»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. This is your feebly genial host John Derbyshire with our weekly survey of the passing scene.

My choice of adverb there was reluctant but accurate. For the past few days Mrs Derbyshire and I have been afflicted with a nasobronchial disorder of the lesser sort, not serious enough to raise our temperatures or justify a doctor's visit but leaving us enervated and operating at half speed.

The podcast will therefore be shorter than usual, for which I apologize. The commentary on current affairs will be thin gruel. When you're feeling unwell it's hard to concentrate on anything other than how unwell you're feeling.

There will also be a healthcare theme to the podcast. Not a personal one: there is nothing more boring than listening to other people talk about their health issues, unless you're a doctor and getting paid for it. I shall therefore not impose on you with accounts of our own ailments. I shall, though, later on give you a segment on health in general, in social and historical context.

And yes, of course, we both know there any many worse afflicted than ourselves, often in solitude. We at least have the consolation of feeling miserable together. With noses red from sneezing and throats hoarse from coughing, she is still my Valentine, and I am hers. God bless you, my Valentine.

OK: First let me do what little I can do with the week's news. For symmetry, I'll start with some healthcare-related items.

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02 — Healthcare gets a new boss.     Congress has been chewing through our President's nominations to senior executive positions. Notable on the healthcare front here was the final confirmation of RFK, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I expressed my doubts about Kennedy's suitability to head HHS here on Radio Derb two weeks ago. I still don't feel altogether easy about the appointment. Is he really determined on making America healthy again, or just on making his friends in the Trial Lawyers' Association rich again? I guess we'll find out.

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03 — Healthcare horror Down Under.     Healthcare's been generating headlines in Australia.

Those headlines arise from a video clip posted originally on social media, now archived on YouTube. In the clip, two Muslim nurses at a big hospital in the Sydney suburbs — one male nurse, one female — tell an Israeli interviewer that they kill Israeli patients. They tell the interviewer that he himself will be killed, although not necessarily by them, and will go to Hell.

The male nurse — he actually claimed to be a doctor, but he's a nurse — is laughing cheerfully as he says it. The female just seems angry — homicidally angry where Israelis are concerned.

The two nurses have since been fired, but the fuss over the incident rages on. The nurses' union condemned the two, but made sure to add that they also condemn Islamophobia.

Well, thank goodness for that! Heaven forbid anyone should find grounds there for Islamophobia!

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04 — Immigration enforcement gets real.     And in Washington, D.C. the Trumpian counter-revolution roars on through Week Four.

Sanctuary cities are now a major issue. Wednesday Trump's newly sworn-in Attorney General Pam Bondi held her first press conference at the Justice Department. She took the opportunity to announce that the Feds have filed lawsuits against the state of New York, its governor Kathy Hochul and other state leaders — yes, including state Attorney General Letitia Lardbutt.

It's high time. Cities and states are not breaking any federal law by instructing their officials not to co-operate with federal law-enforcement; but if "not co-operating" tips over into "actively obstructing," then there is a case at law.

For example: A-G Bondi told the presser that New York's so-called "Green Light" Law would be a particular target of the lawsuit. That's a state law that grants drivers' licenses to illegal aliens while blocking federal immigration agents from accessing the data. The head of the state's DMV is specifically named among those being sued.

And these jurisdictions need to be regularly reminded that, while they are not breaking federal law by withholding co-operation with federal law-enforcement, the feds are likewise not breaking federal law by withholding federal funds from unco-operative jurisdictions.

It is, in certain well-defined circumstances, lawful for states and cities to assert their independence from federal power. For the record, I think that's a good thing. Local authority, local power, local responsibility: all good things, in proper measure. Still, they shouldn't expect federal taxpayers to fund their defiance, and federal taxpayers don't have to.

Just a footnote to that.

Reading so many stories about immigration enforcement in recent days, I believe I have noticed something that warms my heart, and even perhaps my clogged bronchial tubes. I haven't been up to a rigorous quantitative analysis, but my strong impression is that the term "asylum seeker" is falling out of usage as a synonym for "illegal alien." It's annoyed me for a long while every time I've seen it; but now I see it less and less.

If I'm right, that's a great improvement towards honesty in our public discourse.

I'd like to see something similar happen with the word "migrant." It's not as flagrantly bogus as "asylum seeker," but it does carry the idea of a sort of rootless gypsy character just passing through. As a replacement I suggest "settler."

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05 — Why are politicians so rich?     The Eye of Elon has also fixed itself on our politicians' wealth.

An X post on Tuesday got the attention of our DOGE boss. The poster has a Hungarian name not known to me. His post listed annual salary and personal net worth for Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren. It shows Warren, for example, with net worth $67 million on a salary of $285 thousand.

Musk commented, tweet:

It's not like these politicians started companies or were NBA All-Stars, so where did they get all the money?

Does anyone know?

End tweet.

Well, of course, they know, but they're not going to tell us. I covered this terrain in Chapter 12 of my 2009 paradigm-shattering best-seller We Are Doomed. American politics is, I told readers, the Royal Road to Riches. Quote from me:

Cai Shen … is the Chinese God of Wealth. At Lunar New Year, traditional-minded Chinese people paste large pictures of Cai Shen to their doors. In these pictures, Cai Shen is dressed in the uniform of an imperial-era bureaucrat.

So it goes in grand centralized imperial-despotic systems, ruled over by a cadre of officials who have proved their aptitude for the work by passing a lot of examinations. Wealth follows power in such systems. The proper and ordinary route to wealth is through the exercise of power.

End quote,

In qualification I should add that the numbers quoted in that tweet that got Elon Musk's attention have been disputed. Elizabeth Warren's net worth may in fact be "significantly less" than $67 million.

Whatever; it's good to see the subject aired, by someone who might be able to do something about it.

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06 — Healthcare: a history.     So far as commentary on current affairs is concerned, that's all I can offer you this week, ladies and gents. When you're feeling unwell it's hard to concentrate on anything other than how unwell you're feeling.

I did say in my introduction, though, that I'd give you give you a segment on health in general, in social and historical context. Here is that segment.

It's actually a column I wrote for Taki's Magazine ten years ago under the title "How Are You Feeling?" If you're a Takimag subscriber you can probably find the original text there; if not, there's an archived version at my own website.

I'm not going to make a habit of reading old columns from my bottom drawer in lieu of commentary on current events. In fact I don't think I've ever done it before. Allow me just this once, please. Also allow me some slight updates from the 2014 version.

Here we go. "How Are You Feeling?" This was me in Taki's Magazine, November 13th, 2014.

[Pips.]

Reading the November issue of Literary Review (that's a British monthly, somewhat like the New York Review of Books but less claustrophobically liberal), the following thing caught my attention. It's in Donald Rayfield's review of Stephen Kotkin's book Stalin, Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. Quote:

"Medical historians conclude that Stalin was in more or less acute muscular, neurological, and dental pain all his adult life … Stalin's brutality towards the medical profession, hitherto sacred to all Russian authorities, hints at the frustrations of a man in unremitting pain." 

End quote.

That brought to mind a remark I've seen attributed to Winston Churchill, quote: "Most of the world's work is done by people who are not feeling very well." End quote. For persons of Stalin's and Churchill's generation — they were born four years apart — I bet that was true.

Churchill himself had, according to his biographer, quote, "been prey to ills since childhood. Some of his vacations were taken on doctor's orders; others were interrupted by bouts of influenza or infectious fevers." End quote.

Until the middle of the last century there wasn't much relief for illness, even if you were a Russian despot or a British Prime Minister. The title of Lewis Thomas's 1983 book about medicine tells it all: The Youngest Science.

Thomas (1913-1993) was a doctor, the son of a doctor and a nurse. The early chapters of his book are devastatingly frank about the near-uselessness of doctoring prior to the introduction of antibiotics in the mid-1930s. Longish quote:

"Explanation was the real business of medicine. What the ill patient and his family wanted most was to know the name of the illness, and then, if possible, what had caused it, and finally, most important of all, how it was likely to turn out …

During the third and fourth years of [medical] school it gradually dawned on us that we didn't know much that was really useful, that we could do nothing to change the course of the great majority of the diseases we were so busy analyzing, that medicine, for all its façade as a learned profession, was in real life a profoundly ignorant occupation …

Once you were admitted [to hospital] … it became a matter of waiting for the illness to finish itself one way or the other … Medicine made little or no difference."

End longish quote.

This was actually an advance on medicine as practiced before the 20th century, when medical procedures like bleeding, cupping, and purging all too often did make a difference, but in the wrong direction. Whether, as is commonly believed, the multiple bleedings administered to George Washington in his last illness were what killed him, they surely didn't help.

Nor did the attentions President James Garfield received from the White House doctors after he took two bullets in the back from a disappointed office seeker in 1881. The medics spent weeks probing poor Garfield's wounds with their bare hands and unsterilized instruments in hopes of extracting the bullets, giving the President terrible pain and, of course, sepsis. It took him more than two months to die. The assassin was eventually tried, convicted, and hanged, after delivering the memorable line, quote: "Yes, I shot Garfield; but it was the doctors that killed him." End quote.

In the company of medical people who know the history of their craft you can get a good discussion going about the exact date after which medical attention was more likely to help than harm you. Opinions generally settle somewhere between 1910 and 1940.

That's within living memory. People of the generation before my own had little to hope for from medicine. The more realistic among them knew this.

My own father, born 1899, regarded the entire medical profession with fear and mistrust. A hospital, he believed, was a place where poor people went to die. A major theme in the background noise of my childhood was the voice of my mother — a professional nurse — nagging Dad to go see a doctor about some ailment he was suffering. Quote from Mum: "Why won't you at least go see him? He won't HURT you." End quote. Dad knew better. Most things mend by themselves. He lived to be 85, dying at last of pneumonia, which was known to people of that generation as "the old man's friend."

It wasn't all negatives before, quote from Lewis Thomas, "the early 1950s, when medicine was turning into a science," end quote. There was nursing; there was surgery; there were a handful of useful drugs.

Nursing — the art of keeping patients clean, comfortable, and cheerful — must have saved far more lives than doctoring in the long dark ages before antibiotics. Florence Nightingale (a significant mathematician, by the way) has to be reckoned one of the great benefactors of humanity.

Surgery before modern anesthesia (which arrived in the 1840s) was a horror show. Fanny Burney's account of her mastectomy in 1811, when she was 59, is hard to read. She survived it, though, living to be 87, and even stayed friends with the surgeon.

The main component of the surgeon's art was speed — getting the job done before the patient died of shock. Quote from The Pickwick Papers:

"'You consider Mr. Slasher a good operator?' said Mr. Pickwick. 'Best alive,' replied Hopkins. 'Took a boy's leg out of the socket last week — boy ate five apples and a gingerbread cake — exactly two minutes after it was all over, boy said he wouldn't lie there to be made game of, and he'd tell his mother if they didn't begin.'"

End quote.

Pre-modern drugs were just as scary. The only ones that worked were quinine, for malaria, and digitalis, for heart failure. The rest were basically poisons: arsenic, bismuth, strychnine, mercury (though mercury's only poisonous if inhaled as a vapor). James Boswell "treated" his numerous doses of the clap by staying indoors for several weeks injecting mercury into his urethra until the lesions healed.

Cold-eyed realists knew it was all nonsense. Flaubert, for example: Madame Bovary's doctor husband is merely a fool, but Homais the town pharmacist is a crook.

Are we any wiser nowadays? We surely have far better real medicine, and marvelous surgery. Imbruvica has saved my life, and a friend recently got a new knee. A new knee! Churchill's quip no longer applies: Most of today's work is done by people who feel fine.

Colds, allergies, migraines, and insomnia are with us as much as ever, though. We spend scads of money on treatments every bit as bogus as Boswell's mercury. As ebola's been reminding us, most virus infections are incurable and have to run their course. The youngest science is now a science, but it's still young.

[Pips.]

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07 — Signoff.     That's all I can manage in my wasted, distracted, and enfeebled state, listeners. My apologies to all. I should be sufficiently recovered next week to bring you a full show, with all the breadth and depth of coverage you have come to expect from Radio Derb.

To help lift my spirits, note please that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow's Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-"t", CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website, or indirectly by subscribing to that splendid monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I now contribute a regular column. Thank you!

Immigration into the U.S.A. from India has become an issue recently, much commented on at social media and also here at Radio Derb. Key points of annoyance have been Indian staffing agencies taking over the "guest worker" rackets, Indian managers preferentially hiring Indian workers, and Vivek Ramaswamy telling us we are not nerdy enough.

There's a lighter side to offset all the negativity. We can, for example, make fun of the way Indians speak English. A major beneficiary there has been Kunal Nayyar, who played the character Raj Koothrappali in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Nayyar has actually published an autobiographical book titled Yes, My Accent is Real. He definitely doesn't take himself too seriously: one of the chapter headings in the book is "My Big Fat Indian Wedding."

In Britain that particular vein of humor goes back way further than here, for obvious historical reasons. One practitioner was the comedian Peter Sellers. In 1960 he starred as an Indian doctor in a movie, The Millionairess. The actual millionairess was played by Sophia Loren. The plot of the movie has her falling in love with this Indian doctor.

It wasn't a musical movie; but to help promote it, Sellers and Loren recorded a song that became a popular hit. Trawling through my memory for a medically-themed song with which to finish this week's podcast, that song pushed itself to the front of my attention, so I'll sign off with it.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.

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