This Week’s Show

Contents

• 03m05s Snobs & Slobs, Euro style
• 10m11s Trump trashes Ukraine
• 15m12s The mystery of South Africa
• 21m29s Don’t look up
• 28m31s Scatter the feds!
• 31m16s Fort Knox, wha?
• 34m30s Return of Butch & Suni
• 36m16s World Hippo Day
• 39m05s Silly signoff

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your stratospherically genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you some notes from the week’s news seasoned with wit, cynicism, and some bafflement.

Most of this week’s news has related to foreign affairs. That puts me at a slight disadvantage as I’m not really engaged with matters foreign. I often find them interesting, from a detached historical and anthropological point of view; and I have sympathies and unsympathies, both governed by my strong preference for civilization over barbarism.

Those are calm abstractions, though. I’m not engaged with foreign issues in the way that I see commenters on social media engaged, with deep feeling and strong commitment. I’m a Fortress America guy.

I want us to have lots of nukes. I’ve been telling the world that for more than twenty years. Actual quote from me in 2004: “You Can Never Have Enough Nukes.” End quote. I likewise want every kind of anti-missile defense we can devise, and state-of-the-art protections against anything a hostile power might hit us with: conventional, nuclear, chemical, biological, drones, … everything.

That attained, I want us to mind our own business while the rest of the world goes hang.

So I’m not really your go-to guy for news about foreign parts. They’re in the news, though, and we’re tangled up with them because of past stupidities; so I’ll do my best.

02 — Snobs & Slobs, Euro style.     There is no doubt at all that the Speech of the Week was the 20-minute address delivered by our Vice President J.D. Vance to the annual Munich Security Conference on February 14th.

What is the Munich Security Conference? Well, it describes itself on its website as, quote:

The world’s leading forum for debating international security policy. It is a venue for diplomatic initiatives to address the world’s most pressing security concerns.

End quote.

In other words it’s a big talking-heads show for diplomats and national-security decision-makers from umpteen countries, mainly those belonging to NATO and the EU, although other countries have open invitations.

I have no idea how much influence the Conference has on geostrategic developments, or whether it has any at all; but it lets us see what these people are thinking.

So what did our Vice President tell them? In very brief, that their countries were too much under the domination of globalist elites and should pay more attention to what ordinary citizens want. To put it in terms of the monosyllables favored here at Radio Derb, he told Europe’s Snobs to listen more to Europe’s Slobs.

The Vice President’s speech included references to three events close to it in time: two in the recent past, one in the near future.

In the past was the annulling of the December election in Romania — which nowadays is a member nation of both the EU and NATO. There was no clear winner in that election, but a strong showing by parties described in the regime media as “far right,” “ultra-nationalist,” and so on, and accused of being illegally influenced by Russia. Sound familiar?

In the much more immediate past was an attack in Munich itself the day before our Vice President spoke. A fanatical Muslim illegal alien from Afghanistan drove his car into a crowd, killing a two-year-old girl and her 37-year-old mother and injuring 36 others.

The future event is of course the federal election taking place in Germany this Sunday, February 23rd. Polls show the center-right alliance — approximately the pre-Trump Republican Party — at thirty percent, the populist-nationalist Trumpish AfD at twenty percent, and other parties down at fifteen percent, or thirteen percent, or single digits.

Populist nationalism dwells under a dark cloud in Germany, for reasons not hard to figure. Big old respectable parties like that center-right alliance have sworn not to join in coalition with AfD. Since there can be no effective government in a parliamentary system of this kind without coalition, we have a problem. Could we see a Romanian solution? It’s possible.

So that was the context for J.D. Vance’s remarks. He spoke to the Conference from the other side of the Trump Revolution, which none of them has experienced yet. “Trust your citizens,” he told them. “Let your people speak.” Quote from MSN, quote:

Vance accused European leaders of using [inner quote] “Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” [end inner quote] to suppress dissenting ideas — rather than engaging in debate with their own people to figure out what they are fighting for.

[Inner quote:] “I believe deeply that there is no security if you’re afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” [end inner quote] he said, adding there’s “nothing” Europe can do for the US if they are “afraid” of their citizens.

End quote.

The assembled Snobs didn’t take it well. The Conference Chairman Christoph Heusgen, in his remarks wrapping up the event, actually started weeping. Quote from him:

this conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.

End quote.

The news source I took that from — it was actually the Times of India — told us that the Chairman’s voice was, quote, “breaking with emotion,” end quote.

The people running Europe are not just Snobs, they’re also pussies.

03 — Trump trashes Ukraine.     The Vice President’s Munich speech and the reactions to it make the case for Fortress America all by themselves.

While the Euro-pussies are yielding up their nations to barbarian settlers from Islamia and black Africa, they’re looking to us to defend them from mighty Russia? Really?

Mighty Russia has 150 million people and a total GDP of seven trillion dollars. Hold those numbers in your mind a moment: 150 million, seven trillion.

Europe — the EU plus the U.K. — has 520 million people and a GDP of 20 trillion: three and a half times Russia’s population, three times its wealth. Two of the 28 European nation-states there, France and the U.K., have nuclear weapons.

These people can’t defend their territories against a corrupt, way-overstretched empire whose male population is drunk half the time? Too bad.

Our President has generated much tut-tutting with his recent comments on the Russia-Ukraine war — the one I have been referring to since it started as the war between the world’s two most corrupt white nations.

Some of those comments deserve a tut-tut, or at any rate a tut. No, Sir, it wasn’t Ukraine that started the war. They weren’t blameless, and neither were we; but there were alternatives to a military solution, alternatives the Russians might have explored; but Putin decided on straight aggression.

To me, an isolationist, that’s all academic, though. The squabbles among Eastern Slavs are none of North America’s business. They are Europe’s business; and a Europe run by wise decision-makers might have averted the whole thing, while at the same time being well-prepared to defend their territories if matters went seriously pear-shaped.

Whatever, it’s not North America’s business. We should have withdrawn from NATO back in 1991 after the Warsaw Pact folded up their tents. Europe was richer and more demographically stable then than it is now; Russia was in a state of collapse. The Euros could have waved us a cheerful goodbye and rechristened NATO to ETO, the European Treaty Organization.

Historians of the future, studying the West’s geostrategy in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War, will shake their heads in disbelief at our colossal collective stupidity. What on earth were our statesmen thinking?

Now perhaps at last, under President Trump, we may put things right. We know that Trump is, in a general way, anti-NATO. Just pull us out of the darn thing, Mr President.

Our Vice President seems to be similarly inclined. He got my attention in last year’s election campaign when some reporter asked him about Ukraine. Replied Vance: “I don’t care about Ukraine,” or words to that effect. Neither do I, J.D., neither do I.

To the world-saving Snobs that makes me a stooge of Putin. So what? I don’t care. The world-savers are out of power. We Slobs are running the show. Get us out of NATO, Mr President!

04 —The mystery of South Africa.     This week Cyril Ramaphosa commenced his eighth year in power as President of South Africa. That comes one week after President Trump issued an order stating that, and I’ll quote direct from the order here, quote:

(a) the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and

(b) the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.

End quote.

Trump’s order is in reaction to South Africa’s parliament passing an Expropriation Act back in December. The Act aims to correct what black South Africans consider to be an injustice: that a disproportionate quantity of the country’s best farmland is owned by whites, who are only seven percent of the country’s population.

The way the Act is written, though, it seems to disregard private property rights — particularly white people’s property rights — as it permits land seizures by the government without compensation. Hence our President’s response.

Again, as an isolationist, I’m not sure that the travails of white South Africans are any of our nation’s business. That’s by the way, though. The main emotion stirred in me by this story, and every other news story about South Africa, is wonder: wonder that the place is still on the map, is still functioning as a more-or-less modern society, and still has a seven percent white minority. Heck, they even have an illegal-immigration problem.

Thirty years ago when Apartheid ended and blacks took over the government, I was cynical. Zimbabwe, next door to South Africa (and today a major source of those illegal immigrants) had gone under black rule fifteen years before, and was a mess. The joke among us cynics was in fact:  Q — What’s the difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa?  A — About five years.

Yet South Africa’s still there, and still in one piece. It has problems, to be sure: but there’s been no tribal war, no economic collapse, no outward floods of refugees. If you meet white South Africans — I met one a few months ago — they shrug and say, “Yeah, crime’s bad …,” but they don’t seem inclined to emigrate.

Crime is bad, most notoriously crimes of violence against white farmers, although the actual statistics are unclear. It of course doesn’t help that the Economic Freedom Fighters, a fringe political party led by black supremacist Julius Malema, has “Kill the Boer!” as a campaign song (although the New York Times tells us we shouldn’t take it too literally.)

Yet still there’s no outgoing flood of white refugees. Reporting on Trump’s order, Reuters records a lukewarm response from Afrikaners. Sample quote from the Reuters report, quote:

The order provided for resettlement in the U.S. of [inner quote] “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” [end inner quote] as refugees.

Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers, who own most of the country’s farmland.

[Inner quote:] “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go,” [end inner quote] said Neville van der Merwe, a 78-year-old pensioner in Bothasig near Cape Town.

[Inner quote:] “There hasn’t been any really bad taking over our land, the people are carrying on like normal and you know, what are you going to do over there?” [End inner quote.]

End quote.

To me — a race realist, pessimist, and cynic — South Africa is a mystery. If anyone has a theory, I’ll listen to it attentively.

05 — Don’t look up.     It’s not only human action that creates dangers for us. While wars between nations can be very destructive, there are sources of destruction outside the human realm, too.

There are, for example, rogue asteroids. The latest one to disturb our peace of mind is unromantically named 2024-YR4. In hopes of allaying your fears, I shall refer to the thing as Daisy.

Astronomers only got acquainted with Daisy in December, and there are still some important things we don’t know about her. Her size, for example, given in Tuesday’s New York Times as between 130 feet and 300 feet across.

We do know enough about Daisy’s orbit, however, to predict that there is a one-in-thirty chance she will hit our own planet on December 22nd 2032 — just in time for Christmas!

Supposing we do in fact draw that one-in-thirty chance, how much damage might Daisy do?

That, no-one can really say. There are too many unknowns. We don’t know Daisy’s composition, for instance. She could be a solid lump of iron, or a loosely-bound collection of stones, ice, and rock fragments. Nor can we say how she will hit us, if she hits us: just skimming across Earth’s upper atmosphere or crashing vertically down.

A stony asteroid could break up in the air, turning into a shower of meteorites. With a really solid one, it of course matters whether it hits on land or at sea; and if on land, how populated that bit of land is. A solid vertical hit on land could generate an impact crater as much as two-thirds of a mile across. That’s just the crater: there’d be total destruction from the blast wave for miles beyond that.

Well, it’s a one-in-thirty chance (although the astronomers keep updating that number) and we have nearly eight years to prepare ourselves, so don’t be losing sleep over this.

And astronomically speaking, far worse things can happen — have happened. I’m going to quote myself here, if you don’t mind. This is from my monthly Diary, December 2018. The Mrs and I had taken a short vacation in Cancún on the northeastern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Here I was reporting on that trip. Quote:

If I had the time and leisure to do serious travelling in Yucatán … the first place I’d head for would be the little coastal town of Chicxulub Puerto, 200 miles west of Cancún.

That town marks the precise spot, as near as we can figure it, where an asteroid smacked into our planet 66 million years ago. The subsequent ructions and climatic disasters wiped out much of life on Earth, most notably the dinosaurs.

My desire to visit Chicxulub is not, I’ll admit, rational. There’s nothing to see there. A lot of natural landscaping goes on in 66 million years, and the crater — it’s 93 miles across — can now be seen clearly only with special scientific intruments. Half of it’s under the sea.

Still I’d like to stand there where that thing hit, just for the imaginative thrill. Plus, on the assumption that two asteroid hits at the same place are highly unlikely, being in Chicxulub there’s one less thing to worry about in the cosmic-catastrophe line.

(Reflecting on that when reading through: Given that the great worldwide die-off following the asteroid strike was from drowning, burning, freezing, suffocation, poisoning, or starvation, being at Ground Zero when the asteroid hit might actually have been optimal.)

End quote.

To further allay your fears, gentle listener, please notice the difference in scale there. The biggest estimate for the size of Daisy is 300 feet; the Chicxulub asteroid was six miles across. That was one hell of an impact. The worst thing Daisy might do would be a gentle bump by comparison. A crater two-thirds of a mile across? The Chicxulub crater — still detectable after 66 million years — is 93 miles across.

Sure, the human world can be a dangerous one. Try as we might, though, we can’t deliver danger in anything like cosmic quantities.

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

Imprimis:  Of all the administrative reforms undertaken or proposed by President Trump and his people, the one that gets the loudest cheer from me is the idea of moving the headquarters of federal agencies out of Washington, D.C. to some location elsewhere in the other 99.99827 percent of our country’s land area.

The first Trump administration actually tried this, in a half-hearted and ineffectual way. Three and a half years into that administration, in August 2020, the Bureau of Land Management — that’s the agency within the Department of the Interior responsible for managing land owned by the federal government — the BLM had its headquarters office moved out of D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado.

The government people weren’t happy about it. More than 87 percent of the Bureau’s D.C.-based employees quit.

I’d call that a plus; but a year later, September 2021, the Biden administration — or Third Obama administration, George Soros administration, whatever the more accurate term is — moved the BLM head office back to D.C., where it’s been ever since.

With modern communications, there is no case at all for headquartering all the federal agencies on one 70-square-mile patch of real estate. Scatter them to the four winds! It would even make better sense national-security-wise. As things stand, one well-aimed missile with a 50-megaton warhead could wipe out the federal government and all its data.

(Hey, stop that cheering in the back row! Show some good taste, please, and proper respect for our nation’s public servants. Thank you …)

Item:  Fort Knox has been in the news. That’s the bullion depository at Fort Knox army base in Kentucky, where the U.S.A. stores around half of our gold reserves.

I confess I’m not clear as to why Fort Knox has been in the news. Apparently Elon Musk has been posting on X some skepticism about whether the gold bullion there is secure. Maybe we should audit it, he’s said. Wednesday this week, talking with reporters on Air Force One, President Trump confirmed that they are indeed going to do an audit. Actual quote from him, quote:

We’re going to go to Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there.

End quote.

The Treasury Department tells us there are 147,341,858.382 troy ounces of gold in the Fort Knox bullion depository. That’s awfully precise; why do we need an audit?

And with gold currently trading at $2,951.90 the troy ounce, that Fort Knox share is worth only $435 billion. I make that just 1.2 percent of our $36.22 trillion national debt — a mere bagatelle.

Working the arithmetic the other way, that $36.22 trillion national debt equates to around 421,000 tons of gold. Is there actually that much mined gold in the entire world?

So our weeny little $435 billion deposit isn’t going to be much help with the trillions that dominate our national finances. Is it even worth the trouble of auditing? Didn’t we come off the gold standard decades ago?

I guess I’m not really getting the point of Fort Knox. But hey, we got a fun movie out of the durn place — Goldfinger, remember that?

“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.”

Eh, they don’t make ’em like that any more.

Item:  Just one more from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA has now given us a definite date for the return of those two astronauts stranded in orbit on the International Space Station: March 19th.

You’ll no doubt recall that the two — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, aged 62 and 59 respectively — arrived at the space station June 5th last year, for a stay that was only scheduled to last eight days. However, the Boeing vehicle that was supposed to return them to Earth was judged not spaceworthy, so they’ve been waiting for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be ready.

There’s been some concern about their health up there, after all these months in weightlessness. NASA says not to worry, they’re fine; but some physiologists say that without the regular constant stresses on bones, muscles, and body fluids that we get from gravity, there’s bound to be deterioration.

Let’s hope there’s no permanent harm, and these two brave, cheerful astronauts return home safely March 19th. And let’s hope they negotiated a good overtime rate before they went up there.

Item:  Did you know — I bet you didn’t: in this case, in fact, I’d bet money on it — did you know that last Saturday, February 15th, was World Hippo Day? I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that “every dog has its day.” Well, it’s not only dogs; hippos have their day, too — February 15th.

Here in New York State I have been leading a small group of citizens agitating to have World Hippo Day moved from February 15th to October 18th, the birthday of our State Attorney General. So far, however, our efforts have met with no success.

I’m looking at a World Hippo Day commemorative website that tells me, quote:

These adorable creatures spend their days splashing in the water, munching on grass, and wowing us with their powerful jaws!

End quote.

You might get a different point of view from 72-year-old Craig Manders of Cranford, New Jersey. June 5th last year Mr Manders and his wife Lisa, age 70, were on safari in Zambia to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Then while Mrs Manders was standing on a river bank taking pictures of a partially-submerged hippo at rest in the water, the beast suddenly came charging up out of the river and crushed her to death with its enormous jaws.

Last week Mr Manders filed suit against the tour company, which is based in Connecticut, for failing to protect him and his wife.

Radio Derb’s sincere sympathies of course go out to Mr Manders, with hopes for a fair judicial outcome. Being crushed to death by a rogue hippo is a dreadful fate indeed. As a former employee of VDARE.com I can imagine it all too easily.

07 — Signoff.     That’s the show, listeners. Thanks as always for your time and attention, your donations and support.

Thanks also to the listeners and readers who emailed in their sympathies after I reported last week that Mrs Derbyshire and I were both unwell. Thus encouraged, we are now back to normal — bless you all! We are in fact looking forward in good cheer to a small life milestone this weekend: Sunday, February 23rd, is E-Day minus one hundred. I shall have more to say about E-Day in future podcasts.

All those thanks come with my usual reminder that you can support the VDARE Foundation during its suspension by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself 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 other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to that fine monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!

For signoff music this week, I’ve settled on something silly. I like silly and try to encourage it; I don’t think there’s enough silliness in the world.

The land of my birth, it seems to me, has been way out ahead of other nations in the cultivation of silliness. Sure, Americans can be silly: think of the Three Stooges or the Keystone cops. Our TV sitcoms occasionaly attained well-nigh British heights of silliness. Even Saturday Night Live had silly moments, as I remember; although I’m remembering the show as it was forty-some years ago.

In silliness, however, the Brits reign supreme. No other nation could have generated Monty Python’s Flying Circus — even the title is silly.

I don’t know how it was here in the States, but across the pond there, broadcast silliness goes way back before the age of TV. I can remember as a child, before we had a TV, listening spellbound to a deeply silly half-hour radio program called The Goon Show on BBC Radio. Among other keen listeners to that show was Charles Windsor, then Prince of Wales, nowadays King Charles the Third. He was mimicking the silly voices from The Goon Show well into the 1970s.

That great tradition of British Radio silliness continues to the present day. There’s a show on BBC Radio 4 with the title I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, where a panel of comedians is challenged to do silly things … like, for example, singing the words of some familiar song to the tune of a different familiar song.

To give you the idea, here was comedian Tony Hawks in Season 43 of the show, April 2004, singing the words of the Muppet Show intro theme to the tune of the late-1960s pop music hit A Whiter Shade Of Pale.

Yes, it’s silly. That’s the point.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.