01m03s — Two cheers for Trump's immigration proposal. (Applause and some quibbles.)
14m53s — Trump proposes, Congress and the judiciary dispose. (Will it see the light of legislation?)
24m24s — Immigration politics: a golden rule. (With supporting examples.)
29m40s — This year's geniuses. (Parasites, poseurs, and some real talent.)
39m30s — The latest moral panic. (What price showbiz success?)
49m26s — Jerry Brown goes light on AIDS. (While STD rates soar.)
51m38s — The new math. (It's about social justice.)
53m29s — Belt-tightening in Turkmenistan. (No more free power.)
55m01s — Signoff. (With genius music.)
[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, organ version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your unreservedly genial host John Derbyshire with our week's view of the passing charivari.Of the week's two big news items, one has been precisely on-topic for VDARE.com. That topic is, of course, patriotic immigration reform. I shall give over most of the podcast to reporting on that, and some other stories related to immigration.
As for the week's other big story … well, I'll offer my opinions later.
02 — Two cheers for Trump's immigration proposal. Headliner of the week for immigration patriots was President Trump's immigration reform proposal, which he sent to Congress for their perusal last Sunday. The proposal is a very detailed 70-point list under three main headings:
Of course we need improved border security so that people don't enter our country without permission. That comes under the first heading. An equally pressing problem, though, is the millions of foreigners who are living and working here, and using our schools and hospitals and public services, who should not be here.
The President's proposals on interior enforcement cover all bases: Sanctuary cities, visa overstays, law-enforcement resources, compulsory E-Verify, more deportations, improved visa security.
This is a major, wonderful improvement in national policy, when you consider that less than a year ago the White House and Justice Department were run by committed open-borders fanatics. I thank the President and his staff for having put so much work into such a detailed proposal for restoring American sovereignty and the rights of American workers and taxpayers.
That said, here come the quibbles.
That third heading, "Merit-Based Immigration System," with just four items, needs work. Setting aside improvements on visa controls under the other headings, this is really the only part of the proposal that covers legal immigration. In my opinion, it does so imperfectly.
There's some good meat in there, mind. Three of the four items — numbers one, three, and four — got a fist-pump from me:
Establish a new, points-based system for the awarding of Green Cards (lawful permanent residents) based on factors that allow individuals to successfully assimilate and support themselves financially.I know: It sounds OK, bringing in talented, well-educated, well-socialized people, rather than what the late Lee Kuan Yew referred to as "fruit-pickers." Forgive me if I have a rather jaundiced view of this merit-based approach.
For most of my adult life I made a living as a computer programmer. I spent four years doing this in the U.S.A. through the mid-1970s. Then I came back in the late 1980s and worked at the same trade here through the 1990s. That gave me two clear snapshots twenty years apart, of this particular corner of skilled middle-class employment in America.
In the 1970s a programming shop was legacy American, with only a thin scattering of foreigners like myself. Twenty years later programming had been considerably foreignized, thanks to the H-1B visa program. Now, twenty years further on, I believe legacy-American programmers are an endangered species.
So a well-paid and mentally rewarding corner of the middle-class job market has been handed over to foreigners — for the sole reason, of course, that they are cheaper than Americans. The desire for cheap labor explains 95 percent of U.S. immigration policy. The other five percent is sentimentality.
On so-called "merit-based immigration," therefore, you can count me a cynic. I have no doubt that American firms could recruit all the computer programmers they need from among our legacy population. They used to do so, forty years ago. Then they discovered how to game the immigration system for cheaper labor.
Now they are brazen in their crime: you have heard, I'm sure, those stories about American workers being laid off, with severance packages conditional on their helping train their cheaper foreign replacements. That's our legal immigration system in a nutshell. It's a cheap-labor racket.
A "merit-based" points system won't fix that. It will quickly and easily be gamed by employers to lay waste yet more middle-class occupational zones for Americans. If it was restricted to the higher levels of "merit," we would just be importing a professional overclass of foreigners, most East and South Asians, to direct the labors of less-meritorious legacy Americans. How would that contribute to social harmony?
With coming up to a third of a billion people, the U.S.A. has all the talent, all the merit, it needs. You might make a case for a handful of certified geniuses like Einstein or worthy dissidents like Solzhenitsyn, but those cases aside, there is no reason at all to have guest-worker programs. They should all be shut down.
Some of these cheap-labor rackets don't even need congressional action to shut them down; it can be done by regulatory change via executive order. The scandalous OPT-visa scam, for example, which brings in cheap workers under the guise of student visas.
Here is John Miano writing about the OPT program last month, quote:
Measured by the number of workers per year, the largest guestworker program in the entire immigration system is now student visas through the Optional Practical Training program (OPT). Last year over 154,000 aliens were approved to work on student visas. By comparison, 114,000 aliens entered the workforce on H-1B guestworker visas.End quote. (And a cheery wave of acknowledgement to John Miano here from one of the other seventeen people in the U.S.A. that knows the correct placement of the hyphen in "H-1B.")Because there is no reporting on how long guestworkers stay in the country, we do not know the total number of workers in each category. Nonetheless, the number of approvals for work on student visas has grown by 62 percent over the past four years so their numbers will soon dwarf those on H-1B visas.
The troubling fact is that the OPT program was created entirely through regulation with no authorization from Congress whatsoever.
Our legal immigration system is addled with these scams. Don't even get me started on the EB-5 investor's visa. It all needs sweeping away.
So for preference I would rewrite that third heading to include, yes, items one, three, and four — cutting down chain migration, ending the Diversity Visa Lottery, and ending refugee settlement for anyone of less stature than Solzhenitsyn; but then, I'd replace item two with the following:
ii. End all guest-worker programs, with exceptions only for the highest levels of talent and accomplishment, limit one hundred visas per annum.So much for my amendments to the President's October 8th proposals. There is, though, one glaring omission from that 70-item list. The proposal has no mention at all of birthright citizenship.
In a world of cheap, easy international travel, birthright citizenship is an anachronism. Most developed nations that had it twenty years ago have abandoned it. It leads to obstetric tourism: women well-advanced in pregnancy come to the U.S.A. to give birth, knowing that the child will be a U.S. citizen. It is deeply unpopular with Americans, once it's explained to them.
Yes, yes, I know: some constitutional authorities argue that birthright citizenship is implied in the Fourteenth Amendment, although it is certain that the framers of that Amendment did not have foreign tourists or illegal entrants in mind. Other scholars think Congress could legislate against it.
The only way to find out is to have Congress legislate. If the courts strike down the legislation as unconstitutional, let's then frame a constitutional amendment and put it to the people.
Getting rid of birthright citizenship might end up a long and difficult process. We might ultimately fail. The only way to find out is to get the process started. Failure to mention this in the President's proposal is a very glaring omission.
Setting aside that, and the aforementioned reservations about working visas, I give two cheers to the proposal.
What are its chances of seeing the light of legislation? That needs another segment.
03 — Trump proposes, Congress and the judiciary dispose. Man proposes, Heaven disposes, goes the old proverb. The Chinese have exactly the same proverb: 謀事在人成事在天, so there must be something in it.
In our constitutional order, the executive branch proposes, the legislature and judiciary dispose. How will they dispose of President Trump's 70-point immigration proposal?It's hard to be optimistic. The 115th U.S. Congress has been sitting for nine months now without disposing of anything much.
In the matter of immigration reform, Congress presents major obstacles. Two major obstacles, actually: the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party.
The Democrats are solidly, passionately opposed to any real reform. They are consumed by real hatred for legacy Americans — or "Deplorables," as their last Presidential candidate called us.
The gentry liberals who still mostly run the party see mass immigration the way Tony Blair's government in Britain saw it sixteen years ago, according to one of Blair's advisers: a way to, quote: "radically change the country and 'rub the Right's nose in diversity,'" end quote. Immigrants are their allies, their auxiliary troops; and the more, the better.
Wait, though. Isn't the President offering a deal? Amnesty for the DACA recipients in return for some negotiated portion of the October 8th proposal?
That does seem to be what he's thinking of. With all respect to the President, I don't think he's being realistic.
Let's suppose there is no deal: no amnesty for the DACA illegals, none of the items in Trump's proposal. What would that mean for the Democrats?
It would mean a huge propaganda bonanza. Next March 5th, without further action from the White House, no further applications or renewals of the two-year relief from deportation will be taken. A DACA recipient who got his permit two years previously will be liable for deportation, and unable to work legally, the next day. The Cato Institute has estimated that DACA permits will begin expiring at a rate of over a thousand a day.
A thousand a day! And in that thousand, you can bet the liberal media would have no trouble locating a dozen or so especially sympathetic cases — high school valedictorians, Eagle Scouts, college athletes, charity workers, orphans, paraplegics, … to tug at America's heartstrings. This would go on day after day, relentlessly, fixing in our minds the heartless cruelty of Trumpism.
As I said, a propaganda bonanza, one that Trump will not allow to happen. We know he won't because this is precisely why he didn't kill DACA when he could have, when he promised to: in his first day in office, by executive order.
The general level of sentimentality in the U.S.A., and the willingness and skill of the mainstream media to manipulate our emotions in liberal causes, mean that DACA is unkillable. Either we give them amnesty, or we work out some fudge to keep it going for ever, perhaps under some other name.
The Democrats know all this, of course. They will not make any kind of deal. Either Trump allows DACA to die next March 5th, in which case the Democrats sail forward to the midterm elections with a huge propaganda boost, or Trump yields to some fudge and the DACA recipients get amnesty in all but name without any action on the October 8th immigration-reform proposal. I predict Trump yields.
Thus any immigration reform that comes to Congress will face opposition from a completely united Democratic Party. Forcing it through will depend entirely on Republicans.
That's a problem, because the President's immigration proposal is very Trumpian, and there are not many Trumpians in the congressional Republican Party.
It's especially a problem in the case of immigration. The central organizing principle of U.S. immigration policy is, as already described, to provide cheap labor to American businessmen; and those businessmen are the chief financial prop of the Republican Party. The Chambers of Commerce will see Trump's proposal as being aimed right at their member's balance sheets.
As a favor to the President, and a sop to their base — who, after all, voted for the guy, though the GOP bosses are damned if they can understand why — congressional Republicans might pass a handful of the more innocuous of the 70 items in Trump's proposal, likely the items on boosting enforcement. That's as much as I would hope for from Congress, though it's not nothing.
And even if Trump gets a few such morsels out of Congress, we've still only checked two of the three branches. After an entire generation of radicalized law schools and eight years of Obama appointments, Trumpians are even scarcer in the judiciary than they are in Congress.
The illegal-alien lobbies are mighty in the land, and well-upholstered with funds from the likes of George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Koch brothers. They will launch legal challenges to any Trumpian immigration reforms that come out of Congress, assuming any do. These challenges will crawl through the courts for years, while Congress turns over and a new presidential election looms.
Am I painting too bleak a picture? Possibly. There are some developments that might make things better.
There is for example Steve Bannon's plan to make primary challenges to next year's senatorial candidates. That, if it's even partially successful, might at least give us some Trumpians in the U.S. Senate. Sure: it might also give Democrats control of the Senate, as some congressional Republicans are whimpering; but you don't win wars without fighting battles.
So my bottom line on Trump's immigration-reform proposal: Inclined to pessimism, but glad to clutch at any straws that come floating by.
And let's give the President credit at least for putting such a full list of ideas on immigration before the public and the Congress. It's something just to get citizens and congresscritters talking about immigration reform — real immigration reform, not just another bait-and-switch amnesty-in-return-for-nothing deal.
04 — Immigration politics: a golden rule. A footnote here to those segments on immigration, for the attention of legislators, commentators, and citizens as the President's October 8th proposal works its way through the political digestive system.
A golden rule in immigration politics is: Do not believe any estimates of future numbers offered by immigration boosters. They are lies, invariably lies.The archetype here is of course Senator Kennedy, during the Senate's consideration of the 1965 Immigration Act. We quote it periodically at VDARE.com, but in my opinion we can never quote it enough. It is so vividly illustrative of the mix of duplicity and stupidity that characterizes immigration boosters. Relevant passage, quote:
Out of deference to the critics, I want to comment on … what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S.500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.End quote. Senator Kennedy is now, one hopes, roasting slowly on a spit in Hell, but the consequences of his lies and/or stupidity are with us still.
Here's another cautionary example from across the pond.
Back in 2004 the Tony Blair government opened Britain to visa-free immigration from Poland and seven other East European states. They told the British people that numbers would be small: between 5,000 and 13,000 per annum was the official estimate. Within five years, nearly a million had arrived — sixteen times the high-end estimate.
Forward nine years. In 2013 Radio Derb was sounding the alarm on behalf of the Mother Country about a big inflow of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, two of Europe's poorest countries. Under European Union rules, you see, as of January 1st 2014 citizens of those two countries would have visa-free access to Britain.
So how many Romanians and Bulgarians did the British government of the time think would come in? David Cameron, the British Prime Minister of the time, refused to say, probably having in mind the fuss that Tony Blair's absurd underestimate had generated.
The BBC, however, the main media outlet for left-liberal goodwhites in Britain, assured Brits that the numbers would be small. The rest of the political establishment parroted this line.
This week Britain's Office for National Statistics released the actual numbers. Since January 2014, nearly a quarter of a million Romanians and Bulgarians have settled in Britain. That includes a considerable cohort of gypsies, perhaps the least assimilable of all the world's peoples.
So, once again, the golden rule: Do not believe any estimates of future numbers offered by immigration boosters. Any number that comes out of the mouth of Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, or the like — any such number is a lie, a lie, a lie.
05 — This year's geniuses. The weirdest aspect of the open-borders ideology, at least to my mind, is the sanctification of illegal aliens. They are holy objects, radiating a sublime, ethereal glow to those sufficiently spiritually refined to see it.
We're all more or less used to this where blacks are concerned. They dwell on a moral plane far above ours, and any negativity about them is a form of blasphemy. Tell me about it.That's longstanding, though; and as I said, we're used to it. How did illegal aliens acquire their halos? When did they get put up there with blacks in the goodwhite pantheon?
Whatever, that's where they are. Not very surprising, therefore, to see that the latest recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" is Cristina Jiménez Moreta, 33 years old, an illegal alien from Ecuador.
What did Ms Moreta do for her $625,000 grant? Yes, you heard that right: $625,000, no strings attached. That's a lot of chalupas.
So what did the lady do? Quote from the award, quote:
Jiménez … is a co-founder (in 2008) and executive director of United We Dream (UWD), a nationwide network of affiliated groups, organizations, and individuals focused on addressing the needs of immigrant youth and families. Through her leadership acumen and strategic vision, UWD united disparate groups around a common identity that has shifted public perceptions of undocumented youth and focused attention on policy issues that affect them.End quote. In short, another worthless parasite on the American body politic.
Ms Moreta — I know: the MacArthur site calls her "Jiménez": I don't know why and can't be bothered to find out — Ms Moreta holds an M.P.A. degree from Baruch College, where I used to teach Visual Basic programming. Perhaps, all unknowing, I passed her in the hallway. Brushed with greatness! Why didn't I spot that sublime glow? My spirit's too murky, I guess.
What's an M.P.A., though? It was new to me, I had to look it up. "Master of Public Administration," says the Baruch website. There you go; although in these hypersensitive times, shouldn't it be "Mistress" Or "Mixture"? Or something?
News of Ms Moreta's genius grant stirred my curiosity about these MacArthur awards. The previous one that came to my attention was Ta-Nehisi Coates, two years ago. Coates is the guy who writes about how black he is, and how mean white people are, and blackety-blackety-blackety black. He is at least an American, though, not a foreign scofflaw. How's it goin', Ta?
So what are these awards? Well, John D. MacArthur was a business mogul — insurance, real estate — in the middle decades of the last century. He died in 1978, his wife Catherine died in 1981, and there's a philanthropic foundation named after them and funded from their estates.
MacArthur doesn't seem to have been much of a lefty. From what one can glean of his character from bits and pieces on the internet, I'd guess he would have regarded the diversity-obsessed Cultural Marxists of today with baffled scorn.
Concerning his Foundation, he famously told one of the trustees shortly before he died that, quote: "I figured out how to make the money. You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it," end quote.
Robert Conquest's Second Law kicked in soon afterwards. That's the one that says any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
So here are the MacArthur genius grants for this year. There are twenty-four of them altogether, including Ms Moreta, whom I've already told you about.
Some of them actually sound quite worthy. Immunologist Gabriel Victora, for example, who got his award for, quote: "Investigating acquired, or adaptive, immunity and clarifying the mechanisms by which organisms' responses to infection are improved." Good luck to Dr Victora; that sounds like $625,000 well disbursed.
Likewise to mathematician Emmanuel Candès at Stanford, doing useful work, so far as I can judge, in Information Theory. Likewise again to computer scientist Stefan Savage of U. Cal. San Diego, working on internet security and cyber-crime. Good luck to them all. The MacArthur awards are not all gibberish.
Outside the scattering of hard scientists, though, the center of gravity of this year's 24 awardees is well over in the CultMarx zone. The lone representative from the academic Humanities, historian Derek Peterson of Ann Arbor, leans left. He is, quote: "Reshaping our understanding of African colonialism and nationalism in studies that foreground East African intellectual production," end quote.
Academics aside, the awardees are wall-to-wall CultMarx. The word "community" and its plural occur five times on the awardees page. That's a sure tell.
06 — The latest moral panic. The news story that dominated this week was of course the one about Hollywood mega-producer Harvey Weinstein.
The primary story here is that Mr Weinstein is a major-league harasser-slash-molestor of pretty young women who came his way — which, he being a movie producer, they did in great numbers. The secondary stories concern efforts to ignore or cover up what was going on; efforts, that is, by people who had something to lose by alienating Mr Weinstein.
Concerning the primary story, I can't raise much more than a shrug. Rich and powerful men with the coarser kind of personality have felt entitled to have their way with pretty young women since the beginning of time. The converse thing isn't unknown, either: read up on Catherine the Great of Russia or the Dowager Empress Ci Xi of China. Fans of Sir Harry Flashman might want to add Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar to the list here; but I believe Sir Harry's account of Her Majesty has been disputed by historians.
This kind of thing is baked in to the nature of human society, and it's very hard to eliminate it. Strong universal moral codes help; the old system of chaperonage had much to commend it; and exposure and shaming of the sort that Weinstein is undergoing is surely a deterrent, although likely only a temporary one.
The law has a part to play, too. It's not all just fat older guys copping feels from nubile young women. As our contributor Robert deBrus posted at VDARE.com, October 12th, pedophilia is also rampant around movie sets. Movies need kids in them and kids are appealing — in the wrong way, I mean — to adults of a certain inclination.
You'd think the law should step in there, since molesting children is illegal. When the fat old guy actually rapes the nubile young woman, that should be a matter of criminal law, too.
The fundamental problem here is that showbiz success, or just advancement, is seen by many, many young women — and many young men, and even, most shamefully, some parents of children — as having such a high value that submission to groping, fondling, and exhibitionism is seen as a small price to pay for it.
A pretty young woman goes to Hollywood, seeking fame and fortune as a movie actress. She finds herself alone with a major producer. He asks her to pleasure him, or perhaps just to watch him pleasuring himself, hinting that in return he'll help her career. Is that a price she's willing to pay, to get an edge in a very competitive market?
For some women it will be, for some it won't. I suspect that if you cherish your illusions about human nature, you'd best not inquire too closely into the proportions of wills and won'ts.
Given the impossibility of eliminating this kind of behavior, society responds with amused acceptance. The American public at large seems not to have been much bothered by Bill Clinton's escapades in this zone. He remains popular; and his wife, who let him get on with it so long as it did not impact their joint ambitions, darn near got elected President herself.
The acceptance has been pretty open. The term "casting couch" has been current for decades. It's been a staple with novelists. Comedians have joked about it for ever.
They've even joked about it in explicit reference to Harvey Weinstein. Here's Jane Krakowski in the TV comedy show 30 Rock, episode broadcast March 22nd 2012:
[Clip: Tracy: "Don't do it, Jen-Rone. You don't wanna mess wid Weird Al." Jenna: "Oh, please. I'm not afraid of anyone in Show Business. I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions … out of five."]
There was another, similar Weinstein joke in the next season, episode aired January 17th 2013, though YouTube wants me to pay $1.99 to watch it, and I decline.
So, a shrug of acceptance from society at large for decade after decade … Then, suddenly, everyone is outraged.
Harvey Weinstein is the human equivalent of a Robert E. Lee statue: accepted unthinkingly by well-nigh everyone for well-nigh ever, then suddenly, overnight, a monstrous outrage against decency, humanity, and the American Way.
Human societies are prone to these sudden moral panics; but in American society recently, the peaceful periods between moral panics seem to have been getting shorter and shorter.
Personally I think moral panics are all damn silly, which is why I left this segment to the end. I like the steady, common-sense acceptance of human imperfection. Perhaps this is wrong of me; perhaps the moral panics serve some improving purpose; perhaps I am deficient in some aspect of the moral sense; I don't know. I just think this stuff is silly.
So much for the primary story here. The secondary stories are more interesting, and rife with irony. Weinstein was a big donor to the Democratic Party, one of whose philosophical pillars is feminism, so there's been a nasty ideological collision here. It's been delicious to watch, for example, Hillary Clinton pretending to be outraged at learning that powerful men force their attentions on vulnerable young women.
Another favorite of mine in the secondary stories: Saturday Night Live refusing to make any Weinstein jokes the week this all came out. Challenged on this, the show's producer said he didn't want to traduce a fellow New Yorker.
That was so lame, even some of the mainstream hacks felt obliged to point out that the show has done some very thorough traducing of Donald Trump, who not only comes from New York City like Harvey Weinstein, he comes from the same borough of New York City.
The truth of this little matter is that Saturday Night Live is a show for gentry liberals, and Weinstein is one of them, while Donald Trump isn't. So the absence of Weinstein jokes is just tribal loyalty.
Finally, I have to admit to some sympathy for Weinstein. He's the target of this month's Two Minutes Hate. Well, I've been there too, in a much lesser way. I know what it feels like.
"Whoa there, Derb!" I hear you say. "Weinstein is a crude philandering bully. You are known to all the world as a mild-mannered, amiable chap who is unimpeachably monogamous. He forced himself on young women; you merely wrote something that contradicted establishment dogma."
All true. Still, if I had the power and wealth Weinstein had, in a glamor factory like Hollywood, with flocks of pretty young women competing for my attention, would I stay on the straight and narrow? I hope I would, and plenty of other men do. I can't help but wonder, though.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Last Friday Governor Jerry Brown of California signed into law a bill that lowers from a felony to a misdemeanor the crime of knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV without disclosing the infection.Only slightly more astonishing, the measure also applies to those who give blood without telling the blood bank that they are HIV-positive.
May the shades of Arthur Ashe, Isaac Asimov, and innumerable non-famous victims of AIDS-infected blood transfusions, haunt Governor Brown's nightmares.
I'm going to put that together with another news story out of California this week. This one's from L.A. Weekly, headline: Millennials Are Having Less Sex but Getting More STDs. STD stands for "sexually transmitted diseases." From the text of the story, quote:
Los Angeles last year saw a 4 percent annual increase in chlamydia, a 27 percent increase in gonorrhea, a 16 percent rise in syphilis and a 61 percent increase in congenital syphilis, which is the spread of the disease to the unborn, according to recently released data.End quote. Concerning chlamydia, we then read to our astonishment that it, quote: "disproportionately impact[s] African-American and Latino youth, according to a statement from the L.A. County Department of Public Health." End quote. Well, you could knock me down with a feather!
Item: This one speaks for its horrible self. I'll just read it to you. It's the advertisement for two job openings at Texas State University, the jobs open being "Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Professor of Elementary Mathematics." Here's the job description, quote:
The Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas State University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), invites applications for two tenured/tenure-track positions in PK-8 mathematics education at the ranks of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Professor. We seek candidates who share our commitment to educational equity, to social justice, and to the recruitment and high-quality education of students from historically underserved and systemically marginalized communities. We are especially interested in applicants whose scholarly interests and work include attention to the concerns of race, ethnicity, multilingualism, immigrant, social class, gender, and diversity, broadly defined.End quote. If the successful applicants play their cards right, one of other of them could be in line for a MacArthur award a few years down the road.
Item: Finally, our friend President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan has been urging his citizens to some belt-tightening.
Up until now, citizens of the Central Asian nation, thanks to the brilliant policies of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his fatherly concern for the welfare of his people, have enjoyed free natural gas, electricity and water.
Recently, though, a slump in world energy prices, engineered no doubt by the malice of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov's enemies, has obliged him to begin charging citizens for these amenities.
I have no doubt that once the President's enemies have been unmasked and brought to justice, free access to utilities will be restored to Turkmenistan's citizens.
Long live the noble republic of Turkmenistan! Long live President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov! [Turkmen anthem.]
08 — Signoff. That's it, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and two very Happy Birthdays! from Radio Derb. One goes to the boss here, Peter Brimelow, October 13th; the other, for the 15th, to Mrs Derbyshire, whose love, wit, beauty, and good sense help keep me sane in a world I increasingly feel is going off its rocker.
By way of illustrating how I feel, here's some genius music to see us out. I say "genius music" because the composer and performer here is Tyshawn Sorey, recipient of one of this year's MacArthur "genius grants." Concerning Mr Sorey's œuvre, the MacArthur website tells us that he is, quote: "Assimilating and transforming ideas from a broad spectrum of musical idioms and defying distinctions between genres, composition, and improvisation in a singular expression of contemporary music," end quote. Enjoy!There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Tyshawn Sorey, "Template."]
