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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was one of Haydn's Derbyshire Marches and this is your olympically genial host John Derbyshire bringing you the gold, silver, bronze, and zinc from the week's news. |
02 — Illegal alien may not practice law, even in California. First up this week, a follow-up on one of last week's stories. This was the case of Sergio Garcia, the illegal alien who wanted to practice law in California. Mr Garcia, 35 years old, is a Mexican who came to this country illegally at age 17. He was allowed to sit the state bar exam, for reasons I do not understand. He passed, and applied for a law license. As we reported last week, the U.S. Department of Justice was asked to give a ruling on the case. Well, they've given one. Incredibly, and in shameless open defiance of Radio Derb's prediction last week, the Justice Department has ruled that Mr. Garcia may not practice law in California. Federal law denies, quote, "public benefits" to illegal aliens, says Justice. A California lawyer's license is a public benefit, because licensing is controlled by the state Supreme Court, which is publicly funded. Furthermore, Justice pointed out, federal law prohibits employers from knowingly hiring illegal aliens. The California state Bar argued that Garcia could still represent clients as an independent contractor, but Justice said that would also violate federal rules. It would seem to me the road is now open and clear for Mr Garcia's deportation. He doesn't even come within the scope of the administration's much advertised DREAM Act. You'll recall that if you want to DREAM, you must have snuck in to the U.S.A. before age 16 and be currently aged 30 or under. Mr Garcia fails on both counts. What's holding us up here? No gas for the deportation bus? Gimme an address, I'll send a check to cover it. |
03 — Importing poverty. That was this week's good news on the immigration front, or at least it will be as soon as Mr. Garcia is back in the land of his birth and most of his education. Now here's the bad news. The Center for Immigration Studies has trawled through some government databases to assemble data on the current condition of our immigrant population. If you want to check their results, the actual databases are the 2010 American Community Survey, a sort of mini-census conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau every year, and the March 2011 Current Population Survey, that's a monthly household survey the Census Bureau does, concentrating on employment and earnings data. OK, what did they find? Main point: very widespread poverty and welfare usage among immigrants. These, I should note, are both legal and illegal immigrants. The working definition of "immigrant" here is: a person living in the United States who was not a U.S. citizen at birth. So that would include, for example, me. Around 13 percent of the U.S. population, 40 million people, is immigrant on this definition, breaking about 5½ percent naturalized citizens, 7½ percent noncitizens. Of all immigrants, about 28 percent are estimated to be illegal. One surprising data item for me was how few of us immigrants are recent arrivals. Nearly two-thirds of us have been in the United States for more than ten years. The average length of residence in the U.S.A. is nineteen years. Surprising or not, that helps put the information about poverty and welfare usage in focus. Those are not phenomena you can put down to just the disorientation of recent arrival. In fact, the CIS report tells us, adult immigrants who have lived in the United States for twenty years or more have a poverty rate 50 percent higher than that of adult natives; and twice as many of them lack health insurance as adult natives. If you switch to the household perspective and look at households headed by an immigrant who has lived in the United States for twenty years or more, almost twice as many of those households as native households use one or more welfare programs, primarily food assistance and Medicaid. Taken overall 36 percent of immigrant households use welfare, against 23 percent of native households. Dwell on that for a moment: 36 percent of immigrant households using welfare, 23 percent of native households using welfare. Time was, you could only settle in the U.S.A. if you could show you wouldn't be a burden on the public fisc — a pretty fair rule, I think most people would agree. Just not a rule we're willing to enforce nowadays, for fear someone's feelings might be hurt. All this, in spite of the fact that labor force participation among immigrants is pretty much the same as for natives. In fact, immigrant males actually have higher rates of work than native-born males. The trouble is, far too many immigrants have low levels of education, and the modern economy only pays good wages to educated workers. Twenty-eight percent of immigrants haven't completed high school; for natives it's seven percent. It's all pretty depressing. If you argue with immigration boosters a lot, as I do, you soon come to realize that their view of the issue is bathed in nostalgia. The famine ships! Ellis Island! Sweatshops on the Lower East Side! Yeah, well, that was then, and this is now. There was almost no welfare back then. Of the Great Wave of immigrants that came in before the 1920s, it's estimated that one in three eventually went back, unable to make it in the U.S.A. Nowadays nobody goes back. They just sink into welfare dependency. And back in the day, education wasn't much of an issue. A man with a strong back, or a woman with nimble fingers, could easily make a living wage. Nowadays earth movers dig the holes, robots paint the cars, and the needlework's all done in Bangladesh. We're importing poverty. I guess our politicians didn't feel we had enough. |
04 — Adam and Rachel: An American morality play. Here's another follow-up, this one on the Chick-fil-A story, or rather a sidebar story to the main Chick-fil-A story. The dramatis personae in this story number just two: Adam Smith, age not known, of Tucson, Arizona, and Rachel Elizabeth, age 26, of that same noble city. Rachel was working the drive-thru window at a Chick-fil-A outlet last Wednesday when Adam drove through. Adam's a liberal who favors homosexual marriage. He thought it very shocking that principals of Chick-fil-A supported groups arguing for the traditional biological family, and even gave money to those groups. Thus disposed, Adam vented his wrath on Rachel, telling her that her employer is, quote, "a hateful company" and avowing that, quote, "I don't know how you sleep at night. This is a horrible corporation with horrible values." He then drove off with the complimentary glass of iced water Rachel had served him with. Adam had recorded the whole exchange, and when he got home he proudly served it up to the nation on YouTube. The reaction was probably not what Adam had expected. Other than in the scented precincts of organized gayness, he was denounced from coast to coast as an obnoxious jerk. Worse yet, he was fired from his job as chief accountant at a medical-supplies firm. Rachel, on the other hand, came across as a sweet-natured and patient lady doing her best to maintain good manners and a proper composure in her minimum-wage job. A great many of us, including me, would have dumped that iced water over Adam's self-righteous head. In a moment of self-awareness following the firing from his job, Adam realized his blunder. He taped an excruciating 8-minute apology and posted it on YouTube. The net effect of the apology, so far as I can judge, was to move public perception of Adam away from "obnoxious jerk" and towards "creepy loser." Rachel has maintained her poise, and even said she'd be willing to meet Adam in a beer summit, although it would of course be a chicken sandwich summit, to exchange points of view. She told Fox News, quote, "I'm Christian and God tells us to love thy neighbor," end quote. All in all, it was a very touching, and very American, little morality play. The bad guy was punished, and saw the error of his ways, however clumsily he expressed the fact. The other party offered forgiveness and Christian charity. Naturally I have issues here. For one thing, I simply do not understand how homosexual marriage, a notion that was considered beyond bizarre by 99 out of 100 Americans just twenty years ago, is suddenly an unalienable human right, the denial of which can drive people like Adam Smith to insensate rage. What will be an unalienable human right twenty years from now? One shudders to think. And then, I'm not a big fan of Christian charity, which I think Christians take much too far. As I see it, the business of turning the other cheek is situational. Sometimes it's the right thing to do; more often the other cheek should be left where it is and a bunch of flying knuckles deployed. With those reservations posted, though, even I can't resist the mood of the moment. Adam Smith is probably a human being under all that liberal self-righteousness. I hope he gets another job. Rachel Elizabeth is a sweetie; I wish her everything she wishes for herself, and then some. I hope Chick-fil-A goes from strength to strength. And I hope the homosexualist lobbies wake up to how much the rest of us dislike their screeching claims of entitlement, and retreat into a proper reticence. |
05 — Throwing the match, throwing the election. I'm going to assume that Radio Derb listeners occasionally give their attention to other news outlets. You therefore probably know about the eight Badminton players who were sent home from the Olympics a week and a half ago for throwing their matches. The eight were actually four women's doubles teams: two Chinese girls, two Indonesians, and four South Koreans. The Olympic Badminton tournament is structured so that in the early stages it can be to your advantage to lose a game, placing you better for the next round of play. So these four doubles teams had all deliberately thrown matches. In one case, Indonesians versus South Koreans I think it was, both teams on the court were trying to lose, which made for a really dull match. The Indonesians proved to be better at losing than the Koreans, so the Koreans won and had to face a stronger opponent than they'd wished for in the next round. From a Game Theory point of view it's all perfectly rational, and I think the Olympic bureaucrats should rethink their tournament structure here. There's no doubt that throwing games is against the Olympic sporting spirit, though, and the suits were right to send these gals back East of Suez. Of somewhat more moment in the life of our nation, there's the matter of politicians throwing elections. A lot of us believe that John McCain threw the 2008 election because a misplaced sense of honor, and his formative years growing up in Jim Crow America, would not let McCain say anything negative about his empty-suit opponent. Saying negative things about your opponent — true negative things, for strong preference, of course — is a normal part of political campaigning, and helps you win elections. If you won't do it, you're throwing away a key political asset. John McCain wouldn't do it, and he lost. Will Mitt Romney do what's necessary to win this coming election? Will he make a clear appeal for votes from that great mass of Americans who are fed up with the counter-culture's endless demonizing of everything that's normal, traditional, and familiar? That mass of Americans, for example, who showed up at Chick-fil-A outlets last week to poke a finger in the eye of the homosex agitators and PC speech enforcers? The signs are not good. Romney did not show up at any Chick-fil-A outlets, as a politician who gave a fig about winning the conservative vote would have done. Then last weekend we got an even worse sign. The Romney campaign confirmed that their candidate supports the right of homosexuals to be in the Boy Scouts movement. It's not a new position for Romney. He is on record as saying back in 1994 that, quote: I feel that all people should be allowed to participate in the Boy Scouts, regardless of their sexual orientation. End quote. That, however, was when he was running for a Senate seat in Massachusetts. A politician's gotta do what he's gotta do, and you can't drive a block in Massachusetts without running into a Gay Pride parade. The U.S.A. is not Massachusetts, though. Out here in the rest of the nation, a great many of us are conservatives. We've been hoping that Mitt would have a new revelation, like the one his church had when God told them that polygamy was wrong after all, whatever Joseph Smith had said previously. Nope, Mitt apparently really does believe it's fine for declared homosexuals to go off camping in the woods with 16-, 17-, and 18-year-old boys under their supervision. Either that, or his campaign managers are unscrupulous enough to take money from anywhere, and they've been taking it from big homo and liberal lobbying groups. The first possibility speaks poorly of Mitt's judgment about human affairs; the second speaks poorly to his campaign-management skills — or, if he approves that aspect of fund-raising, to his integrity. Either way, Mitt just persuaded another half million conservatives to stay home on Election Day; or, if the choice is going to be between a shallow liberal and a sincere one, to vote for the guy who really means his liberalism. |
06 — Hate music, white and black. Another week, another meaningless massacre. The perp this time is 40-year-old Wade Michael Page, who shot up a Sikh temple in Milwaukee Sunday, killing six people before himself being shot by cops, then shooting himself dead. As with the shootings in Aurora, Colorado three weeks ago, the randomness of this kind of thing defies commentary. Since the gunman here is dead, we don't have much hope of finding out what he thought he was doing, so far as he had any coherent thoughts at all. Page's background is of the type normally called "troubled." At age 20 he enlisted in the army and served six years. He had discipline and drinking issues and was given an administrative discharge in '98. That's not the happiest kind of discharge, though not the worst, and it came with a ban on re-enlistment. He then worked a few years at low-level jobs while getting involved with a weird neo-Nazi rock music scene. He was founder member of two rock groups in this genre, names End Apathy and Definite Hate. Later he joined another one of the groups, Youngland, whose biggest hit — with "biggest" there being highly relative, of course, since prior to this week only three hundred people had even heard of this stuff — Youngland's biggest hit was an altered version of the John Denver song "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" retitled "Thank God I'm a White Boy," which has lyrics referring to, quote, "money-hungry Jews." The lefty websites have been having a feeding frenzy over all that, as you may imagine. Sometimes the frenzy got so frenzied they bit themselves. Huffington Post, for instance, noted that early in the last decade Youngland regularly played at a neo-Nazi-friendly bar called the Shack in Anaheim, California. Huffington adds that, quote, "The bar is now, ironically, a Latin dance club under different ownership." I'm not sure the irony there really points the way Huff Post intends it to, especially in light of the recent riots in Anaheim … but perhaps that's just me. And as deplorable as this neo-Nazi stuff is, the sputtering about it on left-wing websites sits oddly with their calm acceptance of anti-white hatred among blacks, which is approximately ten thousand times more common and way more profitable. Here for example is the Daily Beast gasping in horror at a hand-drawn cover for an album by Definite Hate, one of the groups Page helped found. Quote: On a hand-drawn cover for Definite Hate's album Violent Victory, a Caucasian man's fist, decorated with racist tattoos, is shown making contact with a black man's face, causing blood to spray from his mouth and dislodging one eye. End quote. Nasty stuff, to be sure, but OK, let's do album cover comparisons, since Daily Beast raised the subject. With, to pick a random example, the 1993 album Home Invasion by the superstar rapper Ice-T. The album cover shows, yes, a home invasion: three angry-looking black males with a kicked-down door in the background. One of the home invaders is clubbing the homeowner, a white man, in the head with a rifle butt, generating a lot of blood. Another black guy is ripping the last of the underwear off the white guy's white wife, obviously preparatory to raping her. I don't have sales figures for Home Invasion, but it sure did better than any neo-Nazi album ever has: It peaked at Number 9 on Billboard magazine's Top R&B and Hip-Hop Albums. Or if it's race-hate lyrics you want, check out rapper Dr Dre's paean to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Sample quote: It's time ta rob and mob End quote. Dr Dre's current net worth is estimated at $250 million — considerably more, would be my guess, than any neo-Nazi musician's. So if you think anything in the neo-Nazi music scene inspired Wade Michael Page's rampage, just go to the website blackracismandracehatred.blogspot.com and scroll through their archive of hundreds of black-on-white killings and rapes in carjackings, workplace murders, and, yes, home invasions this past few years, and quietly wonder to yourself how many of those were inspired by rap music. Or just pick up any newspaper or bring up any news website, any day of the week, any day of the week. Yep, here's Channel 7 news from Greenville, South Carolina, this Tuesday. Headline: Suspect Arrested In Greenville Co. Homicide. Story: 59-year-old Ramona Hatton was found dead inside her home Sunday, cause of death, blunt force trauma. Ms Hatton was the victim of a, yes, home invasion. Police are seeking 30-year-old Ramane Quanteraivs Green on murder charges, described as a black male standing six-feet tall and weighing around 150 pounds. I wonder if he owns a copy of Ice-T's Home Invasion album. I wonder if anyone will think to ask. Any day of the week … As for anti-semitic nastiness, well, for that you don't even have to go to rap music. Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and just about any other black rabble-rouser can supply all you need. So by all means condemn the actions of Wade Michael Page, and the horrible music that inspired him, if it did. If you can do that, though, without uttering a peep about the continuous flood of hatred for whites that comes from America's blacks, via music and every other medium they have access to, up to and including church pulpits if Jeremiah Wright is representative, then you are indulging in that exercise the Bible calls "straining at gnats while swallowing camels." |
07 — Veepstakes. As you can tell from a couple of segments ago, I've pretty much given up on Romney. In addition to his other delinquencies, he seems to be loading up on neocon advisors and consultants, raising the prospect of more pointless trillion-dollar wars and floods of immigrants into our eight-plus-percent unemployment economy. There is still a shred of hope, though. Romney might still pick a Vice Presidential running mate who sends some signal that Romney feels something other than loathing and contempt for American conservatives, and that when your national economy is as far down the toilet as ours currently is, saving the world should not be high on the priority list. The latest name to emerge from the VP specualtions is David Petraeus. I admit I don't have much of a handle on Petraeus. He seems to be a capable and seasoned soldier, which is not nothing in an age of empty suits and community organizers. I'm a bit skeptical of senior military brass in general, however. There have been so many shameful surrenders to the feminists, the homo lobbies, the race quota fanatics, and the Islamizers, I'd feel better about an officer at Petraeus' rank if he'd resigned in protest at some point in the shameful decline. Still, there are arguments on the other side, I know. There's the one that says: "We military men are, and must be, subordinate to the civilian authority. So if the nation's civilians go screaming insane, we have to ride the waves as best we can." Then there's the more personal one that says: "If I quit, they'll just replace me with someone worse. At least I might be able to salvage something from the rubble." So there may be a case for Petraeus. I keep an open mind. At least he's not Marco Rubio, whom the neocons and other open-borders nation-wreckers are promoting on the infantile argument that he will swing the Hispanic vote behind Romney. As if Mexicans and Puerto Ricans regard a snow-white Cuban as a blood brother. Yeah, Mitt: With some Anglo on the ticket, you'll get 27 percent of the Hispanic vote; with Rubio, you'll get 28 percent. Brilliant strategy, guy. Another school of thought says that Romney wants a boring white guy for his running mate. Names on offer are Tim Pawlenty, who holds decently conservative positions but is hopelessly feeble on immigration, and Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who reminds me of some historian's remark about Franklin Pierce, our 14th President, quote from memory, quote: "so moderate that he could be fairly described as inert." I suppose it's too much to hope that Michele Bachmann is on Mitt's short-list, but surely there's room on there for Rand Paul. I don't hold out much hope. If the Romney campaign had been conducted to date with the sole and only aim of ticking off the Paulists, how would it have been any different? |
08 — Facecrime. That awful Olympics opening ceremony promised a feast of political correctness, and we have not been disappointed. It started with lovely Voula Papachristou being dropped from the Greek squad for insufficient sensitivity to blacks. Then a German female rower, Nadja Drygalla, was sent home because her boyfriend belongs to the NPD, a strongly nationalist party. NPD is perfectly legal, by the way; in fact it has elected representatives serving in local assemblies. The elites just don't like it, so that's it for Fraulein Drygalla. Next up, Daniel Thomas, a Welshman, upset that two British divers, Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield, had failed to win any medals, tweeted that the two could, quote, "go bum each other." The word "bum" in British slang means "backside," and this was a reference to a certain sexual orientation to which male divers are thought to be, as it were, prone — whether correctly or not, I could not say. For this tweet, Mr Thomas was arrested by local police. He has since been released on bail. Finally, there is the even stranger case of a 54-year-old man watching the Olympic cycling road race in Southern England who was arrested for not smiling. Mark Worsfold was not merely arrested, he was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and dragged off for a five-hour spell at the local station house, where he had his fingerprints, DNA and mugshot taken before being questioned about why he did not appear to be enjoying the event. And you thought I was kidding last week when I compared Britain to North Korea? When Kim Jong-il died, Koreans were arrested for not weeping in public. When London holds the Olympics, you'd better be smiling if you want to avoid the attentions of the peelers. Paging Mr. Orwell, paging Mr. George Orwell. Yes, here it is: Chapter 5 of Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Winston Smith has noticed Julia staring at him across the cafeteria. Long Orwell quote: His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. Don't be caught out in facecrime, dear listener. If you visit Britain, make sure you keep your features fixed the whole time you are there in an expression of happy appreciation of the multicultural welfare state the wise leaders of that nation have created for their fortunate citizens. |
09 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: Thrill of the week was the landing of the super new rover, Curiosity, on the surface of Mars. I sat up late to watch the live feed from Mission Control in Pasadena. It was worth sitting up for. When the little vehicle was safely on the Martian surface, the whole room went wild, engineers hooting, grinning, cheering, and hugging each other. It was like the old days at Houston Mission Control. I know, this is government money being spent here, and as a rock-ribbed fiscal conservative, I ought to disapprove. I just can't. Too much science fiction when I was a kid. Congratulations to all who took part. Next big one to sit up for: July 2015, when New Horizons spacecraft reaches Pluto, completing the mapping of the Solar System. What an adventure it's been! Yeah, yeah, I know, government money, but — what an adventure! Item: We've been reporting on the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, New York, and the problems they've been having there with "teens," "youths," and — who else have they been having problems with? oh right: "thugs." Well, more news from the pool this week: It was closed most of last weekend after a patron had a bout with diarrhea while in the water. So not only is McCarren Park Pool a favorite with "teens," "youths," and "thugs," diarrhea sufferers are also lining up to get in. Hm. There is a small cadre of people who like to take their vacations in "challenging" places: North Korea, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe. For folk like that, McCarren Park Pool sounds just the ticket. For the rest of us, there's the beach. Item: A strange little event in New York City Wednesday: The Trojan company, which makes certain items of rubberware, held a promotional giveaway event: not of rubberware, but of vibrators. Soon New York was humming with the news, and the location of the giveaway, on Pearl Street down in the business district, was swamped with people wanting their free vibrator — mostly, but by no means exclusively, women. Soon there were hundreds of people there, filling the sidewalks and impeding traffic. This woke the city bureaucrats from their slumbers, and they ordered the Trojan reps to buzz off. The Trojans did so, leaving hundreds of women unsatisfied. Altogether a bit of an anticlimax. Item: Finally, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is organizing special degree programs for illegal aliens, including illegal aliens outside of California. This is the brainchild of Professor Kent Wong, Director of UCLA's Center for Labor Research and Education, who came to the nation's attention a couple of years ago by telling a gathering of illegal aliens, to rapturous applause, that, quote: You will go on to become lawyers, teachers, doctors and members of the US congress to replace those old white men. End quote. Prof. Wong has also told us that classes for these new special degree programs will only cost $65 a unit, which is a lot less than regular students pay. He also says that, quote, "some students will be taught by undocumented master's graduates and Ph.D. candidates." So UCLA will be employing illegals, in plain violation of federal law. Well, at least the illegal alien instructors, if arrested, won't be represented by an illegal alien lawyer … unless the Department of Justice changes its mind about Sergio Garcia … |
10 — Signoff. There you have it, ladies and gents: another week of folly, felony, futility, and synchronized swimming. There was that one bright point at JPL mission control Monday morning, though. In honor of all those brilliant engineers and technicians who made it come true, here's a song for your home town. May human curiosity never flag; and may your Curiosity fulfill its mission and bring us new understandings. Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. |
[Music clip: The Temperance Seven, "Pasadena."]