First please note that I mis-spoke on last weekend’s podcast. There will NOT be more from Radio Derb this week; I’m taking a two-week summer break.

So: There will be more from Radio Derb on August 4th. I’ll be doing some random blogging here in the meantime.

OK, some feedback.

South Africa

I got several emails from listeners in South Africa after the July 14th podcast. They all said approximately the same thing: “Thanks, Derb, but you don’t know the half of it.”

Listener A, who lives and works in South Africa, edited excerpts:

[To my quip about S.A. being five years behind Zimbabwe in downward development.] We are 20 years behind Zimbabwe in most regards, especially in terms of general decay, both societal and economic as well as in terms of delivery of government services and infrastructure maintenance. Expect fireworks around 2019/2020. [To my citing S.A.’s 27 percent unemployment.] Our government were well educated in the Soviet bloc. Fake news has been a part of our lives for over 20 years. Unemployment is higher than that. [Concerning the crime rate.] Figures [are] manipulated by the ruling ANC. Murders taking place during home invasions are not reported as such, they are reported officially as burglaries for the purposes of statistics. [To my urging white South Africans to leave.] I haven’t seen the U.K. or Holland rushing to offer the right of return to the descendants of these countries. My mother was born a British citizen in then-British South Africa, but even she is not eligible for a U.K. passport, never mind citizenship. [To my liking the idea of three capital cities, one for each branch of government.] Three capitals is more big government. The judicial capital is OK, the appeal court judges sit put, but Members of Parliament have to travel between Pretoria [executive capital] and Cape Town [legislative capital], necessitating residences, cars, expenses in both cities for both themselves and their entourages—a waste of money.

Thank you, Sir. I still like the three-capital idea, though. Why do legislators need to be in the executive capital? Can’t they Skype the executive?

Listener B:

I started a White House dot gov petition to call for an adaptation of the popular and successful 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment (that fast-tracked refugee status and immigration processing for Jews in the Soviet Union) to let white South Africans into our country. They’re a recognized separate ethnic group and they’re subject to programmatic persecution. It got about one per cent of the threshold of signatures it needed to be acknowledged.

That’s apparently dropped off the petitions website, but this one’s still up there: President Trump please intervene to stop White genocide in South Africa and prevent civil war , created by B.C. on March 17this year.

No offense to B.C., but I like the Jackson-Vanik idea better. “Intervene”? How? U.S. forces involved in a black-white civil war? Uh …

Several listeners pointed out that the people who most need to get out of S.A. are the whites who can least afford to—that white underclass I mentioned in the podcast.

Listener C:

The reality of it is that due to the economic decline, the very people threatened by these attacks—and hate from both government and a big percentage of the black population—are not financially capable to pack up and leave. To top that off the ZAR is currently worth 0.077 US cents. This makes it almost impossible for the whites who desperately need to leave this place to do so.

I used a scratchy old Peter Dawson recording for my sign-out music clip last weekend.

A listener liked the song but couldn’t make out the words. He did the due diligence I should have done and found a YouTube version by Julie Andrews. Enunciationwise, Julie is the gold standard.

My apologies to Cornish folk everywhere. If you want my apologies in Cornish, drog yw genev.

Facial recognition

A listener notes that I caught the zeitgeist as it zipped past.

A different listener vents mild—and justified—paranoia.

Your remarks on artificial-intelligence face recognition were quite interesting, but I can’t share your enthusiasm for the use of that technology, or of biometric technology in general. Wouldn’t it seem that we could do without the various “three-letter agencies” knowing every crease and pore of our face the way they know the back of their robohands?

From the social point of view, as always, this is a case of science depositing something on our doorstep and leaving it up to us to decide what to do with it … For good or for ill: that's up to us, and to our wise, prudent, incorruptible legislators.

My enthusiasm was just geeky admiration for some really clever IT work. I did add the thought:So everything should work out just fine!

The Cold Civil War

In my June Diary I passed comments about the origin of the phrase “Cold Civil War.”

A couple of readers have alerted me to Carl “Watergate” Bernstein’s use of the phrase on CNN, July 16th.

Instapundit picked up on that and made a long blog post out of it. He tracks it back to Ayn Rand in 1962 and novelist William Gibson in 2007. No mention of Derb, harrumph.

As I said in the Diary, I knew I wasn’t the originator of the phrase. I am going to claim some credit, though, for drawing the explicitly racial parallel in my definition of the Cold Civil War:

The conflict between whites who see things like this and whites who see things like that, with colored auxiliaries recruited by one of the sides to groom the horses and dig field latrines.

Many thanks to all who emailed in.