—————————
• Play the sound file
—————————
[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Just barely, I'm afraid, listeners. I've been smitten by one of those change-of-season bugs and am seriously under the weather. So this is your hypodynamically genial host John Derbyshire with a merest glance at the week's headlines. |
02 — White people shoot up annual gathering. Two Muslims shot up a Christmas Party for county employees in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday. That's what happened, although two of the key words there, "Muslim" and "Christmas," were yielded up to us by the mainstream-media hacks only very slowly, with the utmost reluctance. The first thing I heard about the San Bernardino shooting, from the radio on Wednesday afternoon, was that it was carried out by "three white men." To get the news out, you see, the factual train has to be set square on the Narrative rails. The Narrative demands that the shooters in a case like this be gap-toothed Badwhites, down from the hills in their check shirts and work boots, seeking out helpless blacks and Mexicans as victims. When the facts don't fit the Narrative, the media reptiles go into automatic coverup mode. That is why you have heard, approximately ten thousand times in your life from friends and colleagues, quote: "The killer must be a black guy. If he was white, they would have told us." The next thing I heard was that the event being shot up was a, quote, "annual gathering." So these employees gather every year in early December. Why? Hard to figure … No, I can't see any reason people would do that. We eventually learned that the killers were a husband and wife couple from Pakistani Muslim families. Here again we got some media spin. The husband, the mainstream outlets assured us, was American-born. He might be Muslim, and have an Arabic-looking name, and he may have taken a trip to Saudi Arabia to find his wife, but dammit he's an American lad! Born here! The background logic here is that Third World immigrants, like native blacks, are sacred objects, about whom nothing negative may be said. Heaven forbid, therefore, that any consumer of mainstream news should mistakenly assume Sayed Farook to have been a — gasp! — immigrant. No, no, he's all American, just like you and me … well, you. Just two weeks ago, Radio Derb explained how it works. Quote from myself, quote: Migrants are the camel's nose under the tent; the second and subsequent generations are the camel. End quote. The first generation of immigrants find themselves in an Aladdin's Cave of glittering plenty and opportunity: work easy to find, land cheap, welfare abundant, the natives gullible. They're happy. Then comes the second, native-born generation. Drawn from a low-IQ population that's been accumulating genetic defects via a tradition of cousin marriage since the Bronze Age, and raised in a religion totally at odds with Western ideas of self-actualization, they are fidgety misfits. They come to hate the country of their birth, and in extreme cases act out the hatred like this. But what did I say there, "low-IQ"? Surely we don't let in low-IQ people from Pakistan, do we? Farook's father must have been a brain surgeon or something, right? Not according to the New York Times. Farook Senior came here from Pakistan thirty years ago, they tell us. He worked as … a truck driver. Oh, right. Now I remember the great truck-driver crisis of the 1980s, when trucks were rotting in the loading bays because nobody could be found to drive them. It was work Americans wouldn't do. Thanks to our brilliant immigration policies, Mr Farook and a million or so other Third Worlders came over and saved our economy! Thank you, Mr Farook! |
03 — Better dead than rude. A couple of footnotes to the San Bernardino story. First footnote: A feature of the crime that didn't get as much publicity as I thought it should. After shooting up the Christmas Party, Mr and Mrs Farook left and drove away. However, they left an IED behind at the party: a bomb they could trigger by a remote control device that was found in the car with them. The idea was, that when police and EMS people got to the scene, the bomb could be triggered to kill them too. For reasons not known to me, it didn't work, else we'd be looking at a much higher death toll. So banish from your mind any thought that this was a spur-of-the-moment impulsive shoot-'em-up. The whole thing was carefully planned. Second footnote. Some years ago I coined the expression "better dead than rude" to describe the mindset that says if the price of preventing terrorist atrocities is racial or religious profiling, then the price is too high. Better to be blown to pieces than to tell cops about the swarthy-looking guys you can hear chanting in Arabic and taking selfies with AR-15s next door. Well, that mindset is now very well settled-in to 2015 America. Here's a report from Daily Caller, December 3rd. I'll just read you the report, slightly edited, quote: Neighbors of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook told ABC Wednesday that they noticed "suspicious activity" at Farook's home recently, but did not report it for fear of being called racist … In several European countries, including the nation of my birth, that neighbor, if she had made a report, could have been arrested, fingerprinted, and charged with behavior likely to inflame racial hatred. The U.S.A. has not gone that deep into the darkness yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. |
04 — Stupidfacts. If you read or listen to our effusions here on the Dissident Right, you'll be familiar with the expression "hatefacts." A hatefact is a fact that is true, but may not be mentioned in polite society for fear of unmasking oneself as politically incorrect. The vast disparities in violent crime levels between blacks and other races, for example, are hatefacts. They are true, but mention of them will get you in social trouble … let me tell you. Hatefacts. Well, I'm going to try to coin a related concept: "stupidfacts." A stupidfact is a true fact that reveals the gross stupidity of the conventional wisdom we live amongst. An example of a stupidfact would be this one: Since 9/11, the rate of immigration into the U.S.A. from Muslim countries has increased to 100,000 a year, from half that figure before 9/11, according to Pew Research. I mean, how stupid is that? Crazy Muslims slaughter 3,000 of our people, and our response it to invite in more Muslims for settlement, some tiny but lethal proportion of whom will be just as homicidally crazy as the 9/11 guys? If that's not a stupidfact, I don't know what is. Here's another candidate for a stupidfact. Remember that Farook Senior came here from Pakistan in the mid-to-late 1980s. That was a good move on his part. Pakistan is real poor: GDP per capita $4,700 in 2014, in between Burma and Honduras, just above Sudan. So Pakistan's a pretty good place to get out of. Pakistan is of course very disorderly and corrupt. When you talk to a strategy guy about cleaning up Afghanistan, it isn't long before he shakes his head and says, "So long as we can't go after Pakistan, we really can't do much. Pakistan's the real source of the problems up there." OK, here's the stupidfact: Pakistan has nuclear weapons. How did that happen? Because we — we, the civilized world — let it, that's how. The Pakis exploded their first bomb in 1998, after twenty years' development. We could have stopped it. To do nuclear weapons development needs big facilities drawing masses of power. Even back in the 1980s we had good satellite surveillance and accurate long-range missiles. We could easily have stopped Pakistan's nuclear development. That we didn't, was stupid. Am I just applying hindsight there? I don't think so. By the late 1980s we knew Islam was a growing problem. We'd seen twenty years of Palestinian terrorism, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the mujahedin in Afghanistan sticking it to the Soviets … It wasn't hard to figure. A friend I had some years ago had worked on development of the Jupiter missile in the early 1960s, when China was gearing up her nuclear-weapons program. My friend told me there were serious high-level discussions about dropping a Jupiter with a thermonuclear warhead on the Chinese test facilities in Turkestan. The air's clear out there, we had good satellite imaging, and nobody lives out there but a few nomadic goat-herds. At last there was a political decision against the strike, my friend told me, but the possibility was seriously discussed. All right: 1960s China was big, belligerent, and a possible counterweight to the U.S.S.R. There were good arguments for not squashing their nuclear development. But Pakistan? Who would have cared? So why didn't we? Of course I'm going to say "stupidity," but I'll allow there was more than that going on. The first half of Pakistan's nuclear development happened in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R., when we had our minds focused on different threats. There was also a Great Game going on in South Asia: India, Pakistan, China, the U.S.S.R, then Russia, and us. Still I believe there was sufficient stupidity in play to make Pakistan's possession of the bomb a stupidfact, one we might very well pay dearly for some day. |
05 — Politicians think long-term! The other headliner this week was the Climate Change Conference in Paris, which our President Barack Obama attended, and where he made one of his gassy speeches. Sample quote — put yer gas masks on: This summer, I saw the effects of climate change firsthand in our northernmost state, Alaska, where the sea is already swallowing villages and eroding shorelines; where permafrost thaws and the tundra burns … End quote. Far be it from me to gainsay our President, but I was in Alaska myself last summer, all over the place. I saw a great deal of tundra, and actually walked on some of it. To the best of my recollection, none of it was burning. I'm sure I would have remembered. That was last year, mind; perhaps the tundra was more inflammable in 2015. In raising the Climate Change Conference, I actually want to discuss a meta-issue. That is, I don't want to talk about climate change itself, in which I have no interest and no expertise, but in something above and beyond this particular issue. You don't get let off lightly in this zone, though. If I don't restate Radio Derb's position I shall get rancorous emails accusing me of hiding my true nature as a contemptible tool of the Warmist establishment, or a gullible dupe of the anti-Warmist kooks, so I'll just say what I've said before: Not having the relevant expertise, I trust people who do have it, including some personal friends. They are unanimous that global warming is real and caused by human activity. I take their word for it, while remaining skeptical that our moon-booted politicians are capable of doing anything about it, and extremely reluctant to see my taxes spent on their proposed solutions. Speaking of skepticism, I refer people who engage with this kind of thing to an article in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer by geochemist James Lawrence Powell. Dr Powell scrutinizes the claim, which we have all heard, that there is a 97 percent consensus among scientists accepting anthropogenic global warming. After crunching some numbers Dr Powell concludes that the claim is false. The true figure for the consensus is in fact, he says, north of 99.9 percent. Powell's analysis has of course been hotly criticized at anti-Warmist websites … and so the beat goes on. The main reason not to bother with the global warming dispute is that it's become a tribal marker. Earlier this year the Pew Research Institute found that 54 percent of Democrats consider that Global Warming should be a top priority for our government, while only 15 percent of Republicans thought so. Fifty-four to fifteen. I guess it's possible that all of the poll respondents making up those numbers could explain the mathematics of radiative forcing and the role of methane hydrates in ocean salinity; but I think it's more likely most of them are just waving tribal flags. I vote Republican by default, and I hope to spend the rest of my days in the house I currently occupy, which is 240 feet above sea level. I am insouciant about Global Warming. If you email me your 80-page refutation of Global Warming and exposé of the evil Warmist conspiracy, I promise you, in all sincerity, from the heart, I will not read it. Some things are true even though the Party says they are true. All right, that out of the way, what's the meta-issue? It's this. If indeed global warming is happening, it's happening slowly — too slowly to notice. I mean, I can't say I've noticed this year as being any warmer than last year, or the year before, or 2005, or 1995. It's a gradual, long-term phenomenon, which might possibly present real dangers twenty or thirty years from now. That's not an area where politicians venture much. Our Representatives work on a two-year election cycle; our Presidents on a four-year cycle; our Senators on six. Normally if you ask a politician to look beyond those limits, his eyes glaze over and he falls asleep. So why, on this one issue, why are they all making earnest speeches about how we must exert ourselves and spend trillions to ensure that the world in 2040-something will look like this rather than, as the scientists warn us, like that? It's instructive to compare their attitudes on immigration. Immigration laws — like the 1965 Act or the 1986 amnesty — have huge consequences in the long term, totally transforming the nation in ways much more easily predicted than atmospheric CO2 levels in 2045. Why weren't they doing the predicting, and presenting the results to the American people for their decision and choice? Why weren't the relevant scientists — it would have been demographers in this case — why weren't they lobbying and publishing and showing up on TV talking-head shows, as climate scientists do nowadays? I'd like to hear an explanation for the contrast here. Why, on this one issue of global warming, are Western politicians willing to look decades ahead? Why, on the other issue of mass immigration, would they not do so? Is it just white ethnomasochism? Mass immigration is bad for First World whites, so that's good. Global warming is bad for Third Worlders, so that's bad. Is that it, or what? I'm genuinely puzzled. Thoughtful suggestions on this meta-issue, I shall read with attention. |
06 — Girls in foxholes. Just back to the San Bernardino situation for a moment. Here's a quote from the New York Daily News, December 4th, concerning the final car chase in which Mr and Mrs Farook were sent to meet their Maker, quote: Officials released staggering details regarding the amount of firepower used in the gunfight that left both young parents dead. Twenty-three officers fired 380 rounds at the couple's rented black Ford Expedition, with 76 rounds from the .223-caliber rifles fired back during a car chase and shootout, [Police Chief Jarrod] Burguan said. End quote. As it happens, we also heard on Thursday this week about the announcement by Defense Secretary Ash Carter that the military services, including the Marine Corps, must open all combat roles to women. Unfortunately this comes too late for Mrs Farook, who sounds like she would have been a good person to have next to you in a firefight. No-one's much surprised at Carter's decision. Back in October Carter told a gathering of our troops in Sicily that limiting his search for qualified military candidates to just half the population would be, quote, "crazy." It seems crazy to me to think that mixing in women, or openly homosexual men, with normal men in a combat unit could do anything other than degrade unit cohesion. The unit's going to have to cope with resentments and jealousies that weren't there before. How is this not detrimental to fighting efficiency? Those arguments have been made and lost, though. Nothing can stop the onward march of Cultural Marxism, with its determination to prove that in the human world, everything is equal to everything else. The real villain of the piece here seems to be Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. Earlier this year the U.S. Marine Corps conducted a careful, professional study which concluded that combat units with both men and women are less effective than all-male units. The all-male units were faster, had greater accuracy in firing weapons, and suffered fewer injuries. Mabus jeered that the study was deliberately biased, without offering any evidence. He also said that average performance was anyway irrelevant. What was important were talented individuals. I should add in parentheses here that Ray Mabus, while obviously his brain has been completely addled by Cultural Marxism, at least has performed military service; unlike SecDef Carter, who so far as I can ascertain has never picked up a rifle. Whatever: Our men in uniform will henceforth, instead of fighting our nation's enemies 100 percent of the time, will fight them only 50 percent of the time. The other 50 percent they'll spend fighting each other for the favors of the women in their units. With Mrs Farook in mind, however, I will say this. Women in combat might, in some circumstances, be effective. The female units of the Kurdish guerillas fighting ISIS have acquitted themselves well, I believe. There's the thing, though. All-women units — which in our present culture would turn out to be all-lesbian units — might very well be effective if kept apart from the men. The trouble is that in the chaos of battle, soldiers get separated from their units and end up fighting in other units, so you end up with mixed units anyway. Well, it looks like it's a done deal. The gals are going to be huddled there in a foxhole with the guys. It's a fact — another stupidfact. Have we reached Peak Stupid yet? |
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief, very brief, items. Imprimis: Congratulations I guess to Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg, who announced this week that Priscilla successfully gave birth to a baby girl last week. The congratulations are honestly earned because Mrs Zuckerberg's previous pregnancies ended with miscarriages, a very distressing thing I wouldn't wish on anyone. The qualifying "I guess" signals that while I wish the Mrs and the baby no harm whatsoever, I loathe and detest Zuckerberg, and would happily watch him being torn to pieces by wild dogs, if the thing could be arranged and broadcast on TV. When telling us about the baby, the repulsive Mark also announced that he will be giving away 99 percent of his net worth, most of which is in Facebook stock, to charity. This quickly turned out to be a stunt: The vehicle for the giving-away is actually to be a for-profit corporation through which Zuck can, to quote from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, quote, "avoid disclosure rules … and engage in activities that stretch the definition of charity," end quote. In other words, the setup is (a) another money-making racket, through which (b) America-hating Cultural Marxist Zuckerberg can position himself to be the George Soros of the mid-21st century. If you have a Facebook account you have helped to enrich this weasel, and thereby contributed to the ruin Zuckerberg hopes to bring upon our nation. Think about it. Item: White student unions. Can you guess? — I'm all for them. One of the banners flying over Radio Derb corporate headquarters reads TOTAL FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY! If blacks, and Asians, and Latinos on some college campus want to socialize with their own kind, I can see no earthly reason why whites shouldn't. If there is an earthly reason, or even an extraterrestrial one, I invite college bureaucrats nationwide to email in to me explaining it. Until I'm persuaded, I wish all the best to these white student unions, and am available to address them at a very modest fee. Item: Last week I marked the centenary of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and wondered aloud why its signature equation G = 8πT is not as well known as E = mc2. Several listeners emailed in to ask for book recommendations to help them acquaint themselves with that equation. Alas, my own college days are fifty years behind me, and I no longer have my textbooks. There is, though, a book I was very impressed with some years later, and went around recommending to everyone. This was Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's 1973 book titled just Gravitation. When I went looking for it just now, though, I found to my surprise that it's out of print. There's a used hardback copy on Amazon for $428, and a paperback, also used, for $170. Abebooks has some used copies ranging in price from $200 to $1,500. Wow. I should have held on to my copy. I suggest you try to find it in your local college library. I can also suggest you try Ben Schumacher's 24-lectures course titled Black Holes, Tides, and Curved Spacetime: Understanding Gravity currently on sale at the Great Courses company for less than you'll pay for a used copy of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. I haven't actually watched Ben's course; but I do have his course on quantum mechanics from the same source, and he gives you the full business. Ben, we'll settle up on the commissions next time I'm over there. Item: News from Turkmenistan: Radio Derb's dear friend and benefactor President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov played the synthesizer and sang along while a choir of 4,000 broke the world record for singing in the round. Singing in the round — not to be confused with singing in the rain, which doesn't happen much in Turkmenistan — singing in the round is when different sections of the choir sing the same melody but start at different times, so their voices overlap. The event took place inside a giant yurt — that's a Central Asian tent — measuring 115 feet in height and 230 feet in diameter. President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov was present on a giant video screen inside the yurt. Naturally I'd like to play you a recording of the choir, but I can't find one. I can tell you that the actual song being sung was a musical setting of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov's own poem, published earlier this year, titled: "Onward! And Only Onward, Land of my Kin — Turkmenistan!" Here, with kind permission of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, are the first two stanzas: Oh beloved Motherland, And you talk about your Maya Angelou — hah! |
08 — Signoff. That's all, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for listening. There will be more from Radio Derb next week. |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]