»  Radio Derb — Transcript

        Friday, December 8th, 2017

—————————

•  Play the sound file

—————————

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

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your congenitally genial host John Derbyshire, here to bring you news from far and wide, courtesy of VDARE.com.

I see the junior senator from Minnesota has resigned because of you-know-what. That's two hits Minnesota has taken in this current moral panic, the other being lugubrious radio personality Garrison Keillor.

This is a revelation to me. Not only did I not know there is sexual harassment in Minnesota, I didn't know there was sexual anything up there. I thought Minnesotans were all much too nice for that sort of thing, and procreated by fission, like amoebae.

Well, well, we live and learn. Good luck to Senator Franken in his new career, whatever it may be. My only advice to him would be not to try TV comedy; he has totally the wrong face for it.

Now to the other news. What have we got? Ah yes: the Acuckalypse!

[Permalink]

02 — Acuckalypse Not Now.     I've been rattling on for the past few weeks about what a critical date Friday, December 8th is — the day I'm recording this podcast. It's the deadline for congressional action on funding federal government operations. If Congress doesn't act to authorize spending by then, the federal government — well, big parts of it — has to suspend operations.

The threat has been, that congressional Democrats will demand mass amnesty for a huge subset of our illegal-alien population — the so-called DACA recipients — as a condition of they, the Democrats, signing on to a spending deal. The dreaded scenario was, that they'd take a stand on this, figuring the voters would blame a shutdown on the GOP and the President.

As I have argued, it's by no means clear the voters would react like that. The Democrat congressweasels, too stupid to think it through, might take their stand anyway. Then, in the nightmare scenario, the congressional GOP would cuck out and agree, and we'd have opened the door to millions of mostly Mexican and Central American unskilled immigrants via chain migration from the DACA base.

That's what I've been worrying about: Acuckalypse Now!

Well, I'm still worried, but it doesn't look as though the Big Cuck will happen today. Yesterday, Thursday, the House passed a Continuing Resolution to fund the government for another two weeks. There is no mention of amnesty in it.

That means you can take the flag pin out of December 8th on your calendar. Congress has only kicked the can down the road a couple of weeks, though. Kicking cans down the road is a thing they are rather good at: that's why the national budgeting process is so disorderly.

So keep that flag pin handy. Some time before December 22nd — that's the new deadline — matters will come to a head. Democrats really want that amnesty: It's the foundation of their future voter base. There's opposition in the GOP congressional rank and file; but the GOP leadership is bought and sold by the cheap-labor lobbies, and they'll cuck if they think they can get away with it.

So the threat of a Big Cuck still hangs over the republic. It's been pushed back a few days, that's all.

The Continuing Resolution — the one cooked up on Thursday — was apparently the fruit of a meeting at the White House that day: the President, Vice President, and Defense Secretary meeting with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders.

Looking at pictures of that meeting — goofy Paul Ryan trying not to jerk as the cheap-labor donors pull his strings, Nancy Pelosi doing her very convincing imitation of Mrs Rochester escaped from the attic, the vulpine Chuck Schumer and the strigine Mitch McConnell — looking at the pictures, I couldn't help recalling Mark Twain's observation that no American is safe when Congress is in session.

Keep your hands on your wallets this next two weeks, listeners.

[Permalink]

03 — Two cheers for Jerusalem.     Our President made news this week by formally recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and setting in motion plans to move our embassy there from Tel Aviv.

I'll register mixed feelings about that. Like George Washington and many other American statesmen, I think the ideal would be for the U.S.A. not to have any foreign policy at all. That ideal is of course unattainable, like all ideals; but by keeping it in mind, we'll save ourselves a lot of trouble interfering in affairs overseas that don't really concern us and that — as George W. Bush's Iraq War illustrated all too clearly — we don't really understand.

In so far as I give a flying falafel about foreign parts and our relations with them, which plainly isn't very far, I have a vague, generalized preference for civilization over barbarism, and for Western civilization over other varieties. I'd like to see civilization defended and barbarism kept at bay. I'm even willing to pay a modest Civilization Tax to help defend the borders of the civilized world in distant places.

All of that inclines me to be pro-Israel. Since President Trump's move pleases the Israelis, I guess I'm fine with it.

On the other side there's a case for leaving well enough alone. "Don't trouble Trouble until Trouble troubles you" is not a bad maxim. Goodness knows, we have enough issues here at home that need attending to.

You may say: "Hey, at least Trump's fulfilling a campaign promise — one that Presidential candidates of both parties have been making for ever, but that none of them had the stones to honor."

Well yay for candidates keeping campaign promises. Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, though. If I were to list them all in order of the importance to our nation of his fulfilling them (according to my opinion), the Jerusalem thing would not be number one on the list. It wouldn't even be number ten. How about the promise to seal our southern border? The promise to rescind DACA? The promise to end birthright citizenship?

In summary, I'm OK with the Jerusalem thing, just not skipping with enthusiasm.

I don't see much downside. Sure, it will stir up the Palestinian Arabs. So what? They stir up spontaneously every couple of years anyway.

And as David Goldman points out, Trump's move may hammer some reality into the Palestinians' thick heads — the reality that, because of their cultural and political backwardness, the best they can hope for is to be a poor, feeble, corrupt dictatorship next door to a prosperous, strong, constitutional republic. Which is pretty much what they are now, anyway.

And sure, the Saudis will grumble. That's just PR to the Arab street, though. The one thing every expert has told me about the Gulf Arabs is that they regard the Palestinians with contempt, as a loser people.

The Saudis' geostrategic emotions are fully engaged with Iran, Syria, Russia, and Yemen. The Palestinians are a minor nuisance they feel they have to make correct noises about from time to time.

So two cheers from me about recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Now, Mr President, can we talk about birthright citizenship?

[Permalink]

04 — Importing an overclass (1).     In last week's podcast I ventured some remarks about the Justice Department case against Harvard University for discriminating against Asian Americans. This brought in a surprising number of emails, so many I think it's worthwhile to do some follow-up commentary.

I'll take just two main points from the email bag, give over one segment to each, and return to the other points in some future podcasts.

First main point: Import an overclass? We already did that! Listeners who made this point were referring of course to the Ashkenazi Jews who poured into the U.S.A. from the 1880s to the 1920s.

Indeed; and colleges responded to second-generation Jewish academic prowess just as they are now responding to Asian-Americans. They imposed quotas.

The parallel's an obvious one. I didn't raise it last week for two reasons. One, it was too far off the main topic, which was Asian American quotas. Two, the rise and fall of the mid-20th-century Jewish quotas is a long and tangled tale — too long for a podcast segment, but very capably told by Ron Unz in the American Conservative article I mentioned last week, "The Myth of American Meritocracy."

While I'm at it, I'll tell you again that if you don't like reading long-form articles online, the essay is also on paper in Ron's book with the same title.

Ron's account is closely based on a 2005 book by Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel, title: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. I can only give a drastically brief summary here. If you want to know more, I urge you to read Ron's article. If you still want to know more, try Karabel's book, which I confess I have not read.

In very brief then: The Ivy League universities in the early years of the 20th century practiced a more or less meritocratic admissions policy, with academic merit the main consideration. The Ashkenazi immigrants of the Great Wave, however, had a mean IQ much higher than the WASP elites who ran those universities; so when Ashkenazi children came of college age, they began to swamp the admissions.

The WASP elites responded at first by imposing frank, open quotas. That caused controversy, though; so the university presidents backed off to a so-called "holistic" process — basically a subjective one that, as Ron wrote, allowed the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired by undeclared de facto quotas.

Quote from Ron:

The Jewish portion of Harvard's entering class dropped from nearly 30 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year and remained roughly static until … the Second World War.

End quote.

After the war those de facto quotas collapsed. Jews today are again at 25 percent of the student body at Ivy League universities. Since the college-age population is only 1.8 percent Jewish, that's an extraordinary over-representation. Twenty-five divided by 1.8 is almost fourteen. Given the "tail effect" you get in statistical distributions with different means, though, it probably just reflects the reality of higher mean Ashkenazi intelligence.

(An audio presentation is not the ideal place to try explaining the tail effect, but I'll give it a shot. Imagine two classic "bell curve" distributions of some statistic in some populations. Imagine the two bell curves are identical: one on a sheet of paper, one on a transparent overlay sheet. If you line them up exactly, they just look like one curve. Now shift the overlay sheet slightly to the right. Your distributions now have slightly different means.

Fix your attention on the far right-hand tails, and draw a single vertical line cutting off those tails at some point out there. The areas under the two curves east of that cutoff — that is, the numbers of individuals whose statistic exceeds that vertical line — are wildly different, the one you shifted to the right displaying a much bigger cutoff area than the other, even for just a slight shift. That slight difference in means is magnified out in the tails. That's the tail effect.)

But then the question arises: Why can elite colleges get away with admissions policies that reflect the higher mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews when they are apparently not willing to let those policies reflect the higher mean IQ of Asian Americans?

I'll offer a three-part answer. The first part relates to the breakdown of the anti-Jewish de facto quotas after WW2. What caused that?

I'll quote Ron, longish quote:

Karabel convincingly demonstrates that the collapse of the long-standing Jewish quotas in the Ivy League during the decade following World War II only occurred as a result of massive media and political pressure, pressure surely facilitated by very heavy Jewish ownership of America's major media organs, including all three television networks, eight of nine major Hollywood studios, and many of the leading newspapers, including both the New York Times and the Washington Post. By contrast, Asian-Americans today neither own nor control even a single significant media outlet, and they constitute an almost invisible minority in films, television, radio, and print. For most Americans, what the media does not report simply does not exist, and there is virtually no major media coverage of what appear to be de facto Asian quotas at our top academic institutions.

End quote.

Part Two of my answer is that Jews are white, Asians are not, and while any overclass is resented, a racially distinctive overclass is resented more than one that barely looks any different from the resenters. Antisemites know this; that's why they put out drawings of the hunch-backed, hook-nosed cartoon Jew when they want to inflame anti-Jewish feeling. It makes the Jew plainly a different race.

And for Part Three of my answer I'll just point out, as Ron does, that even under the current covert quotas, Asian Americans are enrolled at elite colleges in numbers far above their five percent share of the U.S. population. Yes, they're being held down: on a strictly meritocratic basis their numbers would be much higher yet, because of the arithmetic of those distribution tails. Still, strictly measured by demographic proportionality, they're high.

Well, as I said, it's a long and tangled story. Ron's article and Jerome Karabel's book are out there if you want all the details. I'm sure there must be other sources, too.

Main point: Yes, we were importing an overclass a hundred years ago. Elite universities dealt with the issue by fudging and chicanery, just as they are dealing with this repeat performance.

There are some key differences, though. Jews are white, which makes things easier to fudge. Also, the high IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is more verbal than visuo-spatial, leading to that dominance in the shaping of opinion that Ron wrote about.

Asian Americans, by contrast, are much more visible as a group; and their high IQ is more visuo-spatial than verbal, giving us more engineers and scientists, fewer writers, lawyers, comedians, movie and newspaper moguls.

In both cases, non-Asian gentiles get squeezed. We un-squeeze blacks and Hispanics with affirmative action, but that just squeezes white gentiles even more.

Under our current state ideology, the orthodox approach to that hovers somewhere between "Who cares?" and "Serve them right!" Whether that ideology can be sustained going forward through the 21st century, is an interesting question.

[Permalink]

05 — Importing an overclass (2).     The second point about importing an overclass that many readers wanted to discuss is that any merit-based immigration system imports an overclass.

I agree. Consider for example India. The mean IQ of that nation is 82. The mean IQ of Indians in the U.S.A., on the other hand, is 106, higher than the mean for white gentile Americans So there's an overclass we've imported … from a low-IQ population.

The same applies to Africa. The mean IQ in black Africa is 70, which is very low. Assuming a normal distribution with mean 70 and standard deviation 15, Microsoft Excel tells me that only 0.0032 percent of the population is higher than 130 IQ.

That's a teeny-tiny percent; but there are an awful lot of black Africans: 1.2 billion is the latest number I've seen. Point zero zero three two percent of 1.2 billion is 38,000. Every one of those 38,000 very-smart Africans is applying for a U.S. student visa.

Black Caribbeans are, for complicated reasons, somewhat smarter than black Africans. Add them into the mix and we're importing a small black overclass.

Is this something we should be bothered about? We-e-ell … there are contrary factors to consider.

Under the present regime of chain migration, for example, all those smart Indians and Africans can bring in their way-less-smart siblings, brides, parents, and even cousins. You could argue that long-term that evens out the mix.

There's also regression to the mean. The offspring of these high-IQ immigrants will regress towards their population mean, although not all the way to it, or else Natural Selection wouldn't work. Given the likelihood of assortative mating, in fact — smart immigrants marrying other smart people — regression all the way back to the population mean is highly improbable, even after many generations.

So no, this is not a great issue. It is an issue, though — an issue that lurks behind all the happy talk about a merit-based system of immigration.

The first time America imported an overclass, we did so accidentally. When that Great Wave of Ashkenazi Jews came in after 1881, we had only the vaguest ideas about population differentials in intelligence and personality. Psychometry as a quantitative science was just getting started.

Now we understand much more, and can make better decisions. If we import a new overclass today, we'll be doing it deliberately. We know enough to not do it.

And any overclass we import now will be nonwhite. That follows just from the balance of races in the world being much different than it was 100 years ago.

If you're a nonwhite who doesn't like white people, you are fine with that. If you're a white person living in one of the globalist-bubble districts — big coastal cities, college towns — you may think it's no big deal, we can all get along. The rest of us are shaking our heads.

Wait a minute, someone at the back of the hall has a question. Yes, Sir? … OK, for those of you who couldn't hear, the question was: "Mr Derbyshire: You are against mass immigration from south of the border because you don't want to import a low-IQ, low-human-capital underclass. And you're against merit-based immigration because you don't want to import a nonwhite overclass. So who would you let in for permanent settlement?"

To which I'll give my standard answer.

  • Spouses and dependent children of U.S. citizens.

  • Nobel Prize-level geniuses.

  • Solzhenitsyn-level distinguished nonviolent dissidents from despotic states.

  • Foreigners who've put their lives on the line to help U.S. interests.

  • A few hundred other special cases per annum — a statutory maximum of one thousand, say — considered individually.

  • Nobody else at all.

We've had the doors wide open for fifty years. Time for an assimilation break. Time for a moratorium. Not the time to raise the temperature of social discord by heaping further insults and injustices on white gentile Americans.

[Permalink]

06 — Trump hits a homer.     Last week I reported on all the gasping and swooning over President Trump's having retweeted some videos from a British nationalist party.

I reported that British Prime Minister Theresa May, jumping to the crack of the Muslim whip, had emitted a squeal of outrage. Quote from her:

On the issue of radical Islam, British Muslims are peaceful people who have been victims of acts of terror.

End quote.

Our President stepped up to that, took a swing at it, and hit it out of the park. Tweet from him, tweet:

Theresa, don't focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!

End tweet.

I thought that I, as a public service, would fill out some of the reality behind the President's rebuke; so here are some stories from British newspapers.

Headline, Daily Mail, December 5th: Head of MI5 reveals NINE terror plots have been foiled since March this year and 22 since Lee Rigby's 2013 murder.

MI5 is the approximate equivalent of the FBI. Lee Rigby was the British soldier hacked to death in a London street by two Nigerian Muslims yelling "Allahu akbar!"

Headline, BBC News, December 6th: Man remanded in custody over alleged plot to kill P[rime] M[inister]. If you read down the story it's actually two men who conspired together to kill Mrs May. Their names are Rodney Oglethwaite and Nigel Fishwick …

Just kidding there, of course. Their actual names are Naa'imur Zakariyah Rahman, aged 20, who gave his nationality as Bangladeshi-British, and Mohammad Aqib Imran, aged 21, who gave his as Pakistani-British. I have no idea which religion they adhere to, none at all.

Headline, Daily Telegraph, also December 6th: Terror suspect "urged extremists to attack Prince George at school". Prince George is Queen Elizabeth's great-grandson, four and a half years old, third in line to the throne.

The suspect here is 31-years-old Husnain Rashid, "of Nelson in Lancashire" the Telegraph tells us. A Lancashire lad, just like my own father's people! Ey oop there, Husnain, tha's got thaself in a pickle theer owreet, lad. Nowt ta be feert about, though …

Headline, Daily Express, December 7th: Terrorism arrests rise 54 percent following terror attacks in the UK. Sub-head: "Anti-terror police arrested a record 400 suspects in a year after jihadis carried out attacks in the UK."

Well, you get the idea. I'm not even trying hard here. You can scan the British news outlets any day of any week and come up with a similar list of headlines.

Britain, after decades of terminally stupid immigration policies, is addled with Muslim terrorists. Sooner or later the jihadis will get lucky, and the Brits will have a dead Prime Minister or a dead Prince.

It won't make any difference. British elites will still be bleating about how — wait a minute, let me get the quote right — "British Muslims are peaceful people who have been victims of acts of terror." British courts, when they can take a break from dealing with Husnain, Mohammed, and Naa'imur, will be handing out fines and jail sentences to actual British people who have dared to mutter an offensive word about Islam.

It's a madness: a terrible collective madness that has destroyed what was once a great country. In the larger scheme of things, though, perhaps it all has a purpose. That would be, to stand as a warning to us Americans not to go down that same deadly road, the road to national extinction.

Theresa May is a fool and a coward. Donald Trump is right to mock her. Thank you, Mr President.

[Permalink]

07 — Old Left, New Left.     Browsing through the British press for those headlines I came across this unrelated item … or perhaps it's not totally unrelated.

It speaks to one of the great political shifts of my own time: the extinction of old-style what-about-the-workers leftism, and the migration of leftists to globalist anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian lifestyle narcissism — from, in other words, actual Marxism to Cultural Marxism.

Here's the story. It's from the Daily Mail, December 2nd. Headline: Hard-left Momentum activists kick out councillor for being "too working class".

Let me explain some of that. Momentum is a CultMarx organization founded two years ago in support of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. If you look at the crowd pictures on their website you get the idea: neckbeards, cat ladies, white ethnomasochist gentry leftists, with a handful of racial minorities.

"Councillor" means an elected member of a town government, the town in this case being Sheffield, in the north of England. The councillor in this case is 27-year-old Kieran Harpham. His father Harry, who died two years ago, was an old-style socialist — a coal miner who became a Labour Party Member of Parliament.

The new gentrified Labour Party want none of that. The Momentum luvvies staged a coup and took over Mr Harpham's ward, because he was "too working class." They've replaced him with Janet Ridler, a 58-year-old historian who lives in Sheffield's toniest suburb. I've no idea who she lives there with, but five'll get ya eight she's a lesbian.

It's the story of the modern left in a nutshell. The hell with white proles and their grubby working-class concerns. Those oiks have probably never even read Foucault. Let's have a real revolution — one that will sweep away transphobia, Islamophobia, white supremacy and toxic masculinity!

The main effect of all this on a person of my generation is to stir in our breasts an affection for the old Left. I know, I know: Some of them — by no means all of them — were naïve and misguided about Soviet communism. There were thugs among them, and cynical self-promoters.

They at least knew about poverty, though, and class snobbery, and hard physical work. Most were patriots, who rallied to defend their country when it was threatened. Reading about these Momentum snowflakes — what George Orwell, who saw through it all, called "the pansy left" — I miss those old socialists.

I'm pretty sure I know what the CultMarx folk mean when they call Mr Harpham "too working class." They mean "too unapologetic about being white, male, heterosexual, and patriotic."

My advice to him at this point would be to join Britain First, the movement whose videos our President retweeted to Mrs May's outrage. He'd probably find them very congenial.

[Permalink]

08 — Camp of the saints.     If you were to ask a Momentum activist what he thinks is the main threat to Europe, I'm sure he'd tell you it's the populist and nationalist parties that are rising all over the continent.

Here is the actual threat to Europe, from a December 3rd report out of the Gatestone Institute, a conservative think tank based in New York City. Headline of report: Europe's Migrant Crisis: Millions Still to Come. Subhead: "African exodus of biblical proportions impossible to stop."

The occasion for this report was a summit meeting of European and African leaders held in the Ivory Coast (a West African nation) at the end of November. The idea of the summit was to come up with ideas to stop millions of black Africans flooding into Europe.

That subhead is actually a quote from the President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani. Here's a fuller quote from Mr Tajani, in an interview with an Italian newspaper. Quote:

Population growth, climate change, desertification, wars, famine in Somalia and Sudan. These are the factors that are forcing people to leave.

When people lose hope, they risk crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean because it is worse to stay at home, where they run enormous risks. If we don't confront this soon, we will find ourselves with millions of people on our doorstep within five years.

Today we are trying to solve a problem of a few thousand people, but we need to have a strategy for millions of people.

End quote.

The Gatestone report is rich with similar warnings. One random quote: "Between 2017 and 2050, the populations of 26 African countries are projected to expand to at least double their current size," end quote.

This is Africa we're talking about, a continent with desperately low levels of human capital, sensational fertility rates, and no tradition of orderly, consensual government.

What did the Europeans plan to do about it at this Ivory Coast summit? Throw money at it, basically. That same bloke — Mr Tajani, President of the European Parliament — has called for a "Marshall Plan for Africa" — a 48-billion-dollar long-term investment plan to, quote, "boost education and job opportunities on the continent to dissuade people from leaving."

I hope it is no very cynical asperity on my part to wonder how much of that 48 billion would end up in the Swiss bank accounts of critters like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Joseph Kabila of the Congo, the Odingas and Kenyattas of Kenya, and the rest of Africa's presidents-for-life.

Whatever the Euros offered at this summit meeting was anyway not enough. Nothing was decided. Well, not quite nothing. Of the 700,000-odd black Africans stuck in Libya since the Euros bribed the Libyan warlords to stop them from leaving, 3,800 will be repatriated back to their African countries.

That's not much, but it'll be an improvement in the life prospects of the 3,800. The Libyan warlords, to supplement the Euro bribes, have set up a brisk traffic in slaves, buying and selling these black Africans as chattel labor. Hey, you can't say Africans lack entrepreneurial skills.

It doesn't look as though that Marshall Plan is going to become a reality, though, so you can forget about a Wirtschaftswunder in the Congo.

In fact, unless the Europeans can get some serious, co-ordinated naval defenses together and drop their misplaced charity towards so-called "refugees," "asylum-seekers," and "migrants," you can forget about Europe, too.

Current population of Europe: half a billion. Current fertility rate in Europe: below replacement. Current population of Africa: 1.2 billion. Projected increase in Africa's population by 2050: 1.3 billion. That's just the increase, the surplus.

Where will they all go? Across the Mediterranean, if the Euros don't stop them.

[Permalink]

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

Imprimis:  There's another royal wedding coming up in Britain. Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles, the heir to the throne over there; Harry, who looks remarkably un-like his Dad, for reasons never discussed in the respectable media over there; Harry is to marry Megan Markle, an American divorcee.

That didn't work out too well the last time they tried it; but apparently they think it's worth another shot. Far be it from me, a mere commoner, to argue with them; so a sincere "Good Luck!" from Radio Derb to the happy couple.

And for sure it could be worse. A polling firm over there had the idea to ask Britons how they'd feel about a homosexual royal wedding. Forty-four percent said they'd be okay with it; 41 percent wouldn't, 15 percent had no opinion.

If that 44 percent shocks you, let me put in some extenuating words here. Homosexuality is by no means a new thing for the British monarchy. Several kings have been that way inclined: Edward the Second most notably, but also William Rufus (who was accused by the monkish chroniclers of introducing "oriental customs" at his court), James the First, probably Richard Lionheart, and arguably Charles the Second.

We dirty-minded schoolboys in England around 1960 were alerted to these tendencies in the monarchy by the word "favorite." We'd be studying our history textbook and learn that such-and-such a king had his judgment influenced by "favorites." That was the key word, the fuse that fired of a chorus of Beavis and Butthead-style sniggering at the back of the class. He had FAVORITES, hng hng hng hng.

So royal homosexuality is nothing new, and the Brits can to some degree be excused for their laid-back attitude here.

Wait a minute … "laid back" …? Never mind …

[Permalink]

Item:  Since this has turned out a rather Brit-o-centric edition of Radio Derb, I may as well note the passing of Christine Keeler, one of the most famous bimbos in modern British history.

Back in 1963 we learned that Britain's Defense Secretary John Profumo, 48 years old and married to a movie actress, had been having an affair with 21-year-old Ms Keeler. More or less simultaneously, Ms Keeler had been having the leg over with the Soviet Naval Attaché in London, Yevgeni Ivanov.

When rumors about all this came out, Profumo lied about it to his Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and also to the House of Commons. Then it all turned out to be incontrovertibly true, and he had to resign.

The London tabloids feasted on this for weeks. The government was shaken, and defeated in an election the following year. The very photogenic Ms Keeler was prominent in the tabloid coverage.

It ruined the poor woman's life. She did jail time for perjury, never had gainful employment again, and her two subsequent marriages both failed. Monday this week she died from COPD, aged 75.

My son, who is 22 years old, asked me the other day why, since I'm an opinion journalist, I don't bother much with retail politics. I tried to explain to him that having been a spectator to the Profumo scandal in my salad days, and then Watergate ten years later, my enthusiasm for political shenanegins was pretty much burned out before I turned forty.

After a few decades, those things come to look like epiphenomena. The real stuff, the stuff that keeps History's wheel turning, is deeper and more interesting: culture, demography, science. Retail politics is froth on the waves.

I'll do my duty as a citizen. I'll vote, and try to take an interest. It's the numbers that I watch with real interest, though, not the people.

[Permalink]

Item:  While I'm doing obituaries, I should note the passing on Tuesday of Michael, the former King of Romania, aged 96.

Michael was less famous in the U.S.A., and less colorful altogether, than his grandmother Marie, who was a sensation when she toured our country in the Fall of 1926. Dorothy Parker immortalized her in a poem at the time, thus:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

You will sometimes still today hear Americans of the older generation express their disbelief at something you've told them by saying: "Yeah, right; and I am Marie of Romania."

Marie, by the way, was English; in fact her own grandmother was Queen Victoria.

Well, King Michael's grip on the throne was never firm. That wasn't his fault, nor Romania's; he was a sensible and capable man, as monarchs go, and always popular with the people.

The historical dice never rolled his way, though. Romania, under a dictator named Antonescu, sided with Germany in WW2. Michael's father, King Carol, was deposed and Michael installed in his place at age 18.

Four years later, so he's now 22, with the war obviously going badly for the axis, Michael helped stage a coup against Antonescu, and the country changed sides. Unfortunately that caused them to end up under Soviet control. Michael was fired and spent the rest of his life in exile.

It's a sad story, of a decent man who never got a break. Rest in Peace, Michael of Romania.

[Permalink]

10 — Signoff.     That's all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and special thanks to those supporters who showed up at the VDARE.com Christmas party this evening. It was great fun, and especially encouraging to see so many young faces. Thanks to all.

There aren't a lot of famous Derbyshires, but we do boast a composer: Delia Derbyshire, who wrote the original theme music for the TV series Doctor Who. Here to see us out is another one of her pieces, "Pot Au Feu," which is a kind of beef stew. Why this particular piece has that particular title I can't tell you. Delia can't tell you either as she passed away in 2001; but I'm sure there is a logical explanation.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

[Permalink]

[Music clip: Delia Derbyshire, "Pot Au Feu."]