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

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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! 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.