00m54s Under the Southern Cross. (A polar alliance.)
07m49s Ice People on the move. (Into Japan and ... Russia?)
11m46s Trump's Travels. (The President speaks home truths.)
18m07s The Judeo-Papist Supreme Court. (Where are the WASPs?)
23m11s Bread, circuses, and soccer. (Distracting us while they pick our pockets.)
32m41s Ice People beware! (Heat enstupidates, heat kills.)
39m05s Signoff. (With the master.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Yes, ladies and gents, this is your temperately genial host John Derbyshire with VDARE.com's roundup of the week's news.
I have politics for you of course, and sport, and even medical advice. First, though, as in last week's podcast, let me just stand back and offer some surmises on the great historical movements we are part of.
02 — Under the Southern Cross. My comments on this theme last week concentrated on the huge numbers of Sun People moving, or trying to move, into Ice People territories. Quote from myself:
All these population flows — blacks and Muslims into Europe, Central and South Americans into the U.S.A. — are from south to north. The barriers going up — or at least, that we are just now seriously thinking and talking about putting up — in Europe and the U.S.A. are barriers against south-north flows.
I went on to point out that it may not much longer be just the white people of Europe and North America — the West Arctics, if you like — that are being invaded. Our East Arctic relations in South Korea are dealing with a batch of illegal aliens from Yemen.
I got a fair-sized email bag on that. Two listeners pointed out a rather glaring omission that I have to confess to. The thing I omitted was, the Southern Hemisphere.
The main Ice People territories down there are Australia, New Zealand, and the white nations of the southern South American "cone": Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
These nations, my emailers pointed out, are also getting inflows of Sun People; and the direction of flow down there is from north to south.
That's right, of course. My apologies to all of you down below the equator. We Northern Hemisphere types tend to forget you, slumbering away there under the Southern Cross.
Although, in fairness to myself, I actually have a better record than most here. I once wrote an entire column about New Zealand, which is one more column than the average American pundit. One of my very first pieces for VDARE.com, back in 2001, concerned Australia. I've been promoting Uruguay for years as a promising bolt-hole should things get really nasty up north here.
I can't say I've ever paid much attention to Chile, but apparently they're having some very familiar-sounding problems to do with immigration and diversity. A correspondent sent me a link to this piece from the Migration Policy Institute, dated January this year. Headline: Amid Record Numbers of Arrivals, Chile Turns Rightward on Immigration. Sample quote:
International migration to the predominantly European-descent Chile has also grown racially diverse, as the origins have shifted. Chile received growing numbers of Peruvians and Bolivians starting in the 1990s, and Haitians, Colombians, and Venezuelans in the 2000s and 2010s, while the share of Argentines and Europeans has fallen. This diversification in general, and the influx of tens of thousands of African-descent Haitians in particular, has made immigration more visible as an issue and has provoked public backlash …
End quote. You don't say.
Argentina likewise, although the issue there is more longstanding. Argentina's story this past few decades is in fact something of a tragedy.
A hundred years ago Argentina was one of the world's most attractive, best-developed nations. Quote:
In 1913, the Argentine GDP was almost as great as that of the rest of South America combined. Per capita income was 50 percent higher than in Italy, 85 percent higher than in Spain and Norway, 170 percent higher than in Japan, and more than 4 times greater than that of Brazil.
End quote. I borrowed that from Gustavo Semeria's fine long article published at American Renaissance last year. Semeria tells how, during the Depression of the 1930s, European immigration into Argentina tailed off, replaced by immigration of Amerindians and Mestizos from further north. A series of really bad governments completed the work of destruction.
By the 1980s the quip among economists was that Argentina was a formerly-developed nation. Today it's another Brazil, a small white elite living behind high walls while brown and black narco gangs rule the slums.
Did I mention the title of Gustavo Semeria's fine piece? Title: "Argentina: A Mirror of Your Future."
So yes, apologies to my fellow Ice People down in the Southern Hemisphere. Obviously we need to join forces against the equatorial hordes. I shall revise my plans for an Arctic Alliance. The name, too: Henceforth it will be a Polar Alliance. No more Northern-Hemisphere Supremacy!
03 — Ice People on the move. Here are a few disconnected notes just by way of completing coverage of that theme.
As noted last week, the East Arctics — the peoples of China, Japan, and Korea — may be facing some of the same issues as us West Arctics.
I went looking for an update on those Yemeni illegals in South Korea, but could only find this story from the Korea Herald yesterday, headline: Romanian nun helps Jeju's Yemeni asylum seekers, migrant families. Jeju is the South Korean island the Yemenis arrived on. And yes, the person in the story supplying charitable assistance to the illegals is a nun from Romania.
Japan, meanwhile, as reported here last month, is opening the door a crack to more foreign workers. The Economist ran a story about this last week, noting that, quote: "Pressure from business lies behind the change in attitudes." No kidding.
The Japanese businessfolk are particularly interested in taking more low-skilled workers, The Economist tells us. Quote:
The number of these has been rising fast. Almost a third of foreign workers are Chinese; Vietnamese and Nepalese are quickly growing in number.
End quote. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Nepalese, huh? Why no Sun People? No Somalis, Guatemalans, or Haitians? Get with the program, Japan; bring in some real diversity.
Finally on this thread, just going back to the Southern Hemisphere for a moment: Tallying the Ice People in that hemisphere, I left out white South Africans.
That's understandable. White South Africans no longer have their own country; and listening to the speeches of South African black politicians like Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema, you have to wonder how much longer they'll have a country at all.
Threats by South Africa's black leaders to expropriate white farmers have provoked an interesting reaction from the Boers. Headline from the ZeroHedge website: It's A "Matter Of Life And Death" — White South African Farmers Seek Refuge In Russia.
According to this story, up to 15,000 white South African farmers are planning to move to Russia. Thirty families have already arrived in the Stavropol region of southern Russia.
So that complicates my picture somewhat: Southern Hemisphere Ice People moving into Northern Hemisphere Ice People territory. That's a loss to the southern half of the Polar Alliance but a gain to the northern half, so I guess a wash, net-net. I await further developments with interest.
04 — Trump's Travels. Our President went a-travelling: to Brussels for a meeting of NATO leaders, then to Britain for a four-day visit.
The President ticked off both the NATO folk and Britain's political establishment by uttering some home truths out loud. He started by telling the NATO leaders they weren't spending enough on their own defense, which is surely true. Germany, a very wealthy country, has only four fighter jets combat-ready.
On the other hand, as David Goldman points out over at Asia Times, there's not much point spending a ton of money on defense if your people aren't willing to fight, and NATO's people mostly aren't.
David shows results of a recent poll on the question: "Are you willing to fight for your country?" Just eighteen percent of Germans said "Yes." In the Netherlands the figure was fourteen percent, which is practically a lunatic fringe. For Britain, 27 percent; France, 29 percent.
For Finland, bless 'em, it was 74 percent. Quote from David: "One wonders what would happen if Finland were to invade the Netherlands." Perhaps they should give it a try. The figure for the U.S.A., in case you're wondering, was 44 percent.
This is all interesting in its own way, but it makes you wonder: What is the point of NATO? It looks to me like a case of sheer institutional inertia. There's always been a NATO, therefore there should always go on being one.
Even if there's a case for the alliance as a way for Europeans to provide collective defense against an outside threat, what does that have to do with us? These are rich countries who ought to be able to take care of themselves against a third-rate power like Russia. Why are we still involved?
Candidate Trump asked questions like that on the campaign trail. I wish he'd asked them in Brussels this week.
Then off to Britain, where the President scandalized the natives by telling Prime Minister Theresa May her surrender to the EU on Brexit was a mistake. Then he scandalized them even more scandalously by warning that mass Third World immigration was causing Europe to lose its culture.
Both things are true. The folly of Mrs May's "soft" Brexit deal is so obvious, two members of her own cabinet have resigned in protest against it.
The Brexit fiasco has in fact revealed a major fault line in British politics, one running through Western politics in general. The fundamental problem here is that the widespread sentiment of patriotic nationalism, as revealed by the Brexit vote two years ago, has no party-political representation. None of the big British political parties is hospitable to it.
The seventeen and a half million Brits who voted for Brexit wanted certain things. They wanted the laws they live under to be British laws, made by a British parliament, without being overruled by outsiders. They wanted control of their country's borders, with strict rules strictly applied over who gets to settle in Britain.
None of those things is part of any platform on offer from Britain's major parties. They are all globalist; they all favor continuing large-scale immigration.
You'd think that some new party would come up to cater to this nationalist sentiment, as has happened elsewhere in Europe — in Italy, in Austria. There's something about Anglo-Saxon politics that hinders that from happening, though. UKIP would be the logical choice for a new party; but UKIP was always, and still is, an amateurish affair, plagued with petty personal feuds and oddball characters who turn off voters.
We saw similar problems here in the States. Sure, we got Trumpism at last, and thank Heaven for that; but we only got it via the Republican Party, whose establishment still doesn't really like Trumpism any more than the British political establishment likes UKIP or Brexit. And when it comes to oddball characters who turn off voters, Trumpism has those too. The name Roy Moore mean anything?
There's a real structural problem here: strong, widespread national-patriotic sentiment with no political expression. Donald Trump may have solved the problem for the U.S.A. — we'll have a clearer idea about that after the midterms in November. For the Brits, though, there's no solution in sight. It's a shame, and hard to see how it ends well.
05 — The Judeo-Papist Supreme Court. We got a nominee for the Supreme Court this week: Brett Kavanaugh, 53 years old, from the federal Appeals Court for the Washington, DC circuit.
I'd like to offer you a learned opinion about Judge Kavanaugh, his past career and future prospects, but plenty of people better qualified than me have already done that, so I'll pass. The judge seems like a sensible fellow; Ann Coulter has been promoting him, which means he's sound on the National Question; and the CultMarx mob are all tearing their hair and foaming at the mouth, which is good to see. I'll take Judge Kavanaugh.
I note that he's a Roman Catholic, like Justice Kennedy. He seems to be quite devout, in fact: He's a lector, whatever that is, at a DC church. So if Kavanaugh is approved, the religious balance of the Court will be unchanged: three Jews, five Roman Catholics, one Episcopalian.
No, I'm not complaining about that. To the degree it ticks off the lefties even more, I approve it.
Now sure, my school history lessons sixty years ago followed the traditional English line, in which Papists were the bad guys. Bloody Mary; the Spanish Armada; Guy Fawkes; James the Second; the Young Pretender; … these were the villains in the national story as we learned it. Did all that leave some residue of anti-Papist feeling in my heart?
I really don't think so. The last of those villains has been dead over two hundred years, and he was more a pitiful loser than a real menace. It's water under the bridge. I have no problem with Roman Catholics. Some of my best friends are Roman Catholics!
Surely I can say though, with no malice at all, that the preponderance of RCs on the Supreme Court is a bit odd, in a nation founded mainly by Protestant gents, where until very recently — well within my memory — the ruling class was designated WASP, the "P" standing for "Protestant," and the election of a Roman Catholic President was considered a noteworthy social advance.
I've never seen a satisfactory explanation of it. The Jews one can understand: They're smarter than the rest of us. I don't know of any evidence that RCs have higher mean IQ than Protestants, though, and it doesn't seem very likely.
Are parochial schools just better than public schools? Maybe, but not all the RC justices attended parochial schools. Alito and Kennedy, at any rate, went to public high schools.
Is it learning Latin that does it? Could be, I suppose; but I did four years' Latin at school and it's never been any help to me in dealing with the law.
It's a mystery. I'm sure there are people out there who'd explain it in terms of some conspiracy theory, as the machinations of some secret society — Opus Dei, the Rosicrucians, one of those outfits. I bet I'll be hearing from those people. Personally, though, I'm allergic to conspiracy theories. So, far as I'm concerned, it's just a mystery.
Regardless of all that, I welcome Judge Kavanaugh into the national consciousness, and I hope he gets approved by the Senate.
And then, when he's been approved, I hope he does what he can on the Court to restore to it the virtue of restraint. The laws we live under should be laws passed by our elected representatives, not rulings pulled out of thin air by self-important moralizers.
It's not for the Supremes to tell us what is good and what is bad; their job is to tell us whether lower courts have ruled correctly on the law as written, by our elected legislators.
06 — Bread, circuses, and soccer. If you pay any attention at all to non-political news, you know that the Soccer World Cup is being played in Russia. We just got through with the semifinals, and now know that the final, for the championship, will be played between France and Croatia this Sunday, July 15th, in Moscow.
The last semifinal game was played this Wednesday between England and Croatia. Croatia won the game, two goals to one. A couple of my acquaintances thought I must be in distress about this, being English by birth, and sought to console me.
I appreciate their kindness, but it's misplaced. For one thing, I'm not English. I have the immigrant's sentimental attachment to the Old Country, but in a very mild form. Since getting naturalized sixteen years ago I'm a happy and patriotic American, with no other national loyalties. I'm one of the 44 percent of Americans who'd be willing to fight for America, supposing my sorry old hide would be any use in a real fight.
If England got into a war I'd cheer them on, but wouldn't do what David Niven did. Niven was a Hollywood star already in 1939; but the day after Britain declared war on Germany in September that year, he flew back home and rejoined his old regiment. He was still a British citizen, though. I'm an American.
For another thing, I have no interest in soccer. I actually dislike the game. I once wrote a column arguing for soccer to be banned from the U.S.A. by constitutional amendment.
My secondary school played rugby, not soccer. In England there is — or was, when I lived there — a clear class line between the two sports. Working-class boys played soccer; the middle classes preferred rugby. As the saying went: Soccer is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans, rugger is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen.
The class angle is different here in the States. When I wrote that anti-soccer column back in 2000, political pundits were all talking about soccer moms and the soccer mom vote. Middle- and upper-class American parents were encouraging their kids to play soccer, apparently because they thought it European, and therefore classy, like French wine, German cars, or British tailoring. Plainly these soccer moms had never met a European soccer fan.
Now, a couple of decades on from that, we don't hear much about soccer moms. I have the vague impression soccer's gone downmarket in American public consciousness, associated now more with Mexican busboys than with Beaujolais, BMWs, or Burberry raincoats.
Possibly mass immigration has cured the American middle classes of their infatuation with soccer. For me, as a patriot and soccer-hater, that's nothing but good news. Even mass Third World immigration has an upside, I guess.
Now you may say: OK, Derb, but you must at least allow that soccer enthusiasm is a last refuge of masculinity. No doubt there are female soccer fans, but they're a rare species, and probably lesbians.
Well, yes, but what kind of men are we talking about? My own prejudices aside, the real case against soccer, and against mass sporting enthusiasm in general, is the bread-and-circuses case. Events like the World Cup are spectacles designed to distract our attention while ruling elites pick our pockets.
The vlogger who calls himself Black Pigeon had a good piece on this theme the other day. He raises the case of the disturbances in London last fall, when thousands of supporters of the German soccer team from Cologne demonstrated angrily in the streets of London. Cologne was playing Arsenal, a London team, and the Cologne supporters didn't think they'd been allocated enough tickets. They shut down traffic in central London.
Where, Black Pigeon asks pointedly, were these bold lads from Cologne when the women of that city were being molested by gangs of Muslim invaders at New Year's 2016? There was some grumbling about those attacks when news of them finally leaked out, and a few half-hearted demonstrations by twenty or thirty people — who were promptly arrested by the German authorities, of course — but nothing like the fired-up mob of thousands of soccer fans who shut down London last September over an issue of seating arrangements.
The ruling elites of Europe are wonderfully skilled at directing the natural tribal emotions of young European men away from their proper outlet — the defense of their homelands against invading foreigners — and towards the bread and circuses of pseudo-nationalist extravaganzas like the World Cup.
As if to rub in how phony it all is, the big European countries field teams hired in from the Third World.
The team that won the 1966 World Cup for England was entirely English. Not even British, but actually English; if memory serves, every one of them was born in England, although the right back had a Jewish great-grandfather.
Compare this year's French team: Steven Nzonzi, Samuel Umtiti, Ousmane Dembele, Kylian Mbappe, … I turned a couple of shades darker just reading the names.
So that's today's young European guy: Cowering fearfully at home while mobs of foreigners rule the streets, torching cars and molesting women; then turning out fired up with pseudo-tribal passion to watch hired-in teams of those same foreigners kick a ball around for ninety minutes.
Having gotten all that sourness off my chest, I'd like to add a friendly word for the Croatian team that beat England on Wednesday. Well done, guys!
Thirty years ago there wasn't any such country as Croatia; it was part of the old Yugoslavia. Now here they are, a nation of four million people, humbling England, population 56 million — not to mention Nigeria with 186 million, Brazil with 209 million, India with 1.3 billion, and China with 1.4 billion.
And so far as I can judge from the faces, and the sheer number of diacritical marks used to spell their names, they are all Croatian!
Tell you what: This weekend I'm going to suspend my disdain for soccer as best I can and root for Croatia in Sunday's final. I may even stay awake through the whole game if it means watching Mandžukić, Perišić, Kalinić, and Kramarić beat Nzonzi, Umtiti, Dembele, and Mbappe.
07 — Ice People beware! [Clip: Ella Fitzgerald: "Too Darn Hot."] Yeah, it's hot. Here's a tiny news story about that, a story that caught my eye for reasons I shall get round to narrating. Be patient, please.
The story, which showed up in my New York Post this morning, is, like that Cole Porter song, about human performance in very hot weather. The precise zone of performance is, however, different in the two cases.
The New York Post story concerns a study of students at Harvard University. The students were divided into two groups and tested for cognitive function — how well they did on basic IQ-type and reaction-time tests — during a heat wave. One group of students had air conditioning, the other didn't.
Result, quote from the story:
Students who lived without air conditioning answered questions 13 percent more slowly than those who were able to escape the heat.
End quote. On those sneaky tests where you have to quickly say what color ink a word is printed in — you know, the word "green" printed in blue ink, and so on — the non-air-conditioned students had reaction times 13.4 percent longer than the cool kids.
Bottom line: Hot weather makes people dumber.
The reason this story got my attention is, I have just finished reading Matthew Polly's very comprehensive biography of the movie actor and martial-arts genius Bruce Lee, with whom I had some very slight personal acquaintance.
Bruce Lee died 45 years ago this coming Friday, aged only 32. The cause of his death is something of a mystery, and has been endlessly discussed.
Lee was in Hong Kong at the apartment of his mistress, Betty Ting Pei, when he complained of feeling unwell. He had a headache, he said. Betty gave him a mild over-the-counter analgesic pill and he went to lie down. When Betty went to check a couple of hours later, Lee was dead.
As I said, there has been endless speculation about the cause of death. There was an autopsy and a formal inquest, but they didn't clarify things much.
Well, Matthew Polly, the author of this new biography, has done a very thorough investigation. He's read the records of that autopsy and that inquest, spoken to some of the principals involved, and studied Bruce Lee's medical history. His conclusion, from page 473 of the biography, quote: "On July 20, 1973, Bruce Lee died from heat stroke. It is the most plausible scientific theory for his death." End quote.
Bruce Lee was an Ice Person. By recent ancestry he was five-eighths Han Chinese, one-quarter English (his mother's mother was an Englishwoman), and one-eighth Dutch-Jewish (his mother's father's father was named Mozes Bosman). A hyperactive person, in constant motion, he suffered badly from the heat; and the day of his death was exceptionally hot even for Hong Kong.
Well, you can read the full argument in Chapter 25 of Matthew's book, which I recommend. Matthew makes the point that death from heat stroke doesn't get the attention it deserves. Another quote from Matthew:
It is the third most common cause of sudden death in sports activities and rises to first during the hottest months of summer. In the United States alone, an average of three high school and college football players die every year of heat stroke.
End quote. So, executive summary for this segment: Take care, my fellow Ice People! Excessive heat can make you dumber, and may kill you. That's not even to mention the thing Ella Fitzgerald was singing about.
Head north, young Ice Person! … or, in the Southern Hemisphere, south. We weren't designed for these steamy climates. We flourish best in the shady temperate woodlands and windswept grasslands far from the equator. Leave the sun-baked deserts and muggy, buggy rain forests to the Sun People.
08 — Signoff. Time's up, I'm afraid, ladies and gents — I shall have to forgo my closing miscellany of brief items this week. Thank you for your time and attention. Some day I promise I shall do a podcast containing nothing but brief items, to make up for all the times I've omitted my miscellany.
I owe special thanks to the many listeners who emailed in to commiserate with me and offer remedies for my poison ivy affliction. I was surprised to learn how many different remedies there are. I'd assumed calamine lotion was the beginning and end of it.
What worked for me at last was a proprietary lotion made up and sold by a small independent pharmacy here in my home town, thirty dollars a bottle. I'm normally skeptical of this sort of thing; but hey, this stuff worked faster than anything on offer at the big chain pharmacies, so here's a shout-out from me to small private enterprise and local ingenuity.
After that segment on heat stroke, picking some signout music is a no-brainer, even when my brain is sluggish from the heat.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Noël Coward, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen."]
