»  Radio Derb — Transcript

        Friday, June 23rd, 2017

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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, piano version]

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your indignantly genial host John Derbyshire, here with bits and pieces from the week's news to instruct you, entertain you, and rectify your pronouns.

You don't think your pronouns need rectifying? Stick around. First, though, a brief awards ceremony.

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02 — A glimpse of the Goodwhite id.     This week I'm launching a new Radio Derb award: the Journalist Exposing His Id award, the JEHI for short: J-E-H-I for "Journalist Exposing His Id."

For political correctness, I suppose it should be "His or Her Id," or possibly "His, Her, or Xer Id" … I can't keep up. The hell with political correctness; it's the JEHI award.

The JEHI award goes to whichever journalist unwittingly, unintentionally exposes to the world his darkest innermost drives and hostilities.

The winner for this week is … the envelope, please … thank you … the winner of this week's JEHI award is Bret Stephens, for his June 16th opinion column in the New York Times. What's that you say? June 16th was last week? Yeah, yeah, everybody's a critic.

Mr Stephens' column argued for mass deportation of Americans, actual quote, "whose families have been in this country for a few generations." Like Jeb Bush — remember Jeb Bush? — Bret Stephens thinks that immigrants are a much better class of person than legacy Americans.

Further quote:

The United States has too many people who don't work hard, don't believe in God, don't contribute much to society and don't appreciate the greatness of the American system.

They need to return whence they came.

End quote.

Stephens goes on to note that nonimmigrants are incarcerated at multiples of the rate for immigrants, that scholarly awards for science and engineering go disproportionately to young immigrants, that juvenile delinquency and out-of-wedlock teen birth rates are higher among nonimmgrants than among immigrants, that nonimmigrants are more pious, and so on.

Hmm. Incarceration? Falling short in science awards? Out-of-wedlock teen birth rates? Just which subset of the U.S. population comes most naturally to mind in those contexts? Just exactly which nonimmigrants are you talking about, Kemosabe?

Why wasn't Bret Stephens widely denounced for hateful racist white supremacy and made the subject of a proper, formal Two Minutes Hate?

Possible answer: He's an open-borders Jewish liberal writing for the New York Times. You can be Jewish and get denounced as a racist: Michael Savage could tell you about that. Michael doesn't want open borders, though; and the only place he appears in the New York Times is on their bestseller lists.

Bret Stephens, by contrast, is so loaded up with Goodwhite cred, no-one would dare call him racist.

Further down the article he tells us he's just kidding, quote:

I'm jesting about deporting "real Americans" en masse. (Who would take them in, anyway?) But then the threat of mass deportations has been no joke with this administration.

End quote.

So it's a sort of "How would you like it?" piece. Our government, by way of enforcing the people's laws on entry and settlement, is deporting illegal aliens, as it should. Yet these illegals, according to Bret Stephens, are better than Americans, quote, "whose families have been in this country for a few generations." How would they like it if we deported them? — that's the subtext Stephens is striving for.

To a reader who is woke — that's the currently fashionable term, isn't it? "woke" — to a reader who is woke to the nature of the Cold Civil War, what Bret Stephens' column actually offers is a glimpse into the Goodwhite id.

For example: It never occurs to Stephens to think that his piece could be read as calling for the deportation of blacks — the subset of our population that most naturally comes to my mind in the context of high rates of incarceration and out-of-wedlock teen births and low rates of scholarly achievement in the sciences. It doesn't occur to him, and it doesn't occur to his readers, to judge by the comment thread on his article.

Why not? Because, as I keep telling you, this is the Cold Civil War: two big blocs of white people who hate each other. Blacks are irrelevant. Bret Stephens expects us to understand — and his readers apparently do understand — that he's calling for the deportation of Badwhites. Blacks? Meh.

On Bret Stephens' side of the national conversation, all the passion, all the anger, all the hatred, is directed at those lazy, ignorant, useless whites out there in Flyover-stan, who have the impertinence to think they have some kind of title or claim to the nation that they and their parents and grandparents grew up in, paid taxes to, often fought and died for. What a nerve they have! And then they vote in this Donald Trump character, who doesn't know the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork!

I'm sure Bret Stephens has black colleagues. Probably he has black friends he socializes with. I bet he's thought about blacks and their problems, probably written about them. That's all in the cerebral cortex, though. Down there in the id, in the reptilian brain stem, blacks occupy no space at all. Down there are only Bret's people, the Goodwhites, striving to maintain their mastery over us Badwhites.

On reflection I may change the title of this new award. Instead of calling it the Journalist Exposing His Id award, perhaps I'll call it the Making Life Difficult for Alt-Right Anti-Anti-Semites award.

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03 — Norks kill American, China smiles.     Otto Warmbier died on Monday in a Cincinnati hospital, aged 22.

Otto was from a small town in Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. After graduating high school he went off to study economics and commerce at the University of Virginia.

In his third year at the University, in late 2015, he was scheduled to go on a study-abroad program in Hong Kong. Being I guess an adventurous sort, Otto decided to take in North Korea on his way to Hong Kong. He signed up with Young Pioneer Tours, a company based in China that specializes in tours to North Korea.

It was a three-night trip: nights of December 30th 2015, December 31st 2015, and January 1st 2016. As the tour group was gathered to leave at Pyongyang International Airport on January 2nd, Otto was arrested and taken away.

The Nork authorities said he had taken a propaganda poster from a staff-only area of the Pyongyang hotel the group stayed at. Otto was not seen again until late February, when he gave a tearful statement at his show trial, televised on Nork TV. He was sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

That was pretty much it until last week, when Otto was suddenly released, June 13th. He was in a bad way, barely conscious and unable to speak. He died a week later. He apparently had severe brain damage, consistent with prolonged oxygen deprivation, but no-one can say much more than that.

The first thing I'll say about this story is that I won't listen to any criticism of Otto Warmbier for going to North Korea. At his age, I'd have wanted to go to North Korea, too. Matter of fact, at his age I did the equivalent thing: I took a two-week vacation behind the Iron Curtain.

That was 1964, at the height of the Cold War. My coevals were all taking summer vacations hitch-hiking to the Mediterranean, to Spain or Greece. I decided to do the opposite thing, so I hitch-hiked to the Black Sea. It was a heck of a job to get visas for the Iron Curtain countries, but I found a specialist travel agent in London who'd get them for you — just as Otto Warmbier found this Young Pioneer outfit to get him into North Korea.

Young people of spirit and imagination will do wacky, dangerous things like that. When they stop doing them, you can write an epitaph for the human race.

And no, 1964 Hungary wasn't as crazily evil as 2015 North Korea. I didn't know that, though — didn't really know anything about the place — and it was pretty bad.

So no criticism of Otto Warmbier from this quarter.

Who should we criticize? Well, the first year plus three weeks of Otto's captivity took place during the Obama administration. What were they doing to help one of our citizens in trouble with a crazy regime? Fifteen years hard labor for stealing a poster? Our government didn't have anything to say about it?

Here, though, you get into some deep tangled weeds. When a citizen of country A gets into legal trouble in country B, all sorts of things are in play. Did the Norks think that having an American in captivity would give them some insurance against hostile acts by us against them? Was the Obama State Department keeping shtum about Otto while they negotiated some deal for his release, fearing that making a big public story out of it might scupper the deal? Was Kim Jong-un just poking a fat finger in Uncle Sam's eye for the fun of it, secure in the belief that we are a paper tiger?

I don't know. My default position on North Korea is to withdraw our WW2 garrisons from that region and leave them to sort out their own problems among themselves — the Koreas, Japan, China, and Russia. WW2 ended a lifetime ago, for crying out loud.

The U.S.A. is a sovereign nation, though, and our government has responsibiities towards us, the citizens. That includes the responsibility to do what they can for U.S. citizens in trouble in other jurisdictions, and the responsibility to punish countries that grossly abuse our citizens — by, for example, sentencing them to fifteen years hard labor for a harmless student prank.

You tug on Superman's cape, you pay a price. Remember the Barbary Pirates?

So I want to see some punishment here.

The Trump administration seems to be moving towards some kind of action on North Korea anyway. They don't seem inclined towards a Derbish policy, as just stated: pull our guys out and let Northeast Asia solve its own problems. So what is our North Korea policy?

We were given heavy hints back in April, after President Trump's Mar-a-Lago meeting with ChiCom Godfather Xi Jinping, we were told that China was on board with more punitive economic sanctions against the Norks. We and the ChiComs would be working together to contain and restrain Kim. That was the impression we were given.

Now, two months on, the ChiComs are cheerfully violating those economic sanctions. If they did make any promises at Mar-a-Lago, they were just lying — playing the game that ancient masters of Chinese statecraft called "soothing the barbarians." Give 'em a smile, say some pleasant words, then go ahead with what you were going to do anyway. When the barbarians are weak, irresolute, and divided, this can work for a surprisingly long time.

We don't have to put up with this. China's economy is totally dependent on selling stuff to Americans. They are the weak partner in our relationship. North Korea's a basket case, for all their blustering with nukes and missiles. We could, for example, destroy all their seagoing vessels in a couple of hours, down to the last fishing boat. Destroying their air force would take a bit longer — possibly an entire afternoon.

I don't know what our administration plans to do to punish North Korea for the death of Otto Warmbier, but I sure hope they're planning to do something.

And Mr President: When Xi Jinping gives you that warm smile of his, keep a tight hold on your wallet.

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04 — The Terror Channel.     The war between Muslims and infidels being played out on the streets of Western cities is not so cold. There's something to report almost daily now. I logged four incidents this week: Two on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday.

There was terrorism elsewhere, too, of course. Muslim fanatics attacked a tourist resort in Mali last Sunday, killing four or five people, it's not clear. But hey, Mali. If you care about Mali, go read about it. I care about the civilized world.

It's getting to be so that any news outlet needs to just include a regular slot for these events, like the weather report. If things get any worse, some entrepreneur might start an entire cable TV channel — you know, like the Weather Channel. He could call it the Terror Channel.

Well, here's this week's terror report.

London, Monday, shortly after midnight local time.  Darren Osborne, no known religious affiliation, a middle-aged Welshman, drove a van into a crowd of Muslims outside a mosque in north London. One Muslim died in the attack and nine were hospitalized. Witnesses quoted Osborne on the scene saying he wanted to "kill all Muslims."

Paris, Monday afternoon.  A few hours after the London attack, on Monday afternoon, Adam Djaziri, Muslim, of Tunisian origin, deliberately crashed his car into the lead car of a police convoy on the Champs Elysées boulevard. The car was full of guns and explosives. It did in fact explode after the impact, killing Mr Djaziri but no-one else.

Brussels, Tuesday evening.  Oussama Zariouh, Muslim, a Moroccan national resident in Belgium, tried but failed to blow himself and many other people up at the main railroad station. The attempt failed; his bomb only caught fire. Distraught at his failure, Zariouh ran back and forth on the station platform until he encountered a soldier. He shouted "Allahu akbar!" at the soldier, who thereupon shot him dead. Zariouh's bomb did later explode, but no-one was hurt.

Flint, Michigan, Wednesday morning.  Amor Ftouhi, Muslim, a Canadian citizen born in Tunisia, stabbed a member of the Flint airport police force while shouting "Allahu akbar!" Ftouhi gave his motive as hatred of the U.S.A. He is in custody; the cop is recovering in hospital.

That's the butcher's bill for this week. I don't have anything new to say about the attacks themselves, nor about the weather. The reactions to the attacks have been interesting, though.

That first attack, the one in London where a non-Muslim drove his van into a crowd of Muslims, drew some crowing from out here on the Alt Right. "It's started!" people were saying. Occidental Dissent ran the story under the headline When the Saxon Began to Hate.

That's a misquote from Kipling, who in reference to WW1 wrote a poem with the refrain, "When the English began to hate." Kipling did not write, "When the Saxons began to hate." It would have been odd if he did, since Saxons are Germans, natives of Saxony. In WW1, Saxons were the enemy, along of course with Bavarians, Swabians, Prussians, Silesians, and other Germans.

And while I'm picking nits, I note that the guy who drove the van was Welsh. A Welshman will not thank you for calling him English, and he'll be plain baffled if you call him a Saxon.

All that aside, this talk about the Cold Civil War turning hot is unconvincing. Real civil wars turn on sectionalism — big geographical territories at loggerheads with each other. That's not the case, either in Britain or the U.S.A. Sure, we have red states and blue states; but the red states are 52 percent red and the blue states are 53 percent blue. We don't have sections. If you cut down to the county level you can get sectionalism: Professor Michael Hart has written a book about that. Much as I admire Prof Hart and his work, I think this is a stretch.

Looking at the toll from our last civil war, I hope to God we don't have another one. For sure we don't need one. What we need is sane immigration policies, that's all.

Comment from the CultMarx multiculturalists in the mainstream media gravitated towards moral equivalence on the London van attack. Sample from the New York Times, June 20th, edited quote:

Brendan Cox, whose wife, Jo Cox, a member of Parliament, was shot and killed [last year] by a right-wing extremist, urged the country to fight hateful ideology against Muslims, just as much as it was fighting Islamist militancy.

"When islamist terrorists attack we rightly seek out hate preachers who spur them on," Mr Cox wrote on Twitter. "We must do the same to those who peddle Islamophobia" …

Said Shiraz Kothia of the London Muslim Community Forum, "We've got the right-wing extremists and we've got the Muslim extremists."

End quote.

For the full moral-equivalence shtik, I recommend the opinion column published at MailOnline June 19th. The writer is Piers Morgan, who is some kind of bigfoot mainstream opinion journalist over there. The headline of the piece says it all, quote: Finsbury Park [that's where the mosque was] is just what ISIS wants. It's what the Far Right Islamophobes want. And it's up to the rest of us to fight the hate and lies from both.

The problem with this moral equivalence is that the morals aren't equivalent.

Suppose, for example, that this violence between Muslims and natives got so bad, life in Britain became intolerable for Muslims. What could they do? Why, they could go back to the Muslim countries that they or their parents came from. I seriously doubt the Brits would try to stop them.

Now suppose that things got so bad, life in Britain became intolerable for the natives. What could they do? Where could they go?

There isn't any English-speaking country not afflicted with mass Third World immigration. There are hardly any white countries, though there are a few — I'll speak about that in my next segment.

Moral equivalence is a crock. On the one side here you have people whose ancestors have lived for centuries in the same country, who resent foreigners coming in by the hundreds of thousands, taking over their towns and demanding the natives accommodate their customs and religion. On the other side you have those foreigners.

The two things are not equivalent. With no respect at all to Piers Morgan, the problem here is not some generalized "hate," equally immoral among both people who are having their country taken away and the people who are taking it. The problem is insane levels of mass Muslim settlement.

Britain never needed Muslims, and it was criminally foolish of the Brits to allow Muslim settlement in such numbers. As we say out here on the Alt Right: That's what separate countries are for.

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05 — Tillerson ♥ Soros.     Did you know that our President will be visiting Poland next month?

Purpose of the trip, according to the White House handout, is to, quote, "reaffirm America's steadfast commitment to one of our closest European allies and emphasize the administration's priority of strengthening NATO's collective defense," end quote.

Sad face here at the Radio Derb microphone, recalling the tingle that went up my leg in last year's election campaign when Trump said that NATO is obsolete — which of course it is.

Well, he might learn something in Poland. He might, for example, learn that, as VDARE.com's James Kirkpatrick explained back in March, nationalist politics with immigration oriented towards the interests of the historic population is not incompatible with a single-payer healthcare system.

He might also learn how little of an issue Muslim terrorism — or for that matter, anti-Muslim terrorism — is in a country that severely restricts settlement of Muslims. Amazing!

He might also learn that the people and government of Poland are resolute in their determination to resist mass Muslim settlement despite efforts by the European Union to punish them for their resistance.

From the London Guardian, June 13th, with a hat tip to the indefatigable Ann Corcoran at Refugee Resettlement Watch, quote:

The European commission has launched a legal case against Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic for refusing to take in refugees, intensifying a bitter feud within the bloc about how to deal with migration.

The Eurosceptic governments in Poland and Hungary have refused to take in anyone under a plan agreed by a majority of EU leaders in 2015 to relocate migrants from frontline states Italy and Greece to help ease their burden. The Czech Republic initially accepted 12 people but has since said it would not welcome more.

End quote.

This past week there has in fact been considerable stiffening of spines among European countries on entry of illegal aliens — extremely few of whom are refugees in the dictionary sense.

This Monday there was a meeting in Prague, the capital of Czechia, attended by defense officials from six central European countries: Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Czechia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Quote from the AP report on the meeting, quote:

Among the group's goals is that all migrants who want to apply for asylum in EU countries have to do it in centers outside the bloc.

End quote.

Three of those countries — Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia — already belong to the Visegrad Group, a/k/a/ the Visegrad Four, Poland making up the four in that group. The Visegrad Group, which has been around for 26 years, is also strongly nationalist, as Radio Derb reported last year.

So from Gdansk on the windswept Baltic to Dubrovnik on the balmy Adriatic, there is a solid wall of nations down through eastern, central, and southeastern Europe that seem determined to learn from the multicultural follies destroying Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Is it too much to hope that our President, on his visit to Poland, will take note of this, and transmit his thoughts about it to the State Department?

Well, we can hope. Whatever the state of our President's mind on these issues, the State Department is clueless.

Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been moving legislation to expose and restrain the activities of George Soros, the biggest funder of multicultural and open-borders lobbies all over Europe, and indeed here too.

This legislation is reasonable and necessary; but it's modeled on laws passed by the Putin government in Russia. Since the Trump administration is spooked by anything to do with Russia, even at one or two removes, our State Department is leaning on Orbán to scrap these laws.

That would be a big win for Soros. Personally I didn't vote for Donald Trump in hopes of strengthening George Soros's nation-killing program.

Let's hope our President comes back from Poland wiser about what's happening over there, and which side of it his State Department is on.

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06 — Revolution lite.     No political event of the past 500 years was as important as the French Revolution. It taught us everything we need to know about revolutions.

It taught us, for example, that the overthrow of cruelty and intolerance can lead very quickly to new and worse forms of cruelty and intolerance.

It taught us that a revolution eats its children; although, with Robespierre and Marat in mind, I've always thought that it would be more to the point to say "eats its parents."

It taught us that with skill and luck, and a good measure of cynicism, a person who prospered before the revolution can prosper after it; Talleyrand is the poster boy here.

And so on. Well, the populist revolutions of our own time are nothing like as dramatic and bloody as that original one, thank goodness, but some of the same factors are at work.

These thoughts bubbled up after reading, in quick succession: first, an opinion column by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, then second, a news story about the parliamentary elections in France that concluded last Sunday.

Let's take John Podhoretz first. No, I'm not a fan of the guy, any more than he is of me. He's a limousine liberal on race — won't hear a word against blacks, but makes sure he keeps himself well insulated from them. He's a Bret Stephens-level open-borders fanatic and an invade-the-world, invite-the-world neocon. From my one personal encounter with him I took away the strong impression of a guy who really really likes the sound of his own voice.

So no, I'm far from being a John Podhoretz fan, and disagreed with the opinion piece that stirred my thoughts. You can have your thoughts stirred without agreeing, right?

The title of the piece was: Why electing inexperienced politicians like Trump is backfiring. It's decorated with pictures of France's Emmanuel Macron, America's Donald Trump, and Britain's Jeremy Corbyn, the crazy old commie who almost unseated Prime Minister Theresa May in the election over there the week before last.

The gist of Podhoretz's column is that politics is a profession, like doctoring, that you can only master over a long career of total immersion. By forgetting that, voters in America and France, and very nearly in Britain, put their nations into the hands of bumbling amateurs.

Sample quote:

The startling power shifts of the last year are not revolutionary, but they do constitute a rare voter revolt. And the revolt isn't against bad policies. It's a revolt against the very idea of the politician as a professional who has to master his trade like any other professional …

In the case of both Macron and Trump, the highest elective posts in their countries have been converted into entry-level positions. Neither had ever stood for office before. Think about this. You wouldn't take your car to a repair shop whose proprietor had never even so much as changed the oil, but in the second decade of the 21st century, people have felt amazingly free to hand the levers of power and the nuclear football to someone who doesn't even know what the nuclear triad is.

End quote.

Podhoretz's destination here is to sneer at President Trump, who of course he despises. Doesn't he have kind of a point, though? Modern government is awfully complex. Is it really smart to bring in someone that has no experience with it?

My answer would be that whether it's smart or not, it needs doing. Put it another way: For a nation's political health, a revolution now and then is essential. No, not a chaotic, bloody, vengeful, turn-the-world-upside-down revolution, but a brisk and ruthless cleaning-out of the stables — or, if you want a different metaphor, a draining of the swamp.

It's the dialectic: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Inexperienced people come in, and there are problems. They screw up a few things.

But then, if it's all seasoned professionals, politicians-for-life, who've never done anything else, the system gets ossified and seizes up, and nothing much gets done. You want a caste of career professional politicians running everything? Two words: Imperial China.

Podhoretz's position is actually un-American. The founders' ideal was the public-spirited Cincinnatus type, who rode in from his farm, served as administrator for a few years, then returned to his farm. If government is too complex to be directed by a capable mature citizen, a Cincinnatus, then it's too complex, period, and some swamp-draining needs doing.

The electorate in its collective wisdom understands this. Hence Trump; hence Macron.

Macron takes us back to where this segment began, to France. In these parliamentary elections whose final run-offs were held last Sunday, Emmanuel Macron did extraordinarily well. His party, which he invented just last year, ended up with 308 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, nineteen seats more than he needed for an absolute majority.

The big old center-left and center-right parties were crushed. Marine Le Pen's National Front won nine seats — better than the two they had in the last parliament, but a poor result set against Ms Le Pen's near-success in the presidential election last month.

And as green as he may be, Emmanuel Macron has at least learned the essential political skill of stealing your opponent's clothes. In an interview with the London Guardian this week, Macron showed a glimpse of nationalist ankle. He said the rules on freedom of movement need tightening up and asylum, refugee and migration policy must be, quote, "profoundly reformed." Zut alors!

So: a revolution in France. No tumbrils, no guillotines, no blood, no Committee of Public Safety; just, with luck, a cleaning of the stables, a draining of the swamp.

Revolution lite. We had our revolution, now they've had theirs. Who said history doesn't repeat itself? Vive la France! [Clipthe Marseillaise.]

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07 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Talking about government seizing up, here's a case: the state of Illinois. The Land of Lincoln is heading into its third year without a budget. The Governor gave it as his opinion that, quote, "We're like a banana republic. We can't manage our money." End quote.

The politicians are of course to blame. It's their job to pass a budget. Both chambers of the state legislature are controlled by Democrats, and there are no term limits. The natural result is that public-employee unions have been pulling the strings for years, winning extravagant benefits for their members in return for block votes.

Another problem is Chicago. I don't know Illinois, but people who do tell me that the state is very nice — Midwestern Nice, that is — except for Chicago, which is a putrid sink of corruption and waste.

Chicago Tribune reporter John Kass has caused a stir by suggesting that the solution is to just dissolve Illinois. Break it up, he says, and distribute its parts to adjacent states: Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, and Indiana.

That's all very well, except that none of those states, if they had any sense, would want to take Chicago.

My suggestion would be: Leave Illinois as it is, but expel Chicago from the Union. Other benefits aside, the national homicide statistics would look a lot better.

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Item:  I mentioned limousine liberals back there somewhere. Here's a whole nest of them: the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

That's where there was that terrible fire last week, when a whole residential tower block went up in flames. The survivors of that fire, mostly poor Third World people, are now homeless.

Well, Kensington & Chelsea is a typical Western big-city district with two kinds of people in it: rich, and poor. As Mark Steyn wrote in a very good angry June 16th column, today's London is, quote, "increasingly a city for the super-rich, and the poor who serve them … Or come to serve them, but wind up on welfare as aunts and cousins make their way to join them." End quote.

So the borough had the idea to rehouse these homeless Mohammeds and Fatimas in a luxury apartment block two miles south of the one that burned.

Apartments in this block are listed on the market for between two million and eleven million dollars. People who've paid those kinds of prices to live in the block are not thrilled that they'll be sharing the place — including its swimming pool, sauna, cinema and gym — with welfare cases off the boat from Somalia and Albania.

You can see their point, but at the same time it's hard not to smile.

Look on the bright side, guys. The people moved in to these apartments will get a great lesson in capitalist entrepreneurship. They can sublet them for $5,000 a month while they move in with Uncle Ali in some slum block that hasn't gone up in flames yet.

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Item:  News here from the Friendly Giant to our North: Canada's parliament has passed a law to stop people using the wrong pronouns. To say "he" when you should say "she" — or, I suppose, "ze" — will henceforth be a hate crime for which you can be jailed, fined, and made to take anti-bias training.

Justin Trudeau, Canada's 14-year-old Prime Minister, is pleased as punch with this new law. Tweeted he, quote:

Great news: Bill C-16 has passed the Senate — making it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity or expression.

End quote … Although, wait a minute: I just said, "Tweeted he." Maybe that should be "ze," or "they." How are we, ze, they, supposed to know?

Looking at Prime Minister Trudeau's smug countenance again, I think I'll settle for "it."

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Item:  Finally, a snippet of news from Africa here.

Stella Nyanzi, an activist in Uganda, has served 33 days in a maximum-security prison for referring to that country's president Yoweri Museveni, on her Facebook page, as "a pair of buttocks."

The full Facebook quote reads as follows, quote:

That is what buttocks do. They shake, jiggle, sh** and fart. Museveni is just another pair of buttocks … Ugandans should be shocked that we allowed these buttocks to continue leading our country.

End quote.

Strong stuff; but surely well within the bounds of political vituperation. In having this lady jailed, it seems to Radio Derb that President Museveni has made a complete ass of himself.

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08 — Signoff.     That's it, ladies and gents: another week of mayhem and madness, with glimpses of Bret Stephens' id, Emmanuel Macron's ankle, and the President of Uganda's … well, never mind him.

Thank you for listening, and please be aware, if you weren't already, that the year has turned, the days now getting shorter. Also, in related news, it's time to start preparing for the solar eclipse that will cross the U.S.A. on August 21st. That is when a great celestial dog tries to eat the Sun. We need you all out there banging on pots and pans and letting off fireworks to scare the dog away.

There will of course be more from Radio Derb next week. Here's Gracie.

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[Music clip: Gracie Fields, "Sing As We Go."]