02:09 Educating our doctors. (With a prayer to Momma Earth.)
10:33 Intentional about inclusivity. (Connecticut HATES spunk.)
14:39 The decline of American science. (But the capital letters are right.)
20:25 Geostrategic lunacy. (Inner Party idiots.)
29:32 Promotional vidcast. (Me and the Boss.)
30:14 The other border. (British Invasion!)
32:14 Governmental impotence. (Nothing stops the boat people.)
33:33 Third World L.A. (Good job, Governor.)
35:13 Signoff. (With Judy Garland.)
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners, to the podcast. This is of course your bewilderingly genial host John Derbyshire with some observations on the passing scene.
This week's Radio Derb will be somewhat shorter than usual. Mrs Derbyshire and I are making preparations for a trip to see next Monday's total eclipse and there are domestic issues to be sorted out—care of dog, cat, and grandson, for example, as well as of course packing.
We feel it is our duty to go to the eclipse zone, to be there with our fellow mortals shouting, banging pots and pans, and letting off firecrackers to help scare away the mighty dog that will be trying to eat the Sun.
Perhaps under the influence of this strange celestial event, my scanning of the news this past week has had a more than usually detached quality. What I mean is, I have been feeling like someone watching from a distance things I can make no sense of; people, including people highly placed in our society, behaving in a way that can only be explained by either extreme stupidity or mental illness.
What on Earth has happened to common sense? I keep asking myself.
Let me offer some examples.
02—Educating our doctors. Here's a gem from the Washington Free Beacon, April 2nd. It concerns the Medical School at the University of California, Los Angeles.
First-year students at the Medical School have to attend a course on "structural racism" as part of their training. Yes, they have to: it's mandatory. Once again, these are medical students, who will be diagnosing, treating, and operating on Californians a few years from now.
For the March 27th class in this course our future doctors had to attend a two-hour lecture by a lady named Lisa Gray-Garcia. Ms Gray-Garcia—who is white, as best I can judge—is a full-on radical who-whom warrior who sees the whole human world as divided into oppressors and oppressed.
She is also a bit of a mystic—a worshipper of what she refers to as "Momma Earth." She actually began the class by leading the medical students in what she described as a, quote, "non-secular prayer to the ancestors," end quote, telling them all to go down on their knees and touch Momma Earth with their fists. According to the Free Beacon, at least half the students complied.
Just to give you the flavor of the thing, here's an actual recording of that prayer. The sound quality's not very good and some bits are unintelligible, but it gives you the general idea.
I draw your particular attention to where, fifty-four seconds in, she speaks of, quote, "black and brown and poor people, houseless people from all nations and all generations, who die because of the crapitalist [sic] lie of scarcity, of private property, of money, and ownership of Momma Earth," end quote. Listen.
[Clip:
[Unintelligible] Thank you, Creator, for another day of life. Thank you for [unintelligible] relatives for taking care of the small part of Momma Earth, this big part of Momma Earth that the settlers called "L.A."—Los Angeles. Taking care of it so beautifully so that we could still be here surviving the violent removal of genocide so that we think this is a place called "L.A." with no history, no herstory, no past, no people.
And thank you for still being here, five hundred and two hundred Gregorian years later, standing up, fighting up, speaking up, and shouting out MAN BACK! [Another voice: "Back!"] [Unintelligible]
Thank you to all of our relatives who die on these occupied streets every day; for black and brown and poor people, houseless people from all nations and all generations, who die because of the crapitalist [sic] lie of scarcity, of private property, of money, and ownership of Momma Earth, when Momma Earth was never meant to be bought or sold, pimped or played.
Thank you to the [unintelligible] who are always around us, to the ancestors in this room, to the ancestors of these descendants in this room.
Thank you to each and every one of you, people who go into this world of medicine because you are walking with your hearts and you know something is wrong; and you are walking in love and transformation and new relation. Thank you to each and every one of you.
And finally, thank you to Momma Earth, whom we poison from and extract from and take from every day but is still here and one time soon there will be no "us." [Unintelligible.]
Oh thank you [unintelligible], thank you. [Applause.]]
As is the fashion this season with the who-whom mobs, Ms Gray-Garcia's category of oppressed currently includes the Arabs of Gaza, a beggar people who have been living on the civilized world's charity for seventy-five years while contributing nothing to the advance of civilization themselves and who recently elected for themselves a government whose entire program aims at the annihilation of a neighboring country.
In accordance with that fashion Ms Gray-Garcia came swathed in one of those black-and-white-patterned shawls favored by the ideological avant-garde and led the medical students in chanting "Free, free Palestine!"
As I have observed before: if an Arab state were to take over what is now Israel, it's highly unlikely it would be free. Much more probably it would be another corrupt rattletrap sinkhole state ruled by some gangster like Gadaffy, Hussein, or Assad while continuing to live on the civilized world's charity.
None of that, whatever you think about it, has anything to do with the practice of medicine. That this feral lunatic should be chosen to address medical students at one of our universities beggars belief.
That, according to reports, most of the students went along obediently with her rantings speaks volumes about the enstupidation of our young people. I feel sure that the Class of 1966 Math Department students at University College, London would have been jeering and throwing solid objects at Ms Gray-Garcia before she got through the first sentence of her prayer to Momma Earth.
It wasn't just for that pagan prayer that they went along, either. The event lasted two hours and they sat through all of it. Content aside, that is way too long for a class. Forty-five minutes is the standard; anything much longer than that is too long.
The officers of UCLA Medical School who authorized this academic atrocity should be fired en masse and banned from the university grounds on penalty of prosecution for trespass.
Ms Gray-Garcia should be in an asylum where she can lecture her fellow-inmates on the need to show proper reverence to Momma Earth and the blessings of being ruled by Muslim psychopaths.
03—Educating our children. Also on the education front, although at a lower level, here's a story about a high school in Brookfield, CT.
Quick rundown on Brookfield. It's a modestly prosperous little place fifty-odd miles north of New York City, population seventeen and a half thousand, eighty-six percent white, median household income $133,950.
So what's going on at the high school? What's going on is, that on January 24th a tampon dispenser was installed in one of the school restrooms. Then, within about 20 minutes of its installation, the dispenser was vandalized and destroyed.
Who would do such a mean thing? Oh wait: I forgot to tell you that the tampon dispenser was installed in a boys' restroom.
This was in compliance with a Connecticut state law passed in 2020, State Bill 140, title: An Act Requiring Free Feminine Hygiene Products in Middle and High School Student Bathrooms.
The Bill became an Act and will be law as of September 1st this year. It requires public school districts to, quote, "provide free menstrual products … in women's restrooms, all-gender restrooms and at least one men's restroom … accessible to students in grades 3 to 12 … and in a manner that does not stigmatize any student seeking such products," end quote.
What's the point of it? Here's an explanation from Connecticut State Senator Saud Anwar, a supporter of the Bill. Quote:
The laws are written for the majority but should also always include individuals who are not in the majority. As lawmakers, we have to be intentional about inclusivity.
End quote.
I note that Mr Anwar, as well as being a State Senator, is also a medical doctor. I wonder if he trained at UCLA Medical School?
Whether he did or not, he must have learned the art of oratory from the same place Kamala Harris learned it. "Intentional about inclusivity"? Ri-i-ight.
I am glad, at least, that the teenage boys of Brookfield, CT still have enough spunk in them to smash up the stupid dispenser. I hope they do the same to its replacement. Not all our young men are as emasculated as the UCLA medical students.
It is those Connecticut lads' misfortune to live in a nation now governed by critters like State Senator Anwar … who, I am sure, agrees with Lou Grant in everyone's favorite clip from The Mary Tyler Moore Show: [Clip, Ed Asner: "I HATE spunk."]
04—The decline of American science. Yet another academic outrage, although this one concerning not the classroom but published science journals.
We science geeks have long since got used to the fact that Scientific American magazine, which we once revered, now has an editorial board composed entirely of hysterical 13-year-old girls.
That's popular science journalism, though. We'd supposed that real, authoritative science journals with science written for working scientists, had maintained their integrity. Well, goodbye to all hope.
The October 2023 issue of Psychological Review, flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, has an article with the title "Open science: Friend, foe, or both to an antiracist psychology?" It is co-authored by four credentialed academics affiliated with Montclair State University, Brown University School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Georgia.
So: solid science, right? Permit me, please, to read you the entire abstract of this article. Quote:
The open science framework has garnered increased visibility and has been partially implemented in recent years. Open science underscores the importance of transparency and reproducibility to conduct rigorous science. Recently, several journals published by the American Psychological Association have begun adopting the open science framework. At the same time, the field of psychology has been reckoning with the current sociopolitical climate regarding anti-Blackness and White supremacy. As psychology begins to adopt the open science framework into its journals, the authors underscore the importance of embracing and aligning open science with frameworks and theories that have the potential to move the field toward antiracism and away from the embedded White supremacy value systems and ideals. The present article provides an overview of the open science framework; an examination of White supremacist ideology in research and publishing; guidance on how to move away from these pernicious values; and a proposal on alternate value systems to center equity, diversity, and inclusion with the aim of establishing an antiracist open science framework.
End quote.
I was alerted to that by a post on X by social scientist Lee Jussim, with whom my acquaintance—I mean, as a reader, although we were once at a dinner table together—goes back twenty-three years. I trust the guy. Here's what he said Thursday on X, quote:
Psychological Review, once a bastion for the best, empirically & theoretically driven psychology, a place where the likes of Kahneman & Tversky pubbed some of their best work, has fallen.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were pioneers in the science of behavioral economics. Kahneman got the Nobel Prize in 2002; it's generally agreed that Tversky would have shared the prize had he not died six years earlier. (Nobels are not awarded posthumously.)
So yes, what a falling off there has been. This once serious, respectable academic journal has gone from deep insights into cognitive biases to fashionable gibbering about "white supremacy."
On the bright side, I note that in the abstract I quoted for you, both of the words "Blackness" and "White" are printed with capital initial letters. No biases there!
05—Geostrategic lunacy. It's not just the academics that have taken leave of their senses here in the U.S.A. Our foreign policy has been borderline insane for thirty years now.
Remember how NATO and the Warsaw Pact used to stare grimly at each other across the Iron Curtain? Then the U.S.S.R. disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact was disbanded, and we … doubled down on NATO!
Remember how we suffered a major terrorist attack by radical Muslims, to which we responded with (a) increasing the settlement of Muslims in the U.S.A., and (b) taking down the secular dictator of Iraq, a guy who shot radical Muslims when he found them, and allowing his country to be taken over by Iran, a radical-Muslim nation hostile to us?
Remember how we punished Afghanistan's radical-Muslim government for having hosted the 9/11 terrorists by occupying the place for twenty years then handing it back to the radical Muslims with, as a parting gift, eighty billion dollars-worth of our latest military equipment?
And so on.
I'm not the only person to have noticed all these idiocies. The most accomplished noticer of all, our own Steve Sailer, was noticing them back in 2006 here at VDARE.com. You can read about it in his book just out this month, title Noticing.
Chapter Two of Noticing includes a 2006 article in which Steve reminded us of Mustapha Mond, the World Controller who explains the philosophy of the World State to the hero in Huxley's Brave New World, and of Inner Party member O'Brien, who does the same thing to the hero of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Then Steve wondered aloud, quote:
So—has America's policy since 9/11 been dictated by benevolent Obi-wan Kenobis and Hari Seldons or by evil Mustapha Monds and O'Briens?
"Neither," suggests Gregory Cochran, the physicist and geneticist, who correctly pointed out in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was too broke to have a nuclear bomb program. [Inner quote.] "There is no Inner Party in our government. They just don't know what they are talking about." [End inner quote.]
End quote.
Gregory Cochran is surely right: They don't know what they are talking about.
Here's another person who has noticed this: the X poster with the handle "Cernovich."
The background here is that yesterday, April 4th, marked the 75th anniversary of us, the U.S.A., signing the North Atlantic Treaty. To celebrate the event there was a summit meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. Foreign ministers of all 32 NATO nations were present for the jamboree.
Our own Secretary of State Antony Blinken was of course present. So—inexplicably, since Ukraine is not a member of NATO, was Dmytro Ivanovych Kuleba, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister.
Those were the two figures in a video clip that Cernovich posted at X yesterday. Here's the soundtrack, mainly Blinken speaking.
[Clip:
Blinken: Ukraine? The determination of every country represented here at NATO remains rock-solid. Our allies will do everything that they can, we will do everything that we can to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to continue to deal with Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine—an aggression that gets worse with every passing day.
Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.
Kuleba: Of course we believe that Ukraine deserves to be a member of NATO and that this should happen sooner rather than later.]
Cernovich appended a comment to the clip, quote:
I can't stop thinking of this video. Does anyone have a sane or rational explanation for this? Does anyone truly believe the U.S. could wage a full scale, global war?
End quote.
Wage? Sure. We do that a lot. Win? Eh … not so much.
Would our ruling classes really be so fall-down stupid as to get us actually, militarily involved in what I have for two years been calling a war between the world's two most corrupt white nations?
You bet they would. The stupidity never declines, it only increases, stupidity begetting stupidity.
It's getting scary. Here for example is a guy who's scared: David Goldman of Asia Times.
David's one of the smartest people I know, and very well acquainted with the Inner Party. He was mingling with them at a conference last month, and wrote it up for Asia Times. Opening sentences, quote:
Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation.
I can say that I haven't been so scared since the fall of 1983, when I was a junior contract researcher doing odd jobs for then Special Assistant to the President Norman A. Bailey at the National Security Council. That was the peak of the Cold War and the too-realistic Able Archer 83 exercise nearly set off a nuclear war.
End quote.
David proceeds to give an unsparing account of all the idiocy on display. He makes a presentation himself. Closing sentences, quote:
No one disputed the data I presented. And no one believed that Russia is taking 25,000 casualties a month. Facts weren't the issue: The assembled dignitaries, a representative sampling of the foreign policy establishment's intellectual and executive leadership, simply couldn't imagine a world in which America no longer gave the orders.
They are accustomed to running things and they will gamble the world away to keep their position.
End quote.
06—Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Just a promotional item here. Peter Brimelow and I chat about immigration issues and VDARE's upcoming conference in a vidcast on X under the VDARE handle, April 4th. At the very end you get a look at my grandson Michael, although he's a bit camera-shy.
(The episode with Laura Ingraham that I mention at 15m30s was written up properly in my August 2017 Diary.)
Item: Let's not forget illegal aliens coming in across our northern border. Last Sunday the U.S. Border Patrol reported nine illegals from the U.K. getting caught attempting to enter from Canada into Vermont. A British Invasion!
Their attempt was particularly dumb. A landowner's fence and gate were in their way at or near the border, so they just drove their vehicle right at it and were caught there by wrecked fence and stalled vehicle.
In a post on X, Border Patrol described the invaders carefully as "United Kingdom nationals." The comment thread to that post was, however, full of skepticism that the attempted perpetrators of this latest British Invasion had surnames anything like Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, or Starkey.
I don't know. Sure, there are plenty of disgruntled Mohammeds and Abduls in Britain with relatives in Canada who might have finagled an air ticket for them. There are plenty of legacy white Brits likewise, though, seriously disgruntled at the takeover of their country by Third Worlders.
The strongest reason for thinking these invaders are non-white is the absence of any mugshots from the press coverage. Just as in cases of interracial violence: "If they were white, we would have been told."
Item: The Brits' own problem with illegals coming in boats from France across the English Channel just keeps getting worse. Last Saturday: 349 people in seven boats. Next day, Easter Sunday: 442 in nine boats. Total numbers for this year are actually higher than at the corresponding point in any of the previous five years.
So the Brits are in the sixth year of this swelling outrage and all the resources of their old, rich, ingenious nation can do nothing to abate it. It is the most astonishing example of stark governmental impotence I can ever recall witnessing.
As I say in my exchanges with Peter in that vidcast we just posted, it's as if the flood of Third Worlders into Europe and North America is some kind of cosmic force or principle that nothing can stop.
Item: Having started in Los Angeles, I shall end there.
The City of Angels has not been getting a good press. March 19th Fox News reporter Bill Melugin posted a video clip to X showing a throng of homeless people in downtown L.A., sitting, standing, and lying on filthy sidewalks, some of them gathered round an open fire right there in the road.
Since 2015 homelessness in the city has increased 70 percent. It's increased thirty percent since 2019, when Gavin Newsom took the throne as Governor of California. Good job there, Governor.
Female homelessness in LA has increased 55 percent just the past three years, with over 90 percent of those women experiencing physical or sexual assault.
Check out Bill Melugin's video. Third World America indeed. How many of those ragged, doped-up people on show there are citizens of Third World America, as opposed to aliens from the actual Third World just arrived here courtesy of Joe Biden and Alec Mayorkas, I don't know.
07—Signoff. That's all I have, ladies and gents. Depressing times; depressing, and strange.
While I was putting this podcast together this morning the ground shook. Literally: we felt tremors from a magnitude 4.8 earthquake in New Jersey, eighty miles west of us.
I hope it wasn't my fault. I mean, I hope I didn't make Momma Earth angry with my negativity about Ms Gray-Garcia's prayer to her at the UCLA Medical School. Sorry, Momma!
Eclipse, earthquake: there is disorder in the natural world. Come to think of it, we've been getting an unusual lot of rain the last few days. My garage is flooded … I mean, what used to be my garage but is now my home gym, the floor nicely covered with rubber matting. When the rain stops, if it ever does, I'll have to take up the matting and dry it out, darn it.
Eh well, there's always someone worse off than yourself. And there's always Judy Garland to soothe away life's minor dissatisfactions.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Judy Garland, April Showers]
