Note: Behind the green door I have a post about being smart, stupid and lucky, a post about the proper way to assassinate rich people on the streets on New York, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Lenin famously said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” The world has just experienced, and perhaps is continuing to experience, those weeks where decades happen. There is the war in Ukraine, of course, which keeps tempting the world to the abyss, but now there is the collapse of Syria, which promises to make the Middle East more dangerous. On top of that is the political crises in South Korea, France and Romania.

The easiest to diagnose is the Ukraine crisis, which has been creeping toward a conclusion most have understood since it started. The Russian army is slowly grinding up the Ukrainian army, which is slowly retreating. Slowly has been slowly becoming quickly, leading to rumors that big changes await Kiev. Zelensky has all but volunteered to be Trump’s personal footstool to find out what, if anything, Trump plans to do about Ukraine in 2025. The answer is probably nothing.

For their part, the Russians seem to have decided that they will have to sort things out despite whoever is running American foreign policy. The thing to watch is who Tucker Carlson has on from the Trump team after he returns from Russia. There is a good chance that Tucker is operating as an unofficial go between for Trump or who Trump will trust to manage the Ukraine problem. Regardless, the end of Project Ukraine promises to be weeks where decades happen.

The problem that promises to create lots of chaos for the world is the unexpected collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. One of the things you must learn when doing business in the Arab word is that nothing is ever as it appears. That is most certainly true with the fall of Assad and his exile in Russia. While it is clear that the Turks trained and supplied the “rebel” army, made up of mercenaries from around the Muslim world, it is unlikely that they anticipated this result.

It is also certain that the United States and Israel had a hand in developing this “rebel” army and setting it on its course. Like everyone else, they appear to have been unprepared for this result. Strangely, the Russians and the Iranians seem to have anticipated this result or at least were the first to see what was happening, so maybe they had a hand in this as well. The Russians have been operating in that part of the world for generations, so they understand Arab reality.

What we know is that Syria is now “controlled” by a collection of Muslim fanatics who have little in common with one another. They lack the resources and manpower to remain in control for long, so that means the many other factions and their sponsors will be looking to either flow into the void left by Assad or carve out more space for themselves in what used to be Syria. Iran, Russia, Israel, the United States and the Gulf countries will be backing their proxies in this chaos.

As an aside, the Trump demand that the United States stay out of the Syrian crisis is only going to make things worse. One reason is we will see a flood of refugees from Syria into Europe. This will be done on purpose to draw the West into the conflict, despite what Trump says. Then you have the portion of the foreign policy blob that exists to “manage” the Middle East. There is zero chance that they stay out of of what they see as an early Christmas present.

The Arabs are not having all the fun. South Korea just had an attempted coup, which saw the current president try to arrest parliament. The parliament fought back against martial law and then the president backed down. Then parliament tried to impeach the president but could not find the votes. If you want a laugh, Costin Alamariu did a piece on the bizarre politics of Korea. If North Korea decides it is time to invade South Korea, no one should be surprised.

Europe also is experiencing weeks in decades now. The Romanians tried to have an election, and things did not turn out as expected. They carefully followed the rules of “our democracy” by banning opposition parties and making sure the media ignored anyone questioning the authority of the regime. The result was the “far-right” candidate won a big victory in the first round and was holding a massive lead heading into the second round, so the Romanians annulled the election.

The reason they annulled the election is they said there must have been Russian interference causing the unexpected result. You see the logic of “our democracy” in how Western rulers operate. “Our democracy” is a system that always confirms their righteousness and their right to rule. Any other result means someone or something has sabotaged “our democracy.” Since “our democracy” is sacred, any means necessary must be employed to defend it, even annulling elections.

There is something similar happening in France. Last summer, the French populist party scored a stunning win in the first round of legislative elections. This is the party led by the Le Pen family. They were poised to win a majority in the national Assembly until Macron conspired with the other parties to rig enough seats to prevent it. Then Macron finked on his partners and appointed a prime minister none of his partners liked, which has now led to the collapse of the government.

Convention says that when the government is paralyzed this way, there are new elections to break the deadlock. The only way this can happen is for Macron to resign, which he is not going to do, because Notre démocratie est trop importante pour la laisser aux mains des électeurs. This means France is currently without a government, other than Macron playing the organ grinder’s monkey to Trump. French bonds are now less attractive to investors than Greek bonds.

The political chao in France is a foreshadowing of what lies ahead for all the EU countries as the bill for Project Ukraine comes due. Germany is headed for elections in 2025, and they are desperately trying to avoid a Romanian result, so they will probably jail anyone who could be a problem. Britain is now ruled by a party that is slightly less popular than rectal cancer. The opposition party, the Tories, is led by a clown they imported from Nigeria.

Overall, the European economy is in serious trouble. It is a thing that Western media ignores, for the most part, but anyone doing business in Europe or with companies having exposure to Europe understands. It turns out that an economy built on cheap energy from Russia performs poorly when that cheap energy from Russia is replaced by expensive energy from America and even more expensive energy from Russia, sold through Asian intermediaries.

What all of this points to as we close out the year is that what lies ahead is a time when decades happen in weeks. The looming chaos that is the next Trump administration only adds to the uncertainty. Through no fault of his own, Trump will inherit an empire surrounded by chaos of its making but lacking the human capital to understand the problems and set them right. Instead, it will be old solutions to the new problems, meaning this may seem like a calm time by comparison.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00m00s Intro: Explaining what follows
• 03m34s 2020: COVID hysteria
• 11m38s 2016: Death of Fidel Castro
• 18m07s 2012: Americans, your government hates you
• 28m18s 2008: Blackety-black
• 34m09s 2004: Frosty the Candidate
• 39m25s Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Well, sort of …

This is, never fear, your regularly genial host John Derbyshire. You are listening to this, or reading the transcript, on or after the weekend of December 6th-7th-8th. As it happens, I shall be off the grid that weekend. As I am speaking right now, my wall calendar shows Sunday, December 1st, and it is not lying.

As on similar occasions before, in order that regular listeners not be disappointed I have put together a frozen meal of sound clips from the Radio Derb archives. I shall deliver the finished product to my gracious host, the Z-man, to be defrosted, heated up, and served to you at the usual time on Friday the 6th.

Also as usual in these situations, I have tried to select the following audio clips non-randomly, to illustate some theme. This coming week — I mean, the week coming to me; for you it has come and is now departing — this week marks one month since our general election. That will be my theme.

The following clips are from past editions of Radio Derb podcast in the month following the general elections of 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, and 2004. They are not necessarily election-themed; I have cast my net wide. I believe, though, that each one is of its time.

Because I have pulled these clips direct from the archives going twenty years back, there will be some differences in sound quality. I apologize for that. I don’t think it will be any hindrance to your listening pleasure.

All our yesterdays, opined Macbeth, have lighted fools the way to dusty death. I don’t know about that: a genius can have just as dusty a death as a fool. Macbeth was somewhat under the weather when he said it, though, so we should make allowances. A quick jog through all our yesterdays can at any rate help give us some perspective on our todays.

02 — 2020: COVID hysteria.     I’ll begin with the most recent previous election year, 2020. What was Radio Derb opining about in early December of that year?

Many things, of course. Among them: the COVID hysteria, then in full bloom. Radio Derb, December 4th 2020.

[Pips.]

[Clip.] I mentioned the coronavirus back there, and what I called “the absurd over-reaction” to it. Let me enlarge on that.

You all know about the reaction, whether or not you agree with me that it’s been an over-reaction. You know about the lockdowns and quarantines, the shuttering of restaurants, bars, and gyms. You’ve probably seen some of the protests against it all, like the big one in New York City’s Staten Island midweek.

You’ve also seen the hypocrisy of our ruling class on flagrant display:

• Nancy Pelosi getting her hair done, maskless, at a salon that was supposed to be closed.
• Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, maskless, attending a birthday party at a pricey restaurant.
• Michael Hancock, Mayor of Denver, the day before Thanksgiving gave a public address to the people of that city urging them to stay home and greet family by Zoom for the holiday. Less than an hour later, he got on a plane and flew to Mississippi to spend the holiday with his wife and daughter, presumably maskless.
• Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago, attended a crowded street party to celebrate Joe Biden’s apparent victory. That was November 7th. A week later she shut down the whole city and told Chicagoans to cancel their Thanksgiving plans. She did wear a mask some of the time at the street party, but dropped it when yelling into a bullhorn.
• Steve Adler, Mayor of Austin, Texas, posted a video message to inhabitants of Austin November 9th saying, quote: “We need to stay home if you can … We need to keep the numbers down.” End quote. It turned out he recorded that message while on vacation in Mexico, whither he had flown on a private jet.Two days before flying to Mexico Adler had hosted a wedding and reception in Austin for his daughter and 20 guests — ten more than were allowed under his own city guidelines.
• Just one more, though I could fill the whole podcast with these. This is Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York. November 18th Cuomo told reporters that, quote: “My personal advice is you don’t have family gatherings — even for Thanksgiving.” End quote. Next day, the 19th, he advised New Yorkers that, quote: “This year, if you love someone, it is better and safer to stay away.” End quote.But then, the following Monday, Cuomo told a radio interview, quote: “The story is, my mom is going to come up and two of my girls,” end quote.To the Governor’s credit, after a fuss in the local media, he canceled the dinner. Although perhaps he flew to Mississippi to join Mayor Hancock and his family, I don’t know

I know how I feel about these hypocrite politicians. I’m just having trouble imagining what you think of them if you are the owner of a small business you spent years building up, that has now been put out of business by their crazy regulations.

Isn’t it all necessary, though? Wouldn’t a lot more people die without those regulations? How do I feel about the possibility that I might be one of them? Or someone I love?

This is where I find myself thinking something’s wrong with our deepest instincts. There is a point of balance to be found between carefree carry-on-as-normal and control-freak absolutism. We have not found that point.

Take traffic fatalities as a comparison. The U.S.A. suffers around 35,000 traffic fatalities a year. Every one is of course a heartbreaking tragedy to wives, husbands, parents, children, lovers and friends. Couldn’t we get the number down somewhat?

Sure we could. We could go for control-freak absolutism: implement a nationwide no-exceptions speed limit of fifteen miles per hour. That’s four times faster than walking: should be fast enough for anybody. Traffic fatalities would drop to a few hundred a year.

So why don’t we do this, and spare ourselves those tens of thousands of tragedies? Because Americans wouldn’t stand for it. The economy would be crippled: businesses can’t move goods at fifteen miles an hour. Even just ordinary citizens would be up in arms: “What, I have to spend four hours driving to check on my granny sixty miles away?”

Sure, we take sensible measures to reduce the toll: speed limits, vehicle inspections, seat-belt laws. In the final analysis, though, we accept that normal life includes some number of deaths, possibly deaths of ourselves or our loved ones. We like normal life, even if it costs many deaths. We don’t like control-freak absolutism, even if it saves many lives. We have found the point of balance.

In the case of the coronavirus, we haven’t. Instead of seeking for it in a reasonable way, we have defaulted to control-freak absolutism, along with all those displays of hypocrisy from the absolutists.

[Pips.]

03 — 2016: Death of Fidel Castro.     November 2016 was a good-news month: Donald Trump’s victory in the general election on the 9th, of course; and then, on the 25th, the death of Fidel Castro. Here was Radio Derb on December 2nd.

[Pips.]

[Clip.] The flow of bracing good news that began in the small hours of November 9th continued last week with the death of Fidel Castro.

This particular bit of news would have been even better if we’d heard that the tyrant had died slowly, screaming in agony, like so many of his victims; but one shouldn’t hope for too much. Let’s just be glad the old gangster is gone.

Reactions were predictable. Cubans who had fled from Castro’s communist dictatorship to the U.S.A. were dancing in the streets. Our own communists — people like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who honeymooned in Castro’s Cuba — along with those useful idiots kindly disposed towards communism, like Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau, expressed various levels of regret.

What’s predictable is not generally very interesting, though. It’s the un-predictable that always gets my attention. In that category I’d give pride of place to the article by Katie Hopkins in Tuesday’s Daily Mail.

Katie’s a sort of British Ann Coulter, only not quite so aggressive or intelligent. She’s argumentative, nationalist, contrarian, and irreverent towards PC pieties.

She went to Cuba to attend Castro’s funeral. She stood in line for hours, all through the night, with Cubans waiting to pay their respects, to walk past Castro’s memorial in Revolution Square.

She’s smart enough to know that events like this are stage-managed in a dictatorship, and that some people attend out of fear that not attending would bring punishment. She’s frank about the poverty, the lies, the fear, that pollute life under communism.

Still she is honest enough to see some genuine sorrow and pride. Quote:

Patriotism — manifest in their flag draped around shoulders, and precious currency — young women selling cakes, keen I take the notes home with me, to remind me of their country when I leave. Pride — in a small island, the David to America’s Goliath — who fearlessly prevails, against the odds.

And a strong sense of family, where people stand together, stay together, keep strong for each other to make things better.

There are a number of ways a human being can react to finding himself a native of one of these fly-blown Caribbean slum nations. One way — it would probably be my way — is to get the hell out of there to somewhere civilized. Another way, almost invariably futile, and quite likely fatal, too, is to take up the banner of freedom and justice and try to improve the place into a prosperous and open society.

And another is to adopt an attitude of indifference to what happens politically and flaunt a defiant patriotic pride that anything native is at least better than foreign domination. The canonical expression of this attitude was the Greek in Byron’s poem, living under Ottoman Turkish rule, and fondly remembering the ancient Greek ruler Polycrates, quote:

A tyrant; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.

It’s good to be reminded that human nature is not totally in thrall to the Pleasure Principle. I learnt this early. My childhood was spent among adults who couldn’t stop talking wistfully, nostalgically about World War Two, when they’d lived on starvation rations, their civil liberties severely curtailed, while fleets of enemy planes dropped bombs on their cities every night and their menfolk were shipped to the killing fields overseas.

They remembered those days so fondly! “There was none of this political bickering,” they’d say. “We were a real country then, all pulling together …”

So yes: Castro was a monster of cruelty and depravity, who murdered thousands, including some who thought they were his friends; who lived high on the hog while his people went hungry; whose hatred of America almost caused a nuclear war. Good riddance to the swine.

There is more to be said, though. In human affairs, there is always more to be said. Thanks to Katie Hopkins for saying it.

[Pips.]

04 — 2012: Americans, your government hates you.     One problem with illegal immigration — not the biggest problem by any means, but one of the most long-standing — is that it uses up most of the oxygen in debates over immigration in general, with very little oxygen left over for discussing legal immigration … which badly needs discussing.

Here I was working the topic in mid-December 2012, a month after Barack Obama’s re-election.

[Pips.]

[Clip.]  It’s been a while since there was an immigration item in the news for me to froth and sputter at. This week delivered a couple. I’ll tackle the big one here and defer the lesser one to my closing miscellany.

This concerns the STEM Jobs Act, which passed the House of Representatives last Friday and came up before the Senate this week. STEM — it’s an acronym, S-T-E-M — stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. High points of the Act: It

1. Eliminates the so-called Diversity Visa program. This monumentally stupid program, another demon spawn of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, may he be suffering all the worst torments of Hell, set aside 55,000 permanent resident visas for people from all over the world selected by lottery. Around 50 percent of the winners come from Africa, 30 percent from Europe, the rest from Asia, Australasia, and elsewhere in the Western hemisphere.
2. Awards that same number, 55,000, of permanent resident visas to foreigners graduating with doctor’s or master’s degrees in STEM subjects from U.S. universities, if they agree to work in their STEM field for at least five years.
3. Contains provisions to speed up entry for spouses and children of permanent legal residents, among whom much the biggest category are Mexicans.

The STEM Jobs Act is a Republican initiative, an aspect of the Republican desire to feed cheap labor to their business sponsors and funders. There is no evidence whatever that the U.S.A. has any shortage of STEM graduates. What would count as evidence would be rising salaries in these fields. Salaries overall are in fact falling, largely because these fields have already been flooded with foreign workers.

It’s not hard for a foreign graduate to get a job offer, if he’s willing to work for a low salary. As foreignization depresses salaries, STEM careers become less appealing to Americans, who go to law school instead.

I watched the whole thing happen in my own former profession, commercial IT. As a mainframe programmer in the U.S.A. forty years ago, I worked with teams of American programmers, all of them citizens from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, with ancestries that were Irish or Italian, Anglo or German, Jewish or black. It was a good middle-class career for a citizen. Now foreignization has killed that opportunity, and Americans have responded in the rational way, by shunning computer science courses.

To illustrate the issue, cast your eye down the graduate-student roster for Caltech’s Department of Electrical Engineering. It’s reproduced on ee2.caltech.edu/people/gradstudents.html, and again in a December 4 post on VDARE.com.

There are 96 graduate students listed. I have no way of knowing how many of them are non-citizens, but just based on the names, I’m guessing it’s a lot. Sixteen of the 96 names are of obvious British, German, Italian, or other European origin — that’s one-sixth. The others are all Indian, Chinese, Korean, or Middle Eastern.

Assuming a further sixteen of these non-European names belong to citizens, that would leave two-thirds of the class as foreign, which I think is a fair guess.

So that’s the Republicans’ STEM Act. It’s crafted to balance out various interests: Eliminate the Diversity Lottery, which just swells Democrat voter rolls. Residence visas for STEM graduates, which satisfies the cheap labor lobbies that fund the GOP. Speed up chain migration for legal residents’ families, to do that “reaching out” to Hispanics that the Republicans are always being urged to do. (Mostly by their enemies, but they are too stupid to notice that.)

Congressional Democrats have their own immigration bill, and as is the silly custom now, it too has an acronym: it’s the BRAINS Act. That’s B-R-A-I-N-S, which stands for Benefits to Research and American Innovation through Nationality Statutes. It’s pretty much the same as the GOP bill, except it doesn’t eliminate the Diversity Lottery. The Dems love that Diversity Lottery because the people it brings in are mostly uneducated and low-skilled, which is to say, future Democrat voters. The BRAINS Act is the brainchild of New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer.

Opposing the STEM Act in the Senate on Wednesday, Schumer said the Republicans’ Act contained, quote, “anti-immigrant language,” presumably because it does not increase the number of immigrant visas. It awards 55,000 to the STEM graduates, remember, but ends the 55,000-visa Diversity Lottery. BRAINS, on the other hand, also has the new STEM visas but keeps the Lottery.

In fact neither STEM nor BRAINS is anti-immigrant. What they both are, and what all immigration talk is at the level of congressional or mainstream-media discussion, is anti-American.

When this country first put men in space in the 1960s, immigration levels had been exceptionally low for 40 years, thanks to the restrictive 1924 Act. There was no shortage of scientists and engineers. Today we have twice as many citizens, 315 million people, a big enough pool of talent to supply all the expertise we need in every field. Employers don’t want Americans, though, because foreigners will work for less money.

The whole message of immigration talk from both parties is that Americans are no good. Foreigners are so much brighter, more industrious, more entrepreneurial. Having priced low-skilled Americans out of the bottom part of the labor market by allowing illegal Mexicans to flood in, Congress is now hard at work pricing the skilled middle-class out of their jobs with insults like the STEM and BRAINS Acts.

Here’s my comprehensive — yes!, comprehensive — solution, which I am sure will be enthusiastically received by both parties in Congress: the Systematically Crush America’s Majority Act, known for short as the SCAM Act.

[Pips.]

Just a footnote to that: So far as I can discover, neither the STEM Act nor the BRAINS Act attained legislative consummation. The SCAM Act, however, was approved unanimously by both houses of Congress, and remains in force to this day.

05 — 2008: Blackety-black.     The 2008 Presidential election featured two U.S. Senators: John McCain of Arizona for the Republicans, Barack Obama of Illinois for the Democrats. Obama got an easy win and the U.S.A. had its first black President-elect.

Obama’s blackness naturally got a lot of attention. Here it was on November 7th getting Radio Derb’s attention.

[Pips.]

[Clip.]  Meanwhile, our President-Elect. There is a great deal to say about the man, but I’m going to have four years to say it in, so let’s just take it one bite-size piece at a time.

Here, mainly just to get it out of the way, I’m going to pass some remarks on the fact of his being our first black President — specifically, on the role that Obama’s blackness played in getting him elected.

The main thing to be said here is that being black was a big help to him. For sheer starting advantages in life, there is nothing in the world better than being a smart, self-disciplined black person in America today. Every company, every department of every university, every government office from the federal to the municipal, every sports team, every labor union, every political party, is desperate, is frantic, to assert its “diversity” credentials.

Political parties especially. While Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention. That’s what put Obama on the national stage. Now, what are the chances for an undistinguished state legislator from a middling state — no offense there to the good people of Illinois — who is running for the U.S. Senate, being asked to speak at a Presidential convention?

I don’t think I’m being controversial if I say that for a black person, the chances are very good; for a white woman, much less good, and for a white man, close to zero.

I’m not passing any judgment here, that’s just the way things are. Not just for Democrats, either: the thing I just said would in fact be even truer at a GOP convention.

Let’s face it, we are a race-obsessed nation. In the past, black Americans who were smart and capable were held back because of their race. Now, having recognized the injustice of that, we seek out capable black Americans and give them every possible assist. By acting like this we suppose that we are asserting our nation’s ideals of justice, equality, human dignity, and individual worth.

The supposition is mistaken in my opinion. Those ideals would be better asserted by treating everyone the same, without preference.

I also think there is dishonesty in our actions. By practicing this kind of favoritism, white Americans get the gift of cheap grace. That is, we get ourselves a license to avoid thinking about the really tricky race issues, like black criminality and academic achievement gaps.

Here’s a statistic from the DoJ website: Of black males in the U.S.A., one in 22 was in federal or state prisons at the end of June ’07; for white males, it was one in 130.

The “official” reason for that six-to-one disparity is “racism.” But, excuse me, we just elected a black President. Yet we’re still so racist we incarcerate black men at six times the rate of white men?

But hey, why think about this difficult stuff? It makes our heads hurt. It makes us feel uncomfortable, and anyway no-one has a clue what to do about it, so what’s the point? Voting a black guy into political office is so much easier! You just have to pull a lever! Cheap grace, you see?

There is no denying the U.S.A. has made great progress in the matter of race, as President Elect Obama illustrates. For all the favoritism, we are closer to being a meritocracy now than we were a hundred years ago.

In the matter of honesty about race, though, I don’t think we have much to boast about. It may even be that we have bought our progress at the cost of some honesty. I dunno, ask your grandpa.

[Pips.]

06 — 2004: Frosty the Candidate.     The 2004 general election was not one of the more exciting kind, but it had points of interest.

The Presidential candidates were incumbent President George W. Bush for the Republican Party and John Kerry, junior Senator from Massachusetts, for the Democrats. Radio Derb favored Bush, although with many reservations, especially about his War on Terror, concerning which the word “quagmire” was already in widespread use.

Where the war was concerned, Kerry actually shared those reservations. I didn’t agree with him about much else, though; and there was a cold, shifty quality about the way he presented himself and his positions that turned me off.

To be honest, though unfair, Kerry’s great wealth was also a turnoff. He was the richest man in the Senate, a trust fund kid in his own right who’d never had a regular job or run a business, married to a super-wealthy heiress in her own right.

Sure, the GOP candidate came from wealth, too; but he’d run an oil company and helped to run a baseball team. And, although again unfairly, a rich Texan and a rich guy from Massachusetts give off different vibes.

The Swift boat controversy didn’t help Kerry. A Swift boat is a small, light, fast vessel used for coastal and river patrols. Kerry had served as a naval officer on these boats in Vietnam in the late 1960s. He’d been wounded more than once and been awarded five combat medals for his service.

Once discharged and back in the U.S.A., though, he’d joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and demonstrated with them, on one occasion publicly throwing away his medals. That ticked off a lot of vets.

Thirty years later, Kerry running for President in 2004, a group of Swift boat veterans organized against him, challenging the legitimacy of his medals. So far as I can figure, the medals were legitimate, but in late 2004 this was still a talking point.

In December 2004, after his defeat in the November election, Radio Derb passed comment on John Kerry. This being the Christmas season with Christmas songs in the air, I thought I’d pass my comment musically. I worked out appropriate lyrics to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman.”

Unable to find anyone willing to accompany me, I delivered the song over the airwaves a cappella. Here it is: “Frosty the Candidate.” Please do not email in to tell me I have a lousy singing voice; I’m well aware of the fact.

[Pips.]

[Clip.]  Frosty the candidate
Was a chilly kind of soul.
With his lantern jaw
And his pompadour,
And his icy self-control.

Frosty the candidate
Was a decorated vet.
With a Senate seat
Where he couldn’t be beat,
He just looked like a safe bet.

There must have been some magic
In the way that he campaigned;
For when it came convention time,
Nomination he’d attained!

Frosty the candidate
Came on strong in the debates;
And out on the trail
Seemed he couldn’t fail
To swing some crucial states.

But then his wartime comrades,
Feeling cheated and betrayed,
Showed us how he’d lied,
Slandered men who’d died,
In that long-ago decade.

Frosty the candidate
Started slipping in the polls.
By election night
He’d slipped out of sight,
With his story full of holes.

Thumpety thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,
Look at Frosty go.
Thumpety thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,
Goodbye, gigolo!

[Pips.]

07 — Signoff.     There you are, ladies and gentlemen: five of our country’s Presidential election cycles, as seen by Radio Derb. Thank you for listening. I shall be back at the microphone next Friday, so the December 13th Radio Derb will be farm-fresh and up-to-date.

In the meantime please allow my weekly reminder that my home page at www.johnderbyshire.com has full instructions on how to support my work using snail mail, PayPal, or crypto, or via Zelle direct to my bank. You can also make a tax-deductible donation by mailing a check, earmarked with my name, to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you!

Despite living in the age of universal deceit, people still tend to believe that our political system works as advertised. This is most obvious with Europeans who comment upon American politics. They can be terribly jaded about how the world works, but still insist that Joe Biden is the guy driving administration policy. They may even acknowledge that he is a vegetable, but still insist he is the shot caller.

We just went through an election and people are stunned to learn that no one in Washington noticed it. It is business as usual in the imperial capital. The only change is they will have to throw sand in the gears of the Trump transition, but the purpose of which is to make sure it remains business as usual after January. Exactly no one cares that the people have spoken.

The main reason for this is elected office holders have little say in how anything is done, not even in how legislation is passed. This is done by an army of staffers, agency people, lobbyists and the semi-permanent political class. The people in charge are the people you rarely see on television or in the news. They are the people who make up what Sam Francis called the leviathan.

That is the show this week. The stuff we learned in school about how our political system functions has been reduced to nonsense. It sort of worked that way decades ago, but the full flowering of the managerial state has put the system in the control of the army of people who make their living running the leviathan. Elections are just something they now hold to distract us.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• Intro
• The Elected Representative
• The Pol’s Life
• Legislation
• Policy Making
• Trump Challenge

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Most people assume that you have a constitutional right to a “jury of your peers”, but no such right exists in the law or reality. The phrase does not appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. In the debates over the new Constitution, there was no use of this phrase. Like the phrase, “separation of church and state”, it is one of those ideas that snuck in long after the Constitution was adopted and people have come to accept it is a real thing that exists in the law,

The Constitution is rather vague on the matter of juries. Article II states that “the trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury” but that is a far cry from requiring a “jury of your peers.” The closest it gets is the 6th Amendment which begins with, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

What the Constitution tells us about juries and jury trials is that they need to be speedy, local and impartial. Otherwise, it is up to the states and localities to sort out the mechanics of the trial and the nature of juries. The Framers could have been more specific but they either assumed it was not necessary, given the customs of the age, which had been handed down over many generations, or they thought it best for states and localities to work out the details.

In the 18th century, no one could have imagined a jury drawn from vagrants, imbeciles and lunatics, so there would have been no need to provide against it. Juries were composed of respectable people, almost always men. Since crimes were all state crimes, it made sense to defer to the states on the process. By the time the Constitution was adopted, every state had a court system, and they were generally modeled on the English system for obvious reasons.

This is one of the many flaws in the Constitution. It was created by men who lacked the imagination to provide for the rise of a universal and timeless moral code that included men pretending to be women and drug addicts having an unquestioned right to roam the streets, harassing the citizens. They failed to appreciate the need to have two-digit IQ people, barely able to dress themselves, sit on juries in cases involving complex technical issues in narrow technical fields.

Daniel Penny is on trial for his life in New York City and his fate will be decided by people who may not be able to read at a high school level. New York City is now famous for madhouse juries, lunatic judges and ideological prosecutors who use the former two conditions to persecute their ideological enemies. Everyone outside the ideological fever swamps understands that Daniel Penny is on trial because he is a white and the crackhead was black.

If Daniel Penny was getting a jury of his peers, the bare minimum requirement would be that the jurors be American citizens. We know that at least one juror is a recent migrant from South America. Of course, his peers would include those who have jobs and can read and write at a college level. Given the endless racial agitation, a jury of his peers would have to white or at least majority white. The jury sitting in judgement of Daniel Penny meets none of the qualifications.

This is not a New York City problem. Kyle Rittenhouse is celebrating the three-year anniversary of his acquittal. Everyone assumed he would be found guilty in a rigged trial by a crooked judge, because this has become the norm. He got lucky and was charged in a jurisdiction dominated by sensible white people, including the judge. He was also blessed with unusually stupid prosecutors. As a result, he got a fair trial, and the jury promptly acquitted him of the charges.

The Rittenhouse case is an exception to the general rule of the American legal system which is that you will never get a fair trial or a jury of your peers. Instead, you will face an ideologue for a judge and a jury of randomly selected simpletons. This is true on civil cases as well as criminal cases. Elon Musk is fighting the courts over his Tesla compensation because the Delaware judges hate him. Even the richest man is subjected to trial by ideological madmen.

This is not a new phenomenon. The corruption of the legal system that gave us the civil right revolution has also eaten away at the judicial system. The maxim that anything that hints of discrimination is immoral has resulted in jury selection becoming little more than drawing names from a hat. The names in the hat are composed of people too stupid or lazy to avoid jury duty. The peremptory challenge of prospective jurors has slowly disappeared from the system.

Like the phrase, “separation of church and state”, the right to a “jury of your peers” has become a sad joke. The state has become a weird secular theocracy rooted in the progressive lunacy that gave us the civil right revolution. The state now makes war on actual churches in the name of a religion it pretends is a set of timeless, universal moral principles rooted in reason. As a result, a “jury of your peers” is a threat issued by the clerisy running the system.

Destruction of the law is always the last phase of egalitarian ideologies. Because men are not naturally equal, they must be made unnaturally equal. For everyone to be a peer of everyone else, the tall must be made short and the strong must be made week, because the opposite is not possible. The law becomes a weapon in the war against the people who make society possible. The civil rights revolution was an act of revenge against the capable and it is reaching its logical end.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

One of the remarkable things to happen in the last election cycle was the preference cascade that quietly happened regarding immigration. Five years ago, the best you could hope to hear from normie and the people who prey on him in the political system is that “illegal immigration” is bad. They still clung to “legal immigration” as some sort of magical incantation that put them on the side of angels. Then suddenly, normie was holding up signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”

There is a practical reason for the change. Trump ran on the immigration issue in 2016 and to the surprise of the beautiful people, it was not disqualifying. They were sure they had properly anathematized the issue but there was Trump talking about Mexican rapists and Muslim bans. They responded with violence against Trump supporters and the usual stuff about Hitler. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was using the administrative state to clamp down on immigration.

That created a contradiction. On the one hand, the Cloud People were attacking the Dirt People for being anti-immigrant bigots, even though the Dirt People continued to hold romantic views on immigration. On the other hand, the negative results of immigration were slowly declining as immigration declined. Then like a windstorm, Biden comes in, opens the border and suddenly everyone is now getting to see the results of open borders policy in their neighborhood.

Imagine the government starts doing something about the snake problem, thus reducing the snake problem, but at the same time telling you that you need to stop complaining about the snakes. Since you see fewer snakes, you can go along with the program as it tracks with what you are seeing. Then the government starts dumping snakes in your yard while still calling you an ophiophobe. The scales fall from your eyes and the eyes of others, and you get a ophiophobic preference cascade.

It is far too soon to tell if Trump is serious about immigration, but it was the one thing he did well in his first term. Fighting the Republican Party, the courts and the administrative state, they still managed to reduce illegal crossings to a trickle. They also slowed up the legalization process and the visa process. Now that immigration has a bad odor about it, especially among the economic elites, he should be able to make some lasting changes to the system in his second term.

This tracks with the last crackdown on immigration a century ago. After immigrants started killing rich people, culminating in the Wall Street bombing, rich people suddenly had their own preference cascade experience. It turned out that romantic notions about immigration were no defense against bombs, so they started demanding reform to the immigration system and finally the end of immigration entirely. For most of the 20th century, America suffered little from immigration.

Another aspect is the morality of immigration. For a long time, the nation wreckers kept the debate within economics. Immigration in the general sense was good for the economy, thus it was assumed to be morally good. The sequence was to first sacralize the economy, defined in the interest of the ruling class, then declare things like open borders good for the economy. That meant only a bad person who hates the economy could oppose immigration.

This worked in the abstract until real issues that cannot be addressed economically brought the issue back into the domain of morality. Coeds being murdered by Mexican migrants, Hattians eating your pets and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings cannot be dismissed with economics. The Haitian cat-eaters were a great example of how some people benefit from immigration, while the rest suffer. It showed that immigration privatizes profit and socializes costs.

What we see happening is that immigration is becoming a moral issue. In addition to the cat eating stuff, the name calling has lost its punch. Suddenly, people not only started to realize that everyone else is tired of immigration, but they were also tired of being called Hitler by degenerates and deviants. Those old people waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at Trump rallies were the result of people suddenly free from the old moral constraints on the immigration issue.

The rich people are noticing. Elon Musk was doing the old civic nationalist stuff about legal versus illegal immigration in the summer, only to see his posts buried in negative comments about the morality of immigration. Trump has toned that stuff down as well, which means he no longer feels the need to bend the knee to the plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty. It will not be long before libertarians are writing about the damage done by Emma Lazarus.

In a larger context, this is just the start of a process that will have to reach back to the root causes of the immigration issue. For example, there are millions of able-bodied men in the social welfare system. There are millions of people in pointless cubicle jobs who could be in productive work. The social welfare state was not a solution poverty but a solution to upper-middle-class people feeling sad about poverty. The result is a vast warping of the economy, especially labor markets.

Instead of addressing this colossal mistake, the workaround was to both import millions of low-cost workers into America and export industries to low-cost countries through the fiction of “free trade” policies. De-industrialization and immigration share the same root cause, which is the bourgeoise progressive fantasies about the just society that took over the ruling classes in the last century. It is another reminder that ideology is just another word for morality.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

A central feature of the democratic society is mendacity. The more democratic the culture, the less honest the participants. The reason for that is simple. The goal in a democratic system, whether it is a marketplace for goods and service or a political system for setting public policy, is to win the crowd. You do not necessarily have to win a majority, but you need enough to lie about having a majority. To do that you must say anything to bring the mob to your side.

This is the reason we know or care about Socrates. Ancient Athens was a democratic society, where rhetoric was the prized skill. The reason for that is status was rewarded to those who could win over their fellow citizens through argument. Inevitably the truth stopped mattering very much, as people tend to believe a good story, especially one that flatters them, over objective reality. Socrates skillfully argued in favor of the truth over rhetoric, so the Athenians voted to kill him.

Lying is a funny thing as everyone lies about something, usually in a moment of weakness or in an effort to be prudent. As a result, normal people think of lying as a thing you do reluctantly. You lie about not having broken something at work, even though in the long run honestly would be your better option. You tell the friend that his new car is great, even though you think it is ridiculous for a middle-aged man to be driving around in a Miata. It hurts to say it, but friendship requires it.

While everyone lies, most people are honest. They think the truth matters, even if the truth is unwelcome. You want the doctor to tell you the truth about your health, not because it will have an impact on your health, but because it is your health, and you have a right to know the truth about it. This sense of entitlement with regards to the truth stems from the fact that all humans possess the tools to conceive of what with think is reality and therefore we are entitled to reality.

It is why most people struggle to accept that there are people who are not honest, so they do not struggle with the lie. In fact, they take pleasure in tricking people, even when the truth would serve their interest. Unlike the honest person, the Democratic Man sees truth telling as a weakness. He speaks the truth only when forced into it and seems to see it as a weakness. For him, the truth is bait to lure in the honest to trick them into something they would otherwise resist.

An example of this is in The Atlantic, a publication that has become the symbol of democratic mendacity. In less democratic times, it was a journal for the intellectual class of the WASP ruling elite. Now it is a vulgar tabloid used to insert falsehoods into the media ecosystem. This post from David Frum is a perfect example. Everything about it is a lie from the very first sentence. From there is a clever monument to the art of lying to trick the intended audience.

“For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics” is what someone once described as a lie so colossal that people assume there must be some truth to it because they cannot believe that anyone would lie so infamously. Bill Clinton fired the FBI Director, Bill Sessions, as soon as he came to power. He replaced the capable Sessions with the thoroughly incompetent Janet Reno.

The fact is every position in Washington is political. You cannot be in politics without being political, which means taking a side. David Frum surely knows this, but he likes lying and he has an agenda. One of the funny things about this type is they often start with a kernel of truth around which they wrap their lies. In this case, the kernel of truth is that the FBI helped the media drive off Nixon. The schemers are hoping a similar thing happens (again) once Trump takes office.

This is just one recent example. You can scan the regime media sites and find hundreds of examples on a daily basis. We live in a time when the only reasons to consume mass media are entertainment and to learn what is not true. People like David Frum make being funny on social media much easier. If you see an assertion of fact in the Wall Street Journal, then you know what is not true about that particular subject and can eliminate it from the set of possible truths.

The question, from a sociological and analytical perspective, is whether the system produces the mendacious or whether it simply elevates them. Since Grog sold Trog a bad wheel, lying has been a part of human society. Along with it we have evolved various ways to guard against it, both individually and collectively. Among European people, social rules evolved to sort people between the trusted and the untrustworthy, creating moral societies rather than tribal ones.

Therefore, if liars have always been an issue for human society, it means the proliferation of liars is a product of the current rules. We are becoming a low trust society either because we are conditioning each generation to prize mendacity over the truth or the system rewards the mendacious over the honest, thus flooding the public square with shameless liars. The lack of shame is a critical piece, as moral societies rely on shame to govern behavior.

The counter to this is someone like Tutus Oates. He was an English priest who fabricated a conspiracy to kill Charles II. This was the “Popish Plot” that made him quite famous and wealthy for a time. This was just one of his many lies and schemes that often had no obvious benefit to him. Like Hillary Clinton, he loved lying. Eventually, people caught onto his tricks, but again like Hillary Clinton, he used more tricks to escape the hangman’s noose and continue with his mendacity.

This perfect example of the modern pundit lived in the 17th century when democracy was limited to arguments among nobles after too many drinks. This was the restoration, a time when popular government had a very bad odor. Of course, one could argue that the flickers of democracy under Cromwell fertilized the ground where the seeds of mendacity had lied dormant. Still, in a decidedly undemocratic society a trickster like Oates was able to thrive for a little while.

None of this may seem to matter, but Western people evolved over thousands of generations to exist in high trust societies. Unlike the tribal people of sub-Saharan Africa who organize around the tribe or the people in the Middle East who organize around the clan, Europeans organize around a set of moral codes. The proliferation of liars who have undermined social trust are making Western societies unlivable. The next step is they become ungovernable.

What that means for the reform minded is that for reform to work, Western societies must become hostile to people like David Frum. Either they sink in status to the point where they are nothing more than a warning to others or they find life in a high trust society too terrifying, so they self-deport. In other words, the goal of reform must be elevating candor to the highest quality, as the necessary antidote to the mendacity that has come to dominate the modern West.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about college football and the war on tradition, a post about the bunker mentality in Washington. Due to holiday sloth there was not Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Over the long holiday weekend, President Joe Biden pardoned his crooked son Hunter, which surprised only the enemies of Donald Trump. Everyone else knew that the old man would not leave office without cleaning up the mess of his son. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but he loves his kids, perhaps too much. At some level, you must respect his family loyalty. There is an old world gangsterism about his willingness to help his family loot the political system.

An interesting part of the pardon is that it is not just a pardon for specific crimes that have been alleged by the Department of Justice. It is a blanket pardon for all things he may have done since 2014. This does not cover state crimes like murder, but outside of something extreme like that, it means he has been given the sort of get out of jail free card reserved for important gangsters. Henry Hill, of Goodfellas fame, was given this type of deal so he would become a rat.

If the 2014 start date seems important, that is because it is when the Biden family started feeding at the Ukraine trough. This was when the State Department engineered the Maidan coup that toppled the Ukrainian government of President Yanukovych, who refused to sign a deal with the EU. Once he was gone, the State Department helped put Petro Poroshenko in charge, who was followed by Volodymyr Zelensky. It is funny how so much has revolved around Ukraine for a decade.

That is what keeps many people in Washington up at night. Trump returning with a vengeance could mean him directing his people to investigate this long running scam called Project Ukraine. After all, it was his decision to question Ukraine that got him impeached, so Ukraine should be at the top of his vengeance list. That and the Ukrainians are desperate to cut a deal with Trump. There may be more Ukraine related pardons coming before January 20th.

That is what makes the timing of this interesting. Normally, the president leaving office signs the pardons on the way out the door or maybe over the Christmas holiday, in order to minimize attention. Bill Clinton pardoned the Jewish gangster Marc Rich on his last day in office. At the time, Rich was on the lamb hiding in Switzerland, but his wife was loading the Clinton family down with cash and prizes. Rich got rich as part of the looting of post-Soviet Russia, in case you are wondering.

As an aside, once word got out that Clinton had pardoned Marc Rich there was a hue and cry in Washington demanding that the incoming Republican administration investigate the matter. It was not just Republicans pretending to be outraged. All the beautiful people were playing along as well. Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to look into it, but she took the job seriously, so she was replaced with James Comey, who could find nothing wrong with it.

That aside, it would have made much more sense for Biden to have done this on the way out the door, so it suggests this is part of a process. Everyone involved in the very dirty dealings in Ukraine must remain silent or face the prospect of Hunter Biden talking without fear of prosecution. Given how the Biden family has operated over the years, it probably means the next six weeks will be a pardon auction for those who ever did business with the Biden family.

The hilarious part of this is how the people we call the left are having a collective meltdown over this news. Twitter/X is now full of angry denunciations from Trump haters about how this makes them look stupid. The people who serious thought Kamala Harris was a good choice are also very vexed. They see this as proof that their girl boss was undermined by a conspiracy of pale penis people. They are now determined to make sure this never happens again. That should be fun.

Official Washington sees the problem with this pardon. They have been running with the narrative that Trump is a say anything to win dictator who will then grow a small mustache as soon as he returns to Washington. That sort of self-righteous indignation does not work when your side is issuing blanket pardons to family members and potentially anyone with a fat wallet. It is hard to claim Trump is corrupt when Joe Biden is putting pardons up on eBay.

In a way, it is a fitting end point for this long moral panic that kicked off during the Obama administration and came crashing down in this election. The subtext to all of it was that the good guys, the people launching the pogroms and panics, were surrounded by an invisible army loyal to Old Scratch. This required any means necessary to reveal and then defeat this threat to our democracy. It turns out that the threat was in the mirror all along.

Not only has the “crying Trump” run its course, but the moral panic that has been the basis of it has also run its course. The public no longer believes any of it now and the people doing the point and shriek are running out of energy. It also means there is no more money to be had from monetizing these panics. The relatively muted response to the election is the result of exhaustion. The Hunter Biden pardon is the start of a great sweep up from a party that went on far too long.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m28s Trump’s Labor Secretary
• 13m08s Killing Hong Kong
• 19m56s The late-Biden Rush
• 26m18s Andreessen on Rogan
• 33m40s War, what is it good for?
• 35m15s An ocean of loneliness
• 37m41s Problems with reincarnation
• 40m56s Feeling Seeing the Earth move
• 43m28s Signoff  with Black Metal

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your tenebrously genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you news of the hour seasoned with conservatism, nationalism, and pessimism.

The birthday of a great living dissident is coming up next week — I’ll get to that in a segment or two. Sir Winston Churchill’s birthday is more immediately upon us: the great man was born 150 years ago tomorrow, November 30th. If you think Sir Winston was not a great man but an alcoholic psychopath in the service of international financiers, we’ll have to differ; but at least look up what I said on the topic two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, what’s happening in our domestic politics? Well, the nominations continue apace.

02 — Trump’s Labor Secretary.     Yes, the nominations continue. One of them infuriated the editorial writers at the New York Post, America’s Newspaper of Record. Here they were sputtering away on Monday. I’ll give you the editorial as it appeared in the print edition of the newspaper. Longish quote.

President-elect Donald Trump started celebrating Thanksgiving early by choosing to put a turkey in his Cabinet: Late Friday, he tapped Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to head the Labor Department.

The Oregon Republican-in-name just lost her bid for re-election after a single term in the House, where she routinely toed the Big Labor line, co-sponsoring the radical PRO Act and opposing school choice — a cause Trump has fervently embraced.

She opposed Right-to-Work laws, which guarantee no-one can be forced as a condition of employment to join or pay dues or fees to a labor union in 27 states — nearly all of which voted for Trump.

That’s why she was pushed by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, whose union went no-endorsement in the prez race. And why she has the enthusiastic support of Randi Weingarten and her fellow teachers-union bosses — who went all-out to beat Trump.

This is a horrible pick: Trump won over the working class because he delivered rising wages in his first term, while President Biden’s Big Labor-loving policies slammed workers. Unions in America today are a tiny (and shrinking) force in most of the private sector, but a huge bane in government. Chavez-DeRemer will be another barrier to the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — and, indeed, to Trump’s own push to force out the highly politicized “Deep State” operatives who did so much to hobble him in his first term.

We get that Trump is determined to not be a captive of old-school GOP orthodoxy. But he also prizes loyalty, and Chavez-DeRemer’s loyalties reside with his enemies.

We hope he belatedly realizes that she should go somewhere she can do no harm — say, as ambassador to Burma, even if Turkey would be more appropriate.

End quote.

“The radical PRO Act”?  What’s that all about? I had to look it up.

“PRO” stands for “Protecting the Right to Organize.” The PRO Act has been promoted in Congress this past four or five years, but so far as I can ascertain it hasn’t made it into the statute books. (Which, if I remember my Rules of Order, mean that it’s a Bill, not an Act. Whatever …) The PRO Act would firm up union powers and add some new rights.

One of those new rights particularly caught my attention. The Act would, and here I’ll quote from its Wikipedia entry:

allow for certain workers, such as those working in the gig economy, to attain the right to form a labor union or to bargain collectively. This would potentially include those who work for app-based companies such as Uber, DoorDash, or Lyft, and overall could include hundreds of thousands or millions of workers.

End quote.

Presumably it would also include freelance writers: poor ink-stained wretches like your genial host here who scrape out a meager living writing commentary and book reviews for the dwindling number of print outlets, or online for the infinitesimal number of websites that pay their contributors. I could join a union! Yeah, right.

The New York Post editors are writing from the traditional Republican point of view that the Democratic Party is the natural home of labor unions, the GOP their natural enemy.

I’ve never seen it from that point of view. Here I was passing comment back in October during the longshoremen’s strike.

[Pips.]

In a general way I’m pro-union. Yes, employees should be able to lean on employers to share the profits of business fairly.

That’s in the private sector, though. I’m totally against public-sector unions, who I think do great harm. They’re not making a claim on profits; in the public sector there aren’t any profits, only money raised from taxes and tariffs, which belongs to the citizens at large. If public-sector workers don’t like their wages they can lobby their legislators to increase them, or else go find work in the private sector.

As the great President Coolidge told Samuel Gompers, quote: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” End quote.

[Pips.]

Glancing through my archives, in fact, I see that my recorded hostility to public-sector unions goes back more than twenty years. I may be wrong, but I’m consistent.

Since I’m recycling my past commentary, here is some from February 2011.

[Pips.]

One of the first things I was ever told in the journalism business, by a seasoned veteran of London’s Fleet Street, was to be very careful what I wrote about the teachers’ unions. Approximate quote from him:

“You can say what you like about party leaders, government ministers, the IRA, the PLO, organized crime, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, even the Royal Family. You’ll get a couple of angry letters, that’s all. But say something rude about the teachers’ unions, you’ll want one of those mirrors on a long handle to check for bombs under your car.”

Just so. Hell hath no fury like a public-sector union that believes its political power to be under threat. These teachers, road crews, garbage collectors, and municipal paper-pushers have controlled state legislatures here in the U.S.A. for so long now with their bought-and-paid-for politicians, the thought of any legislative threat to their plush healthcare deals and triple-padded, inflation-proofed pensions drives them to insensate rage.

That’s what we’re seeing in Wisconsin this last couple of days. Wisconsin’s new governor, Scott Walker, a Republican, came in after last November’s elections with a Republican state Senate and House, and they found themselves looking at a $137 million hole in the state’s current budget, which the state constitution requires to be balanced, and a likely $3.6 billion shortfall projected for the next two-year budget.

Governor Walker and his Republican legislators decided to reform the conditions of state employment. They drew up a bill that will double state employees’ health-care contributions to 12 percent and their pension contributions to 5.6 percent — in both cases, bringing the figure up to about half what a private-sector employee pays. The bill also removes most bargaining rights from public-sector unions.

Most of us in the private sector can’t even understand why public-sector workers need labor unions. The point of a labor union is to prevent a profit-making enterprise from maximizing profits by exploiting employees. Since a state is not a profit-making enterprise, what need for unions?

Since a state can’t go out of business, public employment is always more secure than work for a private company. Public-sector workers should give up something in return for that security, and collective-bargaining rights are a fair thing to give up.

Public-sector unionization is in fact quite a new thing. Not until 1961 were federal employees given collective-bargaining rights, though some states and cities unionized earlier. Still today, many states do not permit public employees to unionize. Of all the nation’s eight million public-sector workers, less than forty percent are unionized.

Still, we private-sector Johnnies think that’s forty percent too many, and we’re cheering on Scott Walker here.

Note to self: After broadcast, send out assistant to buy one of those mirrors with a long handle …

[Pips.]

So where the issue of a nominee for Labor Secretary is concerned, my first question is, always has been, and will continue to be: Where does the nominee stand on public-sector workers organizing?

03 — Killing Hong Kong.     I should add, for listeners who are themselves public-sector workers and who might have taken umbrage at all that negativity, I should add that I myself worked in the public sector for two years.

That was in London, 1969-1971. Equipped with a bachelor’s degree in math, I thought I’d give computing a try. My father’s advice to me had always been to “Get a government job!” I did; I went to work for the British Post Office, which in those days also ran the nation’s telephone system.

So in 1969 I became a computer programmer, working on Telephone Billing. This was of course the early mainframe days: punched cards in, masses of printed paper out; no terminals, no screens, 32 kilobytes of main memory, external storage on mag tapes. This being a government operation, management hadn’t yet figured out job titles for IT workers, so I was given the rank APC2 — Assistant Postal Controller Grade II.

If I’d stayed a government employee I’d now be enjoying retirement on a gold-plated government pension. Alas for what might have been! I got itchy feet, resigned from my career as an Assistant Postal Controller Grade II, took a trip abroad, and washed up at last in Hong Kong, where I stayed a year and a half.

Hong Kong was at that time a British colony of the more easy-going sort. There was a government, but you’d hardly have noticed. An ordinary Hong Kong resident could go his whole life barely interacting with the government at all.

Even when you needed the government, they didn’t do much. If you called the police for any reason, when they showed up they would first ask you for money. Then, depending on how satisfied they were with the sum you offered, they might deal with the issue, or they might just drive away.

There was crime, of course, and corruption; but both at low levels — lower than an average big city in the U.S.A. today, — both within limits everyone understood, limits enforced by custom and social pressure. Hong Kong cured me forever of faith in government as the solution to all problems. It also left me deeply, permanently unreceptive to rhetoric about the evils of colonialism.

That wide-open, easygoing, free-wheeling Hong Kong is now long gone, I’m very sorry to say. The Chinese Communist Party has taken over the city with all its usual control-freakery and cruelty.

The Economist, November 19th, quote:

Whether a crime was even committed is debatable. Nevertheless, on November 19th judges in Hong Kong’s biggest-ever national-security trial sentenced 45 activists to between four and ten years in prison. Those jailed are among 47 pro-democracy figures, known as the “Hong Kong 47,” who were rounded up in 2021 for having organised a primary to choose candidates for the local legislature. Fourteen of the defendants were found guilty in May of conspiracy to commit subversion. Thirty-one had already pleaded guilty. Two were acquitted. The entire case has been widely criticised as politically motivated.

End quote.

“Politically motivated”? You don’t say.

Sunday, December 8th will be the 77th birthday of entrepreneur and newspaper and magazine publisher Lí Zhìyīng, English name Jimmy Lai. Mr Lai has been a stalwart supporter of civil liberties in Hong Kong. For that he has spent most of his time since 2020 in jail, the last four years in solitary confinement.

He was brought out for yet another show trial November 20th, accused of sedition and collusion with foreign countries. The verdict will of course be “guilty.”

President-elect Trump vowed on a podcast in October that he would “a hundred percent” get Jimmy Lai out of China. Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has described Lai (who holds U.K. citizenship) as a, quote, “priority,” end quote, for his government.

We old China hands are unanimous that Jimmy Lai will die in a communist dungeon. His friends say he himself is resigned to the prospect.

So spare a thought for Hong Kong and its people. It and they have gone from an extraordinary level of freedom to no freedom at all in twenty-seven years. Spare a thought, spare a thought.

04 — The late-Biden Rush.     After the 2020 elections the Biden Rush — that is, the great rush of foreign scofflaws in across our southern border — was not too hard to predict. I of course predicted it.

With their man in the White House and control of the lower chamber in Congress, the ruling class opened the gates, with results we are all familiar with.

By the run-up to the 2024 elections a lot of that familiarity had turned to discontent among voters. Aware of this, and with the upcoming elections in mind, the Biden administration cut a deal with the government of Mexico to improve the optics of the situation.

Non-Mexicans flooding in across Mexico’s southern border on their way north to the U.S.A. would be held down there in the South-Mexican states of Chiapas and Tabasco, with suitable adjustments to the computerised “asylum seeker” rackets to keep them from getting unmanageably angry. With U.S. journalists fixing their attention on our own border up in Mexico’s north, the Biden Rush was no longer visible to them, or us.

Had the Democratic Party won control in this month’s election, the agreement with Mexico could have been scrapped. The hundreds of thousands of would-be invaders pent up in those south-Mexican states could have been set free for another, now visible, Biden Rush.

Unfortunately American voters went the other way. You’d think that under the circumstances the outgoing administration would just throw up their hands, say “Aw, the hell with it! Let Trump handle it.”

That is not what’s happening. Following the election result, the administration has gotten busy. Busy doing what? Busy making sure that when the new Biden Rush arrives at our border it will be greeted with rules and regulations even more lax, more welcoming, than the last one. Quote from the New York Post, November 21st, edited quote:

The Biden administration is quietly rushing to implement new policies that will loosen restrictions on migrants who entered the U.S. illegally — a parting attempt to thwart President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration crackdowns and mass deportations, sources tell The Post …

The outgoing administration intends to launch an ICE Portal app starting in early December in New York City that will allow migrants to bypass in-person check-ins to their local ICE office.

Homeland Security sources tell The Post the app will make it easier for migrants to flee authorities in part because the software has proven to be glitchy and unreliable.

Even when it’s working correctly, the new app doesn’t check for past arrests or outstanding warrants — something the current system tied to in-person appointments does, sources said.

Up to 100,000 migrants will be enrolled in the first wave of the program, sources said.

That’s just one of a handful of initiatives being pushed through before inauguration day — including allowing migrants to contest government orders to undergo electronic tracking while they await their immigration appointments.

And experts said rolling back the policies might not be as simple as Trump waving his pen, because changes could be subject to both procedural hurdles and legal challenges …

Former acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan slammed the Biden administration’s last-minute moves as [inner quote] “the opposite of a peaceful transition of power.” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

It is, in other words, sheer spite. But spite driven by what?

I’ve been pondering that for years on this podcast. What is the driving factor behind this irresistible desire of ruling classes in the West to replace their legacy populations?

Call me a mystic, but I am more and more inclined to think that there is some deep psychic force being expressed here, like the Dark Energy that cosmologists talk about. It’s not economic, political, sectarian, or cultural. It has no connection to reason at all. It’s just there, like gravity, sucking our civilization down into the Pit.

05 — Andreessen on Rogan.     In all proper modesty I acknowledge that Podcast of the Week this week was not Radio Derb. What was it, then? It was Joe Rogan’s interview with Marc Andreessen. Doing my morning browse of X on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many users enthusiastically posting clips from an interview.

Strictly speaking this was a vidcast, not a podcast. You get to see Rogan and Andreessen, as well as hear them. It also comes with a warning. WARNING: It’s l-o-o-o-ng — three hours, eight minutes, and forty-five seconds.

So who is this Marc Andreessen guy? He is a huge figure in modern tech, with a net worth nudging two billion. If you’re using any kind of browser to engage with the Internet — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Firefox, Opera — just nod a thank-you in Marc Andreessen’s direction. He created the first commercial internet browser thirty years ago, when the Internet — at least so far as ordinary citizens were concerned — was an exciting new thing.

I’ve never engaged personally with Andreessen, but just on the evidence of the Rogan interview it’s plain he is very smart indeed — so smart his vocal apparatus has trouble keeping up with his mind: he’s a very fast talker.

I don’t imagine many of my listeners have the patience to watch a three-hour vidcast all the way through. The best, most quotable part of this one is, by general agreement, the ten minutes beginning at one hour, thirty-three minutes and twenty seconds in.

Here are some sample quotes extracted from that ten minutes, starting just after Rogan quotes Elon Musk saying that there are today more federal agencies than there have been years of the United States. Sample quotes, edited.

Andreessen:  Correct. Yeah: 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year. And then my favorite twist is, we have this thing called “independent federal agencies” So for example, there’s this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is the … It’s sort of Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control. And it’s an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, like, there is no such thing as an independent agency, and yet — there it is.

Rogan:  What does her agency do?

Andreessen:  Whatever she wants.

Rogan:  What does it do, though?

Andreessen:  Basically, terrorize financial institutions, prevent fin-tech, prevent new competition, new start-ups that wnt to compete with the big banks … Just by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services … This is where a lot of debanking comes from, is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system … My partner Ben’s father has been debanked.

Rogan:  For what?

Andreessen:  For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations — here’s a great thing — under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the past twenty years, there’s now a category called a Politically Exposed Person — PEP. And if you are [sic] a PEP you are required by financial regulators to kick them off … to kick them out of your bank …

Rogan:  What if you’re politically on the left? … So no-one on the left gets debanked?

Andreessen:  I’ve not heard of a single instance of anybody on the left getting debanked … There’s a Constitutional Amendment that says the government can’t restrict your speech but there’s no Constitutional Amendment that says the government can’t debank you. Right? So if they can’t do the one thing they do the other thing. And then they don’t have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private-company banks to do it, and then the private-company banks do it because they’re expected to. But the government gets to say: “We didn’t do it. It was the private company that did it.” And of course J.P. Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers — of course, right? Because they’re a private company. And so it’s this sleight of hand that happens. So basically it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran …

End quotes.

There is of course much more, all of it expressed clearly by a serious, seasoned actor in financial and informational technology. I have never seen such a clear description of the Administrative State and its methods, from a guy who’s confronted it and them countless times. Check it out.

My thanks to Marc Andreessen for that; and my apologies to him at second hand on behalf of all the many X users who have trouble with the correct spelling of his name. And yes, of course, thanks to Joe Rogan, too.

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

Imprimis:  The spite of our elites towards Donald Trump, their determination to use the last few weeks of their administration to thwart his plans, may not be limited to a flood of illegal aliens granted new privileges. It may extend as far as engineering a major war to greet Trump when he crosses the threshold of the White House.

Tucker Carlson thinks so. So does my boss the Z-man.

Can Trump Derangement Syndrome really drag people down that low? I don’t see why not. It brought us the corruption and invalidation of the legal system and federal law enforcement, gross mismanagement of the nation’s finances, favors to despots who call us The Great Satan, … in short, lt brought us the World of Null-T.

Our power elites have no limits. Nothing is sacred to them. They destroyed Trump’s first Presidency; now they are bending their efforts to destroying his second. To that noble end, war is a small price to pay. And of course it won’t be them who pay it; it’ll be the rest of us.

Item:  Some new information here from the U.S. Census Bureau, which gathers data on worldwide trends.

One of the most striking findings is that South Korea’s Total Fertility Rate is now at a sensationally low 0.68 children per woman. That’s a decline from 1.2 children per woman since 2014, so a 43 percent decline in just ten years.

For a stable population under modern circumstances you need a TFR somewhere around 2.1. At 0.68 you will, in two or three generations’ time, be producing mere thousands of new citizens per annum while burdened with millions of the elderly living longer and longer as medical science improves.

It’s a sad prospect. I got a small personal glimpse of that sadness just recently.

I was at dinner with an old acquaintance, a seventy-ish American gentleman of good humor, high intelligence, and blessed with worldly success and wealth. Making idle chat about our families, I described the antics of my delightful, mischievous grandson, who lives much of the time with us.

My friend shook his head sadly, looking down into his food. He has given up hope of his children presenting him with any grandchildren. Now in middle age, they are just not that way inclined.

I felt the utmost sympathy. Reading these statistics about South Korea, I felt sympathy and sadness on a wider scale. So many millions — tens of millions — of lonely old people. What an ocean of loneliness is in front of us! Can’t we think of anything to do about this?

Item:  My old pal Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama … Oh, all right: I met him once and shook hands with him. He, the current Dalai Lama, turns ninety next July 6th. That has religious significance.

The significance is, that the physical Dalai Lama — the one whose physical hand I shook — is, in the religion he represents and in the minds of his followers, merely a vehicle for a high-quality spiritual being, a Buddha. Once that vehicle has ceased to operate, the Buddha will migrate to a new vehicle, a newborn child.

So how do you figure out which newborn child got the Buddha reincarnated in him? Or her: the present Dalai Lama has said it could be a female. He has also said that he — that is, his inner Buddha — may not be reincarnated at all.

So it’s already a bit vague and confused. What’s the significance of next July 6th? The significance is that back in 2011 His Holiness declared that discussions about his reincarnation would take place once he reaches the age of 90, adding that, quote: “For now, we must wait a little longer for a clearer picture.” End quote.

The wild card here, the yak in the woodpile, is of course China. They don’t want any discussions about the pontiff’s reincarnation. They’ll appoint someone of their own choosing, someone who won’t give them any trouble.

We know this because it’s happened before. Next to the Dalai Lama, the most important person in Tibetan Buddhism is the Panchen Lama. That dignitary died in 1989 in Chinese-occupied Tibet, where he’d been a political prisoner for fifteen years. In 1995 the Dalai Lama, at this point an exile in India, tapped a six-year-old Tibetan boy as the reincarnated Panchen Lama. The communists arrested the child and his family, and none of them has been seen since.

Why are the ChiComs being so cruel to the Tibetans? Because they don’t want any messy regional uprisings and all the bad publicity they’d bring, that’s why. You think it’s easy running an empire?

Item:  Last weekend Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket took six space tourists into orbit. One of them was an astronautical engineer named Emily Calandrelli, 37 or 38 years old (we’re not sure) and quite strikingly pretty. Ms Calandrelli thereby became the hundredth woman to go into space.

It was of course terrifically exciting for all aboard, with much cheering and whooping in the video clips sent down to Earth. Ms Calandrelli’s mode of expressing her excitement, however, generated much off-color humor. Listen.

[Clip:

Male voice:  Look at that Earth! Look at that Earth!

Emily:  I’m here! I did it! … Guys, look!

Male voice:  There you go!

Emily:  (Gasp.) (Breathlessly🙂 We’re in space right now … Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness! … That’s our planet … (Even more breathlessly) Oh, my goodness! That’s …

Male voices whooping triumphantly …]

The humor was of course widely denounced as sexist, misogynistic, objectifying, and hateful. That’s the times we are in.

I beg leave to think that those who generated the humor were inspired not by hatred of women nor even feelings of superiority, but by the desire to have some harmless fun.

Also to assert the true fact that men and women are in some respects … different, and to poke a finger in the collective eye of the woke schoolmarms who deny it.

However that may be, the phrase, “I felt the Earth move” now has a whole new dimension. Emily Calandrelli didn’t just feel it move, she saw it move.

07 — Signoff.     That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you as always for your time and attention, for your support and donations.

Concerning the latter: The home page of my website johnderbyshire.com has full instructions for how to donate; just scroll down a page or two to the “Introduction” section. My heartfelt thanks to you in advance for doing so.

The item in my November 15th podcast about Japan launching into orbit a space satellite made of wood, continues to inspire. You’ll recall that I concluded the item with the question: “Which nation do you think will be the first to launch into orbit a satellite made of leather?

Last week I recorded my bafflement at the fact that several emailers answered with Scandinavian countries — Sweden, Norway, Denmark. Why? I wondered.

Radio Derb’s reach is of course world-wide. On Monday I received the following from a listener in Norway. Quote:

I too was surprised about the Scandinavian leather suggestions — but I am convinced it has to do with Black Metal, our top music export. It’s all about leather, just image search it and you will see.

End quote.

Sure enough: if I put the phrase “black metal” into the search box for Google Images, I do indeed see a lot of leather.

I had never heard of Black Metal music, though, and had no idea what it sounded like. Over to YouTube, which has lots of examples.

To sign us out, and with a sideways nod to all the retail outlets shrieking at me that today is Black Friday, here is a sample of Black Metal. It’s from an album with title “From the Vastland” by the group Tenebrous Shadow.

This particular track identifies as “Asto Vidatu,” which is the name of a malevolent spirit in Persian mythology.

Yes: that’s Persian, not Scandinavian. That doesn’t make sense to me, either, but I’m no musicologist. Listening to it, in fact, I find myself thinking that there are some doors Man was never meant to open … but judge for yourselves.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

Note: I am taking the long weekend to get started on some projects, so no show today and no posting either. Instead, here is something from behind the green door that people suggested I post here at some point. That point is now. Please consider signing up for a green door account. Five bucks a month is a bargain.

Flipping around YouTube I saw some videos on what I assumed to be the latest abomination in the Star Trek franchise. Having grown up watching the re-runs of the original, I try not to think about what they did to it. Lots of men like me ended up in the STEM world because of science fiction. Not all of it was art. In fact, most of it was crap, but it made being smart cool and adventurous.

That was the real hook for the kids of my day. The original Star Trek was a pirate ship in space where the crew got to do cool stuff with technology. The crew were not just swashbucklers, but problem solvers who often had to use their wits to get out of a jam of their own making. More than a few trips were made to the emergency room because boys decided to replicate what Kirk did to defeat the Gorn.

Then I saw that the Drinker had a review or preview about whatever they were doing with Star Trek, so I gave it a listen. Turns out it is not a new film or series, but a short that is something of a farewell for William Shatner. In less than ten minutes it covers the life of the character he created for the series. There is no dialogue, just computer enhanced images and a soundtrack.

It is a poignant and beautiful farewell to the man who played the role, but also the characters and the series that made the franchise possible. It a short goodbye to a long career and the relationship with the fans. It is exceedingly rare for Hollywood to do anything with dignity and class these days, but this is as close as you get to an honorable death in the entertainment business.

It is ironic, in a way, that Shatner would go out with such class, given that he is an old school carny in many ways. He was known for a willingness to take any role that paid, no matter how ridiculous. His run as TJ Hooker in a television cop show was a long running joke because it was so silly. Shatner was an anything for a buck sort of guy, which often meant taking less than dignified jobs.

On the other hand, it is these sorts of carnies who tend to be the most grateful for and humble about their success. They treat their job as a profession. Michael Cain and Clint Eastwood are other examples. Their job, as they saw it, was to make entertainment product for paying customers. These are the types who avoid politics and just shut up and sing, so to speak.

Maybe that is why Shatner could be part of this poignant goodbye. He is 93 and his health is not good. This is the final role of his career, so he could put what he has left in the tank into it. How much he was able to do is unknown, but the mere fact that he was willing to do it speaks well of him. He respects the role he played, because he respects the audience that made his life possible.

As far as the film itself, it brought back many memories of sitting on the living room floor after school watching the crew of the Enterprise explore the world. It also reminded me of the wonderful scene in The Wrath of Khan where Spock dies and utters the famous line to his old friend Kirk, ““I have been – and always shall be – your friend.” In the theater when I saw it, you could hear a pin drop.

That was the beauty of the original series, something I came to appreciate as I got older, and that is it was a show about a group of men, adventuring through life, not as solo acts but as part of a brotherhood. If you are lucky as a man, you go on your journey with a group of mates, losing and adding some along the way. The ones you lose will be waiting for you on the other side. The ones you add will carry you there.

That is another lesson of the original series. In my life the people who have given me the business for liking the series have always turned out to be people wearing a red shirt, the people who could never get the previous paragraph. Life is for living, which means taking risks. What makes it sweet is doing so with your crew. A man lives and dies inside his *kóryos or he never lives at all.

Another thing that came to mind watching this short was that no one under the age of fifty will get any of it. If you are a millennial, the original series had been supplanted by the sterile nothingness of The Next Generation, which replaced the pirate-ship-in-space concept with the corporate division in space idea. Then came the HR department in space and then the remote field office in space.

More important, the concepts of brotherhood and the noble male life had pretty much disappeared from the culture. Even in my youth these ideas were being mocked by buddy comedies and the action hero. Mel Gibson was a lot of fun in Lethal Weapon, but by normal cultural standards, his character was a loser. The same was true for all the action heroes, who were solitary figures unable to be part of the Männerbund.

Therein lies some flickers of good news. At the AmRen conference I saw groups of young guys, which is not so common. Going to a conference to hear old men moan about the state of the world is not much of an adventure, but it is a start. There are groups like the Old Glory Club forming up for young guys to join. They may not have had these concepts fed to them as children, but the seeds are still there.

That may be why a relatively unsuccessful television series has cast such a long shadow, despite Hollywood trying to kill it. It is based on eternal truths about the human condition and the male role in life. No amount of cultural vandalism can plow under these truths to the point where they cannot grow again. Those who recall the old truths may be in their winter, but spring will come again.

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Thanksgiving is arguably the greatest American creation, despite being the one thing we have not tried to export. Around the world there are American outposts selling degeneracy of various sorts, along with the supposed ideals of the American empire, but you will never get a sales pitch on Thanksgiving. It speaks to the nature of the current ruling elite that gratitude is not something they think about when trying to change the minds of people abroad.

Regardless, the long holiday that is upon us is special. It is a long weekend of doing little more than giving thanks for the simple things. We do not give thanks to our overlords for anything. We do not give thanks for our stuff. We do not even give thanks for the great fortune of being an American. It is simpler than that. It is a time to look around and appreciate the little things that make life worth living. It is a time to remember the true purpose of life.

What makes the holiday better than most is that it is at least a four-day weekend and is slowly becoming a weeklong affair. Within living memory most people had to work Friday if they wanted to get paid for Thursday, but that is long gone. Most employers give their people Thursday and Friday off, except retailers, of course. Many offices now close early on Wednesday. All week offices are light on staff as people use their personal time to extend the holiday.

If we had any sense as a people, we would make the whole week a national holiday, maybe even shutter retail for a few days. Friday is the start of the Christmas shopping season, so giving the retail people a few days off in advance would be the decent thing to do, but our greed heads will never go for it. Big box retailers now force their staff in on Thursday night to get ready for Black Friday. After the revolution, the people doing this will be sent to a camp, a bad camp.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving is it does not celebrate any of the things that have come to define America. There is no soulless gift giving. Christmas has been turned into an orgy of material self-indulgence. It is reasonable to say that what goes on in this country around Christmas is grotesque. Our other holidays are civic affairs designed to celebrate the government or warmongering. Usually, they are on a Monday, so we get a long weekend, but they have no meaning.

Thanksgiving is unique in that it is about you as a person taking time to think about the good things in your life. The big traditional meal with friends and family focuses the mind on those human relationships. Even in these easy times, life is hard, so taking time to count your blessings is a gift you give yourself. Being grateful is one of those odd things that just makes you feel good. Having a long holiday to eat traditional foods and be grateful is an amazing thing we have created.

It is the gratitude part of it that gets to the heart of the current crisis. All around us are people doing nothing but showing their ingratitude. America is filling up with ingrates who do nothing but complain. One can possibly understand the ingratitude of black people, but the endless complaining from new arrivals is maddening. Even worse is seeing useless weirdos freeriding on society while complaining that the rest of us are not thanking them for being parasites.

Joe Sobran put it best. “The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.” That is the heart of the matter and probably why we invented Thanksgiving. It is our nature to build and create, which is why we are naturally grateful for what we have. A people who built a great civilization out of nothing have a lot to be thankful for, so having a long holiday to take our time and be grateful makes a lot of sense.

Even now, with all that is going on, we have plenty of reasons to take the next few days to count our blessings. The Good Lord in his wisdom has provided us with enemies who possess none of the qualities we respect. They may have inherited power, but they lack the ability to wield it responsibly. Like men on death row, our betters walk around with an expiry date on them. It is a long struggle, but we know that in the end we will prevail and for that we must be thankful.

Of course, we also have the community of dissidents that is slowly forming up to provide fellowship and support as we struggle though this age. Those of you who were at AmRen last time certainly know what I mean. You come back from such things humbled and grateful, because you have been reminded of how fortunate you are to be alive in this time. To be blessed with a life of struggle, to have a reason to be better each day, is the greatest gift of all.

I want to thank everyone who comes to this site to read what I have written or listen to the Friday shows. Special thanks to the many people who fill up the comments every day with commentary that is often better than my posts. This is one of the best comment sections on the internet. It is something people often say to me. Posting will be light the next few days, but the comment section will be open as always. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and thank you for all that you do.

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