[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, organ version]

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings to all from your effortfully genial host John Derbyshire, here at the VDARE.com studio in sunny Long Island.

Yes, it's been an effort to stay genial this week with so many horrors going on. I shall cover them in my usual erudite and informative spirit, but I confess they have left me gloomy.

Let's start with the biggest of the week's horrors, last Sunday's mass killing in Orlando, Florida.

02 — Bubble-charting atrocity. The Orlando mass killing is one of those stories that presents itself to my imagination as a bubble chart. If you browse quantitative blogs covering demography, economics, and such, you know what I mean. Not a Venn diagram; those are different things. I mean one of those diagrams with circles of different sizes and colors representing different countries, or states, or occupations, or product lines, in different places on a chart according to some metrics or other.

So in my mind's eye I see different-sized blobs for the different issues generating comment here. There's a blob for Islam, of course, and one for gun control, one for homophobia, one for mental health issues, one for each of the politicians who's had something to say about the event, and so on.

For any one given blob, different people will see it in different sizes. Hillary Clinton, for example, sees the gun control blob as way bigger than I see it.

For me, the biggest blobs on that bubble chart are the ones labeled "Immigration" and "Multiculturalism." You'll get some irreducible level of crazy people doing crazy things in any organized society; but you'll get way more of them if you allow mass settlement by millions of people from cultures with fundamentally different value systems — people who feel uncomfortable and out of place among American norms. Isn't that kind of … obvious?

If, in addition, the cultures they come from are going through a period of crisis, one of those historical fevers that cultures do go through once in a while, then that population that you've allowed to settle in your country will generate a higher than usual proportion of lunacy. That's kind of obvious too, isn't it?

Apparently not. The only prominent public person addressing the Orlando killings in those terms has been Donald Trump; and all the pooh-bahs of respectable opinion have been gasping and sputtering at him for doing so.

What about the other blobs on the bubble chart?

Gun control, for example? As many commentators have pointed out, the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris early last year (eight victims), the Bataclan attacks, also in Paris, later last year (130 victims), the Brussels killings this March (32 victims), and we may as well add the shooting of a British Member of Parliament this week, all took place in countries with gun laws far more strict than those of any U.S. state.

John Lott — who's been studying the data on gun crime for ever, and who, way back in 1998, published a terrific work of quantitative journalism on the subject, title More Guns, Less Crime — John Lott had a fine column out on Wednesday this week with the giveaway title: Why terrorists target gun-free zones. So why do they? Sample quote:

According to police and prosecutors, there have been dozens of cases of permit holders clearly stopping what would have been mass public shootings. It's understandable these killers avoid places where they can't kill a large number of people.

End quote.

The Islam issue? More on that in the next segment. It basically just circles you back to matters of immigration and diversity, though.

Mental health? What's to say? The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, leaving aside his Islamic obsessions, was not in his personality a model citizen, or model husband, or model schoolchild. On the other hand, he wasn't any further off the reservation in those regards than many people I've known, and I'm sure you could say the same.

We know next to nothing about why this person snaps while a hundred others, who are just as antisocial, don't. In a free society, mildly weird people should be left to go abroad among us in their weirdness. The alternative — at least until we understand much more about the mind than we currently do — the alternative is a totalitarian level of control. I'll take my chances with the weird people, thanks.

And so on. But let's get back to what for me are the big blobs on the bubble chart: immigration and diversity.

03 — Absimilation strikes. The very first thing I heard about the Orlando shooter, on the CBS news over my car radio, was that he was an American citizen. They just couldn't wait to tell us that.

Whether it was precisely CBS who were eager to tell us, or Orlando law enforcement, with CBS just passing on what they got, I don't know, and it doesn't much matter. It shows the mindset of authorities at all levels in our society. The thought behind it is the one uttered out loud by General George Casey after the Fort Hood shooting, quote: "As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

That is actually how people in authority think: not merely editors of liberal newspapers or TV stations, but managers and leaders in the military and law enforcement, corporate bosses, bureaucrats and politicians, college administrators, all the way down to schoolteachers and librarians. That's how they think. Diversity is our strength! That's the state ideology; it's the air we breathe. It's also a big fat lie.

I really don't know what it will take to knock that big fat lie on the head and kill it for good. Nine-eleven should have done it in all logic; but no, we just doubled down on our diversity gamble, admitting more Muslims for settlement in the decade after 9/11 than we had in the decade before.

And yes, Omar Mateen was a U.S. citizen, born in Queens Borough of New York City — just like Donald Trump, as all the media outlets have been gleefully telling us.

OK. Let the Gods of the Copybook Headings, in the person of your humble host here, limp up to explain it once more. I don't even need to compose my thoughts here. I only have to quote the relevant passage from my tremendous 2009 bestseller We Are Doomed. Quote from Chapter 10, edited longish quote:

The English word "assimilation" derives from the Latin prefix ad-, which indicates a moving towards something, and the same language's verb simulare, "to cause a person or thing to resemble another." You can make a precisely opposite word using the prefix ab-, which marks a moving away from something. Many immigrants of course assimilate to American society … Many others, however, especially in the second and following generations, absimilate …

Of the four men held responsible for the London terror bombings of July 2005, three were English-born. (The fourth immigrated at age five from Jamaica.) In December 2008, writing in PajamasMedia.com, terrorism expert Patrick Poole noted that many U.S. citizens of Somali origin were leaving the country to train as terrorists in Somalia …

Assimilation, absimilation: If you let great numbers of foreigners settle in your country, you will surely get both.

End quote.

All right; Omar Mateen was second generation, and he absimilated away from American culture. What about the first generation — which is to say, his parents? Why were they given settlement rights in our country from Afghanistan, where they originated?

Mateen Senior, first name Seddique, became a naturalized citizen in 1989 after coming to this country from his native Afghanistan in the early 1980s. I haven't been able to discover what kind of visa he came in on. The leading possibilities are: (a) he came as a refugee, via the United Nations and our own State Department, or (b) he was performing some service to the U.S.A. against the Soviet forces then occupying Afghanistan, or (c) some close relative of his — or some person he persuaded to swear he was a relative — was performing such services, or was a refugee, and Mr Mateen got in on the family-reunification boondoggle.

It wasn't likely an employment visa. Mr Mateen has been making a living selling life insurance since 1991. I don't recall there being any critical shortage of life-insurance salesmen in the early 1980s.

We should allow some slack here to the immigration authorities. Bearing in mind possiblity (b) that I just mentioned, it's possible that Mateen, Sr. risked his life to assist the U.S.A. with policy objectives in Afghanistan. This was the Cold War, remember; and as I remind younger listeners and readers, the Cold War was a very big deal, with nuclear annihilation in play. The Mujaheddin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan were our allies. Islam was not at that point committing acts of homicidal lunacy in Western countries.

So it's possible that Mateen, Sr.'s admission to the U.S.A. was justified even by the very strict Radio Derb standards — which, just to remind you, would allow permanent settlement to spouses and dependent children of U.S. Citizens, certified geniuses, persons who've performed some meritorious service to U.S. policy goals, a few Solzhenitsyn-type high-profile dissidents, and nobody else at all.

It's possible, but is it likely? Not really. Quote from an authoritative website, quote:

Prior to 1978, only about 2,500 Afghans lived in the United States. Between 1980 and 1996, more than 32,000 were admitted as refugees, along with 40,000 under regular immigrant visas, most as part of the family reunification program.

End quote. That's 72,000 Afghans, exceedingly few of whom, I imagine, put their lives on the line for U.S. policy goals under the Soviet occupation. And it goes without saying that of those 32,000 refugees from the Soviet occupation, very few — quite possibly none at all — returned to Afghanistan when the occupation ended in 1989.

So whether you think Mr Mateen, Sr. should have been given settlement rights in the U.S.A. depends on what you think of U.S. refugee policies during the Cold War. Knowing what we know now about the trend in Islam this past thirty-odd years, those policies look to have been naive and foolishly generous; but that wasn't obvious at the time.

Mateen, Sr. seems to be some kind of a crackpot — an anti-American kind, among other things. He hosts a satellite TV show and runs a YouTube channel, both given over mostly to Afghan affairs, in both of which he frequently expresses anti-American views.

It would probably be a slight improvement to the U.S.A. at large, and only a very minor loss to the life-insurance industry, if we could strip this guy of his citizenship and send him back to Afghanistan, which has been free of Soviet occupation now for 27 years.

However, making it easier than it currently is to strip naturalized citizens of their citizenship, is one of those things that sounds great when the target you have in mind is someone obnoxious to you and your values; but bear in mind, please, that once the process is in place, it can be used by people you don't necessarily like — people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, either of whom I'm sure would be happy to strip me of my citizenship and send me back to Airstrip One.

So what's to be done here? Well, as the saying goes, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing is to stop digging. We may not be able to rectify the errors of the past, but we absolutely should not be permitting any further settlement by Muslims. And if a presidential candidate comes along with the good sense and courage to say that out loud, we should vote for him.

04 — Narrative collision. How did our politicians react to the Orlando killings?

As usual, I'll frame this in sectionalist terms — in terms of what I call the Cold Civil War. As with our country's actual Civil War a hundred years ago, the conflict — this time a cold one, thank goodness — is between two big blocs of white people who can't stand the sight of each other: Goodwhites and Badwhites. The Goodwhites draft in battalions of colored people to dig latrine trenches and feed the horses, and to act as figureheads for Goodwhite values, as with our current President.

So when something like the Orlando atrocity happens, the task for Goodwhites is to frame it as the fault of Badwhites, or at least to pin it to Badwhite values somehow.

That was how the Goodwhites proceeded. Badwhites love guns; Badwhites are not enthusiastic about the promotion of homosexuality; Badwhites think our Judeo-Christian culture is threatened by mass Muslim immigration. So the Goodwhite reactions stressed gun control and fighting homophobia, and tried to avoid mentioning Islam at all.

President Obama gave a speech twelve hours after the shooting. He'd just come from a meeting with the FBI Director, he told us, and so at this point he surely knew the killer's identity. He had nothing to say about it, though, other than that, quote: "What is clear is that he was a person filled with hatred," end quote.

OK, but what was the source of his hatred? Obama didn't specify, but he implied that the fault lay with us Americans, by which of course he meant Badwhites. Quote: "May [God] give us all … the strength and courage to change."

The President of course got in a plug for gun control, carefully tying the Orlando killings to Badwhite atrocities at Sandy Hook, Charleston, and Aurora, Colorado. Quote:

This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or in a movie theater, or in a night club.

Those references are carefully selective. There is no mention of Fort Hood, San Bernardino, or the Washington Navy Yard. It's only Badwhites that commit these atrocities, you see.

Hillary Clinton made a much longer speech in Cleveland on Monday: three thousand words, none of which began with "i-m-m-i-g-r." "Weapons of war have no place on our streets," said the lady; and, quote: "The terrorist in Orlando targeted LGBT Americans out of hatred and bigotry," end quote.

The word "Islam" did at least show up once in Mrs Clinton's speech, albeit grudgingly. Quote: "Still, as I have said before, none of us can close our eyes to the fact that we do face enemies who use their distorted version of Islam to justify slaughtering innocent people," end quote.

Is the ISIS version of Islam really distorted, though? As the blogger Iowahawk has pointed out, Abubakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, has a Ph.D. in Islamic studies, so his view of Islam is surely more authoritative than Mrs Clinton's.

Donald Trump also made a speech on Monday, also three thousand words, addressing forthrightly and inflinchingly the key issues here. Ctrl-F on "i-m-m-i-g-r": 29 hits. Hit number three, quote:

We have a dysfunctional immigration system which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens.

End quote. Why can't our President say that? Why can't the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee say it?

Trump also spoke about what a friend of mine calls "Narrative Collision." The Narrative here is the one promoted by Goodwhites: the narrative of Badwhites filled with hate, endlessly seeking to harm or humiliate designated victim groups — blacks, women, Latinos, Muslims, homosexuals. Narrative Collision occurs when two different aspects of the Narrative contradict each other: for example, blacks raping women, or Muslims beating up homosexuals.

The Orlando killings were classic Narrative Collision; so much so, there was some subdued crowing about it from the Dissident Right. I don't condone this, but it expresses very understandable and widespread resentment at the endless rain of Narrative propaganda.

I myself got eight or ten emails from listeners along the following lines, quote — I'm not quoting any particular emailer, just condensing the sense of the group, quote: "So a crazy Muslim shoots up a hall full of black and Hispanic homosexuals. As a straight white Christian [in one case, Jewish] person, why should I care?" End quote. Yes, it's mean, but that's how a lot of people feel after decades of diversity propaganda about the wickedness of normal white Americans.

Trump was not of course as cynical as that, but he did nail the Narrative Collision aspect. Quote:

Hillary Clinton can never claim to be a friend of the gay community as long as she continues to support immigration policies that bring Islamic extremists to our country who suppress women, gays and anyone who doesn't share their views.

She can't have it both ways. She can't claim to be supportive of these communities while trying to increase the number of people coming in who want to oppress them.

How does this kind of immigration make our life better? How does this kind of immigration make our country better?

End quote. Those two closing questions were rhetorical as spoken; but I hope that when debating Mrs Clinton, Trump asks them directly. They are damn good questions.

05 — Horrors abroad. There were horrors elsewhere in the civilized world this week.

In France, in an outer suburb of Paris, an ISIS militant stabbed an off-duty police captain to death outside the officer's home Monday evening. Then he went inside the home; police arrived; there was a three-hour standoff; and when the police stormed the place, they found that the Muslim guy had also killed the officer's wife in front of her three-year-old son.

The Muslim himself died in the assault, but the infant survived. The poor kid is said to be "traumatized," which I can very well believe.

An interesting aspect of this case is that the killer, name of Larossi Abballa, was on a police watch list of individuals thought to be a danger to public security. He'd been arrested in 2011 and given a three-year sentence for terrorist-related offenses. The moral of the story here is that you really need to watch the people on your watch list.

NBC News describes Abballa as born in France, so presumably this is another case of second-generation absimilation.

Then over in England on Thursday this week, a young female Member of Parliament named Jo Cox was stabbed and shot to death in the street outside her constituency office.

This really does seem to have been a case of a crazy Badwhite snapping. The killer, arrested nearby shortly after the murder, was a 52-year-old white English loner, unmarried and childless, named Thomas Mair. He seems to be a mild-mannered sort, no criminal record, but he may have been dealing with mental health issues.

The only Muslim angle here is that the killing happened in West Yorkshire, where there's a very big Muslim population, mostly Pakistani. The nearby town of Bradford was 25 percent Muslim in the 2011 census, up from 16 percent ten years earlier. On a linear extrapolation, it's likely now over thirty percent Muslim. The town of Rotherham, where hundreds of white English girls were made sex slaves by Muslim men, and police refused to act for fear of looking racist, Rotherham is just 22 miles away.

Ms Cox is described on the Middle Eastern website albawaba.com as a, quote, "passionate advocate for Syrian refugees and Muslim immigrants." That website further notes that, quote: "after being elected last year, Cox used her first speech to Parliament to extol the benefits of having Muslims and other immigrants move to Britain." End quote.

With Ms Cox when she was killed was her assistant, a young Muslim woman named Fazila Aswat, shown wearing a headscarf in the new pictures. Ms Aswat gave a very affecting account of Ms Cox's last moments.

So while the motive here was not Islamic terrorism, it wouldn't be very surprising to learn that the killer was pushed over the edge from instability into lunacy by watching the Islamization of his country, and the favoritism shown to Muslims in cases like the Rotherham abductions, and by the "passionate advocacy" of politicians like Ms Cox on behalf of foreigners over native English people.

Once again, in France and England as here, those two questions asked by Donald Trump on Monday are hanging in the air:

• How does this kind of immigration make our life better?

and:

• How does this kind of immigration make our country better?

06 — Patriotism v. globalism in Europe. The killing in England came just one week before the referendum on Brexit, Britain's withdrawal from the European Union.

One big factor motivating the "leave" vote — people who will vote for Britain to leave the EU — one factor is the mass influx of Middle Eastern and African illegal immigrants pouring across the Mediterranean into Europe, most of them Muslims. Some high proportion of the illegals hope to make it to Britain. For one thing, Britain has the most generous welfare benefits in Europe. For another, there are so many Muslims already in Britain, a lot of the illegals have relatives and friends settled there who can help them. That's why thousands of illegals are camped on the north coast of France, waiting for a chance to slip across the Channel.

Great numbers of British people are angry and frustrated at this situation, and at the feeble, half-hearted efforts of their government to control the nation's borders. That anger and frustration is helping to swell the "leave" vote, which is leading polls by six points.

Multiculti ethnomasochists like the murdered Ms Cox of course want the borders opened to as many Muslims as want to come. They regard those angry, frustrated patriots as Badwhites: narrow-minded, nativist, mean-spririted, and of course racist.

The fact of Ms Cox — one of them, a Goodwhite — having been murdered by a loony white loner, an obvious Badwhite, they see as a great opportunity to score political points in favor of remaining in Europe. It's an opportunity that's difficult to grasp, though. To make the political capital from the murder that they want to make would be widely seen as tasteless, and might backfire on them.

Still they can't help themselves. The temptation is too strong. Here, for example, was Labour Party MP Neil Coyle, a friend of Ms Cox, speaking on the telly Thursday night. Those campaigning to leave the EU, he said, quote, "risk inspiring extremist elements on the hard right in this country," end quote.

Various bigfoot politicians and commentators on the "Remain" side honked disapproval of Mr Coyle's tastelessness in yoking the Cox murder to the referendum, but you have to think that off-screen they're chuckling and patting him on the back for it.

UKIP, the U.K. Independence Party — the only major political party in Britain opposed to open borders and forced multiculturalism — UKIP is of course on the "leave" side in the Brexit referndum. They have just put out a new poster, and are driving it around London on panel trucks, showing a stock news photograph of hundreds of illegals surging into Europe with the message: "BREAKING POINT — The EU has failed us all. We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders."

The crowd of illegals shown in the poster are pretty solidly young Middle Eastern males. That has horrified Goodwhites over there. They are denouncing the poster, and the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, as, of course, racist. The brumous British air is thick with Hitler comparisons; although I imagine the oldest generation of Britons, the ones who actually fought and suffered to defeat Hitler, are solid for leaving. In at least one jurisdiction, the poster has been reported to the police as being in violation of Britain's race laws.

As the Brits look set fair to vote themselves out of the EU, other European countries are increasingly unhappy with the superstate. Pew Research surveyed six major EU countries earlier this month. They found declining support for the EU almost everywhere, most sensationally in France. Quote from Pew:

EU favorability is down in five of the six nations surveyed in both 2015 and 2016. There has been a double-digit drop in France (down 17 percentage points) and Spain (16 points), and single-digit declines in Germany (8 points), the United Kingdom (7 points) and Italy (6 points).

The Swiss, surely the smartest nation in Europe, are not in the EU, but they've had a membership application pending since 1992. This week they voted to withdraw that application. Quote from Swiss parliamentarian Thomas Minder, quote: "Only a few lunatics still want to join the EU." This follows Iceland withdrawing its application last year.

So the air is going out of the EU balloon rather fast now. If the Brits change their minds and vote to remain next week, they may soon have the place to themselves.

07 — A disordered world. To round out this week of horrors, here are a couple more, one new and one old.

The new horror was the toddler killed by an alligator at Disney World in Florida on Tuesday. Two-year-old Lane Graves from Nebraska was paddling in shallow water in a lake by one of the Disney vacation hotels when a 7-foot alligator appeared and dragged him away. Lane's body was found the next day.

There is no political angle here that I can think of. Indeed, it seems impertinent even to think of thinking of one. I hope you'll allow me, though, to say that there is something metaphysical, something cosmic, about this particular horror. At Disney World! While the family was on vacation!

The phrase that came into my mind, and no doubt many others, was the old Latin tag et in Arcadia ego. The tag is spoken by Death, and he's saying: "I'm here too, even in Arcadia — the loveliest, happiest place. I'm here too."

British commentator Katie Hopkins, who worked in a Disney park one college vacation, got closest to my own mood here. Quotes from her:

The real horror of the thing is that it happened at Disney — where dreams come true … It seems death is laughing at us from backstage. You fools, you believe in dreams? You know, here at Disney, nightmares happen too …

Everything [at Disney] is perky and upbeat — from Hakuna Matata piped at the line for the bathroom to Elsa the Ice-Queen's boobs.

Which makes the tragedy of the toddler on the beach so stark.

Even if you exhaust your duties as a mother, it is still possible a monster from the deep might come and eat your child.

In a world of terror threats and gun-toting nutters, just where does The Fear end? What can you put your trust in?

When dreams fail and nightmares happen, all you have left is chance. Roll the dice, hope your baby is the lucky one to make it through.

End quote.

I keep thinking also of the classic Chinese tales, where the fall of a dynasty is prefigured by disorders in the natural world: earthquakes, strange vapors in the palace halls, two-headed cattle being born, and, in one of them, hens turning into roosters.

And then an older horror was brought back to us this week. This was the 2007 murder in New Haven, Connecticut of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two young daughters, ages 11 and 17, during a grisly home invasion. The man of the house, Dr. William Hawke-Petit, was beaten, tied up, and forced to listen to his wife being raped by the two intruders. He managed to crawl away unseen; but the intruders then killed his wife and raped and murdered his daughters. I have no stomach to give any details; read them for yourself if you can bear to.

The two beasts who did this, names Hayes and Komisarjevsky, were found, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 2010 and 2011 separately. Then in 2012 the state legislature voted to repeal capital punishment for future cases; and last year all 11 criminals on death row had their sentences commuted.

This week Hayes, one of the New Haven killers, learned what his death sentence has been commuted to: six terms of life imprisonment without parole, to be served consecutively. Komisarjevsky's case is still being adjudicated.

Hearing this weeks' result, Dr. Petit tweeted that, quote: "It is a very sad day when a prolonged trial and decision and sentencing by a jury that took 4½ months to seat is overturned by a legislature that ignores the wishes of the people of CT," end quote.

I second that sentiment, but would add the following.

Shame on the people of Connecticut for allowing some fools in robes to deny them a just sentence fairly pronounced and richly deserved.

08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis: We've all heard of Trump University by now, the ramshackle for-profit enterprise offering real-estate secrets to willing buyers, to which The Donald unwisely lent his name.

Issues relating to this outfit are in litigation, as we all know. What I say about that is: Let the chips fall where they may.

Meanwhile, how many of us had heard of Laureate University? I hadn't, until the New York Post and Investor's Business Daily ran editorials about it this week.

Laureate is another for-profit operation offering to teach you business savvy. And guess what: it too is being sued by disgruntled customers.

Investor's Business Daily quotes George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley thus, quote:

Laureate … has been sued over such programs as its Walden University Online offering, which many have alleged is a scam designed to bilk students of tens of thousands of dollars for degrees. Students say that they were repeatedly delayed and given added costs as they tried to secure degrees, leaving them deeply in debt.

End quote. A shady operation, then. Why should you care?

Well, because the honorary Chancellor of Laureate University until last year was — drum roll, please [drum roll] former President Bill Clinton. According to Inside Higher Education, Bubba trousered 16½ million dollars from Laureate just from 2010 to 2014, although no-one seems to know what he did to earn it.

Bubba stepped down from the chancellorship last year, but Laureate is still in partnership with the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Interesting, huh? But why are we only just now hearing about this? Why haven't the media been all over it? Hard to figure. I'm racking my brains but I can't think of a reason. Nothing's coming up, nothing at all. Not a thing … [Hillary cackle.]

Item: Also on the higher education front, I see that Wayne State University, a humongous public college in Detroit, is dropping its requirement that all students complete at least one math course before graduating.

Reading this news story, I can't say I was foaming at the mouth. I love math myself, but it's not for everybody.

In any case, I myself come out of the traditional English university system, where you can just study one subject for your entire university career. I just did three years of math, then got a degree in math. There weren't any minors; it was just math, math, and math. Friends in the English Department did three years of English, and got degrees in English.

That system worked OK. I'd hate to think that some Eng. Lit. genius with unique insights into Beowulf might be denied a degree because he couldn't solve quadratic equations.

Then I read further down the article. No, they're not turning their academic direction towards greater specialization, British-style. That's not it. They're dropping the math requirement to make room for a new one. Can you guess what the new requirement is?

Diversity! Quote from The Daily Caller, June 14th:

The committee handling WSU's general education reform has recommended a new framework that, if adopted, would place an extremely strong emphasis on diversity-related courses. Under the framework, the school would create a series of new diversity-themed courses, and all students would have to take at least one.

"Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter," said the sign over the door to Plato's Academy. Imagine the white-supremacist nerve of that old fool! There is no wisdom until you've sat in class for a couple hundred hours listening to the life experiences of wise Latinas and black transvestites. That's what a university is for.

Item: Finally, news form Ireland. In County Meath over there, a farmer named Jack Conway was cutting peat the other day when, twelve feet down in the bog, he came across a huge lump of butter, 22 pounds of the stuff.

The butter, it turned out, was 2,000 years old, according to the curator of a local museum, who was called in to examine the find. Quote from her: "It doesn't smell very nice." End quote. No kidding.

Apparently butter was a token of wealth in ancient Ireland, and this was some kind of offering to the gods.

In Ireland. So now you know why a wee blob of butter is called … a pat. [Boo, hiss.]

09 — Signoff. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening, and apologies to Irish listeners for that last.

By way of making up, let's have something Irish to play us out. Here's one of my favorites, from the Clancy Brothers.

More from Radio Derb next week.

[Music clip: The Clancy Brothers, "Rocky Road to Dublin."]

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