Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the clash between the formal and informal rules in Washington, a post on the new world order, a video from the new studio and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

This week Marco Rubio will meet with Russian officials to kick-off what Western media is calling Ukraine peace talks, but should properly be called normalization talks, as in the normalization of relations between Russia and America. The topic of Ukraine will be a part of the process, but not the focus of it. This is something that both sides have said regarding the hour-long talk between Trump and Putin. It was about much more than the war in Ukraine and how to end it.

This is what gets missed in Western media coverage. They are still operating by the old system where everything revolved around Ukraine. It was the lens through which all diplomatic relations were conducted. The new way of doing things is for the major powers to have a framework within which they can work out issues of common interest and settle issues where they are in dispute. For that to happen they must rebuild diplomatic relations between the major countries.

This is why Europe is not included. The EU is not a real place. It is a vague concept that has no sovereign authority. Ursula von der Leyen imagines herself as the empress of Europe, a managerial version of Napoleon, but in reality, she is a bureaucrat who failed up into a position that probably should not exist. As for the major powers of Europe, they will eventually play a role in the new security architecture, but they need to join everyone else in the 21st century before that can happen.

There is another reason the Europeans have been shut out from the talks. It is clear that they do not want anything to change. For them, the new world order is an existential threat so they will do what they can to booger up the process. Amazingly, the Trump people anticipated this. That was one reason for the one-two punch delivered by Hegseth and Vance last week. It has the Europeans reeling, and they are unprepared to do anything about the meetings between Russia and America.

This is right out of the Trump business handbook. The Trump organization was infamous for operating like a whirlwind. Once they got into a deal, they moved so fast and in so many directions, the rest of the parties had no choice but to go along with what they were doing. Not every Trump deal was a smashing success, but all of them were Trump deals and Trump got what he wanted from them. That is clearly what they are doing with regards to the Russia talks.

The other thing you see here is the deliberate minimalization of Ukraine dictator Zelensky by the Trump people. They do not treat him like an equal or even as a European head of state. Instead, he is being treated like a subordinate. He flew to Qatar thinking he could weasel his way into the talks in Saudi Arabia but was told that he would not be invited. Someone might call him if the Trump team felt the need to inform him of anything that happened in the talks.

This is part of the process of minimizing Ukraine. Instead of it being the top priority of the American government, it is now one of many issues that must be discussed between the great powers, once there is a process in place. It may be why the Brits have started to blame Zelensky for squandering the weapons given to him. It has dawned on them that for Trump, Ukraine is not going to be a priority. Now it is time for the political class in the UK to catch up and get with the new program.

Of course, the Russians are clearly uninterested in changing course in Ukraine without resolving the root causes of the war, so they will fight on, even as they are working with the Trump people. The Russians are old school and look at the battlefield as part of the negotiating table, so something like a ceasefire is for the end of the process, not something to be traded away in the middle. This means every day the situation for Ukraine grows worse and thus better for Russia.

That may not be so bad for Team Trump. If Zelensky were to suddenly turn up dead or deposed, replaced by a new ruler free of past errors, the Trump team would have more options as far as working out a peace deal. It is why they keep insisting on elections as soon as possible. Everyone knows that elections mean the end of Zelensky, so the sooner there are elections, the sooner the world is free of the little green man who has held the West captive for three years.

Another fascinating aspect of this revolution in global arrangements is the usual suspects have been marginalized. The attack on the financial superstructure is one reason for it. You cannot rent a mob to make loud noises in front of the media if you no longer have billions from the blob to pay for them. More important, the assault on the administrative state has the media spinning, so they are ignoring the usual suspects, leaving them to complain amongst themselves.

What knits it all together is the Trump whirlwind. The reason there has been so much progress in a short period of time is there are so many things happening in so many places, the “resistance” does not have time to figure out what is happening to them, much less organize to defeat it. The first month of Trump 2.0 has been the most exciting period in politics since FDR’s first one hundred days. It is like the Sea People swarming the brittle empires of the Bronze Age.

That is, perhaps, the way to look at this. Over the last thirty years the troubles for the managerial regime built up to the point where they were facing a tidal wave of enemies, but thought they had them under control. Once the walls were breached, those enemies are flowing in, and they are not interested in having a meeting of the executive steering committee to plan meetings for how to proceed. Like the Sea Peoples, the enemies of the managerial state just want to dismantle it.

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!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m53s Healthcare gets a new boss
• 03m49s Healthcare horror Down Under
• 05m33s Immigration enforcement gets real
• 09m55s Why are politicians so rich?
• 13m05s Healthcare:a history
• 26m43s Signoff with a medical melody

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. This is your feebly genial host John Derbyshire with our weekly survey of the passing scene.

My choice of adverb there was reluctant but accurate. For the past few days Mrs Derbyshire and I have been afflicted with a nasobronchial disorder of the lesser sort, not serious enough to raise our temperatures or justify a doctor’s visit but leaving us enervated and operating at half speed.

The podcast will therefore be shorter than usual, for which I apologize. The commentary on current affairs will be thin gruel. When you’re feeling unwell it’s hard to concentrate on anything other than how unwell you’re feeling.

There will also be a healthcare theme to the podcast. Not a personal one: there is nothing more boring than listening to other people talk about their health issues, unless you’re a doctor and getting paid for it. I shall therefore not impose on you with accounts of our own ailments. I shall, though, later on give you a segment on health in general, in social and historical context.

And yes, of course, we both know there any many worse afflicted than ourselves, often in solitude. We at least have the consolation of feeling miserable together. With noses red from sneezing and throats hoarse from coughing, she is still my Valentine, and I am hers. God bless you, my Valentine.

OK: First let me do what little I can do with the week’s news. For symmetry, I’ll start with some healthcare-related items.

02 — Healthcare gets a new boss.     Congress has been chewing through our President’s nominations to senior executive positions. Notable on the healthcare front here was the final confirmation of RFK, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I expressed my doubts about Kennedy’s suitability to head HHS here on Radio Derb two weeks ago. I still don’t feel altogether easy about the appointment. Is he really determined on making America healthy again, or just on making his friends in the Trial Lawyers’ Association rich again? I guess we’ll find out.

03 — Healthcare horror Down Under     Healthcare’s been generating headlines in Australia.

Those headlines arise from a video clip posted originally on social media, now archived on YouTube. In the clip, two Muslim nurses at a big hospital in the Sydney suburbs — one male nurse, one female — tell an Israeli interviewer that they kill Israeli patients. They tell the interviewer that he himself will be killed, although not necessarily by them, and will go to Hell.

The male nurse — he actually claimed to be a doctor, but he’s a nurse — is laughing cheerfully as he says it. The female just seems angry — homicidally angry where Israelis are concerned.

The two nurses have since been fired, but the fuss over the incident rages on. The nurses’ union condemned the two, but made sure to add that they also condemn Islamophobia.

Well, thank goodness for that! Heaven forbid anyone should find grounds there for Islamophobia!

04 — Immigration enforcement gets real.     And in Washington, D.C. the Trumpian counter-revolution roars on through Week Four.

Sanctuary cites are now a major issue. Wednesday Trump’s newly sworn-in Attorney General Pam Bondi held her first press conference at the Justice Department. She took the opportunity to announce that the Feds have filed lawsuits against the state of New York, its governor Kathy Hochul and other state leaders — yes, including state Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt.

It’s high time. Cities and states are not breaking any federal law by instructing their officials not to co-operate with federal law-enforcement; but if “not co-operating” tips over into “actively obstructing,” then there is a case at law.

For example: A-G Bondi told the presser that New York’s so-called “Green Light” Law would be a particular target of the lawsuit. That’s a state law that grants drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens while blocking federal immigration agents from accessing the data. The head of the state’s DMV is specifically named among those being sued.

And these jurisdictions need to be regularly reminded that, while they are not breaking federal law by withholding co-operation with federal law-enforcement, the feds are likewise not breaking federal law by withholding federal funds from unco-operative jurisdictions.

It is, in certain well-defined circumstances, lawful for states and cities to assert their independence from federal power. For the record, I think that’s a good thing. Local authority, local power, local responsibility: all good things, in proper measure. Still, they shouldn’t expect federal taxpayers to fund their defiance, and federal taxpayers don’t have to.

Just a footnote to that.

Reading so many stories about immigration enforcement in recent days, I believe I have noticed something that warms my heart, and even perhaps my clogged bronchial tubes. I haven’t been up to a rigorous quantitative analysis, but my strong impression is that the term “asylum seeker” is falling out of usage as a synonym for “illegal alien.” It’s annoyed me for a long while every time I’ve seen it; but now I see it less and less.

If I’m right, that’s a great improvement towards honesty in our public discourse.

I’d like to see something similar happen with the word “migrant.” It’s not as flagrantly bogus as “asylum seeker,” but it does carry the idea of a sort of rootless gypsy character just passing through. As a replacement I suggest “settler.”

05 — Why are politicians so rich?     The Eye of Elon has also fixed itself on our politicians’ wealth.

An X post on Tuesday got the attention of our DOGE boss. The poster has a Hungarian name not known to me. His post listed annual salary and personal net worth for Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren. It shows Warren, for example, with net worth $67 million on a salary of $285 thousand.

Musk commented, tweet:

It’s not like these politicians started companies or were NBA All-Stars, so where did they get all the money?

Does anyone know?

End tweet.

Well, of course, they know, but they’re not going to tell us. I covered this terrain in Chapter 12 of my 2009 paradigm-shattering best-seller We Are Doomed. American politics is, I told readers, the Royal Road to Riches. Quote from me:

Cai Shen … is the Chinese God of Wealth. At Lunar New Year, traditional-minded Chinese people paste large pictures of Cai Shen to their doors. In these pictures, Cai Shen is dressed in the uniform of an imperial-era bureaucrat.

So it goes in grand centralized imperial-despotic systems, ruled over by a cadre of officials who have proved their aptitude for the work by passing a lot of examinations. Wealth follows power in such systems. The proper and ordinary route to wealth is through the exercise of power.

End quote,

In qualification I should add that the numbers quoted in that tweet that got Elon Musk’s attention have been disputed. Elizabeth Warren’s net worth may in fact be “significantly less” than $67 million.

Whatever; it’s good to see the subject aired, by someone who might be able to do something about it.

06 — Healthcare: a history.     So far as commentary on current affairs is concerned, that’s all I can offer you this week, ladies and gents. When you’re feeling unwell it’s hard to concentrate on anything other than how unwell you’re feeling.

I did say in my introduction, though, that I’d give you give you a segment on health in general, in social and historical context. Here is that segment.

It’s actually a column I wrote for Taki’s Magazine ten years ago under the title “How Are You Feeling?” If you’re a Takimag subscriber you can probably find the original text there; if not, there’s an archived version at my own website.

I’m not going to make a habit of reading old columns from my bottom drawer in lieu of commentary on current events. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever done it before. Allow me just this once, please. Also allow me some slight updates from the 2014 version.

Here we go. “How Are You Feeling?” This was me in Taki’s Magazine, November 13th, 2014.

[Pips.]

Reading the November issue of Literary Review (that’s a British monthly, somewhat like the New York Review of Books but less claustrophobically liberal), the following thing caught my attention. It’s in Donald Rayfield’s review of Stephen Kotkin’s book Stalin, Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. Quote:

“Medical historians conclude that Stalin was in more or less acute muscular, neurological, and dental pain all his adult life … Stalin’s brutality towards the medical profession, hitherto sacred to all Russian authorities, hints at the frustrations of a man in unremitting pain.”

End quote.

That brought to mind a remark I’ve seen attributed to Winston Churchill, quote: “Most of the world’s work is done by people who are not feeling very well.” End quote. For persons of Stalin’s and Churchill’s generation — they were born four years apart — I bet that was true.

Churchill himself had, according to his biographer, quote, “been prey to ills since childhood. Some of his vacations were taken on doctor’s orders; others were interrupted by bouts of influenza or infectious fevers.” End quote.

Until the middle of the last century there wasn’t much relief for illness, even if you were a Russian despot or a British Prime Minister. The title of Lewis Thomas’s 1983 book about medicine tells it all: The Youngest Science.

Thomas (1913-1993) was a doctor, the son of a doctor and a nurse. The early chapters of his book are devastatingly frank about the near-uselessness of doctoring prior to the introduction of antibiotics in the mid-1930s. Longish quote:

“Explanation was the real business of medicine. What the ill patient and his family wanted most was to know the name of the illness, and then, if possible, what had caused it, and finally, most important of all, how it was likely to turn out …

During the third and fourth years of [medical] school it gradually dawned on us that we didn’t know much that was really useful, that we could do nothing to change the course of the great majority of the diseases we were so busy analyzing, that medicine, for all its façade as a learned profession, was in real life a profoundly ignorant occupation …

Once you were admitted [to hospital] … it became a matter of waiting for the illness to finish itself one way or the other … Medicine made little or no difference.”

End longish quote.

This was actually an advance on medicine as practiced before the 20th century, when medical procedures like bleeding, cupping, and purging all too often did make a difference, but in the wrong direction. Whether, as is commonly believed, the multiple bleedings administered to George Washington in his last illness were what killed him, they surely didn’t help.

Nor did the attentions President James Garfield received from the White House doctors after he took two bullets in the back from a disappointed office seeker in 1881. The medics spent weeks probing poor Garfield’s wounds with their bare hands and unsterilized instruments in hopes of extracting the bullets, giving the President terrible pain and, of course, sepsis. It took him more than two months to die. The assassin was eventually tried, convicted, and hanged, after delivering the memorable line, quote: “Yes, I shot Garfield; but it was the doctors that killed him.” End quote.

In the company of medical people who know the history of their craft you can get a good discussion going about the exact date after which medical attention was more likely to help than harm you. Opinions generally settle somewhere between 1910 and 1940.

That’s within living memory. People of the generation before my own had little to hope for from medicine. The more realistic among them knew this.

My own father, born 1899, regarded the entire medical profession with fear and mistrust. A hospital, he believed, was a place where poor people went to die. A major theme in the background noise of my childhood was the voice of my mother — a professional nurse — nagging Dad to go see a doctor about some ailment he was suffering. Quote from Mum: “Why won’t you at least go see him? He won’t HURT you.” End quote. Dad knew better. Most things mend by themselves. He lived to be 85, dying at last of pneumonia, which was known to people of that generation as “the old man’s friend.”

It wasn’t all negatives before, quote from Lewis Thomas, “the early 1950s, when medicine was turning into a science,” end quote. There was nursing; there was surgery; there were a handful of useful drugs.

Nursing — the art of keeping patients clean, comfortable, and cheerful — must have saved far more lives than doctoring in the long dark ages before antibiotics. Florence Nightingale (a significant mathematician, by the way) has to be reckoned one of the great benefactors of humanity.

Surgery before modern anesthesia (which arrived in the 1840s) was a horror show. Fanny Burney’s account of her mastectomy in 1811, when she was 59, is hard to read. She survived it, though, living to be 87, and even stayed friends with the surgeon.

The main component of the surgeon’s art was speed — getting the job done before the patient died of shock. Quote from The Pickwick Papers:

“‘You consider Mr. Slasher a good operator?’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Best alive,’ replied Hopkins. ‘Took a boy’s leg out of the socket last week — boy ate five apples and a gingerbread cake — exactly two minutes after it was all over, boy said he wouldn’t lie there to be made game of, and he’d tell his mother if they didn’t begin.’”

End quote.

Pre-modern drugs were just as scary. The only ones that worked were quinine, for malaria, and digitalis, for heart failure. The rest were basically poisons: arsenic, bismuth, strychnine, mercury (though mercury’s only poisonous if inhaled as a vapor). James Boswell “treated” his numerous doses of the clap by staying indoors for several weeks injecting mercury into his urethra until the lesions healed.

Cold-eyed realists knew it was all nonsense. Flaubert, for example: Madame Bovary‘s doctor husband is merely a fool, but Homais the town pharmacist is a crook.

Are we any wiser nowadays? We surely have far better real medicine, and marvelous surgery. Imbruvica has saved my life, and a friend recently got a new knee. A new knee! Churchill’s quip no longer applies: Most of today’s work is done by people who feel fine.

Colds, allergies, migraines, and insomnia are with us as much as ever, though. We spend scads of money on treatments every bit as bogus as Boswell’s mercury. As ebola’s been reminding us, most virus infections are incurable and have to run their course. The youngest science is now a science, but it’s still young.

[Pips.]

07 — Signoff.     That’s all I can manage in my wasted, distracted, and enfeebled state, listeners. My apologies to all. I should be sufficiently recovered next week to bring you a full show, with all the breadth and depth of coverage you have come to expect from Radio Derb.

To help lift my spirits, note please that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website, or indirectly by subscribing to that splendid monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I now contribute a regular column. Thank you!

Immigration into the U.S.A. from India has become an issue recently, much commented on at social media and also here at Radio Derb. Key points of annoyance have been Indian staffing agencies taking over the “guest worker” rackets, Indian managers preferentially hiring Indian workers, and Vivek Ramaswamy telling us we are not nerdy enough.

There’s a lighter side to offset all the negativity. We can, for example, make fun of the way Indians speak English. A major beneficiary there has been Kunal Nayyar, who played the character Raj Koothrappali in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Nayyar has actually published an autobiographical book titled Yes, My Accent is Real. He definitely doesn’t take himself too seriously: one of the chapter headings in the book is “My Big Fat Indian Wedding.”

In Britain that particular vein of humor goes back way further than here, for obvious historical reasons. One practitioner was the comedian Peter Sellers. In 1960 he starred as an Indian doctor in a movie, The Millionairess. The actual millionairess was played by Sophia Loren. The plot of the movie has her falling in love with this Indian doctor.

It wasn’t a musical movie; but to help promote it, Sellers and Loren recorded a song that became a popular hit. Trawling through my memory for a medically-themed song with which to finish this week’s podcast, that song pushed itself to the front of my attention, so I’ll sign off with it.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

One of the consequences of the unfolding revelations in Washington is that we must reexamine the past in light of this new data. We now know that the political process was captured by the Blob and used to serve the Blob. That means the alleged policies of past presidents were probably not their policies at all. They were simply staying ahead of the policies put forth by the Blob.

At the same time, much of what we want government to do has gotten worse as the Blob has assumed control. Name a problem and not only has it gotten worse, but the cost of addressing it has grown out of control. One great example is the war on drugs that has tracked closely with the growth of the Blob. The cost of fighting it has spiraled out of control, while the problem has only grown worse.

It is the nature of managerialism to look for things to manage, but managing is not the same as solving or even mitigating. You cannot remain a manager if what the problem you are tasked to manage gets solved. In fact, solving the issue is exactly what you must seek to avoid, which means you become part of the problem. This is what we have seen with the drug war going back to the Reagan years.

That is the show this week. It is a dive into the rabbit hole of the drug war to try and explain how the drug menace is the result of managerialism. At every stop along the way, government either deliberately or incompetently advanced the flow of drugs into the country and the diversity of drugs available. The reason we did not have a drug epidemic a century ago is we did not have managerialism a century ago.

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 War On Drugs
• What Happened?
• Maxine Waters Was Right
• The Poppy Fields
• Syrian Captagon
• Purdue Pharma
• Fentanyl & Meth
• Marijuana Legalization
• Drugs, Protection & The State

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Tomorrow the Trump team arrives in Germany to participate in the Munich Security Conference, where they are expected to inform the Europeans of their plans to bring Project Ukraine to an end. No one knows what Trump is planning, but the Europeans are braced for bad news. That bad news is either a plan for peace brokered without them or a plan that hands the whole mess over to them. Team Trump had made clear that their first priority is accounting for the money.

As a general rule, anytime the guy giving the money starts making angry noises about accounting for the money, the guy receiving the money is in trouble. This type of scene is always part of gangster movies for a reason. It means the giver is unhappy with the receiver and has come to a conclusion about the arrangement that is going to be bad for the receiver. Imagine some DOGE kids stuffing Zelensky into a locker and you have a good idea of what is coming.

To make matters worse, Trump just had a long call with Putin and both sides described it in very positive language. There has been an exchange of prisoners, with Trump indicating the Russians asked for little in return. He was making clear that he understood their gesture and was ready to reciprocate. It is the sort of thing that is done when two sides are looking to build a larger relationship. You do small deals to build trust and develop a process for larger deals.

What is clear is that Trump has looked at his options with regards to Ukraine and did not see a deal worth pursuing. The Russians are not interested in anything but the deal they feel was done in Istanbul in 2022, plus some extra to cover the costs of litigating it on the battlefield for the last two years. They will get that deal either at the table or on the battlefield and there is nothing to be done to prevent them. Trump seems to understand this and accepts it.

Deal making always starts with discovery. You must first learn if there is a deal to be had, otherwise you are wasting your time. The number one rule in deal making in the private sector is that time is your most precious asset. The best salesmen maximize their time by not wasting time chasing bad business. For Trump, Project Ukraine, as constructed by his predecessor, is bad business. The goal now is to get this off the agenda as quickly as possible.

Most likely, the starting place this week is to inform the Europeans and Zelensky that the deal for them right now is Istanbul plus some other things. If they are ready to take that deal, then the Trump Team will hammer out the deal with the Russians and at some point, the Ukraine government will be invited in to sign it. Who the representative of that government is will be determined by elections to be held immediately. That means Zelensky will not be part of the signing ceremony.

This is why they are talking about the money. Imagine the bosses from Chicago coming out to Las Vegas to talk to the guy they sent out to oversee their operations, and their first question is, “Where’s our money?” Zelensky made the fatal mistake of saying he will never be able to account for it. That sealed his fate. There is simply no way Trump will do business with the guy. It now means any support requires elections and repayment of the money.

Like the guy who cannot pay in the gangster films, this leaves Zelensky and the Europeans in an impossible position, which is the point. Team Trump is prepared to work with the Russian on other issues, even if they cannot get a deal on Ukraine, so they are prepared to walk away from Ukraine entirely. If Europe wants to keep the United States engaged, then it means elections and an accounting of the hundreds of billions sent to Kiev over the last three years.

Now that the Trump plan is coming into focus, the girl boss running EU foreign policy issued a statement declaring the unconditional support for Ukraine. Not having come to grips with what is happening in Washington, she seems to think Team Trump will sit down with her to talk it out and come to a compromise. Instead, this will be used to justify handing the whole mess over to the Europeans so Trump can move onto matters far more important than Project Ukraine.

This is the other thing coming into focus. The war caused the Russians to rethink their relationship with Europe. They stopped taking calls from people like Macron and Schultz, because there was no point in speaking with them. The Chinese have gone out of their way to humiliate European leaders who turn up in Beijing. Men close their doors to the setting sun and that is what is happening to Europe. The emerging great powers of the new world order are ignoring Europe.

Now we are seeing Trump do the same thing. Vance was in Paris this week, in advance of the Munich meeting, and he told the Europeans in no uncertain terms how things are going to be going forward. They were properly offended, and that was most certainly the point of his speech. Friday, the Trump delegation is going to tell the Europeans how it is going to be with regards to Ukraine. If they do not like it, they can go it alone, but everyone knows they lack the ability to do it.

It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor. Four years ago, the Eurocrats were congratulating themselves along with Biden people, telling each other stories about the new world order and how they would build back better. Now, the guy they thought they had vanquished will be telling them their place in the new world order. The guy building back better, will be the guy they were sure was the final boss in their quest to spread the managerial revolution around the globe.

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!

One of the many interesting aspects of the Trump era has been the collapse of what was called conservatism in America and the rise of a new coalition to replace it as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Most pundits have been happy to call it Trumpism or MAGA, as they hope it is temporary. Others have tried to jam it into the populist bucket, despite the fact it is not a populist movement. Beyond these superficial attempts at labeling, not much has been said about it.

Not everyone in the coalition is thrilled by what they are seeing. Many older conservatives, the paleo variety, are happy to see Conservative Inc. head off to bankruptcy, but they are a bit uncomfortable sharing a pew with people like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard. They wince when Tucker Carlson gets along with old school lefties like Jimmy Dore or Aaron Maté. They spent their lives on the opposite side of these people and now they share the same movement.

In fairness, it is even more difficult for the old school lefties, because for them, politics defines their life. That means they are now faced with supporting that which they were sure was evil until not so long ago. It also means their conception of evil may have been wrong, which means their conception of themselves was wrong. This is why it is difficult for an ideologue to adjust to new evidence. Unlike the non-ideologue, such adjustment requires a reexamination of their soul.

That aside, the issue everyone is struggling with is that our political buckets, like so much of the past, have been a fiction. The left-right framing was never two groups opposing one another, but two groups negotiating with one another. It was Team Fast versus Team Slower, both agreeing on the destination. The “conservatives” were never interested in conserving anything but their sinecures, while the liberals were hellbent on sweeping liberalism into the dustbin of history.

For as long as anyone has been alive, the consensus in American politics has been the radicalism at the heart of progressivism. Egalitarianism, universalism, and the blank slate are the three legs of this ideological stool. What motivates and justifies using this stool to smash up American society and go abroad to smash up other cultures is the intense belief that they are commanded by history or history’s God to impose this ideology on the people of the world.

This is how we arrived at this odd time where John Derbyshire and Paul Gottfried share a pew with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. The excesses of progressivism, unconstrained by the necessity of the Cold War, have put everything at risk, thus calling forth an old force that has been dormant since Gettysburg. That force is prudentialism. The thing that lies at the heart of Western conservatism is a set of precautionary principles that act to avoid unknowable negative consequences.

If you listen to what RFK Jr. says about medicine, for example, it generally boils down to restoring prudence to the field. The drug makers operate on the assumption that they must rush everything to the market, which often causes new harms while having little impact on the thing they are trying to mitigate. The Covid vaccine is a great example of the recklessness of medicine. Even a little bit of prudence would have avoided this easily avoidable error.

Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard’s main reason to exist is her skepticism of the military industrial complex and the foreign policy community. For the last thirty years, we have staggered from one ill-conceived conflict to the next, never stopping to ponder if what we are doing will have negative consequences down the road. No one seems to be able to think beyond the first move. The main thrust of Gabbard’s critique is that a tiny bit of prudence could have prevented many of these debacles.

The reason these two are attracted to Trump’s movement is that fundamentally, Trump is the great champion of prudence. He would rather not spend money than spend it, not because he is cheap, but because he knows that spending it has consequences and unless you put those consequences in the balance, you are recklessly spending money and that is not prudent. Trump’s foreign policy is motivated by a desire to not create new problems which will lead to new conflicts.

If Team Slower had not abused the word “conservative” for so long, what we are seeing could be easily labeled “conservatism.” Decades of verbicide have left us with a poverty of language to describe what we are seeing. It is why Trump never uses the old labels when talking about politics. He did not call the people running USAID “leftists” or even “radicals” but instead called them “lunatics.” In the current context, it is both the appropriate word and the accurate one.

Even so, Trumpism is the return of prudence to our politics, and it is the necessary precursor for the return of a genuine American conservatism. To paraphrase Michael Oakeshott, “Trumpism is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

The boys and girls in conservative sinecures are hostile to Trumpism because it casts light on their project, revealing it to be nothing more than the sidecar to the radicalism they claimed to oppose. For the neocons, Trumpism is a mirror, revealing their lack of a soul and exposing the vampirism that animates them. For others, it is an uncomfortable calling home of the prudent into a disposition that has defined their lives but never defined their politics.

For lack of a better way of stating it, what we are seeing is the forming up of a new prudentialism, that in the fullness of time may be able to rehabilitate the term “conservative” but for now must settle for Trumpism or MAGA. It is not running around trainyards yelling stop. It is a great rolling back of the progressive project, not driven by superficial romanticism, but by prudent necessity. To make America great again, we must sweep away progressivism and its reckless implementations.

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!

One of the things lost in the excitement of the first month of the Trump administration is the pending reform of the FBI. When Kash Patel was grilled by the Senate, he repeatedly made clear that reforming the agency was his top priority. This is one reason Senate Democrats are stalling his nomination. This paramilitary wing of the Blob is calling in every favor to preserve itself. That lawsuit seeking to prevent the DOJ from getting the names of the J6 agents is a similar move.

There is little questioning the underlying premise of the reform cause. The FBI has lost all credibility with the public after a string of scandals. Framing people is a terrible thing but creating elaborate traps for not-so-bright people, as we saw in the Michigan kidnapping hoax, is monstrous. Most people do not know this has been common practice for decades, but many people know it. Of course, you have the outlandish behavior of the FBI during the first Trump term.

The topic of reform starts with looking at how an organization reached the point where reform is required to save it. That is where the FBI is now. Many people think it might be best to just close it down entirely. The few necessary things it does could be transferred to other agencies or maybe to a new agency with a severely limited portfolio, something like an FBI-lite. When forty percent of the agency was used to go after the J6 people over the last four years, the agency is rotten to the core.

The number one reason the FBI is a mess is that it, like most police forces in the country, was turned into a paramilitary unit. After the North Hollywood shootout, where two heavily armed bank robbers tried to shoot their way through a police cordon, every police department has been transformed into a paramilitary unit. They got money for military grade weapons, body armor and tactical training. They also tapped into the military for equipment and the sort of men who enjoy military life.

The result is the police now function like British soldiers patrolling Northern Ireland during The Troubles or American Marines patrolling Afghanistan. No law enforcement organization group has been deformed more than the FBI by this. Years of selection pressure has resulted in agents who not only look at the general public with contempt, but look forward to confrontations with them. They arrive in full battle gear and have a hostile attitude to arrest mothers holding their children.

It is not an accident that the things the FBI is supposed to do have not gotten better over the last thirty years. Whenever some well-known crazy goes nuts and shoots up a public place, we always learn that this person was “known to the FBI.” We also learn they did nothing about it. Over the last thirty years, the FBI has been transformed from the nation’s top law enforcement agency into a heavily armed gang of thugs who only care about pushing around the average citizen.

You see this in the collapse of standards for FBI agents. A common video online is two portly agents, dressed like they are going to watch their kid’s t-ball game, paying a visit to a citizen over a social media post. The grotesque lack of professional standards jumps off the screen. People now expect higher standards from building inspectors and parking attendants than from FBI agents. The ones not playing soldier are slovenly couch potatoes with the disposition of a postal clerk.

The image of the FBI is a good example of the interplay between the aesthetic and the spiritual that we used to understand. The poorest man used to have a suit for going to church and for when he was buried, because the formal things in life were the important things in life, so it was reflected in your appearance. The Medieval scholar Erasmus, paraphrasing Quintilian wrote, “To dress within the formal limits and with an air gives men, as the Greek line testifies, authority.”

This is where to start with reforming the FBI. The first thing that should happen is every agent must pass a physical test, controlled for their age and sex, within the first ninety days or be fired. At the same time, the agents start wearing suits and the corresponding for female agents. Get rid of the casual clothes and you get rid of the casual attitudes they have toward their jobs. For most, showing up to work dressed like an adult will be terrifying, but maybe they should find other work.

Along the same lines, there is no reason for FBI tactical units. Agents get a standard sidearm that is locked up at their office when they are off duty. The automatic weapons, body armor, flashbangs, etc. all go back to the military. The guys who signed up so they can bust down doors will not like it, but they need to think about either going back into the military or signing up with an international security contractor. Free people do not tolerate paramilitary units operating in their society.

Of course, this will result in most agents leaving the FBI. The PT will eliminate a good chunk of them and the new dress code will filter out many more. The goons playing soldier will find the new culture intolerable. That opens the door for the next reform, which is a return to the old education standard. It used to be that the FBI required a degree in accounting. Then it is expanded to computer science. Now the ranks are littered with criminal justice majors.

In this age, the role of the FBI is to investigate technical crimes, like computer trespass, electronic fraud, corporate crimes, and other crimes that require intelligence. You not only need smarts to do this work, but you need technical skills. Reestablishing educational standards, like bringing back the dress code, is as much about fixing the culture of the organization as raising the quality of people in it. Smart people who take pride in their work tend not to beat up old ladies.

In the end, the problems of the FBI are a microcosm of what has brought managerialism to the brink of collapse. They simply stopped caring about their core function and stopped caring about their own standards. This opened the door to mischief and the sorts of people who feed on mischief. It turns out that those old standards had a purpose after all. The lesson here is Chesterton’s fence. The reform of government starts with revisiting all the old, abandoned rules.

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!

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the importance of enjoying the moment, a post on urban dependency culture, a video from my creek and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

As expected, the lawsuits are quickly piling up as the regime tries to buy time to regroup after the initial attacks from the Trump administration. There are multiple cases involving the Treasury, all aimed at preventing Trump appointees from doing their jobs, at least without permission from the court. There is one case involving the FBI, where the judge is asked to stop the Justice Department from looking into J6 cases. There is at least one case challenging the buyout system.

All these cases have been launched by activists trying to halt the Trump agenda, but they all have something important in common. They revolve around a set of core questions about these executive agencies. Who controls these agencies, by what means do they control them and by whose authority? The activists are challenging the Trump admin on the claim that these are independent agencies. They do not report to the President, so he cannot take these actions.

The trouble with that is there is nothing in the Constitution defining a fourth branch of government under which these agencies are organized. At best, it is a bit of make-believe Washington has indulged since Nixon. The mythology of Watergate says Nixon used these agencies to terrorize his political opponents, so he was driven from the temple of the people. Ever since, permanent Washington has waved around the bloody shirt whenever they did not like what a President was doing.

There is something more important behind this. Watergate was the triumph of the managerial class over the political class. For fifty years, an unelected and unaccountable class of experts has been left to run the administrative state, only indulging the President when it comes to appointing agency heads. In most cases, the appointees were from the managerial elite. These people took turns circulating between government and the Blob.

In his first three weeks, Trump has launched a big arrow offensive on this system and the underlying logic of it. Once these cases get to Supreme Court, administration lawyers will point out that there is no fourth branch of government and that these agencies are part of the executive. While Congress maintains the power of the purse, it does not run these agencies. That is left to the executive branch, which means the President and whomever he appoints to do it.

This seems rather straight forward, but the courts are as corrupt as the rest of the managerial system, so there are plenty of judges who will issue crazy rulings to stop the Trump agenda. While the Supreme Court only has a few ideologically deranged judges, it may not be eager to get involved. This is fundamentally a political dispute, and the court prefers to stay out of those. At the minimum, it may wait until they can choose a clean case to make a clean ruling.

The people filing these suits seem to be banking on the courts dragging this out and never getting to a final decision. They think if they drag it out and make it an issue in the midterms, they can win the House and Senate, then impeach Trump. You can already see hints of this in their rhetoric. While this may sound insane, given the public response thus far, these people live in a bubble. That and they have no other options, given what Trump is doing.

Team Trump seems to be prepared for this. In fact, part of the overall reform agenda is to get one of these cases in front of the Supreme Court to argue for the unitary executive theory, which says the President of the United States has sole authority over the executive branch. Even if the Court rules that Congress plays a role in how these agencies are administered, it will be a massive win. It means the administrative state returns to the control of the political class.

Why is this important?

For the last fifty years, these agencies, along with the media, the academy and the vast network of not-for-profits has operated independent of the President. Further, they have used their capture of the regulatory mechanism and the political finance system to control both political parties, thus controlling the legislative branch. USAID used its billions, in part, to control more billions in the budgets of the agencies, which it directed into its political projects, foreign and domestic.

The reason elections have had no impact on public policy is that the people making public policy were not subject to the voters. The political system became a theater to keep the people distracted. It is why the politicians have become increasingly frivolous and absurd. When Congressman and Senators are furniture, props in the theater of democracy, they tend to be theater kids. No serious person wants to subject himself to the humiliation rituals required of elected office.

The hammer blow delivered to USAID was aimed at shattering the financial structure of the Blob by removing the mechanism the Blob used to circulate money. If they are no longer underwriting the vast network of non-for-profits and regime media outlets, those entities will struggle to control the discourse. The DOGE boys examining every disbursements from Treasury is about starving the Blob of money. The restructuring of the agencies removes their power over the political class.

The reason the economic elite is backing this is because they see that the Blob is threatening their interests. It is out of control. When a girl boss judge in Delaware can crater the state’s economic model, and threaten the country’s financial model, the system that makes her possible must be destroyed. A million girl bosses armed with taxpayer money have set fire to the country for the last decade. What we see now is an effort to put out the fire and eliminate the fire starters.

In the end, we are in one of those momentous times when the fundamental questions of every human society are in the balance. Who decides, by what means do they decide and by whose authority do they decide? The Constitution answers all these questions, but it has been ignored for at least fifty years. Trump wants to restore that old political order, while the Blob seeks to bury it forever. Every civil war and revolution have been fought over these questions, so the best is yet to come.

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!

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m34s Trump the libertarian?
• 05m54s Horsegirl Sam
• 13m37s Zero-based government
• 18m56s Levantines and Slavs
• 27m40s Small win for Brunswick Three
• 30m45s End public-sector employee lobbies!
• 32m26s Indecisive on lobsters
• 34m39s License plate humor
• 36m26s Signoff with J.S. Bach

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! Welcome, listeners and readers, as we close out this first week of February, the second week of the Trump counter-revolution.

Boy, things are happening fast. I just barely got to grips with the tariff issue when all the talk flipped to foreign aid. Halfway through reading up on that I got sidetracked by didn’t-we-just-know-it revelations about FBI shenanigans…

I can’t keep up. It’s some consolation to see that the legacy news outlets can’t keep up, either. I pick up a newspaper and yesterday’s big huge-headlines in-depth cover story has been pushed off to page 22 to make room for today’s big huge-headlines in-depth cover story about something different.

So don’t expect me to cover everything that’s happening, nor even anything in much depth. I’ll do the best I can, that’s all.

02 — Trump the libertarian?

Thomas Jefferson did not, so far as anyone has been able to ascertain, write something like, quote, “The best government is that which governs least,” end quote. Henry David Thoreau used it, but he put it in quotes without telling us who he was quoting. The originator of the sentence seems to have been magazine editor John Louis O’Sullivan in 1837.

So there’s a trivia question for you. You’ll likely be the only person in the room who gets it right. I had to consult Mr Google for it.

The sentiment that “the best government is that which governs least” nowadays belongs under the heading “Libertarianism.” In the realm of commentary, if you think of libertarianism you probably think of the Instapundit blog and its proprietor, law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

Well, in addition to the blog, Professor Reynolds now has a Substack account. Wednesday on that account he posted a well-argued piece a thousand words long under the title, quote: “Trump the libertarian? Yes. And how.” End quote.

In the final words of the piece Professor Reynolds leaves no doubts where he stands. Quote:

Trump isn’t a joke. He’s delivering more cuts, and more blows to unaccountable Deep State authority, than anyone else ever has and there’s no one else who could do this right now.

So that’s how I, a libertarian, can support Trump. Not a hard choice, really.

End quote.

That’s after an excellent brief survey of Trump’s first administration and the reasons for its failures.

Qualifications are required, some of which Professor Reynolds makes. Libertarianism is an ideology; Donald Trump is not an ideologue. No ideological suit of clothes would fit him: it would be too tight or too loose.

Still, it’s fun to watch Trump swinging the axe. Fun, and instructive. Did you know half the bad things that have been uncovered this past twelve days? I didn’t. When I did know one of them, I usually didn’t know the scale of it.

For example, I knew about the federal government’s financial extravagance, but not the billions, the tens of billions of dollars squandered to no good purpose — or to demonstrably bad purposes.

It’s especially instructive to be reminded of all this gross wastefulness just as we are tooling up to pay our federal income taxes. USAID, for example, the U.S. Agency for International Development, had a 2023 budget of forty billion dollars. That’s close to two hundred dollars per federal taxpayer.

The name of the person responsible, until this week, for spending all that money rang a distant bell for me.

03 — Horsegirl Sam.     USAID is the federal agency charged with advancing U.S. interests by supplying non-military assistance to foreign nations. Most of that assistance is of course financial. The agency was founded by an executive order from President John F. Kennedy back in 1961.

Joe Biden, on becoming President in 2021, appointed Samantha Power as head — technically, “administrator” — of USAID. Ms. Power served in that position for all four of the Biden years.

Who is she? Well, I don’t keep precisely up to date with these government people so I couldn’t give you a detailed account of who she is. I did, though, have some things to say about who she was twelve years ago, when the first Obama administration was busy helping to destroy Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya.

I referred to Samantha Power at that time as being one of the Three Horsegirls of the Libyan Apocalypse, the other two being Susan Rice, then our Ambassador to the U.N. (not to be confused with Condoleezza Rice), and Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State.

Here I was commenting: Radio Derb, October 13th 2012.

[Pips.]

What about this business of our ambassador being murdered in Benghazi? Not as an issue of Libyan politics, which should be left to sort itself out, and which no sane non-Libyan should get involved with, but as an issue in U.S. politics?

Key players here have been three ladies, all co-conspirators in the global “human rights” racket.

Exhibit One: Samantha Power, who runs the Human Rights section of the National Security Council. Samantha Power was born in Ireland.

Now, I shall tread carefully here. There are some very sensible Irish people. Some of my best friends are Irish. The Irish as a people, however, have, since they got rid of the British, made something of a specialty of global meddling — going into other people’s countries and telling them how to be better humanitarians. Hang out in the U.N. refectory over there on New York’s East Side; you’ll hear a surprising number of Irish accents.

In the present age, Irish women have been particularly active in this human rights business. Trust me: You haven’t really met a hard-left feminist virago until you’ve met an Irish one.

Samantha Power is in this tradition. She wrote a book, title A Problem from Hell, about America’s deplorable failure to stop the genocides of the 20th century, or even to bother about them much. That got her the attention of George Soros, who funds an outfit named Responsibility to Protect, R2P for short, pushing humanitarian interventions regardless of national interest.

Either the book or the Soros connection, or more likely both, won Barack Obama’s heart, and Ms Power joined the President’s National Security team, always urging humanitarian interventions.

In Libya, for example, where the late Colonel Gaddafy was putting down an insurrection with all the brutality that putting down an insurrection actually entails, and then some. “Make it stop!” shrieked Ms Power, and Obama obliged with an intervention — unnecessary, contrary to America’s interests, empowering to Muslim radicals, but on the Samantha Power scale of values, good and right and just.

It’s interesting to note that Ms Power was especially keen for us to stop Gaddafy’s assault on the rebels in Benghazi. Pause for a moment to reflect on how different this summer’s news might have been if we had let Gaddafy finish the job he started in Benghazi. The phrase “unforeseen consequences” mean anything?

[Pips.]

President Trump dismissed Samantha Power this week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as the new administrator of USAID.

Of a very much reduced USAID. The New York Times reported yesterday that, quote:

The Trump administration plans to reduce the number of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development from more than 10,000 to about 290 positions, three people with knowledge of the plans said on Thursday.

End quote.

If you’ve been following the news at all you will know that a 97 percent downsizing of USAID’s payroll, with a corresponding reduction in its forty-billion-dollar budget, will have a negative impact mainly on the organizers of Drag Queen Story Hours in the schools of Ethiopia and similar cultural promotions.

It was another libertarian, British economist Peter Bauer, who told us fifty years ago that foreign aid is a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Wasn’t anybody listening?

Why reduce the USAID payroll only 97 percent? you may ask. Why not a hundred percent?

Well, USAID is not only about promoting sexual eccentricity. It also participates in disaster relief efforts abroad, which gives the U.S.A. virtue points with foreigners and trains our own people to deal with domestic catastrophies. That’s probably what JFK had in mind all those years ago. I’m just saying: USAID isn’t a total waste of space.

04 — Zero-based government.     Seven years ago, and on a couple of more recent occasions, I reminisced about a management fad that got my attention early in my career as a software developer. Here I was reminiscing in January 2018.

[Pips.]

I know something about budgeting. One of the first big computer systems I designed, back in mainframe days, was for the general ledger and budgeting function of a medium-sized corporation.

Back in those days — this was the 1970s — there was a management fad for “zero-based budgeting, “ZBB” for short.” The traditional way for an organization to work up next year’s budget had been to start with the current year’s budget and make little adjustments up or down here and there. In the zero-based model, you tossed current year into the trash bin and started with a clean sheet of paper. What should we be doing, and how much should we spend doing it?

Like all management fads, sometimes it worked in practice and sometimes it didn’t. It had the appeal of elegance and simplicity, though; and under forceful corporate leadership it made an end run around powerful entrenched departmental interests.

[Pips.]

The federal government’s gross financial extravagance has been on plain view, and Trump is dealing with it ruthlessly. One of his inspirations seems to be zero-based budgeting, ZBB.

So, at any rate, says Andrea James, currently Chief Financial Officer at Oncocyte, a West Coast biotech company. The lady has fifteen years’ experience in corporate finance, including a spell at Tesla when she seems to have engaged with Elon Musk. She writes with authority.

Tuesday this week she posted a long tweet on X with a ZBB theme. At nearly 600 words it’s too long to give you much of, but here are the opening few sentences. Quote:

Gently, softly, calmly, let’s talk about what’s happening in DC right now. Friends, have you ever been through a ZBB process? If not, let me give you my take. So, in a corporation where expenses are out of control, you have to put the entire company through a zero based budgeting process. It is one of the most painful things that people in a company experience.

You basically have to justify every. single. expense. And you also cut a bunch, and then only add back after you’ve gone through a proper ZBB cycle.

The US government is going through a ZBB right now. And that is necessary because spending is out of control. The complexity is so vast that I expect it will take AI to decipher.

End quote.

If AI isn’t up to the job, I still have the skills of my youth. I’d be proud to make them available to the administration. Mr President? Mr Musk? …

Unfortunately, complexity is not the only problem. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution puts the nation’s financial affairs under the control of Congress. That does not, to put it very mildly indeed, mean that our finances are in good hands. Congress hasn’t passed a budget on time since 1996.

It’s all very well to talk about zero-based budgeting: with the Congresscritters in charge, what we inevitably get is zero-timeliness, zero-responsibility budgeting: ZTB and ZRB.

05 — Levantines and Slavs.     I rejoice along with all other National Conservatives at the new administration’s turn to common sense and frugality in domestic affairs. Where foreign affairs are concerned, though, I have my doubts.

Most of them concern that very peculiar speech President Trump made Tuesday evening at a presser alongside the visiting Prime Minister of Israel. Said the President, quote: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too.” End quote. He added that the two million Gazans would be relocated to neighboring countries with no right of return, and that he would deploy U.S. troops to the Strip “if it’s necessary.”

“Relocated to neighboring countries?” Really?

The phrase “Lebanon Civil War” mean anything, Mr President? It lasted fifteen years, there were 150,000 dead, a million people fled the country, and Lebanon has never recovered. A key factor was Palestinian Arabs flooding in after the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War, destabilizing Lebanon’s ethnic balance.

Or how about the phrase “Black September”? That’s shorthand for a civil war in Jordan, also caused by Palestinians flooding in after 1967. It was much shorter than Lebanon’s war, with fatalities only in the low thousands. (Most of those fatalities were Palestinians killed by the very effective Jordanian Armed Forces — British-trained, of course.) The nation of Jordan has survived in reasonably good health. Still, I can’t imagine Jordanians would be receptive to the idea of taking in a few ten thousands of Hamas supporters.

Egypt? Check out the border wall the Egyptians have erected along their border with Gaza. Now that’s a wall!

And yes, it’s Hamas supporters we’re talking about. On all the evidence, Gazans mostly support the terrorists — look at those scenes around the release of Israeli hostages.

This is a rogue population. If they wanted to be the Singapore of the Levant, enjoying comfortable middle-class lives in their sun-kissed little Riviera, they could have had that after the Israelis left in 2005. That’s not what they want. They want to annihilate Israel: that’s what they want.

As for deploying U.S. troops to the Strip “if it’s necessary,” of course it will be necessary. The whole place is booby-trapped. It’s addled with hundreds of miles of underground tunnels, likewise booby-trapped. Does Trump think he can get civilian contractors to deal with that?

So our new President is seriously contemplating sending more troops to the Middle East. Who have we got here, George W. Bush? And yes, I said more troops: we have six thousand in the region already, not counting Turkey. I make that six thousand too many.

The Levant should be left to deal with its own problems. So should the Eastern Slavs. President Trump has had things to say this week about the ongoing war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations.

That was the description I gave to the Ukraine-Russia war back in April of 2022, a few weeks after it started. The Ukrainians may be trying to validate it.

Going around on social media has been a video of Ukraine’s President Zelensky complaining that of the 177 billion dollars in US aid promised to Ukraine, only 75 billion actually reached the country.

I can’t find a date for the video. Furthermore, it’s hosted by a YouTube channel from India. The corruption rankings for 2023 published by Transparency International, with Denmark at number one as “least corrupt” and Somalia at number 184 as “most corrupt,” have India at number 97. Ukraine is number 111, Russia number 147.

So I’d like to know more about the background to that video clip before a definitive pronouncement. On Ukraine’s track record, though, it would not be astounding to learn that some large portion of the aid allocated to them by Congress has been pocketed by “power lords, oligarchs, and political players.”

Is someone keeping careful books on our aid to Ukraine?

To President Trump’s credit, I should say that he is speaking more sense on Ukraine than he is on Gaza. Here he was actually speaking on Monday.

[Clip:  We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earth (sic). We want what we put up to go in terms of a guarantee.

We want a guarantee. We want … We’re handing them money hand over fist, we’re giving them equipment.

European (sic) is not keeping up with us. They should equalize. And look, we have an ocean in between, they don’t. It’s more important for them than it is for us, but they’re way below us in terms of money. And they should be paying at least equal. They should really be paying much more than us, but let’s say equal to us, and they’re billions and billions of dollars below.

So we’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to scure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things.]

You do at least get the impression from that that the President knows the kind of country he’s dealing with.

He even leans perceptably towards the Radio Derb position, which — just to remind you — is: The Europeans are collectively more numerous than us, approximately as rich as we are, and nuclear-armed (twice over if you include the Brits). We should get out of NATO and let the Euros take care of their own problems.

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

Imprimis:  Some good news — not very good, but better than average — on the Brunswick Three. Those are of course the McMichaels, father and son, and their neighbor Roddy Bryan, all three judicially lynched three years ago in Georgia following the death of Ahmaud Arbery, he being black and they white. The Three are now all serving life sentences, both state and federal.

No, the good news isn’t that President Trump has annulled the federal convictions, although he should. Nor is it that appeals on the state convictions have been upheld, although we can still — just barely — nurse hopes on that.

No, the good news concerns Former District Attorney Jackie Johnson. She was the first to investigate the case. From her investigations she concluded that there were no charges to be brought. Travis McMichael had worked in her office, though, so she recused herself, after sharing her conclusions with a replacement D.A.

That replacement D.A. also had to recuse himself because his son worked with one of the defendant’s sons. Before he left the case, though, he wrote a report saying that Arbery had initiated the fight, obliging Travis McMichael to use deadly force to protect himself, as the law allowed him to.

The authorities finally got themselves a D.A. willing to bring charges, and the Brunswick Three were tossed into the volcano at last. Meanwhile, however, that first D.A., Jackie Johnson, had been indicted for violating her oath of office and hindering the police investigation to protect Travis McMichael. Jackie Johnson is white, like the Brunswick Three, so there were insinuations of racial solidarity in some of the reporting about her.

The good news is that on Wednesday this week Judge John Turner threw out the charges against her. The anti-white witch hunters may find some other way to make her life a misery, but for the time being Jackie Johnson is free.

Item:  Here’s one from the boss, which is to say my gallant host the Z-man. Wednesday he tweeted thus, tweet:

I am waiting for Trump to rescind Executive Order 10988, which opened the door for public sector unions. That would defund the Democratic Party.

End tweet.

I don’t know about defunding the Democrats. George Soros could probably make up the shortfall from his petty cash account. The sentiment definitely returns an echo from my bosom, though.

I’ve been complaining about public sector unions for wellnigh as long as I’ve been on the internet.  I’ve even tried to get people to stop saying “public sector unions.” They are not real unions; they are public sector employee lobbies.

At the federal level these lobbies have only existed since January 17, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy issued that Executive Order. Is our federal government performing better today than it did back then? I very seriously doubt it.

Cancel that order, Mr President!

On a related note, I have been told that the estimable Z Man has been hired by DOGE to walk around government office shouting, “If you had not committed great sins, Musk would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”

God help them.

Item:  As a world-renowned commentator on public affairs, I ought to have a strong opinion about everything in the news. Sometimes, though, I just don’t; or I do, but undermined by the lurking suspicion that on a different day, at a different time, I might hold the opposite opinion.

That’s how it was with this story from the Mother Country. MailOnline, February 6th, headline: “Scientists call for an immediate ban on boiling lobsters alive — as they confirm crustaceans CAN feel pain”

Sample from the text, quote:

Scientists say boiling undoubtedly causes crabs and lobsters several minutes of excruciating pain before they eventually lose consciousness.

End quote.

So they want the British government to ban it. Commercial operations would be permitted to kill the creatures quickly by electrocution.

Apparently the science today says that crustaceans have complex mental lives. They can form relationships, make cost-benefit decisions, learn from past experience, and, yes, feel pain. So, at least as smart as the average Congressman.

Do I have an opinion about this? Er … not sure. If it’s an opinion you’re wanting, though: while I enjoy a good plump lobster, I think that as table food a crab is way more trouble than it’s worth.

Item:  Finally, I got a smile from this one. The joke is visual; but with pencil and paper you can easily recreate it. It is also, I should say, an oldie: I have taken it from a link someone sent me to the MailOnline website for April 10th 2015; so this item is just for people who share my ignorance or failures of memory.

In the state of Texas, personalized automobile license plates were popular. A hundred and twenty thousand were currently registered. One Texas gent, name of Safer Hassan, had had a personalized plate on his Lamborghini for three years.

Then he was ordered to get rid of it. The plate was, the Texas licensing authorities told Mr Hassan by mail, “offensive.”

Why? See if you can figure it out. The number on the plate is 370H55V.

(For the answer, follow the link in the Radio Derb transcript.)

07 — Signoff.     That’s all I have, listeners. Thank you for your time and attention, and of course for your support and kind donations.

Before I leave you, please permit me my usual reminder that the VDARE Foundation is down but by no means out, with plans for the future that need your support. Donations, please, by check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking the check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website. Thank you! from VDARE and thank you! from me.

Note in addition that Peter Brimelow now has his own Substack account, and that I have a regular column in that excellent monthly magazine Chronicles.

Eh, too much going on. My head’s spinning. I need something relaxing to play us out. For relaxation, Baroque is pretty reliable. Here’s one of Bach’s Partitas, No. 2 in C minor, played by Maxim Bernard. Sit back, close your eyes, and breathe deep.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

As I was recording the show, news broke that one of the DOGE kids was doxed by an Antifa working for the Wall Street Journal. This is a bit ironic in that the crux of the USAID scandal is the nexus between the government, the vast network of not-for-profits, the media, and the activists. The money flowing around this system is what has made the last decade of domestic terrorism possible.

To emphasize the point, the activist in question was an employee at USAID before they literally paid for her to go to graduate school at Columbia. How exactly that worked is unclear, but that is what people on Twitter have unearthed. Such an arrangement would not be shocking, given the amount of money being pumped into the Radical Industrial Complex through the federal budget.

The fact that the Wall Street Journal is engaging in this behavior is another reminder that “conservatism” was part of the fraud. The kabuki theater of right versus left in our politics was always a fraud on the public, particularly the white middle-class, who were and remain the backbone of the country. The theater of democracy was intended to keep them bought in while they were dispossessed.

It also reveals that what we call the left is entirely artificial. Without the hundreds of billions from your pocket, it would barely exist. Like the progressive programs of the past, this system has cultivated generations of welfare queens to the point where they literally cannot exist without the system. Break the flow of cash into this system and it will collapse and take it bizarre faith with it.

While the week’s news has been both amusing and frustrating, it is important to remember that this is the final struggle for civilization. If the Musk team can break up the money flow, the crazies will be defeated, and society can be rebuilt. If they fail and the crazies win, then at best we get tanks in the streets. The Radical Industrial Complex is Skynet, and the only way forward is for it to be destroyed.

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
• Origins Of The Blob
• The Not-For-Profit Revolution
• Managerialism Meets Charitable Activism
• How The Blob Works
• The Attack On The Blob
• What Comes Next

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

One of the things that is becoming clear to everyone as the USAID scandal unfolds is that much of what has been presented to us over the last several decades, as far as politics, has been an illusion created by the blob. The media was part of the blob, underwritten by the government and cultivated with government access, so they presented a version of political reality that favored the blob. Even the debates over policy were staged by the blob.

That is what is clear in the release of the CBS tapes of the 60 Minutes interview of then candidate Kamala Harris. Calling it an interview is an assault on the language because it was nothing like an interview. It was one part screen test, one part coaching and one part editing to produce what was presented as an interview. Everyone involved knew it was fraud and said nothing. In other words, what we have been seeing is not media bias, but an orchestrated fraud on the public.

As an aside, the corruption was so deep and so normalized that it appears that most people in these media companies were unaware of much of it. The staff at Politico only became aware of who was actually paying their salaries when the USAID money was halted, and Politico could not make payroll. How many people at the BBC knew that USAID was the second largest source of funding to the BBC? Did anyone at the Financial Times know that management were on the pad?

Putting that aside, everyone in Washington certainly knew what USAID was doing, and they remained silent. There is not a single “reporter” in Washington unaware of the fact that the main source for Ukraine news has been an operation run by the Kagan family with funding from the government through various proxies. They all knew it and they played along because their paycheck demanded it. In effect, all of Washington was enlisted as participants in the manufactured drama of politics.

That is probably the biggest part of the scandal. Most political scandals involve a small number of people breaking the rules. Their undoing is the old Benjamin Franklin line about how three can keep a secret if two are dead. What we are seeing is that Ben was wrong about that as tens of thousands were keeping a secret until now. It speaks to the poisonous culture inside Washington that no one dared mention publicly what all of them knew was happening.

This raises another question. What else have they been faking? Think about something mundane like television ratings. They used to be a big topic, but the proliferation of subscription services and cable fees changed the revenue models. Even so, they are still used to gauge the popularity of shows. The more popular a show is, the more likely new people are to give it a go. In the modern sense, it means more people are going to sign up for a Netflix or Disney subscription.

An iron law of life is that if something has value then there will be people trying to steal it or to fake it, so faking ratings has always been a thing. This video from the Critical Drinker where he and his friends discuss the ratings of various bits of bugman content just screams organized fraud. When you are talking about “minutes viewed” rather than actual people watching, it is safe to say you are trying hard to prove the old maxim, “Figures do not lie, but liars figure.”

You can probably look around and find dozens of things that are used as measures or standards that we take for granted but are probably fake. Will the upcoming Super Bowl really break viewing records for the fiftieth straight year? Is the pop star cast to perform at the halftime show as popular as they claim? Is the game itself on the level or is it also a manufactured drama? Speaking of which, how come there are no gambling scandals in sports? Did everyone suddenly get honest?

You can get carried away with this, of course, and begin to question your own grasp of reality, but we are on the cusp of a great questioning. Once the enormity of the fraud begins to sink in, people will naturally start to wonder if what is being presented to them is not part of an ongoing fraud. We already see this with medicine because of the many frauds perpetrated during Covid. Now we are about to see the same process rumble through the rest of society.

In a way, the events of the last three weeks are like what happened in the transition from communism to chaos in the old Soviet Union. On the one hand, there was the mass realization that much of what had been told to the public was an organized lie, but on the other hand an understanding that it was a necessary step to exit the world of lies and enter the period of reform. The American empire is now getting its form of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (transparency).

This should not suggest that success is assured. The blob will fight back, and it has many tentacles, so the fight has just begun. The vast amounts of fraud in the economy support millions of mortgage payments and college tuition bills, so the people benefiting from the organized fraud will not go quietly. With every window that is opened, more sunlight rushes in to expose the corruption. If the blob is to be defeated, it will be through the sorts of transparency we have seen this week.

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!