should take the initiative to adjust its policies, raise its savings ratio appropriately and reduce its trade and fiscal deficits. End quote. Interesting. "Over-consumption," huh? But what are the things we've been over-consuming? Don't they all come with Made in China labels? Perhaps Mr. Zhou should be careful what he wishes for. Item: Closer to home, in Valley Stream here on Long Island, a store employee was trampled to death the day after Thanksgiving by a mob seeking bargains. This was one of those strange events that were discussed one way in the public prints and broadcasts, but an utterly different way in private conversations. The theme of public commentators was: "What's happened to us?" Private citizens, talking among ourselves, responded in the manner of Tonto's reply to the Lone Ranger in that joke everybody knows: "Whaddya mean, 'us,' Kimo-sabe?" Item: Meanwhile, up there in the Friendly Giant to our North, some kind of constitutional crisis is going on. [Snoring sounds.] |
| 10 — Signoff. My producer over in the control booth is signaling that we're
almost out of time, so I'm afraid I have to wrap it up here, listeners. I'm not going to let you go without a brief cultural note, though.
Tuesday is the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Milton. In honour of the great poet, here is one of his best sonnets. It needs a few words of explanation. In 1656, when he was 47, a widower, and already blind, Milton married his second wife, Katherine Woodcock. A baby daughter was born in late 1657, but a few months later both mother and daughter died. This poem is in memory of Katherine. Alcestis in line 2 was a lady in Greek mythology, rescued from the underworld and returned to her husband, a chap named Admetus, by Heracles, son of Zeus, a/k/a Jove. The old Law in line 6 is the one in Leviticus, Chapter 12, about a woman's purification after childbirth. Here you go. Methought I saw my late espouséd Saint There now. Pure Milton. Like every great poem, that one has been parodied a lot. Dylan Thomas, whose wife was just as big a lush as he was, wrote one that started: "Methought I saw my late espouséd Saint / Passed out on the bathroom floor …" You can't subtract from genius, though, and John Milton stands tall after 400 years, not just as a poet but also as a fighter for liberty. Tuesday, December 9: take time off to read a little Milton. You might want to listen to a little Franz Josef Haydn as you do so … |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]