This Week’s Show
Contents
- 04m24s Not a disaster, a tragedy
- 10m21s Illegal aliens > U.S. citizens
- 14m52s The Muslim thing
- 23m48s Trump’s imperial dreams
- 26m18s An African in Greenland
- 33m26s Meet the norovirus
- 34m57s Unwelcome fame?
- 36m33s 2025 IYQST
- 38m51s Happy birthday to the King
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Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On Rumble
Full Show On Odysee
Transcript
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 1 and this is your frostily genial host John Derbyshire with a brief scan of the news.
The news is of course dominated by the terrible fires over on the other coast. The news pictures showing the devastation of Los Angeles are really stunning. My sympathies to those afflicted, and all praise to the brave Angelenos fighting back against the flames.
L.A. can now join the sad list of cities that have been burned out in peacetime. Back when wood construction was the norm, such events were not uncommon. The Great Fire of Chicago is the one everyone knows about. That was in 1871. Legend has it that the fire was started when Mrs O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, but I don’t know if that’s ever been confirmed.
San Francisco suffered devastating fires in 1906, following the great earthquake of that year. It’s a little-known fact that far more buildings were destroyed by the fires than by the earthquake itself.
Better known to British schoolkids was the Great Fire of London in 1666 that destroyed the old St Paul’s cathedral, giving Christopher Wren the opportunity to build the new one. Also on the upside, it likely put an end to the great plague of earlier that year, by killing all the rats.
Yes: back through history peacetime cities have gone up in smoke. My own little provincial hometown, Northampton in the English Midlands, burned down in 1675. Our schoolmasters used to tell us that the medieval town records, kept in the town castle, were moved to All Saints’ Church for fear the castle would be burned down. As it happened the castle went unscathed; but All Saints’ was burned to the ground and the records were lost. Municipal incompetence is not a new thing.
So Angelenos are in plenty of historical company here, although I don’t suppose it’s much consolation for them to know that.
And it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good. Hop over to Amazon.com and put the words “The Great Los Angeles Fire” into the search box. You’ll see that there was a novel of that name by Edward Stewart, published in 1980.
Stewart wrote a shelf-full of novels, none of which I’ve read. Amazon has “The Great Los Angeles Fire” at sales rank 9,687,510 in Books, with just one posted review, dated 2015. This week’s events might give it a boost. That would be too late for Stewart, who died in 1996, but might help his estate beneficiaries.
02 — Not a disaster, a tragedy. What lifts this week’s fires from a disaster into the realm of tragedy is that they are happening in California, the most progressive state in the Union.
The voters of California, we all know, elect only persons of the highest sensitivities to govern them. Concern for the environment is always placed ahead of mere brutish considerations of human amenity. Officials appointed to supervise agencies like Forestry and Fire Protection or Water Management are selected first and foremost with proper regard for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as of course they should be.
There’s the tragedy. You can see that … Wait: my audio files seem to have got somewhat tangled here. Give me a moment, please, while I untangle them.
[Pips.]
The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
[Pips.]
03 — Illegal aliens > U.S. citizens. Here on the other coast, the one where the Derb estates are located, public officials are not as fanatically environmentalist as those of California, but they are very punctilious in defending the Constitutional rights of illegal aliens.
What’s that? You didn’t know that illegal aliens have rights under our Constitution? Welcome to Suffolk County, New York — my own home county, population one and a half million, occupying the eastern part of Long Island.
Thursday last week federal judge William Kuntz handed down a 36-page ruling telling my county that we had violated the Constitutional rights of several hundred illegal aliens when, back in the Obama administration, our Sheriff’s office detained them until federal immigration agents could show up and take them into custody for civil deportation proceedings. Note please that the feds, actually ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had asked the Sheriff’s office to hold the aliens.
Once again: The Sheriff of my county, Suffolk County, had several hundred illegal aliens detained or identified, I don’t know how. He notified ICE. They asked him to hold the aliens until they could get some agents here to take them into federal custody.
Judge Kuntz declared that New York State Law doesn’t allow our Sheriff to co-operate with federal law enforcement in such a shameless, brazen way. He has ordered the county to pay sixty million dollars to the aliens.
So I and my fellow residents of Suffolk County have to hand over our money to illegal aliens because our county Sheriff complied with a federal request. Note that the feds, who made the request, do not have to pay. And this is all according to a federal judge.
Although on that last point, Judge Kuntz does have the full support of New York State Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt, who filed a brief on behalf of the alien scofflaws back in April last year. Quote from her:
Contrary to the contention of the defendants and the United States, federal law does not independently authorize state or local officers to make the civil immigration arrests at issue here.
End quote.
I don’t know the exact number of illegals being rewarded here. The news reports just say “hundreds.” If it’s six hundred, the payout will be one hundred thousand dollars per border-jumper, paid ultimately I guess out of my property taxes.
So while we East Coast slobs may not be as attentive as Californians are to the interests of tiny freshwater fishes, we are way out ahead at prioritizing the Constitutional rights of illegal aliens over the pocketbooks of U.S. citizens.
And if you’re not sure where in the Constitution those rights are affirmed, just email a query to Judge Kuntz’s office, I’m sure they’ll be glad to tell you.
04 — The Muslim thing. There has definitely been some big turn towards openness in public discussion, some widening of the Overton Window. Has all this been triggered by Donald Trump winning our November election; or was that just one expression of something deeper?
Whichever is the case, the noise in Britain about Muslim rape gangs is surely a part of what’s happening. Britain is a cultural colony of the U.S.A. so big sudden changes over there are echoing events here, although with a British twist.
Anyone who pays attention has known about the Muslim rape gangs in British cities for decades. An excellent, very well-researched book about it was published nine years ago. You won’t find the book on Amazon for some reason, but it’s on the Barnes & Noble website and they’ll sell you a paperback copy for $24.99. Title: Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Scandal. Author: Peter McLoughlin. Sample quote from the Overview at Barnes & Noble, quote:
So McLoughlin dug deeper and what he found shocked him: there were mounds of evidence that social workers, police officers, Muslim organisations, journalists and even some Members of Parliament must have known about these grooming gangs for decades, and they had turned a blind-eye to these crimes. He also came across references to incidents where any proof had since vanished. McLoughlin spent several years uncovering everything he could and documenting this scandal before the evidence disappeared. He demonstrates that the true nature of this grooming phenomenon was known about more than 20 years ago.
End quote.
Once again: The book came out in 2016. Peter McLoughlin was toiling away at those researches from the late 2000s through the early 2010s. And now suddenly, in 2025, it’s news.
In that long cover-up you see the power of the media, and of the larger ruling-class establishment of which it is one department. Once again, re-quote:
Social workers, police officers, Muslim organisations, journalists and even some Members of Parliament must have known about these grooming gangs for decades.
End quote.
Could this have happened in the U.S.A.? I don’t think so. As I said, Britain is a cultural colony of America so they adopt all our crazy social fads. Having adopted them, however, they then overlay them on older, strictly British foundations.
What they took in here was what I’ve been calling the Cold Civil War: two big blocs of legacy white people who can’t stand the sight of each other, engaged in constant battle. Racial minorities are sometimes enlisted to dig field latrines or feed the horses, but otherwise they just lurk around on the fringes of the battlefield, waiting for a lull when they can run in and loot the corpses.
In the U.S.A. the Goodwhite-Badwhite cut is between educated metropolitan elites and working people, especially in the South. It’s not deep and old, though. “Log cabin to White House” is still an ideal. America’s Goodwhites are arrogant and often brutal, but they know there are limits to their acceptability. The main racial minority has been blacks, their numbers small, the troublesome ones easily appeased by being ranked as Honorary Goodwhites.
In Britain the Goodwhite-Badwhite cut is overlaid on centuries of class privilege and subordination — all the way back to the Norman Conquest, when English people became second-class citizens of their own country. There was no racial minority until the 1950s. Today there are three: blacks from the Caribbean and Africa, Hindus from India, Muslims from Islamia, mainly Pakistan.
Blacks have proved generally manageable using techniques imitated from the U.S.A. Hindus are clannish and often annoying, but on the whole have merged quite well into Goodwhite ranks, even ascending to the Prime Ministership. That leaves Muslims.
Most Muslims of course want to live their lives, raise their families, and mind their business without trouble. There are, though, big minorities of Muslims who are otherwise disposed. This is true wherever there has been large-scale Muslim settlement. In 2025 that means all over Western Europe. It makes Muslims a very poor fit for Western society.
By the turn of the century Britain’s Goodwhites were aware of this. By then however, millions of Muslims had settled in Britain. The troublesome ones would, it was assumed, eventually assimilate into British culture. In the meantime their malefactions could be covered up, or blamed on Badwhites and their dumb, badly-parented, promiscuous daughters.
That whole model of Goodwhite management is falling apart. One sign of its disintegration is the accelerating disappearance of the word “grooming” in discussions of the Muslim rape gangs, as if they were kidnapping these 13-year-old girls so as to teach them the proper way to brush their hair. That isn’t what they were doing.
“Grooming” is even more offensive than the other term Goodwhites have been using to mask reality: “asylum seeker” for “illegal alien.” Both terms are, I am pretty sure, fast declining in frequency.
The disintegration of Goodwhite control is fortified by news from elsewhere in Europe. From Sweden, for example, which is now slamming the national gates shut and paying settlers to move back to their home countries.
So yes, there has been a turn: a turn from wishful thinking to realism all over the West. I think Donald Trump’s election was a symptom of the turn, not a cause of it. I’m not even sure Trump is a very good fit for these new times. I have no doubt, though, that he is better suited to them that what went before.
05 — Trump’s imperial dreams. Ah yes, the Donald. This week our President-Elect has been indulging himself in some flights of imperial fantasy: Take back the Panama Canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico, annex Canada, buy Greenland.
Probably these are just the ramblings of a guy with too much time on his hands while waiting to move into his new house. There is some realism there in among the dreamings, though. Why shouldn’t we take back the Panama Canal, if it can be done without too much trouble? We built the durn thing, didn’t we?
Annexing Canada, on the other hand, is a crazy idea. The 47th President has major and immediate national problems to deal with; taking in Canada would just double the load. Let’s work on fixing what we can fix, and leave the dreams of imperial grandeur to number 48, or 49, or 50 …
The Greenland suggestion is worth considering, though. There are some great mineral resources there. It’s just across the Pole from Russia; Putin is already issuing warnings. The ChiComs will meddle if they can.
I’ve already written about a coming scramble for the Ant-arctic. It wouldn’t be surprising to see one for the Arctic, which is much more accessible and more relevant to the big players of geostrategy — like all of them, it’s in the Northern hemisphere.
Denmark, to which Greenland currently belongs, seems to have no very passionate determination to hold on to the place. The Prime Minister of Greenland just the other day called for independence from Denmark.
So yeah, food for thought on that one. I have, though, a personal image, a Greenland of the mind, that I’d like to share with you. I’ll give it a segment of its own.
06 — An African in Greenland. I have never been to Greenland and have only ever read one book about the place. That one book, however, left a deep impression on me; so much so, I wrote a review of it — a long review, more than three thousand words. That review was published in The New Criterion May 2004 issue. It’s archived on my personal website, where you can read it at your leisure.
The book’s title is An African in Greenland. It is about just what the title says it’s about: in the late 1950s a young man named Tété-Michel Kpomassie from one of the tribes of what was then French West Africa went to live in Greenland. He stayed there about ten years. Then he moved to France and wrote a book about his Greenland adventures. He wrote in French, of course; the first English translation was published 1983.
To give you some of the flavor of the book, here are a few short quotes pulled from my review.
Quote:
It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written. One can only imagine how the appearance of this tall, very black young African struck the Eskimos of Greenland’s tiny, isolated settlements. Kpomassie carries the whole thing off brilliantly. Open-minded, self-assured, adaptable, acutely observant, and obviously very personable, he is the perfect guide to the Eskimos and what was left of their culture in the mid-1960s.
End quote.
Kpomassie was shocked by the casual sexual promiscuity of the Greenland Eskimos. Here’s a quote straight from the book, Kpomassie speaking. The European names notwithstanding, these are all Eskimos he’s writing about. Quote:
When we got to Lydia’s room a little earlier than expected, we saw Karl, Adam’s brother, lying naked in the bed beside Lydia! They were drinking beer and laughing. Seeing them lying there side by side, I couldn’t help feeling upset … To my astonishment, she didn’t understand why I was angry … In Greenland, jealousy is frowned upon … Greenland morality was beginning to disgust me.
End quote.
Was this looseness just transmitted from the Scandinavian welfare-statism of Denmark? Apparently not. Kpomassie treks further north, to a traditional Eskimo community. Quote from my review:
At the northernmost of his residences, a traditional Eskimo turf house, he slept together with all his host’s family in a single bed, for warmth. The family included a girl of twenty who was eight months pregnant. She claimed not to know who the father was, but [inner quote] “village gossip alleged it was her own father.” [End inner quote.]
End quote.
Quote. This is another one straight from the book, Kpomassie speaking. As before, the people he’s talking about are all Eskimos. Quote:
Apart from Eric … and one or two others who often left the village on fishing expeditions, none of the people I met seemed to have any definite job. Gerhart trailed me around with him day and night and seemed to do nothing. [Karl] gave me the impression of being a parasite living off his brothers … As for Hans, who supposedly worked at the naval dockyard, not once since my arrival had he gone to work. Yet Paulina was always offering coffee and drinks to visitors. How did she get the money? Well, let’s face it: a lot of able-bodied Greenlanders simply live on allowances from the Danish government.
End quote.
Nineteen-sixties Greenland seems, on Kpomassie’s account, to have been a dirty welfare slum with sloppy morals. He fell in love with the place somehow, though, and his book has lyrical passages about whale hunting in the Arctic Ocean and driving a dog-sled team alone, quote: “through starry nights swept by the aurora borealis,” end quote.
I don’t suppose 2025 Greenland bears much of a resemblance to the one Tété-Michel Kpomassie described. Writing that review of his book back in 2004, I did some quick research and turned up this from the BBC News website, quote:
Many of the Eskimo (Inuit) people survive by hunting and fishing and are struggling as fish stocks become depleted. [Greenland’s] population is only 56,000. Inhabitants face severe social problems, notably unemployment, alcoholism and rates of AIDS infection.
End quote.
So maybe things aren’t all that different. If any listeners have more recent first-hand experience of the place, I’d be interested to hear it.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: If I appear to be giving you short measure this week, listeners, I apologize. I have been afflicted by a virus — the norovirus.
If you haven’t made its acquaintance, the main effect of the norovirus is emetic; that is, it makes you puke.
That’s an understatement, though. I’ve puked before. Back in the beer-drinking days of my younger years, I occasonally drank to excess and ended up on my knees talking into the big white telephone. Based on those episodes, I thought I knew about puking.
The norovirus introduced me to a whole new world of vomit. I could swear I brought up the contents not just of my stomach, but of my entire gastrointestinal tract. There was nothing left in there — nothing left in me except a mighty desire to lie on my bed groaning for two or three days.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to gross you out. I’m much better now, back to normal. I’m just a couple of days behind with everything, that’s all.
Item: Following on from that one, though: the “noro” at the beginning of “norovirus” snagged my attention.
I know the medical prefixes we all know: “gastro-” for the guts, “cerebro-” for the brain, “hemo-” for the blood, “pneumo-” for the lungs, and so on. What’s “noro-,” though?
Cassell’s Latin Dictionary has nothing between norma (“a carpenter’s square for measuring right angles”) and nos (“plural of ego“). Liddell & Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon has nothing between νοοσ (“mind”) and νοσερóς (“sickly, ill”).
I consulted Dr. Google. Apparently the “nor-” of “norovirus” refers to the little town of Norwalk in Ohio, where the beastly thing first made itself known back in 1968.
Does Radio Derb have any listeners or readers in Norwalk, Ohio? How do they feel about having a virus named after their town?
Item: UNESCO has declared this year, 2025, to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. The reason is, that it was a hundred years ago, as near as you can pin it down, that quantum mechanics really got airborne.
If you’re not up to date on your history of science, here’s something I wrote in my review of Gino Segrè’s 2008 book about those momentous events, book title Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics. Quote from myself:
The terrific theoretical turmoil of the 1920s, and most especially of 1925-27, gets five of this book’s fourteen chapters. The task facing the author here is to bring out the conceptual revolution that took place in those years, the unprecedented need for a new way of thinking about the subatomic world. These were the years when it dawned on researchers that the intuitions we acquire through our interactions with reality at everyday scales of measurement are simply not appropriate to events in the realm of electrons and protons.
End quote.
So welcome to the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. The definitive comment here was posted on X by everyone’s — well, every guy’s — favorite theoretical physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, quote:
It will be both good and bad at the same time.
End quote.
08 — Signoff. That’s as much as my poor norovirus-addled brain can manage this week, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, for all your good wishes and generosity.
This has been a week of birthdays. On the 5th, my daughter Nellie. God bless you, sweetheart. On the 6th, my brother Noel, who would be 95 had he not unfortunately left us nine years ago. On the 7th … Wait a minute, I have to dig around a bit here … um … Oh yes, of course: Millard Fillmore, the 13th President, born 225 years ago.
And on the 8th, the King — his 90th. Here’s something from him.
There will be more from me next week.
