01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is back on the air! Yes, this is your irrepressibly genial host John Derbyshire with a weekly round-up of news and opinion from a dissident conservative viewpoint. Peter Brimelow, the proprietor of VDARE.com, has suggested that I explain Radio Derb's change of location, to satisfy listener curiosity and quell unseemly rumors. I am glad to do so, although there is very little to explain; and the little that there is is not interesting or dramatic. In June I turned seventy. That got me to thinking about the time I have left and what I can most usefully do with it. I would, for example, like to write another book or two before I fall off my perch. My conclusion was that I had to work less, to free up time for reading and thinking. Something had to go. With no prejudice at all to Taki's Magazine, for whose hospitality and support I shall be for ever grateful, logic demanded that I drop my commitments to them. This was just a time-management calculation with, I repeat, absolutely no prejudice to TakiMag. Henceforth, aside from the occasional book review in this or that magazine, I shall just be writing for VDARE.com. Radio Derb will be hosted here, and I shall contribute to the VDARE.com blog when I have something worth saying — occasionally, but not regularly, at full column length. My thanks once again to the proprietor and staff at Taki's Magazine for their support, especially in 2012 when I was most in need of it. If you've been a reader of TakiMag, I hope you'll continue to be one. If you've supported them in any other way, I hope you'll continue to do so. Here at VDARE.com I shall go on doing what I can, using whatever meager gifts I've been blessed with, to make myself useful in the true old spirit of patriotism: "My country, right or wrong: if right, to keep her right, if wrong, to put her right." [Permalink]

02 — Euro civilization's last hurrah? The greatest event of this past two weeks was the fly-by of Pluto by the American spacecraft New Horizons. I say that in all earnestness, without irony. So far as I am aware, nothing else that happened in those last two weeks of July was half so important. There was of course the increase in our knowledge of this Solar System, which will be our home for decades — probably centuries — to come, barring really sensational technological advances. What in June was just a fuzzy near-featureless blob we now know in some detail as a landscape: mountains, valleys, plains. It's all made from ices, of course: nitrogen gas and methane gas frozen solid, and good old water ice. You're a long way from the Sun out there: a summer's day on Pluto clocks in at around minus 380°F. There is no sign of life, and it would be astounding if there were. There is every reason to suppose that long, long after Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Kim Kardashian, and, yes, even Donald Trump have been utterly forgotten, long after you and I have returned to dust, human beings — or whatever supersedes us — will still remember this as the time when we first got good images of Pluto and its principal moon. This is true discovery: a real, major advance in knowledge. It's been especially thrilling for me. From way back in childhood, seven or eight years old, I loved astronomy. I knew all the planets and their moons. Saturn's moons were my favorites, with those lovely evocative names I liked to murmur to myself as I lay in bed at night: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe. Back then they were all fuzzy blobs. Then out went the probes: Mariner, Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini. After 1989, when one of the Voyagers flew by Neptune, there was only one fuzzy blob left: Pluto. Now, 26 years on, Pluto's dropped its veil. All eight of our sister planets have yielded up their secrets — their major secrets, at any rate — and my lifetime encompassed the whole process. There is a social aspect, too, though I think a more melancholy one. The people who accomplished these technical marvels were that great tribe of American engineers who came up and flourished in the middle-to-later twentieth century. They had predecessors, of course: Bell, Edison, the Wright brothers, all the great tinkerers and inventors that came before and inspired them. Collectively, though, that great midcentury crop was like nothing that had gone before. They won a tremendous war; they held off and at last out-engineered a powerful adversary; they built the infrastructure for a marvellous civilization, the envy of the world; they put men on the Moon. Now they have faded away. Probably the Pluto fly-by was their last hurrah. We shall not be encouraged to remember them: They were too white, male, and European — a shocking, shameful thing to the multicultural sensibilities of today. Well, the hell with those sensibilities. I shall remember them, and I honor them now for the marvels they gave us. Here's a poem for them all, those that are left. It was written in 1908 by the English poet Rupert Brooke, who died just a hundred years ago this April. The stars, a jolly company,

I envied, straying late and lonely;

And cried upon their revelry:

"O white companionship! You only

In love, in faith unbroken dwell,

Friends radiant and inseparable!"



Light-heart and glad they seemed to me

And merry comrades (even so

God out of Heaven may laugh to see

The happy crowds; and never know

That in his lone obscure distress

Each walketh in a wilderness).



But I, remembering, pitied well

And loved them, who, with lonely light,

In empty infinite spaces dwell,

Disconsolate. For, all the night,

I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,

Star to faint star, across the sky. [Permalink]

03 — Man shoots lion. From the sublime to the ridiculous. This week's goat, the subject of our latest Two Minutes Hate, is 55-year-old Dr Walter Palmer, a dental practitioner from the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie, in, of course, Minnesota. Early in July Dr Palmer, on a hunting vacation in Zimbabwe, killed a lion. Now he's in hiding, his office is under siege by furious mobs, and his patients have all deserted him. All the emotional stops have been pulled out for this one. The mobs around Dr Palmer's office are weeping and rending their garments. Mothers are taking their little kiddies — known in lion-speak as "midnight snacks" — to lay bouquets of flowers on Dr Palmer's doorstep in memoriam for the lion. I suppose the tots have images of Simba in their silly Disneyfied heads. Come to think of it, probably the "adults" do, too. (If you go to the transcript you will see that I have put mockery quotes around the word "adults.") Sentimentality about animals is not a new thing in the world, of course. I can remember my sister, back in the Truman administration, crying when the hunters shot Bambi's mother. That was fiction, though; my sister was five; our fellow-countrymen had just gotten through reducing Hamburg and Berlin to piles of rubble; and anyway Bambi's Mom was a herbivore. This fuss over the lion is way more preposterous. Latest news as we go to tape here is that this incident — which happened in Zimbabwe, remember — is now a federal case, literally. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced on Thursday that they are investigating the killing. They will, they tell us, quote, "go where facts lead." Why all the hullabaloo? What are the facts? Let's take a look. This wasn't just any lion. This was Cecil, a star attraction in Hwange National Park. That's a huge safari park — it's about eighty miles across — in the west of Zimbabwe. The late Cecil was 13 years old at time of death, equivalent to mid-fifties in human years. He was named after 19th-century empire-builder Cecil Rhodes — as indeed was Zimbabwe, when it used to be called Rhodesia. Concerning Rhodes, historian James Morris has this to say, quote: Rhodes died in 1902, and was buried at a site of his own choosing in the Matopo Hills in Rhodesia, which he called The World's View. There, in a place of silent beauty, he lies with his friend Jameson and the dead of Allan Wilson's Shangani patrol — all the heroes of Rhodesia, awaiting one fears not the Last Trump but the next regime. End quote. Rhodes was the man who said, quote: To be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life. End quote. He was not the man who said, quote: If you don't like black people, don't come to live in Africa. End quote. That was Roy Welensky. So anyway, this lion Cecil was killed by Dr Palmer of Minneapolis. What's wrong with that? Well, nothing per se. Shooting lions is legal in Zimbabwe, provided the proper formalities are observed. Lots of people, big game hunters, go there for just that purpose, as Dr Palmer did. Problem is, the formalities were not observed. Cecil was shot a few hundred yards outside the park, on privately owned land that had not been assigned a lion quota. That's the main point of illegality. Cecil wore a radio collar because he was being tracked by an Oxford University research project. That's OK: It is not illegal to shoot a collared lion. He was drawn out of the park by bait and shot initially with a bow and arrow. He staggered off, was tracked for several miles, and was then dispatched with a rifle shot. None of that is illegal either. However, the hunting guide who lured the lion so Dr Palmer could shoot it, tried to destroy the collar when he saw it. That is a secondary illegality. So the illegality here is pretty technical stuff: no lion quota on the private land where Cecil was shot, attempted destruction of the tracking collar. Dr Palmer tells us, very plausibly, that he had all necessary permits and relied on the guide and the landowner to ensure everything was legal. From what I've read so far, I don't see any way he can be faulted on this. The killing happened, furthermore, in Zimbabwe, a nation not best known for firm adherence to rule of law, property rights, and governmental integrity. The place is in fact a miserable black African slum ruled by an agéd despot who has murdered his political opponents, banned dissent, and allowed his family and friends to loot the economy, what's left of it. Freedom House ranks nations on a four-point scale: Free, Partly Free, Not Free, and Worst of the Worst. Zimbabwe is ranked Not Free. Starting 15 years ago, white farmers have been driven off their land, frequently with violence, and their farms have been handed over to blacks with political connections. Only about 300 farms are still white-owned, down from 4,500. Zimbabwe is an economic disaster zone. Six years ago the currency bottomed out after years of hyperinflation. For a while the national bank was issuing $100 trillion bills, each one worth around 33 cents U.S. The currency has since been recalibrated, but the economy hasn't improved much. The latest report on Zimbabwe from Human Rights Watch makes pretty devastating reading. You can read it for yourself on the Internet. That's human rights. So people — Americans — are worked up about animal rights in this hell-hole? If you insist on discussing animal rights in Zimbabwe, start from the rampant poaching since whites lost control of the country. Poaching has severely depleted wildlife stocks, to the enrichment of the poachers and of their friends and relatives in Zimbabwe's ruling class. This is Africa, for crying out loud. National Geographic reported in 2007 that 60 percent of Zimbabwe's total wildlife had been killed off in just the previous seven years. The surprising thing in the Cecil story is not that a guy shot a lion, but that there are any lions left to shoot. So, once again, why the massive nationwide hysteria over a lion killed in a remote, badly misgoverned country, under some rather technical issues of local illegality, by a hunter who plausibly was not aware of those issues? Well, these outbursts aren't happening in a vacuum. They are skirmishes in a war. That's the real significance here, the social significance for Americans. Let me give that another segment. [Permalink]

04 — Goodwhite self-regard on display. So OK, there are matters of substance there in the killing of Cecil that we can debate: matters of wildlife conservation, land management, African governance, changing sensibilities … Good meaty stuff for discussion in calm tones by informed observers. Inevitably, though, the whole incident became refracted through the lens of current public discourse in the U.S.A. into a skirmish in what I call the Cold Civil War: that is, the everlasting struggle between, on the one hand, the progressive goodwhites who dominate our nation's mainstream culture — the media, the universities and law schools, big corporations, the federal bureaucracy — and on the other hand the ignorant gap-toothed hillbilly redneck badwhites clinging to their guns and religion out on the despised margins of civilized society. Dr Palmer is of course a badwhite. The evidence for this in in his actions. Hunting charismatic megafauna for sport is a thing only badwhites do. Big game trophy hunting is in fact as typically, characteristically badwhite as shopping at Whole Foods, or patronizing microbreweries, or listening to NPR are characteristically goodwhite. For a full catalog of typical goodwhite lifestyle choices I refer you to Christian Landers' 2008 book Stuff White People Like — slightly out of date now but still reliable on most points. I have occasionally entertained the notion of putting out an updated version to be titled Stuff Goodwhites Like, with a companion volume titled, of course, Stuff Badwhites Like. Big game trophy hunting — indeed, hunting of all kinds — would definitely be listed in that latter volume, along with commercial beer, pickup trucks, Protestant Christianity, side-clip suspenders, NASCAR, and other badwhite favorites. Well, we have our badwhite antihero: this leocidal dentist, Walter Palmer. Who will step up to do battle for the goodwhites? Jimmy Kimmel, that's who. Kimmel's is one of those names that floats around on the outer fringes of my awareness. I know he has a late-night talk show, but I've never actually watched it. Looking him up, I see that he's a 47-year-old native of Brooklyn of mixed German and Italian ancestry who's been busy in radio and TV all his adult life. Hey, good luck to him. Now there's a clip of Jimmy Kimmel on his TV show the other day putting the goodwhite viewpoint on the Cecil story with exceptional clarity. Samples: [Kimmel]: The big question is: Why are you shooting a lion in the first place? I mean, I'm honestly curious to know why a human being would feel compelled to do that. How is that fun? Is it that difficult for you to get an erection that you need to kill things? [Prolonged applause.] Listeners should note there the instant recourse to sexual insult. It is an article of faith with goodwhites that badwhites have unsatisfactory sex lives, and that the discontent badwhites feel in this regard explains their otherwise incomprehensible tastes and viewpoints. Whether badwhites actually do have less happy sex lives than goodwhites, I have no data. This ought to be a matter that can be settled by rigorous empirical enquiry; although given the difficulty of finding out what couples actually experience in the privacy of their chambers, there are some knotty problems of methodology to sort out. Pending reliable research studies, I stand agnostic. I can think of some facts that might be taken as counter-indications. On genetic evidence, for example, Genghis Khan seems to have enjoyed an exceptionally vigorous sex life; yet there surely can't be many topics on which the great conqueror would agree with a modern progressive goodwhite, certainly not big game hunting. And then there is the fact — I'm pretty sure it's a fact — that goodwhites' fertility is way lower than badwhites'. That's all circumstantial, though. As I said, I stand agnostic on the main point here, and leave a dispositive determination to the researchers. Whatever the underlying truth of the matter, what is undeniably on display here with Kimmel and his audience is the psychic need among goodwhites to feel not only morally superior to badwhites, but also sexually superior. Just listen to the studio audience whooping and applauding in approval there. The thought they're taking away, and that you are supposed to take away too, is something like: "If only Dr Palmer were as sexually liberated and fulfilled as we are, he wouldn't want to hunt and kill animals." For full penetration here, Kimmel follows up with a Viagra joke, followed in quick succession by a Bill Cosby joke: [Kimmel]: If that's the case, they have a pill for that. It works great. [Laughter.] Just stay home and swallow it, and you save yourself a lifetime of being the most hated man in America who never advertised Jell-O Pudding on television. [Laughter, applause.] Kimmel's performance strategy here seems to be: First, go for the broad goodwhite audience with a joke about erectile dysfunction among badwhite males. Then pivot to the feminists with a joke about Bill Cosby, who is now a hate figure to them. Kimmel needs a deft touch here, as Cosby is black and you don't want the audience to catch a whiff of racism. Cosby's accusers, though, to judge from the 35 of them pictured on the cover of New York magazine, are almost exclusively white, and thirty or so white females trump one old black guy who hasn't had a hit show since way, way back in the remote past, before Facebook came up. Cosby anyway made a name for himself — I mean, before the Trial Lawyers Association got to work making a different name for him — by telling his fellow blacks to shape up and stop complaining. So he's not, like, authentically black. So hey, screw him! This is, remember, the Cold Civil War between two white armies. Blacks can be trucked in as auxiliaries when needed, to score points off the other side, but nobody cares what they think. There follows a gesture towards multiculturalism: And by the way, I'm not against hunting, if you're hunting to eat or help keep the animal population healthy or to … part of your culture or something, that's one thing … Multicultural considerations do not extend to badwhites, though. They have no culture, being little better than animals themselves: … but here's some a-hole dentist who wants a lion's head over the fireplace in his man-cave so his douchebag buddies can gather around it and drink scotch and tell him how awesome he is, that's just vomitous … "A-hole," "douchebag," "vomitous," … Just listen to the language there! This is the grand old tradition of dehumanizing ideological vituperation, in direct line of descent from Thomas More's ravings against Luther, or the names Karl Marx called Ferdinand Lasalle, both of which I'll leave you to look up for yourselves, this being a family website. The Chinese language is slightly more delicate in these matters, so I can tell you what Mao Tse-tung called his ideological enemies, quote: "bloodsuckers, parasites, smiling tigers, piles of garbage, cow ghosts and snake demons." End quote. OK, Kimmel has us pointed in the right ideological direction. Where is the Social Justice angle, though? How do we translate our righteous anger at the counter-revolutionary wrecker Walt Palmer into political action? To use the term Marx himself would have used: how do we incorporate our revolutionary impulses into praxis? Kimmel tells us: In the meantime I think it's important to have some good come out of this disgusting tragedy. So this is the website for the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at Oxford: wildcru.org. These are the researchers who put the collar on Cecil in the first place. They track the animals and study them. If you want to do something … If you want to make this into a positive … Here the tragic aspect of this, quote, "disgusting tragedy" seizes control of Kimmel's pure but sensitive heart. In orations of this kind, you see, it is not enough to merely make verbal gestures towards feminism. The speaker must show us his own feminine side. Thus, for a moment, Kimmel loses control over his emotions: … you can, er … [Voice breaks] … sorry. I, um … I … I … OK, I'm good. Beautifully done! Just a glimpse of proper empathy; then stern self-control resumes its mastery. Or mistressy … Er, make a donation and support them. At the very least … Yes? Yes? Tell us, Jimmy! What, at the very least, can we do? Er, maybe … maybe we can show the world that not all Americans are like this jackhole here, this dentist … [Cheers, tumultuous applause.] Yes! Heaven forbid the world should think we are all callous brutes like Dr Palmer. We, er … Wait a minute, I need the goodwhite phrasebook here. I can never remember the approved form of words in the progressive liturgy. What am I searching for here? … Right, got it! This is not who we are. [Permalink]

05 — Rule of thumb. I noticed in reading up on the dead lion story an interesting factlet about Dr Palmer. Turns out that a dental assistant who'd worked for him, name of Tammy Brevik, had filed a complaint against him for sexual harassment back in 2005. Dr Palmer denied any wrongdoing and was not formally disciplined, but he settled with the lady's attorneys for $127,500. One never knows what to make of these things. In the agreement they both signed, Ms Brevik alleges that she was subjected to, quote, "ongoing and unwelcome sexual harassment by [Dr Palmer] including, but not limited to, verbal comments and physical conduct involving her breasts, buttocks, and genitalia," end quote. My own observations while working on Wall Street left me deeply skeptical of claims like this, with deep-pocketed firms or professionals on one side and on the other, unscrupulous attorneys and a culture of prized and petted victimhood. Ms Brevik worked for Dr Palmer for six years, an attractive young woman alone in a small enclosed space with a middle-aged guy. Was he sometimes tempted to off-color remarks? Did he brush past her a little too closely, a little too often, in the narrow confines of the office? Could be. I don't know. From the written depositions we've seen, it could very well be nothing more than that. If he put his hand up her skirt, it's not recorded. I come at this as a self-identifying geezer, mind. Making off-color remarks to a female will pretty much get you locked up nowadays; and I think that's ridiculous. I can remember a freer, easier time, when women could deal with obnoxious males without running off to a lawyer. The late Malcolm Muggeridge, for example, was notorious as a groper, especially in taxis. Fleet Street legend has it that one particularly resistant lady broke both of Muggeridge's thumbs during a cab ride. That's the way to do it, gals. All of which brings us back to Bill Cosby. I said what I had to say about the allegations against Cosby last December. Extract from that broadcast, quote: Other accusations are that Cosby got a woman alone and slipped her a Mickey Finn. Renita Chaney Hill, for example, who was a teenage actress on one of Cosby's shows in the early 1980s, told a magazine that Cosby would, quote, "often invite her to stay with him in his hotel rooms, then give her a drink," end quote, whereupon she'd pass out. She suspects the drinks were drugged.



He'd often do this? How much did the girl mind if she let him do it often? And in the early 80s Bill Cosby was 40-something. Did Ms Hill not know it's unwise for a pretty young teen female to go to the hotel room of a middle-aged man? And how are we supposed to evaluate these claims, anyway? What supporting evidence can these women provide, thirty and forty years after the event?



Another woman, Judy Huth, says Cosby took her and a friend to a party at the Playboy Mansion in 1974, where Cosby, when he got her alone, made her give him a hand job. The Playboy Mansion? Hel-lo? Ms Huth is suing Cosby on account of the, quote, "psychological damage and mental anguish" she says she suffered. After she went with him to the Playboy Mansion. And gave him a hand job. In 1974. Lots of luck with that lawsuit, honey. End quote. Now New York magazine has come out with a whole new crop of women who claim Cosby fondled, drugged, or raped them back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. It's the same kind of stuff, and I'm no more impressed with it now than I was last year. Here once again is my advice to young women from back then, quote: It's a pretty easy thing for a woman to make sure she is never alone with a man. It's double easy to never be alone drinking alcoholic beverages with a man. It's triple easy to not be alone drinking alcoholic beverages with a man in the Playboy Mansion, and it was even in 1974. What a crock! End quote. I'm sorry, I just don't care for these whiny, weepy women of today and their sobbing pretensions to victimhood. I liked women the way they were back in the day, when they knew how to break a guy's thumbs. [Permalink]

06 — Cuckoo in the nest. You've probably heard the word "cuckservative" by now. What does it mean? Well, a cuckservative is a self-identifying conservative who is in the same relation to the left-liberal, Cultural Marxist narrative as a deceived husband — the cuckold — is to his wife's lover. Playing the part of the adulterous wife here are all the things that conservatives claim to hold dear — restraint in government, a wide radius of trust, nation, marriage, Christianity, traditional high culture. The cuckservative smiles with approval and understanding as this wife goes off to spend the weekend with her progressive lover. The lover of course looks on the cuckservative with amused contempt. And yes, that probably is how Al Franken, or Rachel Maddow, or the editorial staff of The New York Times regard Jeb Bush, or Sean Hannity, or the editorial staff of The Weekly Standard. If you are of the same kidney as myself — a bit old-fashioned, somewhat fastidious about using the right locution in the appropriate location — you probably winced at the word "cuckservative." It sounds smutty and low-rent. Sure, that's just coincidence. The word's etymology is perfectly sound and respectable. "Cuckold," is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary to be, quote: "a derisive name for the husband of an unfaithful wife." Recorded usage goes back to the 13th century, with instances in Chaucer and Spenser. Shakespeare was especially fond of cuckoldry as an occasion for humor. The horns that supposedly grow out of a cuckold's head are one of his favorite images. Here's Dr Johnson, commenting on Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor, quote: There is no image which our authour [that is, Shakespeare] appears so fond of as that of a cuckold's horns. Scarcely a light character is introduced that does not endeavour to produce merriment by some allusion to horned husbands. As he wrote his plays for the stage rather than the press, he perhaps reviewed them seldom, and did not observe this repetition, or finding the jest, however frequent, still successful, did not think correction necessary. End quote. So you can't object to "cuckservative" on purely etymological grounds. It is certainly nothing like as objectionably disgusting as "teabagger," which leftists, after five years, still consider to be the very acme of refined wit. Common perceptions and mis-perceptions must be taken into account in our social exchanges, though. You can't object to the word "niggardly" on etymological grounds, either; it comes from a solid old Germanic root word and, like "cuckold," is present in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Still, you don't use "niggardly" when you're talking to a nice old black church lady, not if you have any manners. So there are legitimate reasons to shun the word "cuckservative." It seems to have gotten itself firmly planted on the Dissident Right, though, and has inspired some good commentary and much humor, not all of which is blue. Among the commentary, by far the best was the short essay by Jared Taylor at American Renaissance. The essay is titled An Open Letter to Cuckservatives, and is cast in that epistolary form. Sample: Do you stand for limited government and a balanced budget? Count your black and Hispanic allies. Do you admire Thomas Jefferson? He was a slave-holder who will end up on the dung heap with the Confederate flag. Do you care about stable families and the rights of the unborn? Look up illegitimacy, divorce, and abortion rates for blacks and Hispanics. Do you cherish the stillness at dawn in Bryce Canyon? When the park service manages to get blacks and Hispanics to go camping they play boom-boxes until 1:00 a.m. Was Ronald Reagan your hero? He would not win a majority of today's electorate.



Do you love Tchaikovsky? Count the non-whites in the concert hall. Do you yearn for neighborhoods where you can leave the keys in your car? There still are some; just don't expect them to be "diverse." Are hunting and firearms part of your heritage? Explain that to Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor. Are you a devout Christian? Muslim immigrants despise you and your faith. Do you support Israel? Mexicans, Haitians, Chinese, and Guatemalans don't. End sample. I'll admit to bias here. I am one of Jared's keenest admirers. I regard him as a true patriot and an outstanding exemplar of that dwindling phenomenon, the American gentleman. Jared's acceptance of the word "cuckservative" dispels my misgivings. (Kevin MacDonald seems to have had a similar effect on Peter Brimelow.) Any word that's good enough for Jared Taylor is good enough for me. "Cuckservative" — I'm going to practice saying it as non-salaciously as possible. Cuckservative, cuckservative, … Make up your own mind about it. Just be sure, before you do, to read Jared's "Open Letter to Cuckservatives." It's a gem. I'm very curious to see what the cuckservatives come up with by way of a riposte, supposing they deign to notice it. [Permalink]

07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Imprimis: Like the word or not, "cuckservatives" gives us a snappy way to talk about the Donald Trump phenomenon. Why is Trump leading all the other Republican contenders in polls? Because conservatives are fed up with cuck-servatives, that's why. See? this word is useful. I continue to like and support Trump's candidacy. I'm fed up with cuckservatives, too. Still, I'm holding off on extended commentary until I see how Trump copes in next week's debate. There's a lot to be said for a candidate from outside establishment politics, especially in a time like this, when establishment politics has set like concrete. Establishment politics in the shape of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the big federal bureaucracies is what Trump will have to deal with if elected President, though. I want to see how he copes with their representatives, up there on stage. They'll try to cuck him, of course. I want to see how firm a resistance he puts up. [Permalink] Item: This year's session of the IMO, that's the International Math Olympiad, a competition for high school students, wound up July 16th in Chiang Mai, Thailand. As I reported here on VDARE.com, the U.S.A. team placed first. The last time that happened was in 1994. Congratulations again to all concerned. Radio Derb of course had a mole at the Olympiad. My mole passed on the following curious fact. If you go to the IMO Hall of Fame page, right at the very top there you see Alex Song of Canada, who has won five, count 'em five gold medals at the Olympiads. That is pretty damn sensational. In this year's competition Alex got a perfect score, and was the only contestant to do so. That's double sensational. Alex actually grew up in the U.S.A., and has trained with U.S. math teams. His competing on the Canadian team is something of a technicality. My mole tells me that Alex is the nicest guy you'll meet in a month of Sundays, not the least bit aspergery or weird. You ready for the punch line? Here it comes. Alex wanted to go to Princeton but they turned him down. Alex has the rejection letter to prove it. He did end up being admitted eventually, but it was only because Zuming Feng, a former coach of the U.S. math team, made personal representations to Princeton and got them to change their decision. If this math superstar is not good enough for Princeton, who is? It would of course be invidious of me to identify any particular individuals directly, but there is one name that comes to mind. It's an anagram of OCHELLE MIBAMA. [Permalink] Item: Back in 2012 when I published my infamous "Talk" article, one of the things that most gave my cuckservative friends the vapors was item 10g, quote: Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white. End quote. Well, here's illustrative example number 25,789: U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah from Pennsylvania's 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses the black parts of Philadelphia. Chaka Fattah is himself black. Quote from the news website Philly.com, July 30th, quote: Federal prosecutors on Wednesday accused U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah of using his campaign coffers, charities he created, and federal grant funds he controlled to bankroll a failed 2007 Philadelphia mayoral bid, and line the pockets of family members and close political allies. End quote. Hey ho. Not the most surprising news story of the week. What snagged my attention, though, was this passage from the Wikipedia bio of Rep. Chaka, which I looked up on account of I'd never heard of the man before. Quote from Wikipedia, quote: His adoptive father, David Fattah, and mother, Falaka Fattah (born Frances Brown, also known as Queen Mother Falaka Fattah), are community activists in West Philadelphia, where they are building an "urban Boys' Town" through their organization, the House of Umoja … End quote. OK, I'm convinced: we are living in a computer simulation. And the Sim Lords have some sense of humor! [Permalink]