»  Radio Derb — Transcript

        Friday, November 20th, 2020

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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 1, organ version]

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your systemically genial host John Derbyshire. That was a snippet of Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 1, to give us a change from No.2, the one I usually play.

Lots to discuss this week, both home and abroad, so let's get straight to it.

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02 — Bailing on Tucker.     Tucker Carlson's in trouble with his viewers, I see. Twitter and comment threads are filling up with people saying, "You're dead to me, Tucker."

I was loth to take that very seriously — all sorts of cranks post on the internet — until I saw that Ann Corcoran has joined the chorus.

Ann is not a crank. She is in fact a person for whom I have the greatest respect. For several years now Ann has been exposing the refugee rackets on her websites Refugee Resettlement Watch and Frauds, Crooks and Criminals. The former of those two, Refugee Resettlement Watch, was actually deplatformed by the hosting service WordPress last year. It's now back online at a more secure location, along with Frauds, Crooks and Criminals.

And rackets is what these resettlement agencies are. Ann has amply documented this. So have others: Ann Coulter, for instance, and of course ourselves here at VDARE.com. These resettlement agencies, hiding behind reassuringly churchy and humanitarian names, shovel money from the public fisc into the bank accounts of their executives while imposing critters like Representative Ilhan Omar on us. Ann Corcoran has been tireless at documenting and exposing the shameful stinking business.

So I sat up and paid attention this morning reading Ann's latest post at Frauds, Crooks and Criminals. Headline: Tucker Carlson Curries Favor with the Leftwing Media Mob. Ann's opening sentence, quote:

I guess you can say I am now completely done with Fox News after Tucker Carlson went after Sidney Powell last night.

End quote.

Who is Sidney Powell and what's this all about?

Sidney Powell is a lawyer — and that's a female "Sidney," by the way — representing President Trump's campaign in the matter of getting dubious vote counts investigated and overturned. She was there alongside Rudy Giuliani at a 90-minute press conference yesterday, Thursday, helping Rudy make the case that those dubious vote counts were part of a nationwide conspiracy to deny President Trump re-election. Sidney Powell's particular area of interest is the hacking of software that registers and counts votes in key states.

Thursday night on Fox News, Tucker told his viewers that:

[Clip:  We took Sidney Powell seriously. We'd no intention of fighting with her. We've always respected her work, we simply wanted to see the details. How could you not want to see them?

So we invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention. That's a big story.

But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.

When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either; nor did she provide any today at the press conference.

Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous, and she's right — we're with her there; but she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another — not one.]

Ann Corcoran took this to be wounded amour propre on Carlson's part. His tone was, she wrote, "snarky and aggressive." She wrote, quote:

It was almost like he was saying: "I am a big media star and you dared to turn me down!"

End quote.

Sidney Powell issued a statement of her own, edited quote:

Apparently Mr Carlson missed the news conference today … Evidence continues to pour in, but a five-minute television hit is not my focus now. Collecting evidence and preparing the case are my top priorities.

End quote.

So what does Radio Derb think about this little tiff?

First, a few more words about the principals. Not Sidney Powell, about whom I know nothing at all.

Rudy Giuliani, who was running the press conference, I do know pretty well — not personally, I mean as a public figure. I'd heard about him when I was working at a bond brokerage in the 1980s and Rudy was a U.S. Attorney prosecuting securities malfeasance — a bit too vigorously, in the opinion of many. Traders all over Wall Street were sticking pins in wax figures of Rudy Giuliani. In that context, I put him in a novel, though I changed his ethnicity to Irish. You can't be too careful with lawyers.

Then Rudy was Mayor of New York City for eight years, for the first seven of which I was commuting daily into the city he was mayor of. My opinion of him went through a 180-degree turn. He was a very good mayor. The thing I liked best about Rudy, that has ever since inclined me in his favor: In all the years of his mayoralty his staff at City Hall had standing instructions not to let Al Sharpton in through the door.

Sure, I know Rudy's an open-borders neocon with a talent for public-relations disasters; but hey, there's some good in everyone.

Of Tucker Carlson, I count myself a fan. I try to watch his show every night, and watched the offending show last night — the one, I mean, that caused Ann Corcoran to cross Tucker off her dance card.

Tucker presents as a milquetoast Civic Nationalist type: not Dissident Right, definitely not a race realist. I say "presents" because I privately wonder if he is more over on our side than he presents, and just has a very acute sense of how far he can go on Fox. That's just me, though, possibly projecting my own sympathies on a guy I like.

Whatever. The Civic Nationalism grates on me sometimes. I wish, for example, Tucker would do more coverage of immigration and refugee issues — perhaps invite Ann Corcoran on? And Tucker has no math or science, so his outlook is somewhat limited in that way. A liberal-arts major, he lives in a world of words, not a world of facts.

That's nit-picking, though. Where TV commentators are concerned, I'll take what I can get. How many people are there on the silver screen that go as far as Tucker does from orthodoxy? Count me a Tucker fan.

I've already expressed my esteem and admiration for Ann Corcoran; but I have to say, if it's a matter of taking sides here, I think Ann went off the rails with this post.

Her headline, again: "Tucker Carlson Curries Favor with the Leftwing Media Mob"? Where did he do that? She says he was "snarky and aggressive." I just reproduced Tucker saying what he said. It didn't sound either snarky or aggressive to me. Sidney Powell's saying, "Apparently Mr Carlson missed the news conference today" — now that you could put in a dictionary to illustrate the word "snark."

Based on what Tucker told us, then fortified by Sidney Powell's statement, I've come away with the strong impression that Ms Powell is a precious jerk. That is, of course, perfectly compatible with her being on to something serious, and correct in what she believes. Being right and being a precious jerk are orthogonal: neither thing excludes the other.

Sure, she's busy with her investigations. And sure, we shouldn't expect her to reveal on TV what should properly be presented in court. Regarding that, however, given the depth of detail Rudy Giuliani went into standing alongside her at Thursday's press conference — he actually cited two of the affidavits he'd had sworn — I'd like to know why she didn't clap her hand over Rudy's mouth and hiss "Shut up, you fool!" in his ear.

Still, Tucker's show, whether Sidney Powell likes it or not, gets major ratings. A five-minute spot on the show, even just smiling at the camera while saying sweet nothings about preparing a strong case and not wanting to divulge details yet, that would be a boost for the investigation she's part of. It sure wouldn't have hurt, Lady.

Yes, yes, I know about the leftward drift of Fox News. I commented on it myself two weeks ago. I don't see it with Tucker, though. I'll go on watching him until Fox fires him — which, if the leftward drift continues, they surely will.

Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are trying to do a difficult thing, against strong headwinds. I wish them the very best of luck, with all my heart. I'm at a loss to see how blowing off Tucker Carlson helped their case.

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03 — Forgive us our debts.     Meanwhile we've been getting further glimpses of what will be in store from a Biden Presidency.

One thing that will apparently be in store, at any rate if congressional leaders of Biden's party have their way — leaders like Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer — one thing that will be enacted is forgiveness of student loans. Apparently this is something the President can do by executive order.

We're being told that the main goal here is "to stimulate the economy and provide relief to struggling borrowers."

There's also an issue of equity, though. That's "equity" in the woke sense, meaning that we all come out equal on everything. The Fed did a survey last year, found that only seven percent of white respondents were behind on their student loans, compared to 26 percent of black respondents and 19 percent of Hispanics. Systemic racism!

In fact, as our boss Peter Brimelow explained at length seven years ago, the student debt bubble and the associated — very associated — college cost bubble are replays of the mortgage-lending bubble that eventually brought on the 2008-9 financial crisis.

Peter just this week, in a memorial tribute to the late Paul Streitz, re-linked to Paul's solution on student-loan debt: make the colleges eat it. Quote from Paul:

The IRS has strict guidelines as what is permissible for other non-profit organizations: only a certain percentage of revenue can be used for fund raising and administration.

But there appear to be no such guidelines for colleges and universities. So there are art museums, squash courts, luxury dorms, climbing walls, million-dollar college presidents, multi-million dollar loans to administrators, diversity deans, sustainability deans, bloated salaries, excessive staff, and minimal teaching hours (six hours of teaching class per week).

Congress should require the IRS to create and enforce such guidelines on colleges and universities. This would give them a choice: either colleges economize and reduce tuition, or lose their non-profit status and be taxed by federal, state and local authorities.

End quote.

Drastic? Well, it's milder than my solution. My solution would be, after a suitable warning period — 48 hours would be about right — to call in the U.S. Air Force to bomb all the colleges and universities to rubble; then, when the smoke has cleared, call in the Army Corps of Engineers to plow the rubble under and sow the ground with salt.

Our colleges today are centers of indoctrination in a false and poisonous ideology, that is dragging our civilization down into self-loathing and self-annihilation. Bomb, burn, plow, and salt.

And no, I wouldn't make an exemption for the math faculties. They are as bad as the rest — I've been documenting that in my Diaries. In any case, you don't need special buildings or equipment to do math. Isaac Newton did his best work in a year sitting at home alone. Quote:

Freed from the restrictions of the limited curriculum and rigours of university life, Newton had the time and space to develop his theories on calculus, optics and the laws of motion and gravity.

That's what our civilization needs: more Isaac Newtons, fewer Ibram X. Kendis.

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04 — Will China eat our lunch?     This morning, Friday morning, I started off my day by Zooming in to a one-hour webinar presented by Asia Times. The host was David Goldman — "Spengler" to Asia Times followers, and author just recently of a new book You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-form the World.

David's guest was Dr Handel Jones, who has spent thirty years at senior positions in the high-tech industry, has deep expertise on China — with published books to show for it — and knows all there is to know about microchips.

If you don't know David Goldman's work, his strongest theme is the need for the U.S.A. to get serious about the high-tech competition with China, in areas like manufacturing of microchips, 5G broadband services, big data, and artificial intelligence. By "get serious" David means government-sponsored industrial policy, as we had in the Cold War — the kinds of policies that brought us the Internet, via DARPA, Bell Labs, IBM, and so on. If we don't get up to speed on this, says David, China will eat our lunch.

Dr Handel Jones filled out supporting details from his vast store of knowledge. The webinar was very instructive, once I got past wondering about Dr Jones' first name. (Does he have a brother named Bach?)

His reminders of what the Chinese are already doing, or are close to doing, with AI and 5G were sobering. No more railroad tickets: You're checked in by facial-recognition software. Smart cities, fully-automated factories, full-time remote health monitoring, autonomous vehicles, …

As always, I was left wondering how much of our liberty we shall trade away for convenience. If our experience with this pandemic is any guide, I fear the answer is, a lot.

Be that as it may, the very rapid advances in high-tech that China's been pushing through pose a geopolitical question. The question is: Will the ChiComs keep the competition between us and them at a purely commercial level? Or will they advance to land grabs and claims to sovereignty over ever bigger stretches of ocean — perhaps even to space?

David Goldman says, and I think he's probably right, that aside from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and a few small disputed border areas that the ChiComs consider historically Chinese, they don't want to take over anyone's country and rule it. They just want to be the world's landlord, with the rest of us paying rent to them.

(I'd add to that: Even if the ChiComs wanted to go off a-colonizing, with their cratering fertility, the manpower just won't be there. In 1920 Britain ruled a quarter of the world; but in 1920 my British grandmother had given birth to thirteen children.)

For sure the ChiComs have been getting awful pushy lately. A segment on that.

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05 — ChiComs get pushy.     Pushy, yes. Here are some instances.

  1. The crushing of Hong Kong's last traces of autonomy continues apace. November 11th four legislators were removed from the assembly for being "unpatriotic," which of course means they'd spoken out against the ChiCom power grab. Fifteen other pro-democracy legislators then resigned en masse.

    Here's a national alliance you may not have heard of: the Five Eyes. The nations in this alliance are Britain, the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The BBC tells us that, quote: "Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance of the five Anglophone countries set up during the Cold War and initially developed to monitor the USSR and its allies." End quote.

    Well, the Five Eyes had words to say about the ChiCom crushing of Hong Kong. They said it violates the agreement signed in 1997 when Britain relinquished the territory to China. So indeed it does, flagrantly.

    The ChiComs responded with their usual delicacy and tact. A ChiCom spokesman told journalists in Peking on Thursday that it doesn't matter if they have five eyes or ten eyes: If foreign countries dare to harm China's sovereignty, they should, quote, "beware that their eyes could be blinded." Nice.

  2. Tuesday evening in Tokyo the prime ministers of Australia and Japan came to an agreement on allowing the military of each to train on the other's territory. The only point not resolved is whether Australian troops who commit capital crimes in Japan will be hanged, as Japanese law allows.

    That aside, this agreement is another layer of cement in the Quad group that I've been telling you about: Japan, Australia, India, and the U.S.A.

    The point of the Quad group is of course to keep a wary collective eye on rising China, the way the Triple Entente — Britain, France, Russia — tried to manage the rise of Wilhelmine Germany in the early 1900s. That didn't end well, but the Quad group believe they can do better.

    The ChiComs of course hate the whole idea of the Quad. The Global Times newspaper, a ChiCom mouthpiece, snarled that this Japan-Australia agreement, quote, "accelerates the confrontational atmosphere in the Asia-Pacific region."

    Right. And ChiCom jets hot-dogging over Taiwan, China's military building up non-Chinese islands in the West Pacific to use as bases, China's making aggressive troop movements against India in the Himalayas, none of that generates any "confrontational atmosphere" at all. Right.

  3. The Five Eyes; the Quad group; I'm having a fire sale here of news items about alliances, groupings, and ententes. Here's another one.

    Remember the BRICS group of countries? That's B-R-I-C-S, stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. What makes them a group? Well, the logic was that each of them is an emerging economy — that means poor by comparison with Europe, Australia / New Zealand, and North America, but not seriously poor and coming up fast — so each is an emerging economy thus defined, with major influence in its area: respectively, South America, North Eurasia, South Asia, East Asia, and Africa. The BRICS, remember them?

    The BRICS have been having annual meetings since 2009. This year's was at first canceled because of the pandemic; but on Tuesday this week the BRICS leaders had a Zoom call hosted by Vladimir Putin.

    I did my best to follow the proceedings of the Zoom call by reading about it, but my eyes soon glazed over. I anyway doubt the BRICS will be a thing much longer, given India's membership in the Quad, and …

  4. The ChiComs of course hold one of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, the other four held by Britain, France, Russia, and the U.S.A.

    In today's world there's something anachronistic about that list. India certainly thinks so. With nuclear weapons, a space program, and a population due to overtake China's in size round about 2024, India has for some years been lobbying for a permanent seat.

    Biggest obstacle to that? China, which has a veto over such structural changes. So at any rate said an article in the Hindustan Times this Thursday.

    Radio Derb's position on this would be to give our permanent seat to India, then quit the whole clown show and give the U.N. a month's notice to vacate that ugly slab in Turtle Bay.

    That aside, I can't help wondering whether, geostrategic considerations aside, the ChiComs don't perhaps see India's population overtaking China's as a loss of face.

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

Imprimis:  Back there in my first segment I mentioned Ann Corcoran's having been deplatformed last year by the hosting service WordPress. Well, now it's happened to the Conservative Treehouse.

They posted the news on Sunday, November 15th. You can access Conservative Treehouse for a few more days, but Wordpress told them that, quote:

Given the incompatibility between your site's content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.

End quote.

By "our terms" Wordpress means of course the ideological rigidity of their staff and management.

I'll try to keep tabs of where the Treehouse migrates to and post it here.

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Item:  Does Joe Biden have an economic plan? What will he do to make us more prosperous and our nation economically secure? Headline from Bloomberg, November 15th, headline: Biden Fills Economic Posts With Experts on Systemic Racism.

Oh, great. That should do wonders for the Gross National Product.

Sub-heading: "Previous administrations haven't made race scholarship such a clear priority."

Well, darn it, that explains our economic problems these past few administrations! We left federal employees at Treasury and the Fed playing with their fool spreadsheets instead of giving them seminars on Critical Race Theory. No more of that! Joe Biden's on the case.

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Item:  More on the race front: North Thurston Public School system, which oversees some 16,000 students up there in Washington State, tried to change their method for classifying students by race. They removed Asians from the "students of color" category and grouped them together with whites.

That led to protests from Asian Americans, and the school board backed down. Asians are once again "colored," alongside black, indigenous, multi-racial, Pacific islander and Latinx students.

In my paradigm-shifting bestseller We Are Doomed I adopted the schema proposed by distinguished race scholar Leonard Jeffries, former Professor of Black Studies at City College, New York. Professor Jeffries suggested "Ice People" for whites and East Asians, "Sun People" for blacks and Hispanics.

I am at a loss to know why this usage has not been taken up by educators. There is no respect for true scholarship nowadays.

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Item:  Monday was the deadline for filing a claim against the Boy Scouts of America. If you wanted to get some of the loot from the BSA's bankruptcy proceedings by claiming to have been groped by a scoutmaster, Monday was your last chance.

How many of these claims are there? Ninety thousand, if you can believe it. Ninety thousand.

Several commentators have said that the BSA brought this on themselves by opening their ranks to homosexual scoutmasters. However, they didn't do that until 2015 — and only then to fend off endless litigation. Reporting on the Monday deadline, Associated Press said, quote:

Most of the pending sex abuse claims date to the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

End quote.

So you can get a payout in 2020 for having been groped in 1965. My question: How on Earth do you prove such a claim to courtroom standards of evidence?

This destruction of the Boy Scouts is nothing but a lawyers' ramp: the cold, wanton destruction of an organization that helped tens of millions of boys become men. Everyone involved — the parasite lawyers and the clients making unprovable claims about events of fifty years ago — they should all be ashamed of themselves. Of course, none of them are.

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Item:  Robotics researchers at Japan's Gifu University have designed a robotic hand that can make you feel like you're going on a walk and holding hands with someone.

The hand is called "Osampo Kanojo," which means "My Girlfriend in Walk." It's made of a soft and pliable gel material to create the feel of human skin. The animated fingers detect pressure and squeeze back when gripped tightly. And it has of course a built-in heater. Nobody likes cold hands.

Can I get through this item without even a passing reference to Jeffrey Toobin? No, I guess I can't …

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ItemThere has been a coup in Peru. A coup … in Peru.

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07 — Signoff.     That's all I have for you, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening; and double thank you, this weekend before Thanksgiving, for your comments, suggestions, and contributions.

Some music to see us out. A Radio Derb listener who has perceived my weakness for early 20th century concert songs directed my attention to Marston Records, whose mission, and I quote from their website, quote, "is to preserve the great performances of the past and keep alive the traditions that were prevalent at the dawn of recording."

My attention thus directed, I bought a three-CD set titled A survey of British Tenors Before Peter Pears. Here's a little gem from the second CD in the set: Joseph Hislop singing an arrangement of his fellow Scot Robert Burns' fine love poem "Afton Water."

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

The recording's dated June 17th 1927.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

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[Music clip: Joseph Hislop, "Afton Water."]