The busiest month. I don’t know about April being the cruelest month, but for me April 2024 has the busiest month for a long time.
April was bracketed, beginning and end, by two long (500 miles, 320 miles) road trips. In between were two dinner clubs in Manhattan, at one of which I gave a speech, and a couple of time-consuming engagements with the healthcare industry (nothing serious).
I’ve already received invitations for May. I appreciate them and am truly sorry to turn anyone down, but I need a month’s recuperation. The garden’s a mess; my Coolidge-era house needs work; there are financial and family issues to deal with. Sorry, sorry, but I’m staying at home for the month of May.
Total eclipse. The first of those two long road trips was to Cleveland, Ohio to see the total solar eclipse on April 8th. Mrs. Derbyshire and I were both keen to see it, neither of us having experienced a total eclipse. Friends in Cleveland invited us to stay over; so off we went.
Our friends have a house—another Coolidge house!—in north Cleveland just a short walk from the shore of Lake Erie. There is a pleasant little park there on the shore, directly in the zone of totality. It was from there that we saw the eclipse.
This was my very first total solar eclipse. What struck me most about it was the suddenness of the totality.
There we all were, watching through eclipse glasses as the Moon’s black disc covered more and more of the Sun’s golden one. (I myself was actually watching through sheets of polarizing material I had been given years ago by my dear old friend Boris Zeldovich.)
At last only a tiny sliver of Sun was still visible. I was surprised at how little the general illumination around us was affected. There was of course less light, but not much less. Our shadows were still clear and sharp. That wee sliver of Sun was doing most of the work the entire Sun’s disc had been doing.
Then, when the last sliver disappeared, all went suddenly dark. No, not total where-the-heck-am-I dark, only a deep twilight over sky, lake, and shore. We no longer cast any shadows: everything was in shadow.
I never before experienced in full force the expression ”darkness fell.” It really seemed that something had dropped—had been dropped—on us, transforming everything.
The darkness lasted four minutes, then all happened over in reverse. Sensational!
Everyone should experience this once in life. If you so far haven’t, and the opportunity comes your way, take it.
Lost in Cuyahoga. This was my first time in Cleveland. I knew of the city only as the butt of jokes, America’s Dullsville. I think it was Harry Chapin who told us: ”I spent a week in Cleveland one day.”
From what we could see on a short visit, Cleveland is neither duller nor more exciting than any other city its size. Our host cautioned us, as white American hosts always do, about certain neighborhoods we should stay away from, and we took their advice. That aside, Cleveland seems like a pretty nice place. The lakeside views are especially striking.
We took our time driving back to New York, stopping for a day to explore Cuyahoga Valley National Park. My lady, who is a nature lover, has a minor obsession with National Parks.
She once declared her intention to visit all of them. I pointed out that there are more than four hundred, which cooled her ardor some; but I think she still has a private bucket list to see as many National Parks as possible.
Cuyahoga disappointed. Sure, there are some fine views. Too see them, though, you of course have to walk trails, and the trails are very poorly signposted. We kept getting lost, wasting a lot of time.
If anyone at the National Park Foundation reads my Diaries, please send a squad over to Cuyahoga to properly signpost the trails. Thank you!
Eclipse Lit. The total eclipse was such a wonder, I’m surprised eclipses haven’t made more of a showing in literature.
I knew at an early age about the one in H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines. The book was a childhood favorite, thanks in part to the 1950 hit movie with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger. For British kids the story got an extra boost from picture-strip serialization in Eagle comic.
The plot line there was of a civilized man with some astronomical understanding stunning more primitive people with his foreknowledge of an eclipse. I did not know until much later that Mark Twain used the same idea in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
That was published four years after Haggard’s book. Did Twain borrow the idea from Haggard? Did they both borrow it from the journals of Christopher Columbus, who had actually pulled the stunt with some Caribbean primitives in 1504? Something else? I don’t know.
Columbus’ eclipse was lunar, not solar. I’ve seen lunar eclipses and can now testify that they are nothing like as impressive as the solar variety. I’m a bit surprised Columbus got away with his trick.
Perhaps the literarily most famous lunar eclipse is the one in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 107.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d
And the sad augurs mock their own presage …
The lines—which, for sheer lyric beauty, are hard to beat—seem to refer to some misfortune that had threatened the object of the poet’s love, but which proved to be transitory.
(British schoolmasters used to tell their senior students that Shakespeare was giving thanks for Queen Elizabeth the First having passed safely through her menopause. Orwell retails this theory in one of his essays. It’s highly improbable, though. Elizabeth was born in 1533. She would have hit menopause in the mid-to-late 1570s, when Shakespeare was a teenager and perfectly unknown.)
Eclipse abroad. The question that comes up most when you talk about eclipses is: How come the Moon and the Sun seem, to our eyes, so precisely the same size that one can eclipse the other exactly?
The apparent equality of size is not actually that precise. The Earth’s orbital motion relative to the Sun, and the Moon’s relative to the Earth, are neither of them circular. They are ellipses, with the orbiter sometimes a tad closer to, sometimes a tad further from the orbitee.
The key figure here is angular diameter. While standing on Earth’s surface, draw a straight line ninety-some million miles long from the tip of your nose to the left-most edge of the Sun. Then draw another line to the right-most edge. What is the angle between those two lines?
Answer: Less than one degree, in fact not much more than half a degree. Because our orbit is an ellipse, the angle varies from 0.527 degrees when the Sun is furthest away to 0.545 degrees when it’s closest.
The angular diameter of the Moon seen from Earth’s surface likewise varies, from 0.488 degrees to 0.563. The overlap between those two ranges, the Sun’s and the Moon’s, is what makes a total eclipse possible.
Possible, but not certain. If the Earth-Moon situation is such that the Moon has an angular diameter of only 0.49 degrees while the Sun’s is 0.54, the Moon’s disc can’t completely cover the Sun’s. Then you get an annular eclipse, with a ring of Sun still visible at maximum coverage.
A thing I have briefly pondered is: Are there other bodies in the solar system as near-perfectly aligned as our Sun and Moon, generating the same near-perfect eclipses?
If you restrict the enquiry to situations we might witness while standing on something solid, I believe the answer is no.
Working outwards from the Sun: Mercury and Venus have no moons. Earth I have already covered.
Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos (”Fear” and ”Terror,” Mars being the God of War—geddit?) They are tiny things, though. Neither, as seen from the surface of Mars, has an angular diameter more than 0.035 degrees. The Sun, as seen from Mars, has angular diameter in the range 0.16 to 0.20 degrees, so… no eclipses.
Out beyond Mars there are lots of satellites, but the parent planets are gas giants until you reach Pluto. Gas giants have no solid surfaces and thick opaque atmospheres, so if there’s an eclipse no one will see it.
Pluto is so far out the angular diameter of the Sun is down somewhere in the range 0.005 degrees to 0.009 (Pluto’s orbit is more elliptical than most). The little devil has five moons, none of them very big. They are, however, big enough and (I think) all close enough to block out that teeny little Sun now and then. The smallest, for example, is Nix, 31 miles across and 15,000 miles from Pluto, giving it an angular diameter of 0.059 degrees as seen from Pluto. The Sun doesn’t stand a chance.
So no, I don’t believe we shall see anything like our total solar eclipses anywhere else in the solar system. Earth is a special place. Make of that what you will.
Middle East disavowal. So where am I on the Middle East and its troubles? Just where I was fifteen years ago when I published We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. The last three pages of Chapter 11 in that majestic tome are given over to a long vent about the region.
Oh, the Middle East. Do I really need to sell you on pessimism about them? Is there anyone who doesn’t contemplate the whole region with utter despair? Anyone who doesn’t think that the Middle East is the leading candidate for the title Region Most Likely to See a Megadeath Nuclear War? It’s all too horrible to think about.
And so on for another 1,237 words.
[For those benighted readers who don’t own a copy of We Are Doomed and would like to read all three of those pages, I have reproduced them as an appendix at the end of this Diary. Now buy the darn book!]
I’m a U.S. citizen. I have the great good fortune to live in a nation separated from Europe and Asia by mighty oceans and blessed with nonthreatening neighbors and abundant natural resources. We should mind our nation’s security, with strict controls on settlement and sturdy military defenses, ready and able to defend our territories and trade routes against hostile foreign powers.
In other words we should mind our own business and leave foreigners alone to sort out their squabbles among themselves unless they impinge directly on our interests, which they hardly ever do.
Not that I’m perfectly cold-eyed about geopolitics. It can be interesting, the way history is interesting. And I have preferences and sympathies—mainly for civilization over barbarism.
So that’s where I am. I’ve written about it as much as I think I need to, and have no inclination to write more.
Bitter Klingers? That matter of preferring civilization over barbarism has been getting a general airing recently.
Everybdy in the punditariat seems to have been reading Arnold Kling’s 2013 book The Three Languages of Politics. I haven’t yet. There’s a copy waiting for me at the town library, but with all the busyness I haven’t been able to get down there yet.
Here is an extract from Kling’s book, with some commentary, from strongtowns.org:
Kling believes that the majority of Americans fall under one of three political world views: progressive, conservative, or libertarian. He finds the distinction between these world views to be what they view as Good and Bad.
Here’s how he describes these three views:
Progressives organize the good and the bad in terms of oppression and the oppressed, and they think in terms of groups. So, certain groups of people are oppressed, and certain groups of people are oppressors. And so the good is to align yourself against oppression, and the historical figures that have improved the world have fought against oppression and overcome oppression.
The second axis is one I think Conservatives use, which is civilization and barbarism. The good is civilized values that have accumulated over time and have stood the test of time; and the bad is barbarians who try to strike out against those values and destroy civilization.
And the third axis is one I associate with Libertarians, which is freedom versus coercion, so that good is individuals making their own choices, contracting freely with each other; and the bad is coercion at gunpoint, particularly on the part of governments.
…
I don’t think of these axes as some kind of fundamental explanation of why people think what they do. More, it predicts how they will be most comfortable expressing their points of view. So, a Progressive will be most comfortable expressing their point of view on immigration, whatever it is, in terms of how it deals with oppressed groups. Conservatives will be most comfortable talking about it in terms of how it affects civilized values versus a tax on civilized values. And Libertarians will be most comfortable talking about it in terms of freedom versus coercion.So we have three ’axes’ or ways of thinking about the world:
- Progressives: The Oppressed vs. Oppression
- Conservatives: Civilization vs. Barbarism
- Libertarian: Freedom vs. Coercion
As I said, I seem to have been seeing more and more references to this Kling schema recently, especially the oppressor/oppressed axis. It really does nail down the Progressive viewpoint very well. Whites oppress blacks, males oppress females, the cisgendered oppress prouds, Israelis oppress Palestinians, our ancestors oppressed Native Americans, … The schema has a nice clear simplicity to it.
Of course, nothing is that simple. Heck, Arnold Kling wrote a whole book.
Likewise on my own axis, the Civilization vs. Barbarism one. Clear definitions are not easily arrived at. Was the USA a civilized nation when it dropped those nukes on Japan, incinerating tens of thousands of unarmed civilians? I’d say yes, but there is meat for a long discussion there.
And you can work up an argument that for some people, in some circumstances, barbarism may be better than civilization. I did just that in my Diary a few months ago.
So there are definitions to be established and ambiguities to be resolved. I look forward to reading Arnold Kling’s book, to see how well he sorts it all out.
The young ones. Chatting the other day with Jared Taylor, he reinforced an impression I’ve been getting—a happy impression.
Thirty years ago, said Jared, when he had started up American Renaissance and invited people to come together to discuss race realism and white advocacy, the people who’d responded to his call were mostly an older crowd, with a good mix of pop-eyed weirdos and cranks. His followers nowadays, he said, were much younger and more normal.
Just so. I see the same thing. Last month, March, I was invited to attend a gathering in New York City to hear Chris Rufo talk about his recent book. The gathering was of a regular dissident-right club that I’d never been aware of.
It was a big crowd; friendly, cheerful, lively, smart, and… young. Sitting there among the happy noise in the socializing period before Rufo spoke, I tried to estimate the median age of attendees. If it was over thirty, it wasn’t by much.
P.J. O’Rourke’s Babe Rule came to mind, too. P.J. wrote in regard to a demonstration against homelessness he’d attended that no social or political movement in the U.S.A. is going anywhere much unless it has a good component of attractive young women, which the homelessness demo didn’t [Among The Compassion Fascists, by P.J. O’Rourke, American Spectator, December 1989].
If P.J. got that right, my hosts there on the Lower East Side in March definitely have a bright future.
I hear similar things from like-thinking friends all over. There’s a new, fresh, normie National Conservatism coming up—even, I have it on good authority, among card-carrying Young Republicans! All strength to them; and a belated thanks to my March hosts at the Rufo event.
The VDARE conference. And then, at month end, that other long drive, this one solo, down to West Virginia for the VDARE annual conference. That was where I was chatting with Jared Taylor, who was one of the speakers.
I had mixed feelings about this one. Two kinds of mixed feelings, in fact: the regular kind, and a new kind.
The regular kind of mixed feelings are those I always have for weekend events away from home. Friday is Radio Derb Day. I’m chained to my computer in a back room putting the podcast together. It’s hard to get out and spend much time with conference attendees as they’re arriving. I fear that may leave the impression that I’m aloof and unsociable—the snooty Englishman.
Then the next day, Saturday, I’m so clapped out from my Friday work-a-thon that I really am unsociable, or at any rate not very good company. My apologies for all that, to be applied in advance to any future weekend events.
The new kind of mixed feelings arose of course from uncertainty about the future of VDARE.com. Peter Brimelow has already told the world that ”It is finished,” while assuring us that he and Lydia will soldier on for as long as possible.
What does that mean for contributors like myself? So far as I am concerned, I’ll soldier on with them.
”In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious.” That was the quip circulating in the final days of both World Wars, representing the difference in attitude between grimly earnest Prussians and more laid-back Austrians. Put me with the Austrians.
I’ve known the Brimelows for many years. Peter and Lydia have, between them, great resources of intelligence and determination. Let Letitia Lumpkin smirk and jeer: the castle is impregnable. I don’t know what will come next, but it will be just as inspired, witty, ingenious, and patriotic as VDARE has been these 25 years.
Onward and upward! Excelsior!
Math Corner. The Progressive oppressor/oppressed ideology is buttressed by a small number of unshakable key tenets. If you contradict any of those tenets, you unmask yourself as a hateful person full of hate—an oppressor!
The two stoutest and most prominent of these pillars of Progressive Orthodoxy are:
- There is no such thing as race, and
- There is no such thing as sex.
”Race and sex are mere social conventions with no grounding in material reality.” That is most of Wokeness right there.
I had a dinner date in Manhattan on the evening of April 17th. Before leaving the house to take the train in to the city, I emptied the mailbox.
I am a member of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and subscribe to paper copies of their journals. In that day’s mailbox was the latest issue (Vol. 97, No. 2) of the MAA’s Mathematics Magazine.
That gladdened my heart as it gave me something to read on the one-hour train ride into Manhattan. Who doesn’t enjoy whiling away a tedious train journey by reading about Brahmagupta’s Identity or Galois Theory, or by being reminded that if you raise e to the power of π√163 you very very nearly get an integer: 262537412640768743.999999999999250072597? (For much, much more on that last, google ”Heegner Number.”)
The third item in this issue was a report on last year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO),
… the world’s leading mathematical competition for high school students … organized annually by different host countries.
The 64th IMO was organized by Japan, and it was held in Chiba between July 2 and July 13, 2023, with the participation of 618 contestants from 112 countries.
Was the U.S.A. represented? Of course we were.
Each year, the members of the US team are chosen during the Math Olympiad Program (MOP), a year-long endeavor organized by the MAA’s American Mathematics Competitions (AMC) program. Students gain admittance to MOP based on their performance on a series of examinations, culminating in the USA Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO).
So getting selected for the six-member U.S.A. team was pretty darn competitive. How did our high-schoolers do? They did exceptionally well!
The members of the 2023 US team were Jeff Lin (12th grade, Lexington High School, MA); Derek Liu (12th grade, Torrey Pines High School, CA); Maximus Lu (12th grade, Syosset High School, NY); Eric Shen (12th grade, Lynbrook High School, CA); Alexander Wang (9th grade, Millburn High School, NJ); and Alex Zhao (11th grade, Lakeside School, WA). Lin, Liu, Shen, Wang, and Zhao each earned Gold Medals; and Lu received a Silver Medal. In the unofficial ranking of countries, the United States finished second after China.
Hate-filled hater that I am, I could not help but smile at the names there.
- Every one of the team members’ surnames is Chinese, and
- Every one of the given names is male.
No such thing as race? No such thing as sex? Ri-i-ight.
Since I have the magazine open at the IMO page, I may as well give you the easiest of the Olympiad’s six problems.
That’s ”easiest” based on mean scores. Each contestant can score from 0 to 7 points on each problem. For the 618 contestants, the mean score on this problem was 5.845 out of 7.
Mean scores out of 7 for the other five problems were 3.162, 1.256, 4.717, 2.417, and 0.275. That last problem, Problem 6, was so tough that 555 of the 618 contestants scored zero points on it.
OK, here’s that easiest one, Problem 1, slightly reworded by me.
Brainteaser. Think of a fair-sized whole number that is not prime. I shall of course call the number N. By way of an example, say N = 100.
Write down all the whole-number positive factors of N in ascending order:
1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100
Is it the case that each factor in the list exactly divides the sum of the two following factors? (Of course, we’ll have to stop looking after 25, the last factor that does have two following it in the list.)
Answer: No, it is not the case. The number 1 does indeed divide 6, 5 divides 30, and 25 divides 150. Unfortunately 2 does not divide 9, 4 does not divide 15, 10 does not divide 45, and 20 does not divide 75.
So no, it is not the case for N = 100 that every factor in that ascending list exactly divides the sum of the two following factors.
All right, so much for N = 100. Might it be the case for some other value of N, though? Is there perhaps a family of numbers N for which it is the case? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics of that family?
Appendix: On The Middle East, From John Derbyshire’s We Are Doomed, Chapter 11.
Oh, the Middle East. Do I really need to sell you on pessimism about them? Is there anyone who doesn’t contemplate the whole region with utter despair? Anyone who doesn’t think that the Middle East is the leading candidate for the title Region Most Likely to See a Megadeath Nuclear War? It’s all too horrible to think about.
The main thing that comes to my mind when forced to think about the Middle East is our mustachioed friend Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence—the same darn thing happening over and over again, for ever. I go way back with the Middle East—always the same arguments, the same voices, the same grievances, the same horrors.
I see the younger me, in my mind’s eye, riding the New York subway in fall of 1973, on my way to a one-day dishwashing gig in Brooklyn, Rockaway, or the Bronx, following the progress of the Yom Kippur War in the dense, dull, smudgy print of the New York Times.
Further back yet, here I am sitting in the student cafeteria at Liverpool University with some friends, listening to news of the 1967 war, which the college was relaying to us on the PA system. One of those present was a Jewish girl who had spent time on a kibbutz. She kept shushing us to hear what had happened; then, when nothing was happening, giving us long and passionate expositions of Israel’s case. I was rather keen on that girl. Sad: now I can’t even remember her name.
Further back yet, to volunteers in the streets of 1950s England, rattling cans and asking for donations on behalf of the Arab refugees.
And still further back. A few years ago my sister bought me, as a birthday present, the actual issue of the London Sunday Times for the day of my birth, June 3, 1945. I have the paper in front of me right now, discolored and rather fragile—a little slice of the world as it stood in the closing weeks of World War Two. And there the wretched place is, under a headline: DE GAULLE ON LEVANT CRISIS.
Gen. de Gaulle, addressing a Press conference in Paris yesterday afternoon on the crisis in the Levant, said that events there had an international and not merely a local importance … France, he said, was ready for negotiations on the question as a whole, not only concerning Syria and the Lebanon but the whole Eastern Arab world, for America and Russia were also interested in this …
You don’t say. ”Levant” is an old term for the Middle East. (After it was the Levant, it was the Near East. In my childhood geography lessons, the Middle East was places like India, contrasted with the Far East—China, Japan, etc. I wonder if there was something deliberate in the change of name—pushing the whole accurséd place a bit further away from Near to Middle.)
The context to that Sunday Times news story is the reluctance of de Gaulle to altogether let go of the French mandates in Syria and Lebanon, mandates awarded to France in 1918 following the defeat and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. He blamed all the problems on Britain, of course. Hey, about having saved your bacon in two world wars, pal: YOU’RE WELCOME.
Not only the lead front-page headline is concerned with ”the Levant,” but the lead editorial on the Op-Ed page too: ”THE TROUBLE IN THE LEVANT.” Over on the inside Foreign News page, the main story, datelined Washington DC, is: ”AMERICAN DISMAY OVER SYRIA.” (Says the story: ”The headline ’French Bomb Damascus’ produced the same feeling of dismay here as did that announcing the arrest of the 16 Polish leaders by Russia a few weeks ago …”)
Syria … Lebanon … crisis … bomb Damascus … Egypt, ”Irak,” and Palestine … America and Russia also interested … Oh boy. A date plucked at random from sixty-odd years ago, and the names, even some of the issues, are all so drearily familiar.
My health is pretty good, thank heaven, and if my kids don’t drive me to suicide, and Al Qaeda doesn’t pop the big one in New York City (my house is right under the fallout plume), I have an actuarially excellent chance of living for another twenty years. I confidently expect that when at last I shuck off this mortal coil, kick the bucket, get my ticket punched, hand in my lunch pail, and go off to join the Choir Invisible, the newspaper headlines will still be saying ”AMERICAN DISMAY OVER SYRIA,” and editorialists will still be pondering ”THE TROUBLE IN THE LEVANT,” though unless it is true that absolutely everything comes back round sooner or later, they’ll likely refer to the place as something other than the Levant.
A hundred years ago people of a geopolitical inclination used to amuse themselves by saying that the Balkans produced more history than they could consume locally. The Levant was at that point vegetating quietly in the embrace of the Ottoman Empire. When, after World War One, the region at last emerged from its chrysalis, it proved capable of generating a quantity of history that makes the Balkans look like North Dakota.
Does anyone else feel, as I do, an almighty weariness with the Levant and its intractable problems, its immemorial rancors, its savage rivalries, its unappeasable grievances? Back when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State he used to tell his aides that if he ever showed signs of taking an interest in the Cyprus problem, they should immediately put him in a straitjacket. If only we could be that indifferent to the Levant!
I know, I know, we can’t. Oil; nukes; Islam; terrorists; Russia and China—the Great Game of our time. We can’t ignore the damn filthy loathsome place. Our statesmen have to come up with policies; we journalistic thumb-suckers have to come up with opinions; all we citizens have to come up with taxes to pay for the warships and armies, the bribes and subsidies, the front men and stool-pigeons, the soldiers and diplomats. No, we can’t ignore the Levant. But Lord, how I wish we could!
Postscript. A couple of years ago I took my family on a vacation to Montana, to give them a look at the West. One feature of the trip was a ghost town—the town of Garnet, just off I-90 out of Missoula. Garnet was a gold mining town in the late 19th century. It had a little revival in the 1930s when the price of gold soared. The post office finally closed for good in 1942, though some inhabitants lingered on for a few years more.
The place is kept in pretty good shape by some kind of preservation group. You can go inside some of the old buildings, and peer into their rooms from behind bars across the doorways.
Mooching around in the Garnet hotel I spotted, on a table in one of the bedrooms, an old newspaper. Leaning over the bar across the doorway, I could make out the front page above the fold. This was:
The Montana Standard
Butte-Anaconda, Montana
Wednesday Morning, June 2, 1948 Price 5¢
And what do you think was the main headline above the fold?
JEWS AND ARABS ACCEPT U.N. ARMISTICE PLEA
Their replies leave unanswered such questions as when the shooting in Palestine will stop …
No-o-o-o- …
It will never stop, unless the whole place goes up in fireballs. It will never end, just go round and round for ever. You want pessimism? Pick up a newspaper. 1945, 1948, 1967, 1973, … They might as well just recycle the same stories every few years, as the publishers of children’s comics are rumored to do. Who would notice?
