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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is your idiosyncratically genial host John Derbyshire with yet another broadcast covering all the news you need to know, some of the news you don't need to know but might like to know, and some you'd rather not know but I pass on to you for your own good — suck it down. I begin this week with a small announcement. Radio Derb will be suspending operations for the rest of August. It's nothing to be alarmed about; all is well. However, the Derbyshire estate over in Long Island needs some attention. The gamekeepers and foresters, I am told, have been neglecting their duties, so that remoter regions of my property have become overgrown and infested with deer, foxes, and ocelots. Neighboring landowners have encroached, driving our pheasants into their own woods for shooting and diverting our waterways to their own trout streams. Things are getting out of hand, so I shall be over there for the month, putting them right. Miguel the pool boy has done his best to act as master of the estate in my absence, and Mrs Derbyshire has assured me she keeps him busy maintaining the fluids at appropriate levels, but the poor fellow's English is limited, and an estate the size of ours needs a strong directing hand. So that's where I shall be in August. My technicians and research assistants need some stateside time, too, to visit their families and friends. Our next broadcast will therefore be on Saturday, September 6th. I apologize for the interruption, suspension, break, fissure, breach, gap, hiatus, lacuna, caesura, intermission. Rest assured I shall be here again in September to once again put the world to rights … assuming the world is still here. End of announcement. Ethel? [Clip: Ethel Merman, "Let's go on with the show.".] |
02 — The Wichita Horror, Year 14. This week, as last week, we begin with a capital punishment case. I promise not to make this a regular feature, but this case is so egregious I'm putting it up front. Here's what happened. Five young professionals, three men and two women, all white and in their 20s, were gathered in a house in a middle-class neighborhood of Wichita, Kansas, ten days before Christmas of the year 2000. The young men were named Jason Befort, Bradley Heyka and Aaron Sander. The women were named Heather Muller and H.G.; the reasons for the second lady's anonymity will become clear. Jason Befort and H.G. were sweethearts. At 11 in the evening, two young black men, Reginald Carr, recently released from prison, and his younger brother Jonathan, who also had a criminal record, forced their way into the house. They committed numerous sexual atrocities against the five inhabitants: If you want the details, and have a strong stomach, you can read them at the internet crime library, www.crimelibrary.com, heading "The Wichita Horror." The Carr brothers then drove the five victims, naked and bound, to a snow-covered soccer field, where they forced them to kneel and shot them all in their heads, then ran over them with a truck. The anonymous woman H.G. was saved from death by a metal hair clip which deflected the bullet. She also survived being run over. When the Carrs had left the scene she ran naked through the snow for a mile to get help. The Carr brothers meanwhile had gone back to the house, where they killed H.G.'s pet schnauzer, Nikki, by beating him with a golf club, then stabbing him with an ice pick. In November 2002, nearly twelve years ago, the Carr brothers were found guilty on multiple counts of capital murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated robbery, rape, and animal cruelty. Then at a penalty hearing, the jury recommended the death penalty. The judge agreed, and sentenced the Carr brothers to death. Throughout reporting on the crime and the trials, political correctness protocols were strictly observed. Despite the exceptionally ghastly nature of the crime, and the miraculous survival of H.G. — which you'd think would be highly newsworthy in itself — there was no national coverage by major media. None of the big broadsheet newspapers or network TV stations — nor, so far as I can ascertain, any of the national cable TV channels — carried stories. The county D.A. made a point of publicly declaring that there was no racial motive to the crime, on the grounds that the Carr brothers are not known to have used any racial insults. I note the following:
Once the Carr brothers had been convicted and sentenced, the appeals circus began. It ground on for eleven and a half years while the Carr brothers worked out, played cribbage, and watched TV at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. If Kansas Department of Corrections operate along the same lines as those of New York State and Baltimore, they may also have had a little recreational fun impregnating gullible female corrections officers, I don't know. July 25th the seven judges of the Kansas Supreme Court overturned the Carr brothers' death sentences on a technicality — a technicality that had apparently escaped everyone's attention for twelve years. The technicality was that the district court judge, since deceased, who presided over the brothers' trial should have held separate sentencing proceedings for the two men. If you don't think that's a powerful enough reason to allow the Carr brothers to continue on Earth for another twelve years, jeering at their victims' families, at least one of the seven appeals court judges agrees with you. Judge Nancy Moritz said that separate hearings would not have influenced the outcome of the case because witness testimony, the "unusually egregious facts" of the case and evidence against the Carr brothers was so strong. So I guess we can take comfort in the fact that not every judge in Kansas is clinically insane. And those political correctness protocols are still in force. I went to Google News and put "wichita" and "carr" into the search box. I got a ton of stories about the appeals court decision. Here are the outlets carrying the stories:
Well, you get the idea. I scrolled forward for six pages hoping that the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, or some other big news outlet might be carrying a story, but … [Crickets] … |
03 — CultMarxipedia. Just a short follow-up to that last segment. Researching the details there, I noticed that Wikipedia has a handy page listing crimes of violence by nonblacks against blacks, headed: Category: Racially motivated violence against African Americans. James Byrd is there, the guy who got dragged to death in 1998, and there are a couple more less well-known black victims from recent years, like James Craig Anderson, killed in 2011, but the overwhelming majority of the 90 cases listed by Wikipedia are from fifty years or more ago, confirming my impression that violent crimes by nonblacks against blacks have been exceedingly rare for decades now. Curious to see how Wikipedia records the other side of the issue, I tried to find their page headed Category: Racially motivated violence against European Americans. Strange to report, they seem not to have one. I tried replacing "European" by "White," "Caucasian," and "Nonblack," but no dice. The Cultural Marxist encyclopedia does have a page headed Category: Racially motivated violence in the United States. Its list of 43 items includes one each for: the 2003 Beat Up A White Kid Day in Ohio, the Reginald Denny beating during the 1992 L.A. race riot, the 1993 Long Island Railroad massacre, the 2005 Brooklyn assaults by black teenage girls on white ones, the black inmate who killed Jeffrey Dahmer the white cannibal in 1994, and the Zebra killings of the early 1970s, when four blacks hunted and killed a dozen or so whites in San Francisco. Just taking black-on-nonblack killings for the past twenty years, and leaving out the jail inmate killing, that's a total of … zero, according to Wikipedia. So no black killed a nonblack in the U.S.A. this past 20 years with racial hostility in his mind. I'm sorry, but I find that really hard to believe. The Wichita massacre isn't listed. Neither is the 2008 murder of Marine Corps Sergeant Jan Pietrzak and his wife in Winchester, California. Pietrzak was white, his wife Quiana was black. They were murdered in their own home by four black Marines — following rape and torture, of course. Local law enforcement hastened to assure everyone that there was no racial motive, only robbery. Sergeant Pietrzak's mother wasn't convinced. She wrote a letter to then President-elect Obama asking, quote: If it was a robbery, why didn't they come when nobody was home instead of in the dead of night — armed to the teeth? End quote. It's really hard to figure, isn't it? Obama did not favor Mrs. Pietrzak with a reply. Why should he have? She's obviously just another racist cracker. (I should say that Wikipedia does have a page on the Pietrzak killings, they just don't consider it racially motivated. They also make the page hard to find. If you put "pietrzak" in the Wikipedia search box, six names show up, but none of them is Sergeant Pietrzak. If you put "byrd" into the box, 35 names show up, incuding James Byrd the dragging victim. If you put in "martin" and go to the Names page, you see Trayvon Martin in the "Born since 1950" category. Ah, Wikipedia.) So: A nonblack kills a black in self-defense — TV news people will doctor the 911 tapes to make it sound racial. Blacks kill nonblacks — nothing to see here. That's crime reporting, Cultural Marxist style. |
04 — Immigration-wise, we're a one-party state. The invasion of teenage gangsters … sorry, I mean welfare spongers … sorry sorry, I mean low-IQ illiterate disease-carrying tax-eaters … sorry sorry, I mean future astrophysicists, neurosurgeons, and captains of industry — the invasion from Central America continues apace. Now Congress is stirring into action. At any rate, congressional Republicans are — Democrats are happy to leave matters in Barack Obama's hands, but the GOP bots want to be able to say they did something when they go home to their constituents for the summer recess. As Radio Derb has been telling you, the Republican Party is stuck with one foot on each side of a mighty chasm. On one side is their voter base, who are outraged at the federal government's willful failure to enforce the people's laws, and have been clogging the congressional switchboard with their outrage. On the other side are the GOP's big-money donors — people like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and the Chambers of Commerce, for whom there can never be enough cheap labor in the nation to help them privatize profits while socializing costs. The donors invariably win in these situations, which is why Republican voters are less and less inclined to turn out at election time. So it has proven this time. Aware that they had to look as if they were doing something, the House Republican leadership worked up a bill, H.R. 5230. This week they have been trying to round up the 218 votes they need to pass it in the House. This is purely gestural as there is no chance any Republican bill would pass the Senate; or, if by some bizarre accident it did, that Obama would sign it. This is gesture politics, hoping to appease the base without ticking off the donors too much. The excellent conservative Madison Project has a devastating analysis of the bill. The filthy thing actually increases low-skilled immigration from the south, makes it easier for recent arrivals to thwart deportation, continues the catch-and-release system, so that released illegals will go on failing to show up for their court appearances, and of course — of course! does nothing whatever to secure the border. The invaluable Senator Jeff Sessions summed up Boehner's bill. It is, said the Senator, quote, "a plan for expedited asylum, not expedited removal" of the 100,000-and-counting Central American invaders. Listener, if you had any illusions that the Republican congressional leadership has any intention of resisting Obama's open-borders policy, permit me to disabuse you. Actually, permit Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks to disabuse you. Rep. Brooks told the Daily Caller, quote: In my judgment, a majority of the senators and the House members of both parties are more than happy to betray America and the principles who made us who we are, first and foremost of which is the rule of law. Those of us who are fighting for hard-working families, unfortunately, we're in a minority. So far as anything to do with immigration is concerned — legal or illegal — we live in a one-party state. |
05 — Ramadan-a-ding-dong. Our President's been doing some tricky straddling of his own this last month. The name of the straddle is "Jews and Muslims." Jews are a key Democrat constituency and AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is a rich and powerful lobby in Washington, D.C. It's therefore important for Obama to keep the Jews on-side. On the other hand, a lot of the grass-roots energy of the Democrats comes from black and radical leftist groups, who all hate Israel. Hispanics lean antisemitic, too: Which part of the world do you think all the old Nazis retired to? Furthermore the Democrats are the party of minorities, and the U.S.A. has a swelling Muslim minority — somewhere around one percent of the population, though the figure is disputed, and of course the numbers are concentrated in a few locations. Further-furthermore, the Saudi government and the Gulf States also have powerful lobbies in D.C., hosing money around to advance their interests. That's the straddle Obama has to do. It got him into a spot of bother this past month. June 28th to July 28th was the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when good Muslims fast from dawn to sundown. After the sun's gone down you have a meal, the Iftar. Since 1996 the White House has hosted an Iftar dinner at some point during Ramadan. This year it was held on July 14th. There was Obama with a roomful of Muslim worthies chowing down on falafel, hummus, and sheep's eyeballs. This year's Iftar dinner, however, was held under somewhat of a cloud. The American-Arab-Anti-Discrimination Committee, which bills itself as "the largest Arab American grassroots civil rights organization in the U.S.," had urged Arabs and Muslims to boycott the dinner on the grounds that (a) the Obama administration was supporting Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, and (b) the NSA, the National Security Agency, runs surveillance on Muslim leaders. The dinner went ahead regardless, but got mixed reviews from Muslims who attended. For one thing, the White House had invited the Israeli ambassador to the dinner. I bet he had a jolly old time. Then Obama compounded the offense by saying, in his speech at the dinner, quote: "We've been very clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against what I consider to be inexcusable attacks from Hamas," end quote. That had some of the attendees sputtering into their fig juice. Quote from the al-Jazeera report: Tarik Takkesh, a Palestinian-American who attended the dinner, characterized the president's remarks as a symbolic slap in the face. Elsewhere online, a number of observers described the event as a humiliation for the Muslim guests. End quote. Nothing deterred, the President on Sunday issued a statement to mark Eid al-Fitr, which is the end of Ramadan. "In the United States," said the statement, "Eid also reminds us of the many achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy," end quote. "The very fabric of our nation," huh? The fabric got a few tears in it on September 11th, 2001, as I recall, and again from the Boston bombers, and the Fort Hood massacre. Possibly "the many achievements and contributions" make up for that, I wouldn't know, since I can't actually think of any Muslim "achievements and contributions." Whether this Eid al-Fitr statement ticked off Jews as much as the Iftar dinner ticked off Muslims, I couldn't say. I'm sure the President was doing his best on both occasions, but it's a heck of a straddle he has to do there. |
06 — See progressives squirm. A news story here from Elmhurst, a neighborhood in Queens Borough of New York City. It caught my eye because my wife and I lived in Elmhurst for six months in the early 1990s. We lived in an apartment building with all the occupants' mailboxes occupying one wall of the lobby. I used to smile every time I passed that stack of mailboxes. It was a little advertisement for the New York immigrant experience. The names on the mailboxes read something like: O'Shaughnessy, Rodriguez, Wong, Ramachandran, Derbyshire, Grodzinsky, … It looks like the Wongs now have the upper hand in Elmhurst demographically. That's what I deduce from this story in the New York Times, anyway. Headline: In Queens, Immigrants Clash With Residents of New Homeless Shelter. What's happened is, a hotel in Elmhurst went out of business, and New York City took it over. They then moved 180 homeless families into the hotel. That upset people in the mostly-Chinese neighborhood, and they came out in protest — 500 of them, in a demonstration July 22nd. Quote from the Times, quote: There were reports of shoplifting from the Good Fortune Supermarket, public urination and panhandling — all things, they said, that had been unheard-of in their neighborhood until now. End quote. Several points for attention here. First, it's not hard to understand the protestors' point. Not every homeless person is a lowlife, but in 180 homeless families, there will be a lot of lowlifes. Second, you have to smile at the squirming the New York Times goes through trying to report this, a conflict between two designated victim groups: immigrants and the homeless. Quote: Because many of those opposed to using the hotel as a shelter are Chinese immigrants, the conflict has also produced discomfiting images of immigrant families and the mostly black and Latino homeless families shouting insults at one another. End quote. Those images are only discomfiting if you think all designated victim groups should be marching together in lockstep to the beat of the Progressive drum to bring down the evil white male heterosexual hegemony. In fact the Chinese in America show encouraging signs of resistance to the Progressive narrative when it impacts them directly. We reported back in March how an attempt to reinstate affirmative action in California's public colleges was quashed by Asian-American protestors, mostly Chinese. They're just not playing by the Progressive script. They're opening up cracks in the Democrats' minority coalition. I still don't think it's anything the Democrats can't cope with, but it's nice to see them thus distracted. Third, there's a whiff of hypocrisy here. Those Chinese demonstrators were free with comments about how the homeless were all on welfare, which they probably are. The Times quotes a Mr Gao speaking in Mandarin, quote: Why does the government want to support this group? Why do they want to give them free money? We have to work from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. End quote. I'm pretty well acquainted with the immigrant Chinese, and I certainly wouldn't deny they have a good work ethic. I can also tell you this, though: They are skillful and shameless at exploiting the American welfare state. I bet anyone in that crowd of protestors could tell you precisely how much reported income, to the dollar, you can have before losing Medicaid benefits. And then, always, the folly of mass immigration. Not of immigration: of mass immigration. I'm the last person to complain about letting in this or that Chinese person — or this or that Brazilian, Nigerian, British, or Sri Lankan person — but how many do we want? Numbers, numbers, numbers are of the essence. Don't we have enough people already? With 150 million we put men on the Moon. When did we decide we needed 320 million? In the 20 years since I lived in Elmhurst it looks like the whole neighborhood has gone Chinese. That's a lot of people coming in. Is the number at some point enough? Should we maybe have a moratorium while we assimilate all these newcomers? Or are high levels of immigration just an unquestionable good, to be continued for ever? Look at it this way. According to the Times the homeless people there are black and Hispanic. Leaving the Hispanics aside — that's a whole other issue — the blacks are presumably American-born, with American parents and grandparents. Shouldn't that count for something against the interests of foreigners? All right, maybe they're lowlifes, but they're our lowlifes, American lowlifes. |
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: One of the stupider excesses of political correctness has been the placing of female sailors and officers on warships. In close quarters like that, sexual attachments, rivalries, and misconduct are bound to arise, degrading unit cohesion and combat effectiveness. This simple truth was illustrated last week when Britain's Royal Navy relieved Commander Sarah West of her duties. Commander West, 42 years old, was in charge of a Navy frigate, but was reported to have been having an affair with a male officer on the same vessel. Radio Derb's solution here is segregation. If women want to go to sea in Navy ships, give 'em their own ships. Submarines too, if they want 'em. Heck, give 'em a carrier. Don't let men on those ships, and don't let women on the others. What would be wrong with that? Separate but equal. I offer this suggestion to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a spirit of constructive patriotism. You're welcome! Item: Just a follow-up point on Islam. Radio Derb's take on Islam remains what it has always been: It's is a fine old religion that fortifies and consoles innumerable people in the fifty-something nations where it is dominant; but it doesn't play well with others, and a non-Muslim nation is foolish to allow mass settlement by Muslims. Well, Americans at large are swinging round to the same opinion, according to a Zogby poll released last week. Only 27 percent of Americans have a favourable opinion of Muslims, down from 35 percent in 2010. Forty-seven percent of white Americans favor profiling of, quote, "Arab Americans or Arab Muslims." I'm guessing the antipathy is to Muslims, not Arabs. Two-thirds of American Arabs are not Muslims; and as a matter of fact only a quarter of American Muslims are Arabs. This is too fine a distinction for most people to make, though. Once again: It's a fine religion, and no crazier than any other, but it belongs in its homelands, not in our countries. We should be bribing Muslims to leave, not flattering their "achievements and contributions." Item: Complete the following sentence: "The next civil rights movement is …" What did you say? Transsexuals? Undocumented minors? Undocumented minor transsexuals? Well, you're wrong. The next civil rights movement is — according to Jesse Jackson, who surely knows — is diversity in the Silicon Valley tech businesses. This follows revelations that the big tech firms are all woefully un-diverse. Here are the percentages of black employees at Yahoo, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and eBay: 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7. Here are the percentages of Hispanic employees at those firms: 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 5. And this is mainly California, remember. Rev'm Jesse is of course on a shakedown campaign here. When he says, quote, "This is the next step in the civil rights movement," that translates out of Jacksonese as: "Give me some money and I'll go away." I have to say, though, that on the stopped-clock principle, Rev'm Jesse has got one thing right. Quote from the USA Today report, quote: Jackson spoke after meeting with Labor Secretary Tom Perez to press for a review of H-1B visas, which allow U.S. companies to hire foreigners for specialty jobs. He said data show Americans have the skills and should have first access to high-paying tech work. End quote. I'm not sure that the Americans with skills are precisely the ones Rev'm Jesse has in mind, but if he's looking to shut down the H-1B cheap labor racket, he has my full support. |
08 — Signoff. And that's it, ladies and gents. OK, I'm off to Long Island for a month to take care of business and recharge batteries. Radio Derb will be back on the air September 6th. Until then I urge you all to keep your peckers up. Here's Gracie Fields to get you in the raised-pecker mood. More from Radio Derb next month! |
[Music clip: Gracie Fields, "Sing As We Go."]