vdare--2020-07-31--The War on the Suburbs, Election Prospects, Barr Testifies, and Herman Cain RIP, Etc

01m22s Affirmatively Furthering the war on suburbia .
( From LBJ to Trump . )
08m06s The one great everlasting @ @ @ @ @ votes , too . )
20m49s Congressional report .
( Fun time in the Halls @ @ @ @ @ Herman Cain RIP .
( Would have been better than Romney . )
32m53s Another @ @ @ @ @ ( And Mutti is mad . )
34m51s Signoff .
( From deep in the @ @ @

01m22s Affirmatively Furthering the war on suburbia. (From LBJ to Trump.)
08m06s The one great everlasting problem. (Suburbanites have votes, too.)
13m43s Election prospects. (Logging the unknowns.)
20m49s Congressional report. (Fun time in the Halls of Uselessness.)
26m10s Herman Cain RIP. (Would have been better than Romney.)
28m08s A close shave in South Korea. (End of a fracas.)
29m57s Covington kid collects. (Jolly good luck to him!)
32m53s Another morsel from the President. (And Mutti is mad.)
34m51s Signoff. (From deep in the 60s.)
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was Franz Joseph Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your conventionally genial host John Derbyshire with reflections on the passing scene.
This week's podcast starts and ends in the 1960s. I'm sorry about that; I can hear your eyes rolling all the way across town. Yes, yes; It was in the sixties that our country went off the rails in some key respects, and many of us aren't sure we ever got back on those rails.
Those who forget the past, however, are condemned to repeat it. I do have some points to make about current political events, and the sixties are a handy hook to hang them on. Let's see how it goes.
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02—Affirmatively Furthering the war on suburbia.
[Clip: Pete Seeger, "Little Boxes."]
That was old-style lefty Pete Seeger mocking the suburbs back in 1963. The suburbs, according to the songwriter (a different old-style lefty, not Pete), the suburbs were just breeding farms for the bourgeoisie, a wasteland of conformist middle-class values: doctors, lawyers, golfers, and—oh my God!—nuclear families, who drank their martinis dry and sent their kids to summer camp.
Pete's recording of the song was a big hit. There was a market for mocking the suburbs in the sixties: not just songs, but movies like The Graduate and novels like those of Updike and Cheever. The Boomers were looking for something more exciting, more spiritual, more life-affirming than the routine drudgery of middle-class life.
This being America, there was of course a race element to anti-suburbanism. The people in those little boxes Pete Seeger was sneering at were far too white; everyone understood that.
This was the Civil Rights era, so government action followed. Five years after Pete's hit, in 1968 the Lyndon Johnson administration gave us the Fair Housing Act, bringing the power of the feds to bear on race discrimination in those lily-white suburbs. Federal agencies were required, quote: "affirmatively to further" the purposes of the Act, which included diversifying residential neighborhoods.
Fast-forward 47 years. Someone in the Obama administration plucked those words out of the Fair Housing Act and brought forth the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, ordering the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to withhold federal funds from localities that weren't sufficiently diverse.
Some shameless cynics like our own Steve Sailer suggested that Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing—which, Steve observes, sounds like something Daffy Duck might say—that AFFH was really just a scheme to move poor blacks out of the inner cities. This would open up more prime urban real estate for gentrification, for the benefit of hip young Obama-voting urban types with outlooks formed by TV shows like Friends and Sex in the City; and perhaps, coincidentally of course, perhaps also to the benefit of urban real-estate developers like Obama's pal Tony Rezko.
The poor blacks being shunted out of the inner cities would have to go somewhere. So where? To the suburbs, of course. Suburbanites might grumble at having inner-city blacks and their problems dumped on them; but hey, suburbanites are mainly racist white people with way too much white privilege, so it serves them right.
Well, July 23rd the Trump administration announced they are dropping the AFFH rule on the grounds that, quote from HUD Secretary Ben Carson:
Washington has no business dictating what is best to meet your local community's unique needs.
End quote.
Under the AFFH rule, said Carson, local jurisdictions were forced to comply with complicated regulations that require hundreds of pages of reporting, to very little practical effect. Which I believe is true—both parts of it.
That started off what news outlets call a "firestorm" of indignation from social-justice outfits like The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who sputtered that dropping the AFFH Rule was, quote, "a full-frontal assault on the rule of law."
President Trump stoked the flames by tweeting out on Wednesday this week that, tweet:
I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood …
End tweet.
What does Radio Derb think about all this? New segment.
03—The one great everlasting problem. First off, I was never on board with the anti-suburb sentiment, even in my lefty college days. I've always liked the suburbs. I've been living in this one for nigh-on thirty years, and have no desire to live anywhere else.
One of the first opinion pieces I wrote for an American magazine was in defense of suburbia. That was in reaction to an initiative out of the Clinton administration with the almost comically moon-booted bureaucratic title: Building Livable Communities for the 21st Century. I opened my opinion piece with the ringing declaration that, quote:
I shall give up my lawn mower when they prise it from my cold dead fingers.
End quote.
That Clinton initiative—the year was 1999—was not in fact explicitly anti-suburb, just a play for more federal control over zoning and transportation. I don't think it was anti-white, either. The really open, aggressive anti-whiteness we're all used to now wasn't much in evidence in the nineties, before the Great Awokening. It took another fifteen years of leftward drift before Obama came right out into the open with AFFH.
I think Steve's probably right that there were ulterior motives behind AFFH. It's hard to watch someone as sanctimonious as Barack Obama without glimpsing the dollar signs flickering on his eyeballs. Probably there was also racial revenge in play. How dare white Americans monopolize those pleasant leafy suburbs, leaving blacks stuck in smelly, crowded, crime-addled inner cities?
I'm going to give benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that there was some element of genuine altruism in there, too. Let me explain that.
The one great everlasting problem of American society is the problem of poor blacks. There are poor whites, too, of course; but because of race differences in ability and behavior, there are proportionally more, way more, poor blacks.
I raise again my analogy of a man dragging a sack along the road. If the sack is not too big in proportion to the man, it's a nuisance, but he can keep moving. That's the situation of whites in relation to their own poor, antisocial element.
If the sack is too big in proportion to the man, however, it's really hard for him to make any progress. That's how it is for the Talented Tenth of blacks—and indeed for the rest of us, too—in relation to the black underclass.
But that's a race realist point of view. If you're a race denialist, there's a solution to what I just called our one great everlasting problem. The solution is: magic dirt! Just move poor blacks out of the inner cities where they are concentrated and scatter them out into the suburbs. The magic suburban dirt will cure them of antisocial behaviors and have them crowding into Advanced Placement classes in no time. Problem solved!
I've no doubt there are people who sincerely believe in Magic Dirt Theory. That's the element of altruism I just mentioned.
However, a great many suburbanites—including Talented Tenth black ones, and probably a lot of white liberals whose enthusiasm for social justice goes no deeper than virtue signaling—a great many of us don't believe the Magic Dirt Theory and don't want to live around poor blacks. When we hear the phrase "low-income housing" we think of crime, disorder, welfare mommas, and discipline problems in schools.
Was President Trump's Wednesday tweet a bare-faced appeal to us—a "dog whistle," as the media lefties say? I bet it was, but so what? We suburbanites have votes, too.
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04—Election prospects. Votes, yes. We are, what?, I make it fourteen weeks away from the November election. It's a weary cliché by now, but true none the less, that this will be a very consequential election. What are the prospects?
There is a vein of commentary saying that his one is really hard to call. Even just fourteen weeks out, say these commentators, there are too many unknowns.
The virus. Will it make a comeback in the fall, throwing us right back to the generalized panic of February and March?
The economy. The second-quarter GDP figures just came out. Our economy contracted a horrendous 9.5 percent. That's an annualized rate of 32.9 percent; so if we go on like this, a year of pandemic will swallow one-third of our economy. Shall we go on like this? No-one really knows.
The riots. Who will November voters blame for all this social unrest: the Democrats who encourage and support it, or the administration who aren't doing anything much about it? There are respectable polls—I've just been looking at one published this Tuesday from Gallup—reporting strong public support for the anarchists. Ninety-five percent of Democrats support them, says Gallup, and even 22 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 59 percent support; among 18-to-29-year-olds, eighty-seven percent. Good grief! There might be a Bradley Effect in there—people giving Gallup the socially-approved response rather than an honest one—but I feel like I'm clutching at straws there.
Trump. Does he actually want to run? Will the GOP bosses let him? There's been speculation for a while that Never Trumpers in the party will sabotage him—James Carville, who knows a thing or two about retail politics, has made this case. I see signs—like Trump's ham-fisted suggestion Thursday the election might be put off—that he's stopped giving much of a damn. With his poll numbers in the tank, Biden refusing to debate, and coronavirus putting the kibosh on his energizing rallies, Trump may feel that all the fun has gone out of campaigning. Why bother? Retirement might be looking pretty good right now.
Biden. Will he run? If his poll numbers hold up, I bet he will. If they go against him for some reason, though, or if he takes a nasty fall, as people his age are liable to do, or if some major figure in his party turns against him, maybe not.
Biden's Veep. As Radio Derb goes to tape here we are waiting to hear the name of the lucky lady. Given Biden's condition, this is the most significant Veep choice ever.
Events, dear boy, events. Will China make the move on Taiwan? Will China and India go to war? Greece and Turkey? Something no-one's thought of?
I'm sticking with my prediction of a Trump loss. As those Gallup numbers show, what pollsters call "low-information voters" are a mighty legion. Most people don't engage much with politics; they take their lead from the media, who are of course going all out against Trump.
And then, immigration. Not the political issue, but the sheer overwhelming consequence from fifty-five years of high immigration levels. I've just been re-reading a piece from The American Spectator last October by James Delmont, title: Is Mass Immigration Killing Two-Party Democracy in the U.S.? Yes it is, says the author. Sample quote:
The demographic tidal wave of mostly Third World immigrants who vote heavily Democrat is now running legally at a million a year, an all-time record, and is turning red states purple and then blue. Arizona is going, Colorado and Georgia are going, Virginia is gone, North Carolina is tipping, and Florida is a dead heat but the immigration trends (south-of-the-border Latinos and Puerto Ricans) are against the GOP. Even Texas is drifting leftward as Latinos bid to become a solid majority there.
End quote.
Just as we've been telling you all these years: California is the future. The Republican Party has been digging its own grave for thirty years now, and the job is pretty much done.
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05—Congressional report. From the Halls of Uselessness — which is to say, the United States Congress—we have at least been getting some entertainment value this week.
Attorney General Bill Barr put up a spirited defense of the administration Tuesday in a five-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. At least, he tried to: The Antifa members of the committee … I'm sorry, I mean of course the Democrats on the committee did all they could to prevent him getting a word in edgewise.
Barr took it all with good humor for the farce that it was, and scored at least one point against the toad-like Jerry Nadler:
[Clip: You're a real class act, Mr Chairman …]
While I enjoyed the Attorney General's performance there and appreciate his refusal to be baited by the congressreptiles, I can't help wishing he was a bit more forceful in carrying out his other duties.
Where has he been on the wretched DACA business, for example? All right, it's Homeland Security's bailiwick; but the legality of DACA is a Justice Department issue too, and neither Jeff Sessions nor Bill Barr have been shy about expressing their opinions on it.
As our own correspondent Federale has urged, the administration should cut through the Gordian Knot with DACA—placing DACA recipients in deportation proceedings, starting with those who have criminal records. They're illegal aliens, aren't they? Fiat justitia ruat caelum; and as the guy in charge of justitia, Barr should be active here.
There has also been some grumbling that federal attorneys are going easy on arrested rioters. People arrested and charged with federal offenses earlier this month in Portland were released pending trial on condition, imposed by the judges, that they not participate in any public demonstrations or public assemblies while on release. Oregon newspapers report that this condition has now been dropped. Rioters are free to re-riot while awaiting trial. Wha?
In Bill Barr's defense, however, people tell me he's up against an entrenched leftist establishment among his judges and prosecutors. Like President Trump, he's fighting the Swamp.
To add to the entertainment, on Wednesday a subcommittee of that same House Judiciary Committee, a subcommittee on commercial and antitrust issues, had a videoconference hearing on Big Tech. The CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all testified. Questions focused on whether they are running monopolies and whether they are putting their big fat thumbs on the scales to influence the November election. We already know the answers to both questions, so not much light was shed.
I've recently been reading up on the issues involved here. I was dismayed, although honestly not very surprised, to see that the congressrodents hadn't. The general level of knowledge on the committee's side of the exchanges was dismal. All right, not everybody can be an expert on everything; but don't they have staff to boil things down to bullet points for them?
I respectfully suggest to the congresscritters that before further hearings on Big Tech issues they at least take time to read Yuval Harari's article "Why Technology Favors Tyranny" in the October 2018 issue of The Atlantic. There are huge issues here—issues of privacy, personal autonomy, state power, and the democratic process—that will be of major importance to us all in the decade we've just entered.
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06—Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Back in our July 3rd podcast I noted that 2012 GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain had come down with COVID-19. I confessed to having had a soft spot for Herman back in that campaign, and sent Radio Derb's best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Alas, on Thursday this week Cain passed away at age 74. I was very sorry to hear the news. From my one encounter with him I judged him a smart and likeable man who would probably have made at least as good a President as the eventual Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.
Cain was seen without a mask at a Trump campaign rally in Tulsa last month. There's speculation he might have caught the virus there, so that his death has been an issue in the sub-political debate between maskers and no-maskers, which I think is regrettable—and, in the case of some snarky jeering on Twitter, disrespectful.
For the record, I have the same disgracefully low level of interest in the mask controversy as I have in the whole pandemic business. I wear a mask when I go out just from sheer chicken-soupery: it can't hurt.
Good night, Herman. I look forward to discussing ODEs with you in another place.
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Item: Back in my January Diary I recorded the strange little fracas about Harry Harris, our Ambassador to South Korea: precisely, about his mustache.
Ambassador Harris was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American father, so he looks sorta-kinda Japanese. And has a mustache. That rubbed the Koreans the wrong way, as mustaches sometimes do. Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, and several Japanese leaders at the time—including Tojo, the wartime Prime Minister, and Hirohito, the Emperor—had mustaches. I know, it sounds kind of silly, but the Koreans were riled up about it.
Some deplorable spirits in the comment threads suggested that Ambassador Harris trim back the 'tache to just the Hitler style, but our man decided to go all the way. July 25th he went to a barber shop in Seoul and had the whole thing shaved off.
The Ambassador put out a cover story, telling reporters that the mustache, together with a face mask, was making him feel too hot and uncomfortable. That was just shaving face, though … sorry, I mean saving face.
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Item: Hearty congratulations from Radio Derb to Nicholas Sandmann of Park Hills, Kentucky. Sandmann is the best-known and most-abused member of the student group from Covington High School who were in Washington, DC in January last year for an anti-abortion rally.
Sight-seeing after their rally, the students, many—including Sandmann—wearing MAGA hats, were accosted and taunted by a black-supremacist group, then by a Native American activist. They responded with some good-natured chanting of school sports songs. Sandmann himself just stood smiling through the whole thing. It was all reported by the press, however, as racist white-supremacist teenagers threatening and insulting a harmless old Indian.
Sandmann sued eight media outlets—The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Hill, NBC, and Twitter—for defamation, asking for a total $800 million in damages. In January this year he came to an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed amount with CNN. Now we've heard that on July 24th, which as it happened is his 18th birthday, he got another settlement from The Washington Post, amount likewise undisclosed.
Addressing the sinister Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, Sandmann tweeted that, tweet:
The fight isn't over. 2 down, 6 to go. Don't hold your breath @jack.
End tweet.
I certainly hope the fight isn't over. All strength to you, Nicholas. Radio Derb is cheering you on. Out-of-court settlements in cases like this are way smaller than the amounts being asked for, but I'm betting Nicholas Sandmann will come out of this with enough for a very nice car, perhaps a new house for his Dad and Mom. Jolly good luck to him!
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Item: There were two things we Trump voters hoped for above all others if our man got elected President. One was of course a firm, strict enforcement of the nation's laws on immigration, with some new laws to reduce the numbers coming in. The other was an end to, or at least a major scaling back of, our overseas troop deployments.
We didn't get much of either, but we didn't get nothing; and on that second item, Trump just threw us another morsel. Our troop numbers in Germany, currently at 36,000, are to be reduced by 12,000. Now there will be only 24,000 Americans there when the Soviet forces come charging through the Fulda Gap.
It's better than nothing, I guess; and Mutti Merkel is mad as hell about it, which is a bonus. I still can't figure why we have any troops at all in Germany, though, 75 years after WW2 and 30 years since the Warsaw Pact disbanded.
To add to my puzzlement, I read that only half of the 12,000 being withdrawn will return to the States. The other half will be re-deployed to … Italy. You know, just in case Mussolini rises from the grave.
Oh well; thanks, Mr President … I guess.
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07—Signoff. That's all I can offer you this week, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and be sure to catch my July Diary, to be posted on the VDARE.com website sometime in the next few days.
I started off this podcast with Pete Seeger mocking us suburbanites. That was definitely a thing back in the sixties, although I have to say Pete Seeger's sappy leftism wasn't much to my taste.
Here to play us out is something along the same lines that was to my taste; although I'll admit, listening to it again now after a lapse of several decades, I'm a bit embarrassed to say so. If you were around in the sixties you can probably relate; if not, you'll think it's deeply weird. By all means decide for yourselves.
Yes: It's Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, from their 1966 debut album Freak Out, Side Three (it was a double album). Don't blame me: I didn't make the sixties happen, I just report them.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
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[Music clip: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, "It can't Happen Here."]


vdare--2020-08-01--DERB'S JULY DIARY: Law-enforcement Algorithms, The Knot Of Ethnomasochism, And Yet It Moves, Etc [10

DERB'S JULY DIARY: Law-enforcement Algorithms, The Knot Of Ethnomasochism, And Yet It Moves, Etc [10 ITEMS!]

Notes from underground .
Well , from the lockdown .
I hope readers are bearing up OK under confinement .
The Derbs are keeping busy .
Paid employment aside , she has her beloved flowers and innumerable contacts on WeChat , the ChiCom messaging app .
I have home-improvement chores : this month , stripping out and rebuilding a bathroom closet for maximum accessible shelving—nearly 28 square feet of shelf in a closet 3′×2′4″×8′ .
This was the last interior space still untouched since we bought the house in 1992 .
It takes me a while to get round to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on translating a Chinese poem : See Segment Four below .
And then of course there 's been reading .
Supernaturally smart .
Through the middle days of July I read Cheryl Misak 's biography of the English mathematician , logician , philosopher , and economist Frank Ramsey .
It 's an astonishing story .
Ramsey must have been one of the smartest people that ever lived .
He was staggeringly , breathtakingly , supernaturally smart .
Here he was translating Wittgenstein 's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , which Misak , who is a Professor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it—as `` immensely difficult . ''
Those last italics are mine .
Wittgenstein , who could read English , went over the translation carefully and was pleased with it .
He and Ramsey became friends , to the degree it was possible for anyone to be friends with the pathologically prickly Wittgenstein .
For a few months in 1927-28 , encouraged by John Maynard Keynes , another friend , Ramsey concentrated his thoughts on economics , producing two scholarly papers on that subject .
Misak tells us that : Having then had his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to math and founded Ramsey Theory , which concerns the occurrence of order in situations of generalized dis-order .
This is still an active field of inquiry , with obvious connections to Artificial Intelligence research .
So why is n't this tremendous genius world-famous ?
Because , as you know if you clicked those links , he died at age 26—January 19th , 1930—from an infection of the liver .
Should you ever be tempted to think of yourself as smart , Cheryl Misak 's book is a wonderful corrective , a real @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capable of intellectually at ages 19 or 25 .
By comparison with the Frank Ramseys of the world , the rest of us are stumbling , mumbling dullards .
Ramsey was no spergery introvert , either .
Big-built and active—swimming , hiking , tennis—he was also genial and gregarious , the far opposite of Wittgenstein .
( Whose nephew Tommy described Ramsey as `` the most natural , good-natured , kind-hearted person you could imagine . ''
) He had a successful—although , by mutual agreement , `` open '' —marriage and was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with sex affairs along the way .
Then he died , a month short of his twenty-seventh birthday .
My Ramsey connection .
I can claim some faint personal connection with Frank Ramsey .
At my English secondary school we specialized early , dropping most general subjects at age 15 .
For my senior three years , ages 15 to 18 , the only academic subjects I took were Pure Maths , Applied Maths , and Physics* .
Our main textbook for Applied Maths was Dynamics by Arthur S. Ramsey , a math @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 20th century .
Our class teacher , `` Pug '' Richmond** , referred to this book reverently as just `` Ramsey , '' as in : `` All right , gentlemen , open your Ramsey to page 97 … '' This Ramsey , I learned from Cheryl Misak 's book , was Frank Ramsey 's father .
He wrote several other textbooks , including Statics , a companion of course to Dynamics .
I think we engaged briefly with Statics*** .
For a room full of dirty-minded adolescent boys , the favorite section @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Impulsive Motions of a Rigid Body . ''
Prof. Misak tells us that Arthur Ramsey was a stiffly puritanical Congregationalist church deacon , so I imagine he would have been horrified to hear us sniggering**** over his text .
Frank Ramsey himself was an atheist , although a cheerful one .
His younger brother Michael became Archbishop of Canterbury .
* The joke about this early narrow specialization , by contrast with the wider American system , was that we Brits , as we advanced through secondary and tertiary education , learned more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until eventually we knew practically everything about pretty much nothing .
The Yanks , on the other hand , learned less and less about more and more , until at last they knew well-nigh nothing about approximately everything .
** Pug , at center here , number 60 in my 1961 school photograph , signed his observations in my school reports as `` CAR . ''
He was a formidable character who had no trouble at all keeping his classes orderly .
Before WW2 he had been a street cop in the slums @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his lessons with grisly cop stories .
*** Dynamics is the math of things moving under Newton 's Laws .
Statics concerns the math of stresses and strains where nothing is actually moving : dull stuff by comparison with the glamor and thrill of dynamics , but of compelling interest to architects , bridge builders , and such .
**** The verb `` to snigger , '' which the OED tracks back to 1706 , is nowadays very seriously out of favor with the editors at respectable books , newspapers , magazines , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that they increasingly , without consulting the author , replace `` snigger '' with `` snicker . ''
I beg VDARE.com editors to stand firm against this deplorable trend .
Conjugal collaboration .
I shall have a note on Ramsey Theory in my Math Corner at the end of this Diary .
Meanwhile , I hope I may be forgiven just one more connection to the Ramsey biography .
This is another tenuous one .
Mrs Derbyshire and I have collaborated on the translation into English of a Chinese poem .
To see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reading , and understand the Ramsey connection , see here .
Yeah , yeah ; but how are you filling your time under lockdown ?
Mr Sai and Mr De .
Just 99 years ago as I write , in late July 1921 , the Chinese Communist Party was founded .
I imagine today 's Party bosses already have plans for a big celebration one year from now .
One of the prime movers in the CCP 's founding was Chen Duxiu .
Although unable to attend that founding congress , he was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the CCP in absentia .
Chen was later booted out of the Party for Trotskyism ; but he avoided the executioners somehow and died in obscurity in WW2 Chungking .
I was reminded of Chen when browsing some reference books for background on our poet in my previous segment .
What reminded me was a passing mention of `` Mr Sai and Mr De , '' which I have always thought one of the oddest , yet cutest expressions in modern Chinese .
Mr Sai and Mr De are not people but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Chinese language in a 1919 essay by Chen .
Putting his hopes for the modernization of China in science and democracy , Chen anthropomorphized these two concepts by writing their first English syllables with Chinese characters having the same sound : 賽 ( sài , `` competition '' ) and 德 ( dé , `` morality '' ) .
So : Mr Sai and Mr De , Sài Xiānsheng and Dé Xiānsheng .
Now here we are a hundred years later .
Mr Sai seems to be doing pretty well in China , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sad !
Virus news .
After a mild sore-throat ' n'coughing episode , I yielded to Mrs Derbyshire 's nagging and got tested for COVID-19 .
This was just a test for the active virus .
Testing for antibodies is harder to arrange , with a lot of paperwork and waiting around .
The hell with that .
Do I have the durn virus , or do n't I ?
Our local hospital has testing set up as a very brisk and efficient drive-through operation , thirty-five minutes from start to finish , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ May Heaven forgive me for any unkind words I have written about America 's health-care sytem .
As a bonus , I was attended at my driver-side car window by two very pretty and personable young nurses , both of whom chirruped happily over my British accent .
( But neither of whom begged me to say : `` My name is Bond , James Bond , '' as American girls used to back in the seventies .
Sigh … ) I got my result a few hours later via the hospital website @ @ @ @ @ @ @ either I got infected and came right through COVID-19 and out the other side without anything much in the way of symptoms , or have never been infected at all .
I am sunk so deep in fatalism I do n't care much either way , but at least this takes care of the nagging .
Thanks again to the hospital staff—especially Teresa and Colleen—for an exceptionally well-run operation , and for standing out there attending a line of cars in ninety-something heat .
And yet it moves .
Steve Sailer has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ words Galileo is supposed to have murmured in 1633 after formally abjuring Copernicus ' idea that the Earth moves around the stationary Sun : `` and yet it [ the earth ] moves . ''
You can , Steve is telling us , blather and bluster all you like about `` social constructs , '' poverty , redlining , and the legacy of Jim Crow .
It still remains the case , after decades of effort and trillions in expenditure to close the race gaps , that blacks fill up the jails while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with whites intermediate on both scales—Rushton 's Rule of Three .
And yet it moves .
Leaving aside the fact that scholars doubt Galileo actually said the famous words , the parallel is not a good one .
Heliocentrism went against observation and ordinary intuition .
The notion that the Earth , with all its cargo of oceans , atmosphere , mountains , forests , cities , and us , is zipping through space at nineteen miles a second sounds preposterous .
Nobody feels the Earth to be moving , other than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ … no , ca n't think of any other situations .
As I pointed out in that review , the balance of real scientific understanding did not swing decisively in favor of heliocentrism until the matter of stellar parallax was resolved in 1838 .
There are fringe groups clinging to geocentrism even today .
Race realism , by contrast , is hard to deny .
The Rule of Three is in plain sight everywhere you look .
It jumps out at you from all over .
Presidents come and go ; Republicans and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ programs are enacted ; scads of money are spent ; the Constitution is tied in knots ; yet still , after it all—decades of it—the gaps remain .
Not just in the U.S.A. , either .
Haiti is a desperate slum after 200 years of self-government while South Korea , after a brutal colonization , a massively destructive war , then barely 70 years of independence , is stable and smugly prosperous , … and so on .
Might that all be an illusion , like the stationary Earth ?
Might it all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , white privilege ?
I suppose it might , although I have yet to see the race denialists give a convincing account of East Asian success .
`` It 's their culture , '' is their common response ; to which an old friend of mine is wont to reply : `` Culture ?
Culture ?
What are the upstream variables ? ''
And most of the world 's large phenomena are what they seem to be .
Your lying eyes do n't actually lie much .
The tides do rise and fall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do happen together , cause and effect ; living creatures do breed true , lions begetting lions , sparrows begetting sparrows .
The stationary-Earth illusion is an exception , not the rule .
True , population genetics has not yet had a stellar-parallax moment to consign race denialism once and for all to the kooky fringes of scientific thinking .
Still we understand enough that our understanding , together with daily evidence from our senses , make race realism , as a description of the world outside our skulls , a far , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , culture-culture-culturism .
So why is n't race realism the default belief for all educated people , as heliocentrism was even before 1838 ?
I guess the answer has to be : Because thinking about our fellow human beings is , in some deep way , unlike thinking about celestial mechanics .
The one engages our social emotions ; the other does not—at any rate , not since the Inquisition shut up shop .
And yet it does move … The logical knot of ethnomasochism .
In my July 17th Social Distancing exchange @ @ @ @ @ @ @ `` logical knot '' of ethnomasochism , but the conversation moved on before I had a chance to enlarge on the concept .
Some viewers want to know what I meant .
Just this : That by grumbling about white ethnomasochism—about the way white Social Justice Warriors bemoan their own `` white privilege '' and hold nonwhites to be their moral superiors—I am myself practicing a style of ethnomasochism .
That brought in a few irate emails from white people : `` I was with the Marine Corps at Khe Sanh , three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calling 'pussy , ' Pussy ? ''
Etc.
, etc .
Well , yes .
The question I always end up at in discussing the race issue— '' What 's the matter with white people ? ''
— is implicitly ethnomasochistic , is n't it ?
I can try to weasel out of the charge by arguing that ethnomasochistic whites—the SJWs — are only a subset of whites at large ; so I 'm not accusing the entire race of moral failure , as Robin DiAngelo and her imitators do .
To judge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though , ethnomasochistic whites are a mighty big subset of whites in general .
As long as that 's so , and I ca n't resist grumbling about it , I guess I have to confess to some degree of ethnomasochism myself .
So , yes : a logical-philosophical knot .
I wonder what Wittgenstein would have said .
( 1 ) Boycotting law-enforcement algorithms .
Friends have sent me this link to a July 20th story in Popular Mechanics .
Opening paragraphs : I am sure this letter will be given pride @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Notices .
That journal is now so thoroughly woke , it is unusual to see a white male face in the photo boxes , other than in the Obituaries section .
There is a lot to be said , on both sides of the argument , about these `` social algorithms . ''
For my part , I ca n't think of anything to add to the remarks I passed in my review of Cathy O'Neil 's book Weapons of Math Destruction which you can read—the review , I mean , not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Back to Frank Ramsey .
Just one more time , I swear .
One of the gems of Ramsey Theory , although it emerged after Ramsey 's time , is the stupendously colossal Graham 's Number , which for a while in the 1980s was given in the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest number ever to have been used in a published mathematical proof .
Graham 's Number , which dwells far , far , unimaginably far beyond the realm of mere trillions and quadrillions , is the upper bound @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Ramsey Theory .
That is , we do n't know the exact answer to the problem , but we have proved it ca n't be bigger than Graham 's incredibly humongous Number .
For the longest time mathematicians thought the actual solution to this problem is 6 .
It 's now been proved that it must be at least 11 .
You probably know the factorial function .
For any positive whole number N , the factorial of N — commonly written N !
, pronounced `` N-shriek '' — is 1×2×3×4×5× @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the factorial function gets out of hand rather quickly .
So while we soon get and then , just a bit further along , That last one , although not even remotely as big as Graham 's Number , is none the less quite impressive from just a three-digit argument .
When non-mathematicians talk loosely about something-or-other increasing exponentially , it would actually be more forceful to say `` factorially . ''
The common exponential function of 100 is a trifling 26 million trillion trillion trillion and change .
OK , here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 26th `` Mind-Benders for the Quarantined '' out of the National Museum of Mathematics .
Consider this number , which you might call a super-factorial , or factorial-factorial : Now that 's a big number , although still the merest speck of dust compared with Graham 's Number .
Referring to the individual factorials that make it up as `` terms , '' so that 2 !
is a term , 37 !
is a term , and so on , can you remove one term in such a way that what is @ @ @ @ @ @

Notes from underground. Well, from the lockdown. I hope readers are bearing up OK under confinement.
The Derbs are keeping busy. Paid employment aside, she has her beloved flowers and innumerable contacts on WeChat, the ChiCom messaging app. I have home-improvement chores: this month, stripping out and rebuilding a bathroom closet for maximum accessible shelving—nearly 28 square feet of shelf in a closet 3′×2′4″×8′. This was the last interior space still untouched since we bought the house in 1992. It takes me a while to get round to things …
Husband and wife also collaborated on translating a Chinese poem: See Segment Four below.
And then of course there's been reading.
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Supernaturally smart. Through the middle days of July I read Cheryl Misak's biography of the English mathematician, logician, philosopher, and economist Frank Ramsey. It's an astonishing story. Ramsey must have been one of the smartest people that ever lived. He was staggeringly, breathtakingly, supernaturally smart.
Here he was translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which Misak, who is a Professor of Philosophy, describes correctly—I've tried it—as "immensely difficult."
Ramsey went to Miss Pate's secretarial agency in the winter of 1921-22 and translated the manuscript. He read it off an Annalen offprint to a shorthand writer who then typed it up … It is hard to adequately convey how astounding an accomplishment it was to more or less straight away translate this immensely difficult text from the German to English. Ramsey turned nineteen in the middle of the translation, in January 1922.
Those last italics are mine. Wittgenstein, who could read English, went over the translation carefully and was pleased with it. He and Ramsey became friends, to the degree it was possible for anyone to be friends with the pathologically prickly Wittgenstein.
For a few months in 1927-28, encouraged by John Maynard Keynes, another friend, Ramsey concentrated his thoughts on economics, producing two scholarly papers on that subject. Misak tells us that:
When the Economic Journal celebrated its 125th anniversary with a special edition in 2015, both of Ramsey's papers were included. That is, looking back over a century and a quarter, one of the world's best journals of economics decided that two of its thirteen most important papers were written by Frank Ramsey when he was twenty-five years old.
My italics again.
Having then had his fill of economics, Ramsey turned back to math and founded Ramsey Theory, which concerns the occurrence of order in situations of generalized dis-order. This is still an active field of inquiry, with obvious connections to Artificial Intelligence research.
So why isn't this tremendous genius world-famous? Because, as you know if you clicked those links, he died at age 26—January 19th, 1930—from an infection of the liver.
Should you ever be tempted to think of yourself as smart, Cheryl Misak's book is a wonderful corrective, a real humility check. Recall what you were capable of intellectually at ages 19 or 25. By comparison with the Frank Ramseys of the world, the rest of us are stumbling, mumbling dullards.
Ramsey was no spergery introvert, either. Big-built and active—swimming, hiking, tennis—he was also genial and gregarious, the far opposite of Wittgenstein. (Whose nephew Tommy described Ramsey as "the most natural, good-natured, kind-hearted person you could imagine.") He had a successful—although, by mutual agreement, "open"—marriage and was a loving father to two children, with sex affairs along the way.
Then he died, a month short of his twenty-seventh birthday.
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My Ramsey connection. I can claim some faint personal connection with Frank Ramsey.
At my English secondary school we specialized early, dropping most general subjects at age 15. For my senior three years, ages 15 to 18, the only academic subjects I took were Pure Maths, Applied Maths, and Physics*.
Our main textbook for Applied Maths was Dynamics by Arthur S. Ramsey, a math professor at Cambridge University in the early 20th century. Our class teacher, "Pug" Richmond**, referred to this book reverently as just "Ramsey," as in: "All right, gentlemen, open your Ramsey to page 97 …"
This Ramsey, I learned from Cheryl Misak's book, was Frank Ramsey's father. He wrote several other textbooks, including Statics, a companion of course to Dynamics. I think we engaged briefly with Statics***.
For a room full of dirty-minded adolescent boys, the favorite section in Ramsey was the one headed "Impulsive Motions of a Rigid Body." Prof. Misak tells us that Arthur Ramsey was a stiffly puritanical Congregationalist church deacon, so I imagine he would have been horrified to hear us sniggering**** over his text. Frank Ramsey himself was an atheist, although a cheerful one. His younger brother Michael became Archbishop of Canterbury.
* The joke about this early narrow specialization, by contrast with the wider American system, was that we Brits, as we advanced through secondary and tertiary education, learned more and more about less and less, until eventually we knew practically everything about pretty much nothing. The Yanks, on the other hand, learned less and less about more and more, until at last they knew well-nigh nothing about approximately everything.
** Pug, at center here, number 60 in my 1961 school photograph, signed his observations in my school reports as "CAR." He was a formidable character who had no trouble at all keeping his classes orderly. Before WW2 he had been a street cop in the slums of Glasgow. He would occasionally enliven his lessons with grisly cop stories.
*** Dynamics is the math of things moving under Newton's Laws. Statics concerns the math of stresses and strains where nothing is actually moving: dull stuff by comparison with the glamor and thrill of dynamics, but of compelling interest to architects, bridge builders, and such.
**** The verb "to snigger," which the OED tracks back to 1706, is nowadays very seriously out of favor with the editors at respectable books, newspapers, magazines, and webzines. I have been told that they increasingly, without consulting the author, replace "snigger" with "snicker." I beg VDARE.com editors to stand firm against this deplorable trend.
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Conjugal collaboration. I shall have a note on Ramsey Theory in my Math Corner at the end of this Diary. Meanwhile, I hope I may be forgiven just one more connection to the Ramsey biography.
This is another tenuous one. Mrs. Derbyshire and I have collaborated on the translation into English of a Chinese poem. To see my translation, hear my lady's reading, and understand the Ramsey connection, see here.
Yeah, yeah; but how are you filling your time under lockdown?
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Mr Sai and Mr De. Just 99 years ago as I write, in late July 1921, the Chinese Communist Party was founded. I imagine today's Party bosses already have plans for a big celebration one year from now.
One of the prime movers in the CCP's founding was Chen Duxiu. Although unable to attend that founding congress, he was none the less elected first General Secretary of the CCP in absentia. Chen was later booted out of the Party for Trotskyism; but he avoided the executioners somehow and died in obscurity in WW2 Chungking.
I was reminded of Chen when browsing some reference books for background on our poet in my previous segment. What reminded me was a passing mention of "Mr Sai and Mr De," which I have always thought one of the oddest, yet cutest expressions in modern Chinese.
Mr Sai and Mr De are not people but personifications. They were introduced into the Chinese language in a 1919 essay by Chen. Putting his hopes for the modernization of China in science and democracy, Chen anthropomorphized these two concepts by writing their first English syllables with Chinese characters having the same sound: 賽 (sài, "competition") and 德 (dé, "morality"). So: Mr Sai and Mr De, Sài Xiānsheng and Dé Xiānsheng.
Now here we are a hundred years later. Mr Sai seems to be doing pretty well in China, but Mr De never showed up. Sad!
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Virus news. After a mild sore-throat'n'coughing episode, I yielded to Mrs Derbyshire's nagging and got tested for COVID-19.
This was just a test for the active virus. Testing for antibodies is harder to arrange, with a lot of paperwork and waiting around. The hell with that. Do I have the durn virus, or don't I?
Our local hospital has testing set up as a very brisk and efficient drive-through operation, thirty-five minutes from start to finish, no need to leave your car. May Heaven forgive me for any unkind words I have written about America's healthcare sytem.
As a bonus, I was attended at my driver-side car window by two very pretty and personable young nurses, both of whom chirruped happily over my British accent. (But neither of whom begged me to say: "My name is Bond, James Bond," as American girls used to back in the seventies. Sigh …)
I got my result a few hours later via the hospital website: negative. I guess that means either I got infected and came right through COVID-19 and out the other side without anything much in the way of symptoms, or have never been infected at all. I am sunk so deep in fatalism I don't care much either way, but at least this takes care of the nagging.
Thanks again to the hospital staff—especially Teresa and Colleen—for an exceptionally well-run operation, and for standing out there attending a line of cars in ninety-something heat.
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And yet it moves. Steve Sailer has been getting some race-realism mileage out of the words Galileo is supposed to have murmured in 1633 after formally abjuring Copernicus' idea that the Earth moves around the stationary Sun: "and yet it [the earth] moves."
And yet, it moves. — Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) July 28, 2020
You can, Steve is telling us, blather and bluster all you like about "social constructs," poverty, redlining, and the legacy of Jim Crow. It still remains the case, after decades of effort and trillions in expenditure to close the race gaps, that blacks fill up the jails while East Asians fill up the AP classes, with whites intermediate on both scales—Rushton's Rule of Three. And yet it moves.
Leaving aside the fact that scholars doubt Galileo actually said the famous words, the parallel is not a good one. Heliocentrism went against observation and ordinary intuition. The notion that the Earth, with all its cargo of oceans, atmosphere, mountains, forests, cities, and us, is zipping through space at nineteen miles a second sounds preposterous. Nobody feels the Earth to be moving, other than when there's an earthquake, and … no, can't think of any other situations.
As I pointed out in that review, the balance of real scientific understanding did not swing decisively in favor of heliocentrism until the matter of stellar parallax was resolved in 1838. There are fringe groups clinging to geocentrism even today.
Race realism, by contrast, is hard to deny. The Rule of Three is in plain sight everywhere you look. It jumps out at you from all over. Presidents come and go; Republicans and Democrats rise and fall; mighty social programs are enacted; scads of money are spent; the Constitution is tied in knots; yet still, after it all—decades of it—the gaps remain.
Not just in the U.S.A., either. Haiti is a desperate slum after 200 years of self-government while South Korea, after a brutal colonization, a massively destructive war, then barely 70 years of independence, is stable and smugly prosperous, … and so on.
New investigative piece from @rhersher: You Probably Don't Want To Know About Haiti's Sewage Problems https://t.co/dR65kBIWf1 pic.twitter.com/lGs01cUOh1 — NPR Goats & Soda (@NPRGoatsandSoda) July 31, 2017
(Yes, yes, I know: North Korea is a crazy despotism. It's a high-IQ crazy despotism, though, with missiles and nukes. When Haiti has missiles and nukes, let me know.)
Might that all be an illusion, like the stationary Earth? Might it all be the work of invisible forces—systemic racism, white privilege?
I suppose it might, although I have yet to see the race denialists give a convincing account of East Asian success. "It's their culture," is their common response; to which an old friend of mine is wont to reply: "Culture? Culture? What are the upstream variables?"
And most of the world's large phenomena are what they seem to be. Your lying eyes don't actually lie much. The tides do rise and fall with the moon; thunder and lightning do happen together, cause and effect; living creatures do breed true, lions begetting lions, sparrows begetting sparrows. The stationary-Earth illusion is an exception, not the rule.
True, population genetics has not yet had a stellar-parallax moment to consign race denialism once and for all to the kooky fringes of scientific thinking. Still we understand enough that our understanding, together with daily evidence from our senses, make race realism, as a description of the world outside our skulls, a far, far better bet than socially contructed, no-such-thing-as-race, culture-culture-culturism.
So why isn't race realism the default belief for all educated people, as heliocentrism was even before 1838?
I guess the answer has to be: because thinking about our fellow human beings is, in some deep way, unlike thinking about celestial mechanics. The one engages our social emotions; the other does not—at any rate, not since the Inquisition shut up shop.
And yet it does move …
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The logical knot of ethnomasochism. In my July 17th Social Distancing exchange with Jesse Lee Peterson I mentioned the "logical knot" of ethnomasochism, but the conversation moved on before I had a chance to enlarge on the concept. Some viewers want to know what I meant.
Just this: That by grumbling about white ethnomasochism—about the way white Social Justice Warriors bemoan their own "white privilege" and hold nonwhites to be their moral superiors—I am myself practicing a style of ethnomasochism.
I once published a column titled "White People are Pussies."
On a call-in radio program recently, we had been airing my infamous assertion in a Taki's Magazine column back in April that white people should avoid large concentrations of blacks as likely to be dangerous.
A caller-in asked me why I would not be similarly fearful of a large concentration of whites. I made the obvious reply — that the element of racial animus, of black hatred of whites, would be missing. Then I added, off the cuff: "Anyway, why would anyone be scared of a crowd of whites? Whites aren't going to do anything to you. Let's face it, white people are pussies."
That brought in a few irate emails from white people: "I was with the Marine Corps at Khe Sanh, three months under heavy fire. Who you calling 'pussy,' Pussy?" Etc., etc.
Well, yes. The question I always end up at in discussing the race issue—"What's the matter with white people?" — is implicitly ethnomasochistic, isn't it?
I can try to weasel out of the charge by arguing that ethnomasochistic whites—the SJWs — are only a subset of whites at large; so I'm not accusing the entire race of moral failure, as Robin DiAngelo and her imitators do.
To judge by that lady's book sales, though, ethnomasochistic whites are a mighty big subset of whites in general. As long as that's so, and I can't resist grumbling about it, I guess I have to confess to some degree of ethnomasochism myself.
So, yes: a logical-philosophical knot. I wonder what Wittgenstein would have said.
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Math Corner.
(1) Boycotting law-enforcement algorithms. Friends have sent me this link to a July 20th story in Popular Mechanics. Opening paragraphs:
Several prominent academic mathematicians want to sever ties with police departments across the U.S., according to a letter submitted to Notices of the American Mathematical Society on June 15. The letter arrived weeks after widespread protests against police brutality, and has inspired over 1,500 other researchers to join the boycott.
These mathematicians are urging fellow researchers to stop all work related to predictive policing software, which broadly includes any data analytics tools that use historical data to help forecast future crime, potential offenders, and victims. The technology is supposed to use probability to help police departments tailor their neighborhood coverage so it puts officers in the right place at the right time.
I am sure this letter will be given pride of place in the next issue of Notices. That journal is now so thoroughly woke, it is unusual to see a white male face in the photo boxes, other than in the Obituaries section.
(Picking up the June/July issue just to check that I am not misleading you there, I was momentarily embarrassed to see that the first two contributor photo boxes are in fact both of white males. Then, reading the accompanying byline text, I saw that they are "Alexander Hoover and Alexander Wiedermann, Board Members of Spectra, the Association for LGBT Mathematicians." Ah.)
There is a lot to be said, on both sides of the argument, about these "social algorithms." For my part, I can't think of anything to add to the remarks I passed in my review of Cathy O'Neil's book Weapons of Math Destruction which you can read—the review, I mean, not the book—here. Sample:
Programs for social justice, including O'Neil's, rather frequently display this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't, aspect. Here was Jesse Jackson complaining in 2012 about under-policing in poor Chicago neighborhoods: "More police have been dispatched to neighborhoods where the murders have spiked, but citizens there still aren't protected as well as our … uptown businesses are."
On the other hand, O'Neil grumbles that policing algorithms like New York's Comp-Stat and Los Angeles's PredPol send too many cops into poor, crime-prone neighborhoods. She writes:
How about crimes far removed from the boxes on the PredPol maps, the ones carried out by the rich? … We have every reason to believe that more such crimes [i.e., like those that led to the 2008 crash] are occurring in finance right now … Just imagine if police enforced their zero-tolerance strategy in finance. How soon they forget! I refer Ms. O'Neil to Daniel Fischel's 1995 book, Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution, about the vengefully politicized arrests and prosecutions on Wall Street in the 1980s, when traders were led away from their desks in handcuffs.
Doesn't Add Up, Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2017
(2) Back to Frank Ramsey. Just one more time, I swear.
One of the gems of Ramsey Theory, although it emerged after Ramsey's time, is the stupendously colossal Graham's Number, which for a while in the 1980s was given in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest number ever to have been used in a published mathematical proof.
Graham's Number, which dwells far, far, unimaginably far beyond the realm of mere trillions and quadrillions, is the upper bound for the solution of a particular problem in Ramsey Theory. That is, we don't know the exact answer to the problem, but we have proved it can't be bigger than Graham's incredibly humongous Number.
For the longest time mathematicians thought the actual solution to this problem is 6. It's now been proved that it must be at least 11.
Ah, math!
(3) Brainteaser. Speaking of big numbers …
You probably know the factorial function. For any positive whole number N, the factorial of N — commonly written N!, pronounced "N-shriek" — is 1×2×3×4×5× … ×N.
You may also know that the factorial function gets out of hand rather quickly. So while
3! = 6
and
6! = 720,
we soon get
10! = 3,628,800,
and then, just a bit further along,
100! = 93,326,215,443,944, 152,681,699,238, 856,266,700,490, 715,968,264,381, 621,468,592,963, 895,217,599,993, 229,915,608,941, 463,976,156,518, 286,253,697,920, 827,223,758,251, 185,210,916,864, 000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000. Which is to say, 93 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion and change.
That last one, although not even remotely as big as Graham's Number, is none the less quite impressive from just a three-digit argument. When non-mathematicians talk loosely about something-or-other increasing exponentially, it would actually be more forceful to say "factorially." The common exponential function of 100 is a trifling 26 million trillion trillion trillion and change.
OK, here's a factorial-related brainteaser from the July 26th "Mind-Benders for the Quarantined" out of the National Museum of Mathematics.
Consider this number, which you might call a super-factorial, or factorial-factorial:
1!×2!×3!×4!×5!× … ×100!
Now that's a big number, although still the merest speck of dust compared with Graham's Number.
Referring to the individual factorials that make it up as "terms," so that 2! is a term, 37! is a term, and so on, can you remove one term in such a way that what is left is a perfect square?
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vdare--2020-08-01--NYT: Racist Hate Slurs Are Good, as Long as They Are Against Karens

From : Dear White Women : The Establishment Hates You And Wants Terrible Things To Happen To You From the New York Times “ Style ” section : In 1965 , it was the third-most-popular baby name in the United States .
In 2018 , it was the 635th — and today it ’ s even less popular .
How did Karens fall so far ?
Ask a woman named Karen what she used to think of her name and you ’ ll hear phrases like “ generic , ” “ perfectly serviceable ” and “ an easy name.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ an easy name.
” Once popular for girls born in the 1960s , it then became a pseudonym for a middle-aged busybody with a blond choppy bob who asks to speak to the manager .
Now , the moniker has most recently morphed into a symbol of racism and white privilege .
It ’ s almost as if anti-white racist hate speech has been promoted by the New York Times in recent years .
A “ Karen ” now roams restaurants and stores , often without a mask during this coronavirus era @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to tattle , usually on people of color and often putting them in dangerous situations .
And while this archetype had previously been called “ Permit Patty ” or “ BBQ Becky , ” “ Karen ” has stuck ... .
In other words , a Karen is a white woman who asks to have picky rules enforced , or is a white woman who is picked on over picky rules .
But let ’ s not get picky over logical consistency .
The point is that , whatever she does or doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a white woman and therefore deserves racist mockery .
One important takeaway ( in my opinion ) : Don ’ t give your daughter a trendy name .
If you do , the likely result is that she has a cute and sexy name until age 30 but after that her name will more and more be seen as non-cute , non-sexy , and representative of an older disfavored generation .
Eventually , most of the women in the nursing home will have that name .
Sometimes out of fashion names come back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ young couples honor a beloved grandparent .
But , yeah , having the hot name of 1965 is not so good in 2020 .
But age must come to us all .
What ’ s not so necessary is a society that thinks racist slurs are hilarious as long as whites are the victims .

Earlier: Dear White Women: The Establishment Hates You And Wants Terrible Things To Happen To You
From the New York Times “Style” section:
A Brief History of ‘Karen’ In 1965, it was the third-most-popular baby name in the United States. In 2018, it was the 635th — and today it’s even less popular. How did Karens fall so far? By Henry Goldblatt
July 31, 2020 Ask a woman named Karen what she used to think of her name and you’ll hear phrases like “generic,” “perfectly serviceable” and “an easy name.” In 2020, Karen is no longer “an easy name.” Once popular for girls born in the 1960s, it then became a pseudonym for a middle-aged busybody with a blond choppy bob who asks to speak to the manager. Now, the moniker has most recently morphed into a symbol of racism and white privilege.
It’s almost as if anti-white racist hate speech has been promoted by the New York Times in recent years.
A “Karen” now roams restaurants and stores, often without a mask during this coronavirus era, spewing venom and calling the authorities to tattle, usually on people of color and often putting them in dangerous situations. And while this archetype had previously been called “Permit Patty” or “BBQ Becky,” “Karen” has stuck....
And, of course, the Queen of Karens — Amy Cooper, also known as Central Park Karen — threatened and fabricated accusations against a Black man after he politely asked her to put her dog on a leash, as park rules stated.
In other words, a Karen is a white woman who asks to have picky rules enforced, or is a white woman who is picked on over picky rules. But let’s not get picky over logical consistency. The point is that, whatever she does or doesn’t do, the Karen is a white woman and therefore deserves racist mockery.
A reader writes:
One important takeaway (in my opinion): Don’t give your daughter a trendy name. If you do, the likely result is that she has a cute and sexy name until age 30 but after that her name will more and more be seen as non-cute, non-sexy, and representative of an older disfavored generation. Eventually, most of the women in the nursing home will have that name.
Sometimes out of fashion names come back in fashion maybe 70 years later as young couples honor a beloved grandparent. But, yeah, having the hot name of 1965 is not so good in 2020. But age must come to us all.
What’s not so necessary is a society that thinks racist slurs are hilarious as long as whites are the victims.
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-08-01--Annie Lowrey In The ATLANTIC: Beware of Readers Who Know More of the Facts Than the Journalists Do

Annie Lowrey , wife of media mogul Ezra Klein , has had enough of unofficial men and their unofficial facts popping up in comments sections and the like .
If there are facts you really need to know , her husband will apprise you of them through the proper channels in Vox .
From The Atlantic : Facts Man is less about truth than raising questions .
Why can ’ t Facts Man talk about certain issues in exactly the way he wants to ?
… You have met Facts Man before if you have spent any time online in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He ’ s inescapable .
He podcasts .
He makes YouTube videos .
He traffics in Medium posts .
He burns up Facebook .
And he loves—loves !
—Twitter .
What does he serve up there ?
Truth .
Facts .
The overlooked and the undercovered .
The unvarnished and obvious conclusions that the media do not want you to believe .
The conclusions that the social-justice warriors and sheeple professors will not let you reach .
The conclusions that mere mortals , including lauded subject-matter experts and the people who have actual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , have not yet grasped .
He—and he is almost always a he—is a venture capitalist who has analyzed the hospitalizations data !
He is a growth hacker with a piercing view of race and measures of intelligence !
He is an industry analyst with insight into viral spread !
He is a lawyer exploding nuances of gender and sex !
In contrast , Annie ’ s husband Ezra worries constantly about which facts readers can handle and which facts they should be kept in the dark about .
From my review of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Polarized : The good news , according to Klein , is that “ white Christians ” are being demographically inundated in what Ezra calls the Browning of America .
The bad news , according to Ezra , is that some whites have started to notice the fate that is being prepared for them , and thus they voted for Trump .
Klein says that the media should try harder to mislead white Christians about demographic change so that they don ’ t see it coming until it ’ s too late for them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we navigate these sensitivities , we can do so with more or less care .
[ Jennifer ] Richeson believes it would be wise for demographers to stop using terms like “ majority-minority America ” —after all , whites will still be a plurality and what good can come of framing America ’ s trajectory in a way that leaves the single largest group feeling maximally threatened ?
It sounds like “ a force of nonwhite people who are coming and they are working as a coalition to overturn white people and whiteness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s a problem.
” Yet of course , as Ezra makes clear throughout his book , that ’ s not just a problem , that ’ s also the plan .
Ezra points out that if you simply lie to whites about what you are plotting , many of them will foolishly believe you : Richeson ’ s research shows that if you can add reassurances to discussions of demographic change—telling people , for instance , that the shifts are unlikely to upend existing power or economic arrangements—the sense of threat , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conservatism , vanishes .
But , Klein and Professor Richeson conclude , with regret , you can ’ t fool all the white Christians all the time : The problem , she admits , is “ we can ’ t say , ‘ Don ’ t worry , white people , you ’ ll be okay and you ’ ll get to run everything forever !
’ ”

Annie Lowrey, wife of media mogul Ezra Klein, has had enough of unofficial men and their unofficial facts popping up in comments sections and the like. If there are facts you really need to know, her husband will apprise you of them through the proper channels in Vox. From The Atlantic:
Beware of Facts Man Facts Man is less about truth than raising questions. Why can’t Facts Man talk about certain issues in exactly the way he wants to? JULY 31, 2020 Annie Lowrey
Staff writer at The Atlantic … You have met Facts Man before if you have spent any time online in the past half decade or so. He’s inescapable. He podcasts. He makes YouTube videos. He traffics in Medium posts. He burns up Facebook. And he loves—loves!—Twitter. What does he serve up there? Truth. Facts. The overlooked and the undercovered. The unvarnished and obvious conclusions that the media do not want you to believe. The conclusions that the social-justice warriors and sheeple professors will not let you reach. The conclusions that mere mortals, including lauded subject-matter experts and the people who have actual lived experience of the topic at hand, have not yet grasped. He—and he is almost always a he—is a venture capitalist who has analyzed the hospitalizations data! He is a growth hacker with a piercing view of race and measures of intelligence! He is an industry analyst with insight into viral spread! He is a lawyer exploding nuances of gender and sex!
In contrast, Annie’s husband Ezra worries constantly about which facts readers can handle and which facts they should be kept in the dark about. From my review of Klein’s Why We’re Polarized:


vdare--2020-08-02--Dwight Garner In The NYT On Isabel Wilkerson's CASTE

In the New York Times , the normally sensible book critic Dwight Garner , a white guy from West Virginia ( right ) desperately shouts “ Don ’ t Cancel Me !
” Isabel Wilkerson ’ s ‘ Caste ’ Is an ‘ Instant American Classic ’ About Our Abiding Sin By Dwight Garner July 31 , 2020 Caste : The Origins of Our Discontents By Isabel Wilkerson 474 pages .
Random House .
$ 32 .
A critic shouldn ’ t often deal in superlatives .
He or she is here to explicate , to expand context and to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone .
I recently came upon William Kennedy ’ s review of “ One Hundred Years of Solitude , ” which he called “ the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.
” Kennedy wasn ’ t far off .
I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson ’ s new book , “ Caste : The Origins of Our Discontents.
” It ’ s an extraordinary document , one that strikes me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far .
It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages , and that feeling never went away .
… Wilkerson , who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book , “ The Warmth of Other Suns : The Epic Story of America ’ s Great Migration , ” won the National Book Critics Circle Award , avoids words like “ white ” and “ race ” and “ racism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dominant caste , ” “ favored caste , ” “ upper caste ” and “ lower caste.
” Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste .
( Social class is a separate matter , which Wilkerson addresses only rarely . )
She does not argue that the words are synonyms .
She argues that they “ can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other .
Race , in the United States , is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste .
Caste @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” My guess is this will be adopted by the Science Proves Race Does Not Exist crowd .
They are starting to wonder why they know that Race Is Only Skin Deep but everybody in 2020 , including them , acts like it ’ s the most important thing in the world .
So they will adopt Ms. Wilkerson ’ s conspiracy theory : … A caste system , she writes , is “ an artificial construction , a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits , traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.
” “ As we go about our daily lives , caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater , flashlight cast down in the aisles , guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance , ” Wilkerson writes .
She observes that caste “ is about respect , authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.
” As we all know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such abundant supply that we have to have irrational systems for not according it to all the people who have it .
Wilkerson ’ s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts .
They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India ’ s treatment of its untouchables , or Dalits , Nazi Germany ’ s treatment of Jews and America ’ s treatment of African-Americans .
Each country “ relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jews of German and Austria on January 1 , 1933 , such as Einstein and Freud , were probably the highest achieving ethnic group in the world .
… Her consideration of the 2016 election , and American politics in general , is sobering .
To anyone who imagined that the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had begun to enter a post-racial era , she reminds us that the majority of whites did not vote for him .
Now that ’ s proof of their perfidy .

In the New York Times, the normally sensible book critic Dwight Garner, a white guy from West Virginia (right) desperately shouts “Don’t Cancel Me!”
Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin
By Dwight Garner
July 31, 2020 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
By Isabel Wilkerson
474 pages. Random House. $32. A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off. I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away. … Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.” Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste. (Social class is a separate matter, which Wilkerson addresses only rarely.) She does not argue that the words are synonyms. She argues that they “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.”
My guess is this will be adopted by the Science Proves Race Does Not Exist crowd. They are starting to wonder why they know that Race Is Only Skin Deep but everybody in 2020, including them, acts like it’s the most important thing in the world. So they will adopt Ms. Wilkerson’s conspiracy theory:
… A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.” “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance,” Wilkerson writes. She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”
As we all know, competence in 2020 America is in such abundant supply that we have to have irrational systems for not according it to all the people who have it.
Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans. Each country “relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.”
The Jews of German and Austria on January 1, 1933, such as Einstein and Freud, were probably the highest achieving ethnic group in the world.
… Her consideration of the 2016 election, and American politics in general, is sobering. To anyone who imagined that the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had begun to enter a post-racial era, she reminds us that the majority of whites did not vote for him.
Now that’s proof of their perfidy.
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-08-02--John Derbyshire: Trump IS Dogwhistling To White Suburbia. Quite Right Too.

[ Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb , now available exclusively through VDARE.com ] Earlier : Trump 's Defense Of The Suburbs Against Obama-Legacy Social Engineering Is TERRIFYING To Democrat-MSM Complex Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky tacky Little boxes Little boxes Little boxes all the same There 's a green one and a pink one And a blue one and a yellow one And they 're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same That was old-style Lefty Pete Seeger mocking the suburbs back in 1963 .
The suburbs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , another old-style Lefty ) , the suburbs were just breeding farms for the bourgeoisie , a wasteland of conformist middle-class values : doctors , lawyers , golfers , and—oh my God !
—nuclear families , who drank their martinis dry and sent their kids to summer camp .
Pete 's recording of the song was a big hit .
There was a market for mocking the suburbs in the sixties : not just songs , but movies like The Graduate and novels like those of Updike and Cheever .
The Boomers were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spiritual , more life-affirming that the routine drudgery of middle-class life .
This being America , there was of course a race element to anti-suburbanism .
The people in those little boxes Pete Seeger was sneering at were far too white ; everyone understood that .
This was the Civil Rights era , so government action followed .
Five years after Seeger 's hit , in 1968 , the Lyndon Johnson administration gave us the Fair Housing Act , bringing the power of the feds to bear on race discrimination in those lily-white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quote : `` affirmatively to further '' the purposes of the Act , which included diversifying residential neighborhoods .
Fast-forward 47 years .
Someone in the Obama administration plucked those words out of the Fair Housing Act and brought forth the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule , ordering the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to withhold federal funds from localities that were n't sufficiently diverse .
Some shameless cynics like our own Steve Sailer suggested that Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing—which , Steve says , sounds like something Daffy Duck might say—that AFFH @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poor blacks out of the inner cities .
This would open up more prime urban real estate for gentrification , for the benefit of hip young Obama-voting urban types with outlooks formed by TV shows like Friends and Sex in the City ; and perhaps , coincidentally of course , perhaps also to the benefit of urban real-estate developers like Obama 's pal Tony Rezko .
The poor blacks being shunted out of the inner cities would have to go somewhere .
So where ?
To the suburbs , of course .
Suburbanites @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their problems dumped on them ; but hey , suburbanites are mainly racist white people with way too much white privilege , so it serves them right .
Well , July 23rd the Trump administration announced they are dropping the AFFH rule on the grounds that , in the words of HUD Secretary Ben Carson : Under the AFFH rule , said Carson , local jurisdictions were forced to comply with complicated regulations that require hundreds of pages of reporting , to very little practical effect .
That started off what news outlets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Social Justice outfits like The Lawyers ' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law ( which recently libelled VDARE.com to scare our Domain Registrar into dropping us ) .
It sputtered that dropping the AFFH Rule was `` a full-frontal assault on the rule of law . ''
President Trump stoked the flames by tweeting out What do I think about all this ?
First off , I was never on board with the anti-suburb sentiment , even in my lefty college days .
I 've always liked the suburbs .
I 've @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years , and have no desire to live anywhere else .
One of the first opinion pieces I wrote for an American magazine was in defense of suburbia .
That was in reaction to an initiative out of the Clinton administration with the almost comically moon-booted bureaucratic title : Building Livable Communities For The 21st Century .
I opened with the ringing declaration that , quote : That Clinton initiative—the year was 1999—was not in fact explicitly anti-suburb , just a play for more federal control over zoning and transportation .
I do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The really open , aggressive anti-whiteness we 're all used to now was n't much in evidence in the nineties , before the Great Awokening .
It took another fifteen years of Leftward drift before Obama came right out into the open with AFFH .
I think Steve 's probably right that there were ulterior motives behind AFFH .
It 's hard to watch someone as sanctimonious as Barack Obama without glimpsing the dollar signs flickering on his eyeballs .
Probably there was also racial revenge in play .
How dare white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaving blacks stuck in smelly , crowded , crime-addled inner cities ?
I 'm going to give benefit of the doubt , though , and assume that there was some element of genuine altruism in there , too .
Let me explain that .
The one great everlasting problem of American society is the problem of poor blacks .
There are poor whites , too , of course ; but because of race differences in ability and behavior , there are proportionally more , way more , poor blacks .
I raise again @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sack along the road .
If the sack is not too big in proportion to the man , it 's a nuisance , but he can keep moving .
That 's the situation of whites in relation to their own poor , antisocial element .
If the sack is too big in proportion to the man , however , it 's really hard for him to make any progress .
That 's how it is for the so-called Talented Tenth of blacks—and indeed for the rest of us , too—in relation to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ race realist point of view .
If you 're a race denialist , there 's a solution : Magic Dirt !
Just move poor blacks out of the inner cities where they are concentrated and scatter them out into the suburbs .
The magic suburban dirt will cure them of antisocial behaviors and have them crowding into Advanced Placement classes in no time .
Problem solved !
I 've no doubt there are white people who sincerely believe in Magic Dirt Theory .
That 's the element of altruism I just mentioned .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tenth black ones , and probably a lot of white liberals whose enthusiasm for social justice goes no deeper than virtue signaling—a great many of us do n't believe the Magic Dirt Theory and do n't want to live around poor blacks .
When we hear the phrase `` low-income housing '' we think of crime , disorder , welfare mommas , and discipline problems in schools .
Was President Trump 's Wednesday tweet a bare-faced appeal to us—a `` dog whistle , '' as the media Lefties say ?
But so what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
email him ] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets .
( This no longer includes National Review , whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him . )
He is the author of We Are Doomed : Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books .
He has had two books published by VDARE.com com : FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT ( also available in Kindle ) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II : ESSAYS 2013 .
For years he ’ s been podcasting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ VDARE.com for no charge .
His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com .
Readers who wish to donate ( tax deductible ) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire 's writings at VDARE.com can do so here .

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
Earlier: Trump's Defense Of The Suburbs Against Obama—Legacy Social Engineering Is TERRIFYING To Democrat-MSM Complex
[Clip: Pete Seeger, "Little Boxes."]
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes
Little boxes
Little boxes all the same
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
That was old-style Lefty Pete Seeger mocking the suburbs back in 1963. The suburbs, according to the songwriter (Malvina Reynolds, another old-style Lefty), were just breeding farms for the bourgeoisie, a wasteland of conformist middle-class values: doctors, lawyers, golfers, and—oh my God!—nuclear families, who drank their martinis dry and sent their kids to summer camp.
Pete's recording of the song was a big hit. There was a market for mocking the suburbs in the sixties: not just songs, but movies like The Graduate and novels like those of Updike and Cheever. The Boomers were looking for something more exciting, more spiritual, more life-affirming that the routine drudgery of middle-class life.
This being America, there was of course a race element to anti-suburbanism. The people in those little boxes Pete Seeger was sneering at were far too white; everyone understood that.
This was the Civil Rights era, so government action followed. Five years after Seeger's hit, in 1968, the Lyndon Johnson administration gave us the Fair Housing Act, bringing the power of the feds to bear on race discrimination in those lily-white suburbs. Federal agencies were required, quote: "affirmatively to further" the purposes of the Act, which included diversifying residential neighborhoods.
Fast-forward 47 years. Someone in the Obama administration plucked those words out of the Fair Housing Act and brought forth the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, ordering the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to withhold federal funds from localities that weren't sufficiently diverse.
Some shameless cynics like our own Steve Sailer suggested that Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing—which, Steve says, sounds like something Daffy Duck might say—that AFFH was really just a scheme to move poor blacks out of the inner cities. This would open up more prime urban real estate for gentrification, for the benefit of hip young Obama-voting urban types with outlooks formed by TV shows like Friends and Sex in the City; and perhaps, coincidentally of course, perhaps also to the benefit of urban real-estate developers like Obama's pal Tony Rezko.
The poor blacks being shunted out of the inner cities would have to go somewhere. So where? To the suburbs, of course. Suburbanites might grumble at having inner-city blacks and their problems dumped on them; but hey, suburbanites are mainly racist white people with way too much white privilege, so it serves them right.
Well, July 23rd the Trump administration announced they are dropping the AFFH rule on the grounds that, in the words of HUD Secretary Ben Carson:
Washington has no business dictating what is best to meet your local community's unique needs. HUD revokes Obama-era rule designed to diversify the suburbs, AP (Fox), July 23, 2020
Under the AFFH rule, said Carson, local jurisdictions were forced to comply with complicated regulations that require hundreds of pages of reporting, to very little practical effect.
That started off what news outlets call a "firestorm" of indignation from Social Justice outfits like The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (which recently libelled VDARE.com to scare our Domain Registrar into dropping us). It sputtered that dropping the AFFH Rule was "a full-frontal assault on the rule of law."
President Trump stoked the flames by tweeting out
I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020
What do I think about all this?
First off, I was never on board with the anti-suburb sentiment, even in my lefty college days. I've always liked the suburbs. I've been living in one for nigh-on thirty years, and have no desire to live anywhere else.
One of the first opinion pieces I wrote for an American magazine was in defense of suburbia. That was in reaction to an initiative out of the Clinton administration with the almost comically moon-booted bureaucratic title: Building Livable Communities For The 21st Century. I opened with the ringing declaration that, quote:
I shall give up my lawn mower when they prise it from my cold dead fingers. The Vital Middle, National Review, March 22, 1999 [PDF]
That Clinton initiative—the year was 1999—was not in fact explicitly anti-suburb, just a play for more federal control over zoning and transportation. I don't think it was anti-white, either. The really open, aggressive anti-whiteness we're all used to now wasn't much in evidence in the nineties, before the Great Awokening. It took another fifteen years of Leftward drift before Obama came right out into the open with AFFH.
I think Steve's probably right that there were ulterior motives behind AFFH. It's hard to watch someone as sanctimonious as Barack Obama without glimpsing the dollar signs flickering on his eyeballs.
Probably there was also racial revenge in play. How dare white Americans monopolize those pleasant leafy suburbs, leaving blacks stuck in smelly, crowded, crime-addled inner cities?
I'm going to give benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that there was some element of genuine altruism in there, too. Let me explain that.
The one great everlasting problem of American society is the problem of poor blacks. There are poor whites, too, of course; but because of race differences in ability and behavior, there are proportionally more, way more, poor blacks.
I raise again my analogy of a man dragging a sack along the road. If the sack is not too big in proportion to the man, it's a nuisance, but he can keep moving. That's the situation of whites in relation to their own poor, antisocial element.
If the sack is too big in proportion to the man, however, it's really hard for him to make any progress. That's how it is for the so-called Talented Tenth of blacks—and indeed for the rest of us, too—in relation to the black underclass.
But that's a race realist point of view. If you're a race denialist, there's a solution: Magic Dirt!
Just move poor blacks out of the inner cities where they are concentrated and scatter them out into the suburbs. The magic suburban dirt will cure them of antisocial behaviors and have them crowding into Advanced Placement classes in no time. Problem solved!
I've no doubt there are white people who sincerely believe in Magic Dirt Theory. That's the element of altruism I just mentioned.
However, a great many suburbanites—including Talented Tenth black ones, and probably a lot of white liberals whose enthusiasm for social justice goes no deeper than virtue signaling—a great many of us don't believe the Magic Dirt Theory and don't want to live around poor blacks. When we hear the phrase "low-income housing" we think of crime, disorder, welfare mommas, and discipline problems in schools.
Was President Trump's Wednesday tweet a bare-faced appeal to us—a "dog whistle," as the media Lefties say?
I bet it was.
But so what? We suburbanites have votes, too.
John Derbyshire [ email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.


vdare--2020-08-02--Her Name Is Jessica Whitaker: White Mother Gunned Down by  Blacks In Indianapolis for Daring to Say

Her Name Is Jessica Whitaker: White Mother Gunned Down by  Blacks In Indianapolis for Daring to Say "All Lives Matter"

PK NOTE : Their Lives Matter Too .
It ’ s a book you must pick up .
Names you ’ ve never encountered , stories you ’ ve never read about , all for one , unmentionable reason : black on white murder .
We were never supposed to notice what ’ s happening .
We were never supposed to catalogue the names and tell their stories .
But we did .
But we have .
Their Lives Matter Too .
Her name is Jessica Whitaker .
She dared say All Lives Matter , in a world where such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jessica Doty Whitaker and three friends were hanging out along the Indianapolis Canal Walk at about 3 a.m. on July 5 , WXIN-TV reported .
They argued with another group after one of the people Whitaker was with used a racial slur , her bereaved fiancé , Jose Ramirez , told WXIN .
A racially charged confrontation ensued with the other group , during which the suspect ’ s group shouted , “ Black Lives Matter , ” and someone in Whitaker ’ s group — possibly her — said , “ all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Guns were whipped out , and both sides , seeing that all were armed , backed off , he said .
“ It was squashed , and they went up the hill and left , we thought , but they were sitting on St. Clair waiting for us to come under the bridge , and that ’ s when she got shot , ” Ramirez told WXIN .
He fired off a shot in return , but didn ’ t hit anyone , he said .
“ I was actually holding her when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ She just fell .
I turned around , and I opened fire too .
But that ’ s just a reaction.
” Whitaker , a home health nurse who WTHR said was on the verge of going back to school and getting married , leaves behind a 3-year-old son as well as her fiancé , mother and numerous other family members .
The shooting was the third in a week in the same area , WTHR reported .
Her bereaved family is left picking up the pieces — and vowing to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heart forever .
Saying “ All Lives Matter ” is not a cause for being murdered .
Worse , her Facebook page was assaulted with Black Lives Matter supporters claiming she deserved being murdered for daring to claim “ All Lives Matter.
” This is America in July of 2020 .
White people are supposed to fall to their knees and meekly proclaim “ Black Lives Matter , ” while a white mother is gunned down , murdered , for daring to say , “ All Lives Matter.
” The time to stand @ @ @ @ @

PK NOTE: Their Lives Matter Too. It’s a book you must pick up. Names you’ve never encountered, stories you’ve never read about, all for one, unmentionable reason: black on white murder. We were never supposed to notice what’s happening. We were never supposed to catalogue the names and tell their stories. But we did. But we have. Their Lives Matter Too.
Her name is Jessica Whitaker.
She dared say All Lives Matter, in a world where such a claim is an unforgivable sin.
Indiana woman shot dead after saying ‘all lives matter’: family, NY Daily News, July 13, 2020
A young mother was fatally shot earlier this month in Indiana and may have been targeted for saying “all lives matter,” the 24-year-old’s family said Sunday.
Jessica Doty Whitaker and three friends were hanging out along the Indianapolis Canal Walk at about 3 a.m. on July 5, WXIN-TV reported. They argued with another group after one of the people Whitaker was with used a racial slur, her bereaved fiancé, Jose Ramirez, told WXIN. A racially charged confrontation ensued with the other group, during which the suspect’s group shouted, “Black Lives Matter,” and someone in Whitaker’s group — possibly her — said, “all lives matter,” Ramirez said. Guns were whipped out, and both sides, seeing that all were armed, backed off, he said.
“It was squashed, and they went up the hill and left, we thought, but they were sitting on St. Clair waiting for us to come under the bridge, and that’s when she got shot,” Ramirez told WXIN. He fired off a shot in return, but didn’t hit anyone, he said. “I was actually holding her when it happened,” Ramirez told WTHR-TV. “She just fell. I turned around, and I opened fire too. But that’s just a reaction.” Whitaker, a home health nurse who WTHR said was on the verge of going back to school and getting married, leaves behind a 3-year-old son as well as her fiancé, mother and numerous other family members. The shooting was the third in a week in the same area, WTHR reported. Her bereaved family is left picking up the pieces — and vowing to keep Whitaker in her son’s heart forever.
“I’m never going to get to hold her again,” her mom, Arlena Doty, told WTHR. “I just want the people who are responsible to be held accountable.”
Saying “All Lives Matter” is not a cause for being murdered. Worse, her Facebook page was assaulted with Black Lives Matter supporters claiming she deserved being murdered for daring to claim “All Lives Matter.”
This is America in July of 2020.
White people are supposed to fall to their knees and meekly proclaim “Black Lives Matter,” while a white mother is gunned down, murdered, for daring to say, “All Lives Matter.”
No.
The time to stand against evil is now.
Their Lives Matter Too