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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! This is your abundantly genial host John Derbyshire with a summary of the week's news. Exceptionally rich pickings this week, listeners, so let's go straight to the news wires. |
02 — The March of Hypocrisy. Over a million people marched in Paris last Sunday to express their solidarity with the journalists murdered in the terrorist attack on the anarchist-left magazine Charlie Hebdo. Out at the front of the march was a phalanx of politicians from around the world. French President Hollande was there in the phalanx of course, along with British Prime Minister Cameron, German Chancellor Merkel, and Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy. The Russian Foreign Minister, the Turkish Prime Minister, and the King and Queen of Jordan marched. The presidents of Niger, Mali and Gabon, which are French ex-colonies in Africa, were there. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian kleptocrat-in-chief Mahmoud Abbas [ker-ching] marched together. It was called the March of Unity. It should have been called the March of Hypocrisy. They were marching against Muslim terrorism? The Prime Minister of Turkey — a country that for years has supported the terrorist group Hamas, and is currently in bed with ISIS — this guy is marching against Muslim terrorism? And perhaps he forgot to tell his country's president he was marching: The very next day Muslim-supremacist President Erdoğan said the journalist massacres were the fault of the French authorities. Actual quote from Erdoğan, quote: As Muslims, we've never taken part in terrorist massacres. End quote. Ri-ight. The Mayor of Ankara, Turkey's capital city, took conspiracy theory to the next level, blaming the attacks on Mossad, the Israeli state security service. Likewise with Mahmoud Abbas [ker-ching], whose people were dancing in the streets when the World Trade Center went down, and who has publicly honored Muslim terrorists. The claim that they were marching for freedom of speech is even more preposterous. The Foreign Minister of Russia was there marching for press freedom? Really? Wikipedia actually has a page titled "List of journalists killed in Russia." It's a lo-o-ong page — check it out. In David Cameron's Britain, freedom of speech is a fading memory. Last month a truck accident in Scotland killed six people. Someone posted a tasteless joke about it on Twitter and found himself being investigated by the police. Last April Paul Weston, chairman of the British party Liberty GB and a candidate in the European elections, giving a campaign speech, read out a passage about Islam from Winston Churchill's book The River War. Someone took offense and called the police. Weston was arrested on a charge of racial harrassment. He faced two years in jail, although charges were dropped after much public protest. Emma West was not so lucky. She let forth with a drunken rant on a London tram, telling black and Pakistani fellow passengers that, quote, "you're not English," and, quote, "none of you are English," and, quote, "get back to your own countries." She did end up in court and now has a criminal record. Same of course with the French. The Daily Mail reported on Wednesday that, quote: French justice officials have ordered a major clampdown on hate speech following last week's attacks in Paris. Authorities said 54 people had been arrested for hate speech and defending terrorism since terror attacks killed 20 people in Paris last week. I don't know anything about Niger, Gabon, and Mali; but I just looked up their rankings on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Out of 174 nations, Denmark number 1 and Somalia number 174, the rankings are: Mali 115, Niger 103, Gabon 94. That doesn't directly tell us what press freedom is like in those places, but it does tell us what money can buy, which is a fair proxy. Yeah, those were real lovers of freedom out on that march there. The U.S.A. has been criticized for sending no-one higher ranked than our ambassador to the march. Much as I hate to give the Obama administration credit for anything at all, I must say, I'm glad our politicians stayed away from this phony, bogus event. |
03 — While infidels march, Islam advances. While the hypocrites were marching, Islam was advancing. Islam advanced in Syria. In spite of what has now been nearly 800 air strikes, ISIS has gained territory since the air campaign began. Quote from a January 15th report in the Daily Beast, quote: A map developed by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria (CDS), a Syrian-American opposition umbrella group, shows that ISIS has nearly doubled the amount of territory it controls since airstrikes began last year … End quote. When the reporter called the Pentagon for an opinion, the Pentagon conceded the point, quote: "Yes, they have gained some ground. But we have stopped their momentum," end quote. As of last weekend, the U.S.A. and its allies had conducted 790 airstrikes in Syria, according to Pentagon statistics. The campaign against ISIS has cost $1.2 billion, although that's for both Syria and Iraq. One point two billion, and ISIS in Syria has gained ground — proving yet again that you can't win a war just from the air. Didn't we learn that with the Vietcong? Islam advanced in Britain. The very distinguished British publisher Oxford University Press has sent a letter to all its children's authors telling them to avoid, quote, "Pigs plus sausages, or anything else which could be perceived as pork." This is to avoid offending Muslims, who consider pigs to be unclean. When the letter was read out on a radio show, the publisher protested that, quote: Our materials are sold in nearly 200 countries and as such … we encourage some authors of educational materials respectfully to consider cultural differences and sensitivities. End quote. No word from Oxford on whether authors have also been told to drop stories of the "Heather has Two Mommies" type, or indeed stories in which Heather's mommy is allowed to go out of the house bare-headed. And Islam is advancing in America, or trying to. We learned earlier this week that the adhaan, that's the Islamic call to prayer, would be broadcast across the campus of Duke University in North Carolina every Friday at 1 p.m., starting this Friday — amplified, so everyone gets to hear it. The very appropriately named Christy Lohr Sapp, associate dean for religious life at Duke University Chapel, murmured in the pages of the Raleigh News & Observer that, quote: Perhaps … this small token of welcome will provide a platform for a truer voice to resonate: a voice that challenges media stereotypes of Muslims, a voice of wisdom, a voice of prayer and a voice of peace. Perhaps it will, Ms Sapp; or perhaps it will just confirm what the jihadists already know: that the infidels are saps — cowards and pussies who would rather be dead than rude. Duke does not yet have a minaret on campus. The adhaan was to be called from the 200-foot-tall Duke Chapel bell tower. Just to remind you, here's a bit of the adhaan. [Clip.] When this news came out, local evangelist Franklin Graham, son of Billy, called on Duke donors and alumni to withhold support from the school until the policy was reversed. That got 'em where it hurts, and the plan was hastily revised. Muslim students will now gather on the quadrangle outside the chapel to chant the adhaan there. College authorities didn't say whether it would be amplified. |
04 — The Establishment Pincer. Among those not invited to join the March for Unity was Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front Party, which wants immigration restriction. Ms Le Pen's non-invitation was rather surprising. In the last French presidential election in 2012 her party polled at 18 percent, making them the third biggest party. In elections to the European parliament last May they got 25 percent of the vote, the biggest share of any party. Current polls give the National Front 30 percent of the vote. So why was Ms Le Pen excluded from the march? Because everybody else in French political life wanted her excluded, that's why. Here you see a phenomenon I'm going to call the Establishment Pincer. When there is a party in the arena standing against multiculturalism, open borders, cheap immigrant labor, and the "diversity" rackets, all the other parties, left and right, will sink their differences and join forces in a pincer movement to exclude them. Sweden showed the way here, as Radio Derb reported two weeks ago. The left faction in the Swedish parliament joined with the right faction to keep the flow of Third World immigrants pouring in to Sweden, over the objections of the Sweden Democrats party. You may expect to see the Establishment Pincer applied all over the West. France has a presidential election coming up in 2017. Both the Socialist Party of current President Hollande and UMP, the center-right party of Nicolas Sarkozy, are for multiculturalism and open borders. They will do everything they can, working together, to shut out the National Front. The Socialists would rather hold the presidency than not hold it; the UMP would rather hold the presidency than not hold it; but either of them would rather see the other hold the presidency than see Ms Le Pen there. It will be the same in Britain if Nigel Farage's UKIP party gains any real traction, which it hasn't yet. There are no deep differences of principle between the British Labor and Conservative parties. Both are transnationalist and open-borders. They will certainly unite against the terrifying threat of a party that puts British people before foreigners. In the U.S.A. the Establishment Pincer is closed so tight around the body politic, there is no room for any patriotic party. So far as the National Question is concerned, Democrats and Republicans are of one mind, as events in Congress this week have shown. |
05 — Immigration kabuki in Congress. Congressional Republicans, now with majorities in both houses, went through a little immigration kabuki this week. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out at the end of February so Congress has to pass a budget bill to keep the Department in business. The budget bill was duly voted on and passed by the House of Representatives Wednesday. However, the bill as passed by the House included two significant amendments, forbidding the Department to spend any money implementing Obama's amnesty proposals for illegal aliens. Speaker John Boehner staged some theatricals on the House floor, pretending to be outraged at Obama claiming the powers he has claimed. It's all kabuki theater, all cynical empty gesturing by Boehner. The bill, with those amendments, now has to go to the Senate. Republicans do not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate; even if they did, Obama would veto the amended bill anyway; and half the Republican senators are in the pockets of the cheap-labor business lobbies. As congressional reporter Neil Munro writes in the Daily Caller, quote: GOP Senators are under intense pressure from business groups to avoid any criticism of immigration. End quote. So those amendments are going nowhere. Boehner knows it as he performs his little kabuki dance, and everyone else knows it. These congressional antics are fake, phony, and disgusting. Illegal immigration is perfectly easy to manage. The key is workplace enforcement, with universal E-Verify and massive fines against businesses that don't comply. The technology is straightforward, as anyone who's every used a credit card knows. It could be implemented at a fraction the cost of housing, schooling, healthcare, and law enforcement for these millions of alien scofflaws. Why don't we just do this? Because nobody in political authority wants it done. The Republicans don't want it done because it would upset their donors, who want a continuing flood of cheap labor to undercut American workers. The Democrats don't want it done because they know the illegals, if they can just get them legalized, will vote 70-30 for Democrats. So it doesn't get done. No important person wants the immigration laws enforced. That's the beginning and end of it. The rest is kabuki. |
06 — Taxation by ticket. Here's some follow-up on our reporting from two weeks ago about New York City's communist mayor Bill de Blasio and his issues with the city police force, and their issues with him. On the police side tempers have calmed somewhat. Arrests are being made and citations being issued, not yet in normal numbers, but normaller than two weeks ago. One factor here is that the cops have just calmed down and resumed their normal sense of responsibility. There have been two other things in play though, both worth a mention. First, the police slowdown in issuing citations and summonses has cost the city a ton of money — around five million dollars in the three weeks of the slowdown. The city takes in well over eight hundred million dollars every year in fines of various kinds. Parking tickets are the biggest single revenue source at well over half a billion dollars in the average year, but residents can be ticketed for an extraordinary range of things, and small business owners have it even worse. Ask a New York City restaurateur about city inspectors, and stand well back before he answers you. "Taxation by ticketing," New Yorkers call it; but politicians love it. Well, of course they love it; the first word in that phrase was "taxation." So the police slowdown generated serious panic among city politicians and other tax-eaters. They leaned hard on the Police Commissioner; he leaned hard on his subordinates; and pretty soon people were being leaned on all the way down to the precinct level. Quotas for tickets issued were laid down, and cops were denied meal breaks, time off, and even sick days until the quotas were met. That was one of the factors. The other one was the Paris shooting. As much as they want those revenues from ticketing, city pols most surely do not want an incident like that in the Big Apple. Cops, they know, are the first line of defense against Muslim terrorism. Cops know this too. They know their duty; they know their friends and families are on the line; and they further know that de Blasio has stopped city surveillance of mosques and Muslim groups, calling it "racial profiling." So law enforcement-wise, things in New York City are getting back to normal. So much so, in fact, that de Blasio has felt able to put on his leftist clown suit and be his own idiot self in public again. Monday this week, for example, he launched the city's new Municipal ID program. This will give identity cards to anyone who wants one, is 14 or older, and can show proof of city residency. The cards are free, and they give the bearer free or discounted membership in 33 cultural institutions — libraries, museums, etc. The main point of these cards is of course to enable illegal aliens to identify themselves to cops, banks, and city authorities. There are estimated to be about half a million illegals in New York City. Here's what de Blasio said when announcing the issuance of the cards. Listen to his words carefully. Quote: It's going to open so many doors to our fellow New Yorkers … We don't want any New Yorkers to feel like second class citizens. End quote. Did you get that? He's issuing ID cards to illegal aliens because he doesn't want them to feel like second class citizens. Yo, Mr Mayor: They're not entitled to feel like even second class citizens. They're not citizens of any class. They're illegal aliens. |
07 — White guilt porn fading? The latest movie in the genre I've labeled White Guilt Porn is Selma, which is about Martin Luther King and the 1965 Civil Rights march. I'm encouraged to see that Selma isn't doing very well. Of movies opening last weekend, the Liam Neeson thriller Taken 3 filled the most seats, earning over $39 million. Selma was way behind with $11.3 million, which means it's highly unlikely to cover its costs. Foreign sales can usually be counted on to pad out the revenues a bit, but unfortunately there is very little interest abroad in America's racial neuroses. So, Selma's a flop. It didn't help that the producers of Selma twisted the actual history of the event to make King look more capable and effective than he actually was, and Lyndon Johnson more hostile and duplicitous than he actually was. There's a larger truth behind that. If a minority gains in social acceptance and rights, it's because of a will on the part of the majority to grant them those things. It's a gift. Advertising your cause might help it to happen, but in the final analysis, it's something given by the majority to the minority. Lyndon Johnson was the main giver here. He made it all happen. That of course is a thing it's hard for the minority to face. "We made it happen!" they want to believe. "Martin Luther King made it happen!" Well, no, you didn't and he didn't. You need a psychological defense mechanism against this unacceptable truth, though, so you tell a big lie. The inability of blacks to do anything much for themselves without whites is illustrated all over again by the subsequent fate of Selma — the town, not the movie. Paul Kersey, one of our best anti-anti-white reporters, wrote an excellent piece for VDARE.com about this. In 1965, when the march took place, Selma was half-white, half-black — about 14,000 each, whites and blacks. Today there are four times as many blacks as whites, and the city's a ruin. Selma can't even maintain a movie theater; the last one closed in 2013, though there's talk of reopening it just to show the movie. For all the bellyaching about "white supremacy," the evidence is that when there aren't whites around to supervise things, blacks sink into poverty and helplessness. To face the fact of their own collective impotence, they blame their condition on whitey. "Hey," they shout, "Our town would be doing fine if only those white folk hadn't all left!" … not hearing what they are saying. Well, let's hope that the movie Selma is a big enough flop to kill off the White Guilt Porn genre. |
08 — Is this a golden age? As the year 2014 was dwindling away in the rear-view mirror I was struck by an opinion column in the Telegraph, headline: Goodbye to one of the best years in history. The writer is Fraser Nelson, a pleasant-looking young chap about whom I know absolutely nothing. Nelson argues that Ebola and ISIS notwithstanding, and outside a few small pockets of misery like North Korea and Syria, the world at large reached new heights of peace, prosperity, and health in 2014. Sample quotes: Global life expectancy now stands at a new high of 71.5 years, up six years since 1990. In India, life expectancy is up seven years for men, and 10 for women. It's rising faster in the impoverished east of Africa than anywhere else on the planet. In Rwanda and Ethiopia, life expectancy has risen by 15 years … And so on. Fraser of course adds a cautionary note at the end, about how things might none the less go perflooey, as they did in 1914, but his main argument stands. There's a concept in psychology called the Hedonic Treadmill. Other than in really dire circumstances, says the concept, happiness and contentment stay at a pretty steady level. When our circumstances improve, we just ratchet up our expectaions. A related concept is the hierarchy of needs described by psychologist Abraham Maslow back in the 1940s. We need food, warmth, and shelter. Once we've got them we discover we need physical safety. Once we're fed, clothed, and safe, we discover that we have social needs: friendship, love, belonging. So on up the hierarchy until we have everything but "self-actualization," the belief that we are all we can be. None of this is new to people as sophisticated as Radio Derb listeners, but it's useful and instructive to look through this end of the telescope now and then. The problems I gripe about here — social, national, political, and international — are mostly problems of success: problems we can afford to turn our attention to because much bigger, nastier problems have been solved. British journalist Ed West had a nice tweet on this, January 15th, quote: I consider left-liberalism the political equivalent of obesity/type-2 diabetes, [a] product of our success & better than previous ailments. Well, yes. Obesity is better than malnutrition, and diabetes is better than TB. And yes, left-liberalism is better than communism, and we'll emerge from it at last in better shape than Russia emerged from the USSR. The blogger Dennis Mangan, whose posts have an unusually high density of thoughtful good sense, also saw Ed West's tweet. Here's what he said, longish quote: Leftism can be considered the political equivalent [of obesity] for the same reasons because it's a product of wealth, laziness … and the presence of civilization, industry, and a coddling government between the person and nature. End quote. I think that's all true too. Not sure where to go with this now … Oh wait, I haven't played Joe Dolce for a while. [Clip: "Shaddup You Face."] |
09 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: Here's a headline no geezer can resist, from the London Daily Telegraph, December 28th, quote: Young people are a 'lost generation' who can no longer fix gadgets, warns professor. The Professor is Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester over there. She's grumbling that today's youngsters have grown up among disposable products and don't know how to fix anything. That returns an echo from my wrinkled geezer bosom. Three or four years ago I looked out the kitchen window and saw my son, then 15 or so, standing with a friend in the garage next to a bicycle they seemed to be talking about. I went to look. Turned out they needed to remove the front wheel, I forget why, and had no clue how to do it. I went to the shelf where I keep wrenches, picked a likely wrench, went back and took off the retaining nut and pulled the wheel out. The two healthy, smart, well-educated and well-socialized adolescents looked at me as if I'd split the atom. On reflection, though, I think the geezer reflex is wrong here. These kids will live in a world of self-driving cars and dirt-cheap stuff turned out by robot factories. Knowing how to do things that don't need doing is pointless. They'll know how to do other things. My granny knew how to churn butter and spin yarn. My Dad knew how to change a valve in a radio — I saw him do it. I know how to extract a square root with paper and pencil — pretty handy before calculators came up. The world moves on. Get over it, Prof. Item: As just one instance of things the younger generation knows how to do, meet 23-year-old Mohammed Khursid Hussain from India. Mr Hussain has shattered the world record for nose typing. Yes, this young man got himself an entry in the Guinness Book of Records by typing out, with his nose, a 103-character sentence on a computer keyboard in a sensationally fast 47.44 seconds, trouncing the previous record, which as listeners will no doubt recall was set in Dubai in 2008. So once again, the fears of Professor George, and the reflex belief of us geezers, that the younger generation is not much use for anything, are proved to be totally misplaced. Item: Here's another poopquake story from China. Faithful listeners will recall that in our November 29th broadcast we offered our sympathy to the citizens of Zhangjiajie, in central China, where a cesspit exploded, showering a whole neighborhood in human waste. This story is from a different town, Hechi in southwest China. This time it was a vehicle that exploded, a sewage tanker. Here is an eyewitness quoted in the news story, quote: I realised that a tank filled with some disgusting brown liquid had exploded, scattering it all over the street and the people who were shopping or walking past. End quote. Well, I should think he was. One's entire merchandise inventory covered in human excrement — I hate when that happens. I hope listeners don't mind these occasional stories about excrement raining down from the sky. Way I look at it, they fit in nicely with our reports on the actions of Congress and the federal government. I shall use them as fillers when nothing's happening in the Miss BumBum Pageant. Item: Finally, here's one from the "overlawyered" file. We all know that advertisers use sex to promote products. Well, here's a company named Gildan Outerwear. They sell a line of women's tights under the brand name Kushyfoot. By way of promotion they run a TV commercial of a young woman wearing their product, walking down the street writhing, moaning, and uttering things like, quote, "that's the spot," and, quote, "oh yeah, that's it." Meanwhile a chorus in the background is singing: "I'm super satisfied, super satisfied." A lady named Meng Wang of Queens, New York, not unreasonably took the implication to be that if she wore Kushyfoot tights she would attain the furthest shores of sexual rapture just by walking down the street. She hastened out to her local drugstore and purchased a pair for seven dollars. Imagine Ms Wang's disappointment when, on trying out the tights, the earth failed to move for her. She found an attorney willing to take her case, and launched a lawsuit seeking, quote, "redress for deceptive and otherwise improper business practices." At the speed the New York civil courts operate, it could take quite a while for this case to reach its climax, but that's … only to be expected. |
10 — Signoff. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. A bumper issue of Radio Derb there. Just a word of thanks to my staff here at the studio, without whom none of this would be possible. Thank you, everybody … I say, Mandy, those are new tights you have on, aren't they? Very attractive, but … why are you walking around in that rather strange way? [Female moan] … Are you all right, my dear? [Moan.] Fetch her a glass of water, someone … |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]