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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 first day of the year 2016. Yes, listeners, this is your unapologetically genial host John Derbyshire with an end-of-year news roundup. The overall themes of this week's podcast are ignorance, folly, and despair, seasoned with a wee dash of hope towards the end. Radio Derb is not for the timid or self-deluding. Let the brazen frankness commence! |
02 — Americans self-demoralize, self-humiliate, self-enstupidate. So I'm reading the New York Post whilst I ingest my breakfast Quaker Oats. In the Op-Ed pages there's a column by local writer Betsy McCaughey. Betsy McCaughey is one of those conservative opinion journalists whose columns I always start reading but don't often finish. She made her name twenty-odd years ago as a healthcare policy wonk — she did some fine destructive wonkery on the Clinton administration's attempt at a healthcare overhaul. She probably did us a favor there, but healthcare policy isn't a field I'm much interested in. McCaughey's commentary on other topics comes under the heading Respectable Conservative. She says sensible things on topics like mass immigration, policing, affirmative action, and so on, but always from a point of view of Standard Social Science orthodoxy: Race is a social construct, parenting shapes children, the human personality is infinitely malleable, and so on. Steven Pinker calls this "see no genes, hear no genes, speak no genes" — it's a point of view that basically concedes the Cultural Marxist view of human nature. Well, there was Betsy McCaughey in this Wednesday's New York Post with a column titled: From NYC to Harvard: the war on Asian success. Executive summary: Asian kids do really well in school. Misguided politicians and administrators are trying to deal with this by leveling down: canceling advanced math courses, dumbing down tests so that all students get prizes, and urging schools to take a "holistic" approach in classifying and selecting students. That word "holistic" is, as McCaughey says, quote: "a word that … strikes terror in the hearts of Asian parents." It's the word the Ivy League universities use to keep the intake of Asian undergraduates below twenty percent, and to give preference to NAMs — non-Asian minorities. "We're not practicing racial discrimination against whites and Asians," the Ivies squeal, "we're just selecting applicants holistically." Why do Asian students do so well, though? McCaughey says she knows. Quote: It's not a difference in IQ; it's parenting. That's confirmed by a recent study by sociologists from City University of New York and the University of Michigan, which showed that parental oversight enabled Asian-American students to far outperform the others. End quote. That got my attention. The thing McCaughey says that these researchers say flies in the face of facts we know from behavioral genetics, a field I try hard to keep up with. One of the strangest but most firmly established results in that field is that parenting styles have no measurable effect on their children's life outcomes. So what is this study saying the opposite? A few minutes googling located it. It's at the PNAS website — that's the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — dated June 10th, 2014, title Explaining Asian Americans' academic advantage over whites. Just scanning through the paper, alarm bells were going off in my head right away. For starters there is the definition of "Asian American" they're working from. Quote: Sample sizes from [the Education Longitudinal Study] are 315 East Asians, 99 Filipinos, 201 Southeast Asians, 130 South Asians. End quote. There are at least four quite different ancestral populations implied there. From the point of view of behavioral genetics, that's a completely incoherent group. The authors of the paper — they are sociologists, remember — aren't interested in behavioral genetics, though. Quote: Qualities such as attentiveness, self-control, motivation, and persistence may be as important as cognitive abilities in positively affecting academic performance. End quote. Well, yes, I bet they are: but those traits are all known to be highly heritable. Studious, motivated parents with high levels of attentiveness and self-control have kids who are studious and motivated with high levels of attentiveness and self-control. As the kids say: Duh. Concluding sentences of Betsy McCaughey's article, quote: Some Asian-American eighth-graders practice for two years for the test, while their parents toil in laundromats and restaurants to pay for exam-prep classes. End quote. Answer: What's stopping them is the same thing that's stopping them having glabrous yellowish skin, epicanthic eyelid folds, shovel-shaped incisor teeth, and dry crumbly earwax. They are different races. Why is this so hard to say? I've really lost patience with race denialism. Why do people enstupidate themselves like this? As Nicholas Wade says in his book A Troublesome Inheritance, human beings are a highly imitative species. If one race is behaving in some way that gets them good social results, why don't other races just imitate them, for those same good results? Because they can't. They're different races, with different average behavioral styles. There are huge social negatives to race denialism. It's used to justify mass immigration, for example. Since, according to the race denialists, any race can change its typical behaviors just by an effort of collective will, they'll all assimilate to a common American norm. Well, no. Quote from Betsy McCaughey: West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in New Jersey …, which is 65 percent Asian, routinely produces seniors with perfect SAT scores, admissions to MIT and top prizes in international science competitions. So mass immigration of East Asians leads to the legacy American population being demoralized and humiliated. Why would this be allowed by any government that gave a damn about its own citizens? It sure as hell wouldn't be allowed in China, Japan, or Korea. If you like, you can take that as further evidence that they are smarter than us … I leave that with you. Do we really not know — do Americans of all people really not know — that nations with big racial minorities are arenas of discord, social friction, group rancor, and perpetual conflict? We didn't know that from our own historical experience? Really? How did we get so stupid? |
03 — Ignorance is social acceptance. It's not just us, of course. All the old Anglo-Saxon and northwest European countries have enstupidated themselves in the same way. I have two stories from the recent news illustrating this. I'll give each story a separate segment. First story, from Germany. Germany has a rising National Conservative party, roughly equivalent to France's National Front or Britain's UKIP. The party is called Alternative für Deutschland, AfD for short. Like UKIP, AfD is a bit wobbly, not quite ready for prime time. There's a lot of factional infighting and some slightly nutty attention-seekers. AfD does, though, at least aim to be what its name says it is: an alternative for Germany, a second party, since Germany's big established political parties have no real differences on National Question issues like mass immigration, multiculturalism, "diversity" favoritism, and so on. Well, one of the regional leaders for this new party, for AfD, is a chap named Björn Höcke, 43 years old, father of four, a schoolteacher by trade. Mr Höcke sits in the Diet, that's the state legislature, of Thuringia in East-Central Germany, along with seven other AfD members. That's eight AfD members out of 91 altogether in the Thuringian Diet — not bad for a newish party opposed by the entire media and political establishment. (I note that the most famous resident of Thuringia was Venus, the Goddess of Love, who lived inside a mountain there eight hundred years ago, according to Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser. That's nothing to do with our story, though.) So a few weeks ago, November 21st, Mr Höcke passed some remarks in public apparently drawing on r/K Selection Theory. This is a theory in biology that tries to place the reproductive behavior of different species, or different races within a species, in an evolutionary context. Thumbnail sketch of r/K Selection Theory: An animal can practice an r reproductive strategy or a K reproductive strategy. In an r-strategy the animal has lots of offspring and doesn't bother much with nurturing them, expecting that while only a few will survive, that few will be enough to keep the species going. In a K-strategy the critter has few offspring but puts more effort into nurturing them, hoping that most will survive. Fishes who lay a great mass of eggs are practicing an r-strategy; big land mammals like elephants who nurture and protect their cubs are going more for K-strategies. In the human context, the r/K difference is sometimes referred to as "Cads and Dads." In "cad" groups the men impregnate as many females as possible but don't bother much with parenting. "Dads," on the other hand, have few kids but work hard at nurturing them. Various ideas have been proposed as to how the natural environment shapes these strategies across evolutionary time. If there's a high disease load in your environment, for example, an r-type reproductive strategy might be the better way to go. That's r/K Selection Theory. OK, so back in November Mr Höcke, speaking about the flood of illegal aliens into Europe from Africa and the Middle East, made reference to the theory. Here's what he said, translated and slightly edited, quote: Africa's population surplus amounts to about 30 million people per year. As long as we are prepared to absorb this population surplus, nothing will change the reproductive behavior of the Africans. The countries of Africa need the German borders … they need the European borders in order to arrive at an ecologically sustainable demographic policy. [Applause.] And the countries of Europe, compared with Africa and the Arabian region, need borders even more urgently because Europe pursues, phylogenetically … its own reproductive strategy. End quote. Note please that Mr Höcke's intentions towards Africa are benign. He wants them to change their reproductive strategy so they don't get over-populated; he argues that while they have Europe as a safety valve for their surplus population, they are under no strong pressure to make that change. So Mr Höcke is talking about population policy. May I quote myself here, please? I know, I've been quoting myself a lot lately. Over the years I have told the world the few things I know. My hope now is that if I keep working over and repeating key points, they'll sink in: a sort of K-strategy of opinionating, if you like. OK, here is me in my world-sundering 2009 bestseller We Are Doomed, Chapter 10, quote: You can't not have a population policy. To not have any laws at all concerning immigration and settlement … to train yourself and your fellow citizens never to think about such matters at all, would itself be a population policy — in the case of a rich and stable nation like ours, it would be a policy of very fast and unlimited population growth … You have a population policy whether or not you know you do, and whether or not you feel comfortable talking about it. End quote. Just so. My own point of view, which you may think childishly naïve, is that since nations have population policies nolens volens, we ought to discuss those policies in public forums, with different points of view being put forward, and with reference to ideas from the human sciences where relevant. Mr Höcke apparently agrees with me. Note also that you need not take, and Radio Derb does not take, any position on the epistemological status of r/K Selection Theory. It's certainly not a lunatic-fringe theory: Respectable biologists like E.O. Wilson have endorsed it. Possibly there are problems with it. Conceivably, it's just totally wrong. I'm not a biologist, I couldn't give you an authoritative ruling. Mr Höcke is even less of a biologist than I am; his college major was History. As geneticist Greg Cochran likes to say, though: The world does look like that. And r/K Selection Theory is not so esoterically profound that thoughtful nonspecialists shouldn't bring it up in argument, unless you believe that all public discussion should be dumbed down into fortune-cookie mottos and Marxist clichés. Most of the power centers of Western culture of course do believe exactly that. The editorial staff of The New York Times, for example, believe it. The December 29th issue of that magisterial broadsheet published an Op-Ed column by Anna Sauerbrey. Ms Sauerbrey writes about European issues, especially German issues, from a Cultural Marxist, Social Justice Warrior perspective. So there was Ms Sauerbrey on Tuesday gasping and swooning at Mr Höcke's remarks. Sample quote: For years, racism and hate in Germany mostly came with clear social markers. In the minds of most, racists wore their heads shaved, feet heavily booted and arms rune-tattooed. They lived on the fringes of society, often in public housing, and made their living illicitly. End quote. To be fair to Ms Sauerbrey, her hyperventilating is mainstream in Germany itself, where political correctness is so fiercely enforced as to make the average American college campus look like an episode of South Park. It probably didn't help that Mr Höcke's remarks, if you listen carefully, include the word lebensraum, although in what seems to me an innocuous usage. There has actually been a move in AfD, Mr Höcke's party, to have him expelled, though my latest information is that it hasn't succeeded. The co-leader of the party, a chap named Jörg Meuthen, said that Mr Höcke's deployment of r/K Selection Theory was, quote, "factually nonsensical, lacked any scientific substance, and invited misinterpretation as an almost racist statement," end quote. Mr Meuthen is a Professor of Economics — I should of course be referring to him in proper German style as Professor Doktor Meuthen — at something called a "School of Public Administration" in Kehl, southwest Germany. He is thus far, far better qualified to pass judgment on matters of biology than Mr Höcke or me. Main point here: Thoughtful discussion of population issues, informed by ideas from the human and biological sciences, is verboten in Germany, in fact streng verboten, if not verboten am strengsten. If you don't want to be expelled from public life and denounced by The New York Times and Economics professors at provincial German community colleges, you must train yourself to be stupid and ill-informed, and speak only in the threadbare clichés of multiculturalism and Cultural Marxism. You must take particular care not to inform yourself about biology, a crank pseudoscience with no epistemological standing. "Ignorance is strength" said the Party slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four. For sure, in the Western world of 2015, knowledge will get you into trouble. Whether or not ignorance is strength, in the Western world today, ignorance is definitely social acceptance. |
04 — Brits apologize on the beaches. I told you I have two stories about the self-enstupidation of Western civilization in matters of race. Here's story number two, this one from Britain. The principal figure here is Oliver Letwin, 59 years old, married with two kids. Mr Letwin is an Anglo-Jewish intellectual who has spent his entire adult life in politics, although never at the highest levels. He's a Tory Member of Parliament and currently a senior policy adviser to David Cameron, Britain's stupid, worthless, and repulsive Prime Minister. Thirty years ago, precisely in October 1985, Letwin was a junior policy adviser to a different Tory Prime Minister, the late great Margaret Thatcher. At that time there occurred the Tottenham Riots, when the inhabitants of a North London ghetto, mostly blacks, took to the streets to protest against police trying to enforce the law. The thing British people remember about the riots is the murder of Police Constable Keith Blakelock. The rioters had looted a supermarket, then set fire to it. Firefighters who tried to deal with the blaze were attacked with rocks and bottles. Some police officers were sent to guard them; but the mob was too strong, and both police and firefighters had to retreat. Officer Blakelock stumbled and fell in the retreat. He was surrounded by a mob of rioters screaming "Kill the pig!" They stabbed him more than 40 times and apparently, to judge by the pattern of wounds, attempted to decapitate him. Two other policemen were shot by the mob, one seriously. Altogether 58 officers were hospitalized. Three people, two blacks and a white, were convicted of the Blakelock murder, but the convictions were overturned on appeal. To date nobody has been successfully prosecuted for Officer Blakelock's murder. It's a sorry tale, made sorrier by the fact that the Brits never should have imported their own U.S.-style race problem. There was in fact strong public opposition to the mass settlement of blacks; but cheap labor lobbies, race guilt, and post-imperial sentimentality won the day, and a huge social problem was planted where there was none before. Less than three percent of Britons today are black, but blacks are ten percent of inmates in British prisons. Well, those were the Tottenham Riots of 1985. As I said, Oliver Letwin was a junior policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the time. Now, Britain has a 30-year rule for the release of government papers not critical to national security — minutes of cabinet meetings and suchlike. So internal government papers relating to the Tottenham Riots have just been released. Among them are some memos Oliver Letwin and a colleague sent to Mrs Thatcher. In one memo Letwin wrote, or co-wrote, quote: The root of social alienation is not poor housing, or youth "alienation," or lack of a middle class. Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale. End quote. When David Young, Mrs Thatcher's Secretary for Employment, recommended a scheme to foster entrepreneurship among blacks, Letwin pooh-poohed it, quote: David Young's new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade. End quote. He was likewise skeptical of Jack-Kemp-style proposals to lift up the inner city ghettos by throwing money at them. Quote: Riots, criminality, and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral characters remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder. End quote. Letwin was of course correct on all these points. In matters of race, however, Britain has retreated ever deeper into lies and enstupidation this past thirty years. Letwin's 1985 truthful, sensible remarks are considered unspeakably shocking nowadays. How dare he suggest that black mob violence was caused by anything other than "racism" — by the malice of white people? All the muckety-mucks of racial correctness have piled on him. To pick a few descriptors at random: quote "breathtaking," quote "disgusting and appalling … positively Victorian," quote "utterly, utterly out of touch," quote "bordering on criminality," and so on. You can write this stuff for yourself. Heck, a computer could write it. Come to think of it, a computer probably did write it. Oliver Letwin has groveled and apologized, I am sorry to say. None of these professional political hacks has an inch of backbone. There isn't much backbone in Britain at all nowadays, in fact. Seventy-five years ago the Brits stood alone, brave and unafraid, against Hitler's bomber fleets and Panzer divisions. Nowadays they won't even take a stand against alien troublemakers, criminals, and race hustlers. To judge by the coverage this sad little story has been getting in the British press, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the PC commissars and black supremacists ordered the whole nation to apologize for Letwin's remarks. If they did, the Brits would most likely comply. They would apologize on the beaches, they would apologize on the landing grounds, they would apologize in the fields and in the streets, they would apologize in the hills … Poor, poor old Britain. Why did you do this to yourselves? Why? Why? |
05 — The unbearable strangeness of white ethnomasochism. What I've been talking about here, this wilful self-enstupidation regarding race, isn't just deplorable and depressing, it's also, as I see it, deeply strange. Again and again, when I'm reading the words of people who've succumbed to the white race guilt scam, my reaction is: "WHA?" Here's an example of what I mean. The New York Times has been running a series titled "Race in America: Your Stories." It features a lot of short pieces, two or three hundred words each, sent in by readers, each supposed to show some aspect of race in America. (At any rate, the Times tells us these pieces come from readers. Given the miasma of lies and dishonesty that permeates everything to do with race, it's perfectly possible that these pieces were all written by staffers at the Times, as was said to be the case with readers' letters in Penthouse magazine, and as actually was the case in at least one British tabloid. I leave that to your judgment. The main point is not affected.) Here is the submission by a lady identified as Elizabeth E. I'm just going to read you the whole thing, beginning to end, no editing. Ready? Here we go. Quote: I'm a white female, 63 years old. When I was 11 years old, I was pinned down and raped by a young black man, a stranger, while I was playing in a public park in suburban Pittsburgh. I didn't tell anyone until I was in treatment for alcoholism at age 36. End quote. WHA? You see what I mean about strange? It's not just me, is it? I mean, is that strange, or what? Suppose I had not read out that last sentence, but instead just asked you to guess it. You might have guessed: Now I live as far away from blacks as I can get, and try to never interact with them. Or perhaps you might have guessed: I never go anywhere nowadays without my Glock 9mm Compact. You might even have gone out on a limb and guessed: Let's bring back segregation and lynching! Would you ever, in a hundred years, given what had gone before, would you ever have guessed the actual last sentence, as printed in The New York Times? Here it is again, quote: I think we should make clear apologies and reparations to the descendents of slaves in this country. There is a sickness here, a pathology, that I'd like to understand. At present I don't understand it at all. It's strange to me: weirdly, deeply strange. |
06 — The post-post-colonial world. It's not all darkness out there, mind. There are pockets of sanity in the civilized world. The East Asian nations, as I pointed out in a previous segment, would never think of doing to themselves what we West European and settler nations are doing to ourselves. In Eastern Europe, too, there is resistance to multiculturalism. Never mind Cultural Marxism: East Europeans have bitter decades-long experience of actual Marxism. They know the score. In Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic today there are governments in power that believe their first responsibility is to uphold the interests of their own people — of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians. I know, it sounds incredible, but it's true. I'm going to offer you some evidence. First, though, I'm going to grumble. Here's my grumble. Why are we still saying "The Czech Republic"? That's what we're supposed to say, "The Czech Republic." It's what the country calls itself in English-language promotional materials. It's what the State Department calls it. It's what the CIA calls it. It's what the U.N. calls it. Why? Is there some other Czech nation it's differentiating itself from, like back when Taiwan was officially "the Republic of China" and mainland China was "the People's Republic of China"? Is there a Czech People's Republic? A Czech Federation? A Czech Kingdom? A Czech Despotism? A Czech Empire? When Czechoslovakia broke up 23 years ago last week — when the Czechs decided they'd prefer to be governed by Czechs and the Slovaks by Slovaks — the Slovaks set up Slovakia and the Czechs set up … the Czech Republic. Why not just "Czechia"? It's petty, I know, but it annoys me. I'm going to take a stand here. Henceforth Radio Derb will refer to the homeland of the Czechs as Czechia. With the awesome power of Radio Derb bestriding the opinion airwaves like a Colossus, I am confident that with us behind it, this usage will soon sweep the world. OK, end of grumble. Here's my evidence for a pocket of demographic sanity in Eastern Europe. The President of Czechia, a bloke named Miloš Zeman, broadcast a Christmas message to the Czechs. Edited extracts, quotes: I am deeply convinced that what we are facing is an organized invasion, and not the spontaneous movement of migrants. End quote. Why don't West European leaders speak like that? Why don't ours? I guess we know the answer: decades of soft living and indoctrination in false ideas. In fairness to the migrants, I raise again the topic of post-post-colonial despair. There was colonialism, when the backward, sparsely-populated regions of the world lived under European overlords. The colonized took spiritual support from their traditional religions. Then there was post-colonialism, when the old white empires withdrew and the subject populations got nations of their own. Post-colonialism was optimistic, and sometimes vengeful. Young people turned away from traditional religions to new, secular pseudo-religions: in the Arab world, Ba'athism, elsewhere, Marxism. Now, governed by their own people, with the dusty remnants of traditionalism cast aside, why (the thinking went) why should not these places rise to heights of power and influence, create and invent, and perhaps pay back the Europeans for the indignities of colonialism? But those sparse populations, thanks to Western medicine, ballooned. It turned out that the arts of rational government are not of the kind you can pick up by imitation. The very concept of a nation was a poor fit for low-trust societies divided by tribe, religion, caste. Nothing was created, nothing was invented. So now we find ourselves in post-post-colonialism, an era of despair. Among Muslims, millions have returned to the mosque for spiritual consolation. Tens of millions in Africa and the Middle East have come to the conclusion — a true conclusion, it seems to me — that there is no hope of a decent life under rule by their own people. To live well, you need to somehow get yourself to a First World country. That's the answer to President Zeman's question. Why don't the young men of these places fight to establish modern, rational governments? Because they know it's hopeless, that's why. They know they'd just end up with just another corrupt tribal autocracy. And they're right. The Gods of modernization have failed these peoples. As despair strengthens its grip, the tens of millions will become hundreds of millions — numbers far beyond what the First World can absorb. It's hard on the migrants, I do understand; but if civilization is to survive, the only possible response any First World nation can make to post-post-colonial despair is the one made by President Zeman in his Christmas message:
I'm not smug or happy about it, truly I'm not; but google "lifeboat ethics." |
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: Thin end of the wedge department. You remember the fuss about the Confederate battle flag — a hateful symbol of racism, oppression, white supremacy, and so on? Well, that may have been the thin end of a mighty wedge. Headline from the Independent, a London broadsheet newspaper, quote: Oxford law student Ntokozo Qwabe calls for universities to ban French flag after Paris attacks, comparing it to "Nazi flag". Writing on Facebook, Mr Qwabe targeted those Facebook users who, following the Muslim attacks in Paris, changed their Facebook profile pictures to the French flag. Quote from him, as written: You can miss me with the buffoonery of changing Facebook profile pictures to violent imperial flags & hashtaging [sic] "prayers for Paris" I will silently pretend to but not kneel to carry out. End quote. Mr Qwabe went on to call the French flag a, quote, "violent symbol" that should be banned from college campuses. Mr Qwabe is a native of South Africa. He is studying for the prestigious Bachelor of Civil Laws degree at Oxford University — on, it has turned out, a Rhodes Scholarship, which pays his airfare and college fees and gives him $20,000 a year pocket money. The Rhodes Scholarship fund was established by Cecil Rhodes, a colonial-era entrepreneur who, among other achievements, founded the prosperous and successful state of Rhodesia, nowadays the black-ruled basket case police state of Zimbabwe. Somewhere in England there is a young white man who can write grammatical English and who would benefit, and benefit his own nation, by being admitted to the Bachelor of Civil Laws degree. Somewhere in South Africa there's a bunch of goats that need herding, and I know just the man for the job. Item: A Darwin award here. That is an award seriously stupid people get for removing themselves from the gene pool. The awardee here is from Munster in Western Germany. His name hasn't been released; I'll just refer to him randomly as Herman, Herman the German. Herman died at a hospital in Schoeppingen near the German-Dutch border on Christmas Day. Two of his friends had brought him to the hospital with a serious head wound. They said he'd had a fall, but hospital staff were suspicious and notified the Polizei. It turned out the three men had conspired to steal the money from a roadside condom dispenser. They used explosive, blowing the dispenser apart. Herman had taken shelter in the getaway car; but he'd left the car door open and was hit by a flying steel shard. Memo to other males who seek to end their genomic line: Just use condoms in the normal way. You don't need to blow up a whole dispenser-full. Item: A sad Christmas for some American families. Six of our servicemen were killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. This comes along with news that the Taliban are gaining strength in that country. Our Defense Secretary Ashton Carter conceded this earlier in December, in a speech he made while visiting Afghanistan. Quote: The Taliban's advances in some parts of the country, even if only temporary, underscore that this is a tough fight, and it's far from over. End quote. Excuse me: "far from over"? We've been dithering around in that worthless, godforsaken country for fourteen years, and it's "far from over"? We have ten thousand troops stationed there, and it's "far from over"? What else would the SecDef like to tell us: that there's light at the end of the tunnel? We had a legitimate beef with the Taliban fourteen years ago. They had hosted and supplied the Al Qaeda group that carried out 9/11. We had every right to go in there, smash everything the Taliban own, and kill their people until we got tired of it. And then, go home. When Barack Obama got elected President I took what consolation I could find in the hope that Obama, who seemed to be of lefty-pacifist inclinations, would at least end the stupid missionary wars that the fool George W. Bush had got us embroiled in. Vain are the hopes of mortal men! Obama turned out to be too weak and stupid to cut our losses. Instead of deep-sixing the Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney evangelical mission, he doubled down on it. Six American families paid the price this Christmas. God damn these fool politicians to hell. |
08 — Signoff. That's it for our first podcast of the year, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening; and before we turn away from the sadder side of the season, let's please spare a thought for those who lost their homes, and in eleven cases their lives, in the tornadoes that struck Texas last Saturday. The two afflicted counties, Garland County and Collin County, both have web pages advising how to make donations for relief; just google the county name and "tornado relief" in quotes. And now to the new year when, I don't think it's too fanciful to hope, our country, perhaps our entire civiliztion, may at last begin to turn away from futile wars and suicidal population policies. Onward and upward: Excelsior!. Take it away, mate. |
[Music clip: Peter Dawson singing "Auld Lang Syne."]