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Sleeping prone is harder than you’d think
As followers of Radio Derb are aware, I was out of action for a couple of weeks there in mid-July.
What happened was, I broke the First Rule of Being Over Seventy.
First Rule of Being Over Seventy: Don’t fall!
Fortunately I didn’t break anything else. I was tidying up the home gym when my feet got tangled with each other somehow. I lost balance, keeled over, and landed with my full weight (180 lbs.) on a stray dumbell. The point of impact was quite precisely the fleshiest part of the human frame—well, of mine—and that accounts for no bones having been broken.
The dusky melancholy sprites who afflict us with minor troubles, thus frustrated in their attack on my skeleton, took their revenge on my soft tissues. Over the next week I developed the Mother of All Bruises: a vast black terrain of shattered capillaries and homeless blood.
I could not sit; my right hip joint went on strike; standing for long was painful; likewise lying down in any normal position. My only relief was to lie prone, face in a pillow, chancing suffocation. It is actually possible to sleep in that position, although it took me three or four unhappy nights to master the art. Sleeping prone is harder than you’d think.
Now, at month end, everything’s much better. The Mother of All Bruises faded from black to purple and split into lesser units. Watching this day by day has brought to mind plate tectonics: one of those YouTube clips of Pangea, the ancient super-continent, breaking up into Africa, Asia, the Americas, and so on.
As my dear mother used to say: Worse things happen at sea. I am sure there are people reading this who have far greater misfortunes to contend with. My honest sympathies. I wouldn’t have given as much of an account as this, but people have been asking.
Staircase wit
That first week, with Pangea at its most alarming, I went to see a doctor. He didn’t have much to offer: “It’ll heal, take a few weeks … cold compresses … easy on the painkillers …” I did, however, come away from the consultation with an item of staircase wit.
As usual, before seeing the actual doctor I was taken into one of the examination rooms to be weighed and have my pulse and temperature checked by a PA, in this case a pretty young Indian lady. “What brings you in here today?” she chirped after closing the door.
Me: “I can show you faster than tell you.” I unbuckled my belt and opened the zipper on my shorts preparatory to dropping them.
She: “No, no … Wait! … Please … No! Wait! …” This was said in a high register. Apparently she thought I was going to flash her.
Shorts dropped, Mother of All Bruises in plain sight, her voice went down an octave. “Oh, my goodness!”
That was my cue to respond: “Aw, that’s what women always say when I drop my pants.” Of course I didn’t think of it at the time, and the consultation proceeded in a normal fashion, our voices appropriately pitched.
On reflection, it’s probably just as well I didn’t think of it. I’d likely have ended up on the sharp end of some “harassment” lawsuit.
Guilt exhibitionism
It’s silly, I know, to make fun of people’s names; but every time Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the news, his name fires off a chain of neurons in my brain that ends with the childhood ditty “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”
If you follow the plotline there—come on, it’s only four stanzas—you learn that Blynken is actually one of the eyes of the tot who is being lullabied to sleep. Wynken is the other eye and Nod is the kiddie’s head.
What’s the relevance of that to U.S. foreign policy? None that I can see. I have idly wondered, though, with Blinken at Secretary of State and sleepy Joe Biden nodding off in the White House, which administration figure could stand in for Wynken.
I favor the sinister apparatchik Merrick Garland, our current U.S. Attorney General. Comrade Garland doesn’t actually wink when addressing us, but neither does he do a very good job of concealing the subtext of his remarks: You know what I’m trying to do here. I don’t need to spell it out, do I?
Where was I going with that? Oh yes: Secretary of State Blinken. July 13th he announced that he will issue a formal invitation to the U.N. Human Rights Council to have their Special Rapporteurs on racism investigate the state of affairs here in the U.S.A. and issue a report.
We Americans are guilty! Secretary Blinken wants everyone to know. Guilty, guilty, all guilty! Let the U.N. human rights experts come and inspect us, then issue a report telling the whole world how shamefully racist and xenophobic we are, and always have been!
Hoo-kay. Here are the current member states of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Eritrea, Fiji, France, Gabon, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Libya, Marshall Islands, Malawi, Mauritania, Mexico, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Venezuela.
Just a few questions here.
One: Why the hell are we still in the U.N.? What’s in it for us, for Americans? Almost exactly a hundred years ago as I write, newly-elected President Warren Harding was killing off the last prospect of America joining the League of Nations, cherished project of the previous president, who, after a stroke in October 1919, was even more ga-ga than Joe Biden is today. Can’t we elect a new Harding to extricate us from this sleazy Third World racket?
Two: So the President-for-Life of Gabon, wherever the hell that is, has a dimwitted nephew who needs to be found paid employment somewhere he won’t get up to regime-threatening mischief. Hey, let’s make him a U.N. Special Rapporteur on racism!
Three: What’s with “Rapporteur,” anyway? Why not just “Reporter”? I guess “Rapporteur” just looks more hifalutin, official, and diplomatic. Oops, sorry: I meant diplomatique.
I have a dream, brothers and sisters, I have a dream. My dream is that the ornery spirit of Old America is not yet dead. My dream is that when the U.N. Special Rapporteur on racism shows up in some small American town, the townspeople find out who he is and pelt him with rotten fruit. Then they tar and feather him and run him out of town on a rail. I have a dream.
So’s your old man
Every nation has historical skeletons in its closet. How should a healthy nationalism deal with the airing of these past misdeeds?
If the nation is under totalitarian control, there is no problem at all. The regime just prohibits any public mention of the misdeeds, any reference to them in educational or historical materials. Within a single generation, all knowledge of the misdeeds has disappeared down the memory hole. In communist China today there is no public recollection of the Land Reform massacres or the Mao Famine. Nobody under thirty knows anything about the reform movement of 1989 that ended with tanks rolling in to Tiananmen Square.
If a foreigner raises such issues, the front men for totalitarianism just lie; or else they counter with something the foreigner’s nation did, supposedly of equal moral turpitude. Loyal Chinese citizens are expected not to make a fuss about the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), but to be seething with indignation at the burning of the Summer Palace a hundred years previously.
Even absent totalitarian control, East Asians seem not to bother much with collective guilt. I know plenty of overseas Chinese who are perfectly aware of the horrors of communism; but I have never heard any of them express remorse over, for example, the Dzungar genocide.
Likewise with the Japanese. Their nation perpetrated some gross atrocities within living memory, but Japanese people seem not to suffer anguished guilt about it. Their government has issued formal apologies when there has been some diplomatic or commercial advantage to be gained by doing so, but you have to wonder if there was any sincerity behind the words. (If there was, wouldn’t the apologist, in the proper Japanese tradition, have closed the proceedings by committing public seppuku?)
And then, the Mongolians. Today’s Mongolia is not at all totalitarian. On the scoring system used by Freedom House, Mongolia (84) is in fact freer than the U.S.A. (83).
You can make a case that, with due allowance for available population numbers and low levels of killing technology, the worst mass murderer of all time was 13th-century Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan. How do the free Mongolians of today feel about him?
They LOVE him! Mongolia’s main international airport is named after him; so is the country’s premier university; so is the capital city’s main tourist hotel.
A must-see sight if you visit Mongolia is the colossal equestrian statue of the conqueror:
In 2008, a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan riding on horseback was erected on the bank of the Tuul River at Tsonjin Boldog, 54 km east of the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, where according to legend, he found a golden whip. The statue is 40 meters [130 ft] tall and wrapped in 250 tons of gleaming stainless steel. It stands on top of the Genghis Khan Statue Complex, a visitor center that itself is 10 meters tall, with 36 columns representing the 36 khans from Genghis to Ligdan Khan. The statue is symbolically pointed east towards his birthplace. [Enormous Statue of Genghis Khan in Mongolia by Kaushik Patowary; Amusing Planet, September 10th 2013.]
Just the standard 40 metre high, stainless steel equestrian statue of Genghis Khan located in Tsonjin Boldog, Mongolia.
Look how little the people are!!! pic.twitter.com/80B5oSE0u0
— PPS Ltd (@PPSLtd) February 15, 2018
I must say, totalitarianism aside, when watching a snivelling worm like Antony Blinken writhe and rend his garments over our nation’s faults and misdeeds, I find myself preferring the more robust East Asian attitude. Yeah, we did that. They would probably have done it to us if they could, though. In any case, we’re not doing it any more, so what’s the point of banging on about it?
Back in the day, when some schoolyard nuisance accused yourself or your family members of some fault or defect and you couldn’t be bothered with a detailed rebuttal, you could shut down the topic by saying: “So’s your old man.”
Behind the smooth diplomacies of those Japanese apologies, or the shrugs of Chinese friends when I mention the wanton killing of missionary wives and children in the Boxer Rebellion, I’m pretty sure I detect some component of “So’s your old man.”
I’m not a totalitarian and I don’t want anything memory-holed. I would, though, stand up and cheer if, the next time one of those U.N. pests or ChiCom flunkies accused the U.S.A. of historical misdeeds, some appropriate official representative of this republic would respond publicly and loud with: “So’s your old man.”
A statue is forever … hardly ever
There has been much defacing and toppling of statues since last year’s race hysteria broke out. Most of the statues affected have been ones I myself would prefer to have been left alone.
When my wife and I did the Great Birthday Civil War Battlefields Tour in 2015, we were especially struck by the beauty and grandeur of Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Now those fine old statues are gone, the pedestals spray-painted with cuss words. Beauty has been traded in for ugliness, grandeur for spite. It’s hard not to be angry.
It’s salutary to be reminded, though, that pulling down statues is an activity as old as civilization. Some scholar with nothing better to do might trawl through the historical record to assemble statistics on the life expectancy of statues. My guess for the mean would be more than twenty years, but less than fifty.
There was a reminder of it all in this month’s Literary Review. Lefty historian Alex von Tunzelmann has written a book titled Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, and fellow historian Michael Burleigh has reviewed it.
I hold no brief for either writer and won’t be buying the book, but Burleigh’s review helps put today’s iconoclasm into perspective. It’s illustrated with an item of statue-desecration no conservative could mind: the decapitated head of a Stalin statue dumped on a street in Budapest during the 1956 uprising.
Burleigh also reminds us of the antiquity of statue-smashing. The first of von Tunzelmann’s twelve statues, he tells us, was one of George III in New York, made of gilded lead and erected in 1770 but pulled down just six years later by American revolutionaries, “the ‘melted Majesty’ turned into musket balls to fire at British soldiers.”
And much further back than that:
It was our delight to dash those proud faces to the ground, to smite them with the sword and savage them with the axe as if blood and agony could follow from every blow. Our transports of joy—so long deferred—were unrestrained; all sought a form of vengeance in beholding those bodies mutilated, limbs hacked in pieces, and finally that baleful, fearsome visage cast into fire, to be melted down, so that from such menacing terror something for man’s use and enjoyment should rise out of the flames.
That was Pliny the Younger, venting his hatred of the Emperor Domitian by beating up on the Emperor’s statues shortly after Domitian was assassinated in A.D. 96. I can go a bit further back still, to the fall of Sejanus in A.D. 31. The satirist poet Juvenal gloated that:
Some men are hurled headlong by over-great power
and the envy to which it exposes them;
they are wrecked by the long and illustrious roll of their honours:
down come their statues, obedient to the rope;
the axe hews in pieces their chariot wheels and the legs of the unoffending nags.
And now the flames are hissing, and amid the roar of furnace and of bellows
the head of the mighty Sejanus, the darling of the mob, is burning and crackling,
and from that face, which was but lately second in the entire world,
are being fashioned pipkins, basins, frying-pans and slop-pails!
It looks as though human beings have been pulling statues down ever since they started putting them up. I get the point; but I still think it’s a shame about Monument Avenue.
And here’s a guess about that huge statue of Genghis Khan I mentioned in the last segment: It won’t be pulled down any time soon.
A guide to free housing
I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country, but the housing market here in Long Island is booming. Why? No idea, and I find the boom hard to square with the fact that half the people I know seem to be selling up and moving to Florida.
It’s even harder to square with the fact that you apparently can, under our peculiar legal system, get yourself a very nice house for no money at all. Here’s a story.
I have a neighbor; call him Sam. Sam has a daughter, who is married. Until recently daughter and husband owned a house nearby, a very nice suburban family house.
They were spending more and more of their time in Florida, though. Eventually they decided to move there permanently. They put the Long Island house on the market. It was snapped up at once, for more than the asking price.
So daughter and husband were living in rented property in Florida, looking for a house there, waiting for the closing on the Long Island house, which stood empty. Closing is early August. Sam was keeping an eye on the house, driving by once or twice a week.
On one of these drive-bys he saw someone moving inside the house. He pulled over, got out of his car, and rang the doorbell. A young man opened the door and invited him in. The young man had a young lady, also resident. They had, Sam was told, rented the house through a firm in Louisiana. They had paid a sum of money—a suspiciously small one—for three months’ rental, and showed Sam the check stub.
“But this house belongs to my daughter,” Sam protested. “She’s already negotiated a sale. Closing is early August. Then it will belong to the buyer.”
Sam called the police. The young couple told the cop the same tale they’d told Sam. The cop told Sam there was nothing he could do, Sam should find a lawyer. “The sooner the better. If they’re in here thirty days, they get squatters’ rights, and eviction is well-nigh impossible.”
Sam got a lawyer, but he wasn’t much more help than the police had been. “Eviction? Eh, it’s a long and expensive process. Probably they just want money. Negotiate a deal with them.”
Sam went back to the house. Now the couple had moved their furniture in: sofa, armchairs, dining-room table, the lot. He told them he’d started eviction proceedings. They shrugged.
Here things get delicate. I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything irregular. Sam is a really nice guy, hard-working and a good family man. He is, though, a first-generation immigrant from a part of the world not best known for punctilious attention to legal niceties. He has many friends from that same part of the world. They converse among themselves in their own language—a non-European language whose sounds can be uttered in a way that non-speakers find, very unfairly of course, to be menacing.
Sam called on the house with some of his friends. Matters were settled to everyone’s satisfaction. The “tenants” have departed, furniture and all. Sam will be sleeping there every night until the closing.
Where has the law been in all this? Nowhere much. Law-enforcement has been pretty openly on the side of the squatters. The cop who had showed up that first time called on the house again a few days later, after the “tenants” had departed. Where had they gone? he asked Sam, in a tone of deep suspicion. All Sam knew was that they had moved upstate somewhere. That didn’t satisfy the cop. He did a thorough search of the house and back yard, in which latter location he seemed to think the “tenants” might be buried. (Sam assures me they’re not.)
Since all this happened I’ve been noticing stories in the local press about unscrupulous people getting their housing for free.
Item:
A Long Island man who hasn’t paid his mortgage in more than 20 years got another free pass from the courts this week after hiring a new lawyer.
Guramrit Hanspal, 52, hasn’t coughed up a dime to live in his East Meadow home since making a single mortgage payment in 1998, but ducked eviction for decades by filing lawsuits and bankruptcies, records show. [Long Island man who hasn’t paid his mortgage in 20 years dodges eviction again by Kieran Ungemach; New York Post, July 3rd 2021]
Item:
Julie Rinke first rented Genya Markon’s 1,260-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home September 2019. She was supposed to vacate June 18. But when Markon returned last month from Israel, where she spends her winters, Rinke refused to leave, citing pandemic-fueled hardship.
Markon’s attorney says Rinke is acting in a “dishonest and manipulative way to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic.” … Markon, who is suing Rinke in Suffolk Supreme Court in a bid to get her out, is now locked in a battle to reclaim her home, valued at $675,000 … [Squatter ‘living like a pig’ in Holocaust survivor’s Hamptons home by Jennifer Gould and Kerry J. Byrne; New York Post, July 10th 2021]
Lotsa luck with that lawsuit, lady. Don’t get your hopes up, though. The law isn’t on the side of middle-class suburban homeowners; it’s on the side of grifters and crooks. It isn’t on the side of normal citizens at all: It’s on the side of shoplifters and arsonists, muggers and bullies, illegal aliens and tech-billionaire content-controllers.
Above all it’s on the side of the lawyers and judges and activists, who grow fat while our ancient rights and liberties shrivel and die. The U.S.A. less free than Mongolia? Stick around; pretty soon we’ll be less free than China.
Don’t bother calling the cops, either, Ma’am … but I guess you already found that out.
Twenty years of diarizing
This month’s diary marks a sort-of anniversary. If you go to the index of all the diaries at my personal website, the very first one shown is for July/August 2001. So diarywise, it looks as though I have just crossed the 20-year mark.
That’s somewhat misleading. The July/August 2001 “diary” was an account of our family visit to China that summer. Blogging was still quite new; I hadn’t settled into regular diarizing.
I did so some months later, in March 2002. Some diary-type bloggings from the previous three months were grandfathered in as diaries when I set up the index page. So the proper, formal 20-year anniversary of these diaries will be in March next year.
Well, the hell with all that. Look: I’ve been diarizing for 20 years!
Math Corner
Acknowledgment. The words that follow are all my own. I wouldn’t have written them, though, if I hadn’t been alerted to the IMO results by a friend who is better connected to the math world than I now am. Thanks, pal!
The 62nd International Math Olympiad for high-school students worldwide was held July 14th-24th in St. Petersburg, Russia, although “in remote format.” I guess that means that the social and ceremonial aspects were all done online. There were 107 competing nations, each sending a team with no more than six members.
However, the 6-problem, 4½-hour competitive exam that is the real fun of the thing was held “in national IMO Exam Centres” pre-approved by the IMO in participating countries.
Each of those six problems is marked from zero to seven points, so a score of 42 points means you scored full marks on every problem. A score of 24 or more gets you a gold medal; 19 or more gets a silver, 12 or more a bronze. This year’s U.S.A. team got four golds and two silvers—well done, guys! (Yes, they are all male. Of a total 619 competitors from all 107 nations, 63 were female.)
The results by nation hold no surprises for the HBD-savvy. The top five, with their rankings: China (1), Russia (2), South Korea (3), U.S.A. (4), Canada (5). Bottom five: Egypt, Kenya, Oman, Pakistan (all tied at 103), Botswana (107).
Given the seven-point leeway available to the officials marking the exam, and the many, many complaints in these diaries about the woke-ification of math, you can’t help but wonder whether there is some “holistic” (i.e. totally subjective) tilting of the marks to make the results more compliant with egalitarian ideology. If there is, I can’t detect it; and I’m pleased to see that the IMO guidelines for markers explicitly warn against it:
Marking IMO is not like marking school work. There are no marks for effort, no marks for solving the wrong problem and no marks for social justice.
“No marks for social justice”! I’ll be interested to see for how many more years that prohibition survives against the rising waters of ideological orthodoxy.
In there among the HBD-predictables there are of course some outliers. Ghana, for example, ranked a dismal 94th in the national standings; but young Roni Edwin of the Ghanaian team aced the first of the six problems, winning himnself an Honorable Mention. At last year’s IMO he aced two of the problems and made respectable attempts on two more, winning himself a bronze medal. I don’t know that Roni Edwin is, as my friend wrote, “the smartest kid in Africa,” but he’s pretty damn smart. If you want to test yourself against his smarts, try the brainteaser below.
Better-than-you’d-have-guessed result in the national rankings: Mongolia, ranked 11. And no; to judge by the team members’ names, they weren’t poached from China. Genghis Khan would’ve been proud … although probably not as proud as he would have been if his team had made their way to St. Petersburg somehow, put the IMO officials to the sword, and dragged their wives and daughters back to slavery in Mongolia.
What’s that you say? “A better-than-expected IMO result doesn’t make up for two centuries of pillage, rapine, massacres, and civilizational destruction the length and breadth of Eurasia?” So’s your old man.
Brainteaser
Here is Problem Number One from the 2021 IMO exam. This is the problem that Roni Edwin aced.
Let n ≥ 100 be an integer. Ivan writes the numbers n, n + 1, …, 2 n each on different cards. He then shuffles these n+1 cards, and divides them into two piles. Prove that at least one of the piles contains two cards such that the sum of their numbers is a perfect square.[Permalink]
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.
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That’s the greatest statue I’ve ever seen! Compare with the Irish version:
Of course, that one is maybe a tenth the size.
Did anyone think through the Terms of Surrender when ‘gay marriage’ became law of the land?
It meant UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER to Jews on whatever they demand. Result has been catastrophic.
Maybe cuckservatives thought it was conditional surrender. Chunkhead Ross Douthat thought so. “If we cave on ‘gay marriage’, they will finally stop.”
NO, it meant victory is totally Jewish, and reality and ‘justice’ are a matter of what Jews demand.
Result is Covid hysteria, George Floyd as saint, trannies in women’s sports, and this…
But westernized Asians have guilt-envy. They look to the West as model. They look to whites who yammer on and on about their guilt, and westernized Asians want to feel the guilt too and also status-signal. So, there’s a new generation of Asians who yammer about need for ‘diversity’ and how Asians are ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’.
Also, even without guilt, they can get fever. Japanese got jungle fever and the nation is being Africanized. You just watch.
If any people feel zero guilt, it’s the Jews. How many Jews apologize for financially exploiting goyim, writing horrible stuff about goyim in the Talmud, selling opium to Chinese, communist mass murder, and Zionist terrorism?
If you think that the labor shortage is the result of unskilled laborers preferring to live on unemployment than work at low-paying jobs then you are dead wrong.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/22/cuts-to-unemployment-benefits-didnt-get-people-back-to-work-study-finds.html
Yeah, right. You just try squatting in an empty house and see what it gets you.
Belly full of lead, most like.
I don’t know what outer dimension you live in. But where most of us live, they enforce the law on peons like us, oh, yes they do, with a extremely-prejudiced vengeance.
Chinese, Japanese have no guilt, yes, because US manufactured “atrocities” are not real and they know it. It’s simple, even though citizens of self-righteous evil empire are too arrogant, delusional and historically illiterate to understand it.
Meanwhile, the endless evils, gross atrocities unprecedented in the whole human history which is not only in “living memories”, but ongoing at this very much moment worldwide, have done and are being done by America. If Japanese should feel guilt for American manufactured fake “atrocities” hoax story, then every single American should kill themselves right now for the very real crimes all over the world for centuries, the greatest evil of all time committed by US empire.
I know & understand people’s utterly negative views about the U. N. The U. N has often been a complete failure. However, why blame the U. N when it’s the Biden government who are so monumentally insane as to invite them in?
No one makes a fuss about the genocide of Native Indians, hundreds of wars that America have lanuch against other countries and the millions of innocents it have slaughtered and enslaved but Americans still talk about Pearl Harbor and 911 (where a few thousands have died) as if they didn’t deserve it.
As usual, some introspection would help before you open your mouth about China.
That’s a secret of the law – one of its main purposes is to feed its tribe for its services. The service part seems to diminish, while the self-service part keeps growing bigger. Strange times.
“Nobody under thirty knows anything about the reform movement of 1989 that ended with tanks rolling in to Tiananmen Square.”
You are seriously out of touch, Mr. Derbyshire. Having recently lived in China, in my idle time there, I easily found a Chinese website run by families of people killed during the Tiananmen Demonstrations (六四事件）The total number killed seems to be between 300-400, based on non-government investigations, including reviews of Beijing hospital records from the time. Most young Chinese are as interested in the Tiananmen events as young Americans are interested in Woodstock. Your tired “Chicom” shtick is well past its shelf-life. The suppression of the Tiananmen Demonstrations main usefulness is as a propaganda tool to generate fear and loathing of China, as you, a prime practitioner of the journalistic form, well know.
Hey, Chinaman: So’s your dad.
He’s fully Jewish. US is their country now, but they don’t trust the Goy cattle who once dominated it. So they must destroy them, demographically and psychologically/spiritually. At least it certainly looks that way.
IMO even if a part of american crimes are too old to talk about (massacras of the Natives, triangular slavery of Black people) an other part of them are still done today. For exemple, use prohibited warfare technics (use of maximal force to separate civilian from beligerant which never worked btw) or use “international law” against adversaries (such as the law of the Seas that the US never ratified)
There is a reason why americans are hated all other the world:only Israel is seen as a more belicose country than the US.
Yes, it was a very bad thing for FDR to steer the US into war with Japan (and Germany). Hahahahaha
At least Israel’s bellicosity has limits.
The states that didn’t end early had their shortfall
made up by teenagers looking for part-time or summer work. A restaurant I frequent just went back to takeout only, since most of their servers are headed back to school.
The Asian “okay, and” model is fine, but I would greatly prefer a very internationally destabilizing one based on the principle of agree and amplify. Openly brag about atrocities, and seek to outdo them every now and then.
Such a state, of course, would be hyper-imperialist by necessity. It also needs to either be sneaky or very powerful so it doesn’t get coalitioned to death.
This would be very based, if I may dare say, and in case that every country adopted it, the ensuing shenanigans would be very funny to see.
Oh wait. I’m receiving messages that there already is such a state, a small Near Eastern one. Intriguing.
As for the squatters – a system that openly encourages the destruction of crooks and the scum, would also be an innovation. The closest thing we have is untouchability of the caste system, or the helot system of Sparta, but it’s merely oppressive and exploitative, not outright genocidal, so the problem of trash occupying people’s property by the merit of genecucked bureaucrats instead of using brute force to take what they want will not be resolved soon. Pathetic.
I am very glad to hear that your health problem was nothing more than a fall onto a dumb bell on your soft tissue, Mr. Derbyshire. It definitely could have been a lot worse.
How is the plate tectonics going now? Have the continents pretty much separated into their current positions? One wonders what the real world would be like if that African plate pulled an Atlantis on us. I know the Africans would do great in a new life under the sea. There’s no racism under the sea.
Perfect, Old Prude!!
OK, it’s been 3 minutes now! If nobody else is gonna do it, here:
Derb: Sorry about your mega-bruise. I recently had a similar — but much smaller — bruise, and wondered whether, at my advanced age of 75, it would heal. Fortunately, it did. Ain’t the body amazing!
The math problem seems pretty trivial to me unless I’ve missed something about it.
The range of the addition of 2 numbers from the set [n, 2n] is [n+1, 4n-1]
The number of perfect squares in this [n+1, 4n-1] range is OBVIOUSLY greater than 2^2 = 4. So one of the piles contains at least one perfect square in the addition of 2 of its members.
The number of perfect squares in [n+1, 4n-1] would be floor(sqrt(4n-1)) – ceil(sqrt(n+1)) – which is something like 10 when n = 100.
I wrote that range wrong. It is [2n+1, 4n -1]. We’re starting at n – I was thinking starting at zero.
Number of perfect squares for n = 100 is then about 5 – not 10.
But 5 is greater than 4 as well.
I might have to think it through a bit more; but that’s the gist.
If only we were hated–we could get our borders under control. Clearly we need to be bigger bastards. Anger more people with additional drone strikes and egregious violations of sea treaties. Might even end Nato and Anzus.
The Unz Review Retweeted:
Buy an Airex balance pad. The real thing. Amazon. $64. Sorry. Then do exercises like simple standing, standing with eyes closed, turning head, turning head eyes closed, Finaly, omg, standing on one leg. Not easy, but Bezos went into space. I suggest you do this in a corner so that you cannot fall backwards or sideways, and in front of you ready to catch you if you fall forward is your wife, but if perchance you think she would just smile and let you fall, then use someone else. Disclosure: I am only a nobody in pajamas, not a physical therapist.
Hi John, what’s up with you and your wife getting baptized at the local Baptist church (per your website)? Congrats! Surely there must be a story there…
I agree that legalizing “gay marriage” was the beginning of the end of our society. But keep in mind, not one state voted in favor of it, not even liberal California. It was foisted on us by the corrupt SCOTUS. Thousands of years of tradition thrown out the window. For what?
That math problem is easy
Let’s assume one pile holds numbers
100-150, the other 150-200
112+113 = 225 a perfect square
C’mon man! Derb has made his areligious preference known for a long time. Besides, despite Derb’s hostility to the Roman Catholic Church if he ever decides to become a Christian he will definitely join to the church founded by Jesus Christ and whose members in the Church Triumphant include: Ss. Peter and Paul, Ss. Augustine and Aquinas, Messrs. G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and Alfred Duggan, … Certainly not a church founded by an English separatist in Amsterdam 400 years ago and which counted as its members: Jerry Falwell, MLK, Bill Clinton and the majority of televangelists.
When the white majority allowed Jews to institute minority-elite rule, the result has been more minorities making outrageous demands on majorities. Jews > Goyim. Blacks > Whites. Homos > Straights. Trannies > Women. Illegals > Citizens. Insane > Sane. But the first template for the minority-elite supremacism goes back to whites giving Jews carte blanche to do as they please. If you give a crook a blank check, what do you think he will do?
It’s gotten to the point where the only choices are between Tyranny of the Normal vs Tyranny of the Abnormal.
The pile that has 112 does not necessarily also have 113.
You need to show that one of the 2 piles would always have 2 numbers whose sum is a perfect square on any shuffle.
And the range is the more general [n, 2n] – with n >= 100. Perfect squares become more sparse as n increases. You need to show the point holds for any n >= 100.
I did that in my post but need to explain it better (the 2^2 = 4 bit in my post)
‘State-sanctioned invasion’?
It’s about time we stopped calling this an ‘invasion’. Invasion is when your side cannot stop the conquest by the other side. Invasion is when resistance fails to keep out the foreign forces.
But the US and the West in general have more than enough resources and power to keep out foreign mobs and masses. Why don’t they? Because the ruling elites of both US and EU(along with Canada and Australia) are owned by Jewish Masters who actively RECRUIT foreign non-white masses to use against whites in the game of divide-and-rule ‘diversity’ strategy.
When an ‘invasion’ is welcomed and enabled by the ruling elites, it is RECRUITMENT. When we call it ‘invasion’, we place most blame on foreigners breaching the barriers. But they can easily cross the borders and enter only because the ruling elites of the US and EU do as ordered by their Jewish Supremacist masters.
The example of Hungary is proof that the ‘invasion’ can be stopped. Nations far weaker and poorer than the US have effectively halted illegal immigration. US and EU constitute the most powerful bloc in the world. They can invade and destroy just about any nation.
So, why can’t they stop the ‘invasion’ of Third World nobodies? It’s not that they cannot but that they will not because they are hellbent on RECRUITING foreign mobs to overwhelm the power of the native white masses who are no longer represented by their elites utterly obeisant to Jewish Power.
If we call it ‘recruitment’ than ‘invasion’, we can properly fix the blame on Jews and their cuck-puppet elites than on the hapless masses who naturally want to move from poor countries to richer ones.
When someone removes the roof on your house and rain pours in, do you blame the rain or the jerk who removed the roof? When rats and other pests enter your house through holes in the wall made by someone, do you blame the pests or the a**hole responsible for the holes?
The real reason for mass illegal migration to the West has less to do with the migrants than with the Jewish elites(and their cuck puppets) who encourage and exploit the Great Replacement’. It is Recruitment than Invasion.
Me go pee-pee in your Coke.
So Solly in advance.
It’s not obvious on a general level although it is easy but tedious to do for any specific case. The problem is being able to turn that into a general proof. If one wants to look at the case of n = 100 then the range of possible sums of numbers between 100 and 200 runs from 201 to 399. If we look at the perfect squares in this range they are 225, 256, 289, 324, and 361. So you wish to show that any partition of the set {100, 101, … , 199, 200} into two disjoint subsets will lead to one of the subsets having a pair which adds up to at least one of these five numbers. You may start with Class A and assume that this contains 100 as a member. Then this will determine things which must belong to Class B which does not contain 100.
The obvious first things to notice would be that Class B must contain 125, 156 and 189. If any one of these elements belongs to Class A then Class A has a pair which sum to a perfect square. So thus far we have:
Class A = {100, …}
Class B = {125, 156, 189. …}
For both there is more to be determined, but it can be done in a tedious but simple way when the numbers are fixed like this. It’s not clear how a general proof could be made. The thing is that there is a specific set of pairs which one tries to avoid, while showing that it can’t be avoided entirely. This would consist of:
(100,125), (101, 124), … (112, 113)
(100, 156), (101, 155), … (127, 129)
(100, 189), (101, 188), … (144, 145)
(124, 200), (125, 199), … (161, 163)
(161, 200), (162, 199), … (180, 181)
These are all of the possible pairs in [100, 200] which add up to a perfect square. There are 144 such pairs. You wish to arrange a partition which avoids all of these pairs occurring anywhere. So the presence of 100 in Class A dictates the initial elements of Class B. But now these will dictate the elements of Class A in turn. If Class B has 125 then Class A must have 131, 164 and 199. Likewise Class B carrying 156 means Class A holds 133 and 168. As for 189 belonging to Class B we get that 135 and 172 are in Class A.
Hence:
Class A = {100, 131, 133, 135, 164, 168, 172, 199, …}
Class B = {125, 156, 189, …}
But we can keep expanding this by now using the elements of Class A to deduce what must belong to Class B. We see that the new expanded version becomes:
Class B = {117, 121, 123, 125, 152, 154, 156, 158, 162, 189, …}
Flipping it back we see that Class A has to have more elements as well:
Class A = {100, 102, 104, 108, 127, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 164, 168, 172, 199, …}
I won’t bother going through to the end but the point is that you will force everything into one of 2 groups and it will become clear that even then one of the groups still has a pair which adds to a perfect square. So this will give the result for the specific number of 100. But I’m not clear on how the general claim would be deduced.
Is it possible to arrange the cards so that, for each pair that sums to a square, one member is in one pile, and the other member is in the other pile?
The problem amounts to proving that such an arrangement is not possible.
ZeroHedge claims that the house price boom is driven by companies like Blackrock buying large amounts of property:
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/wealth-redistribution-blackrock-and-other-institutional-investors-buying-entire
It is part of the Great Reset: the WEF idea that by 2030, you won’t own anything and you’ll be happy. Specifically, you won’t own anything, but somebody else will, and you will rent your house from Blackrock. This arrangement may or may not make you happy, but it will make the clients and stockholders of Blackrock very happy indeed.
How can we be we sure that there was damage?
Most Chinese know that Tiananmen was the prototype Colour Revolution, organised by the Yanks to ‘..bring China down’. After weeks of patience by the Chinese authorities, the usual culmination in armed violence, as seen in Belgrade, Tbilisi, Kiev etc, by Taiwanese intelligence, triad gangsters from Hong Kong and others, broke out in the neighbouurhood of the Square, and was crushed, with a couple of hundred dupes as ‘collateral damage’. Meanwhile the Square itself was peacefully cleared in the early hours. Westerners don’t know that because they are moronic, ignorant and ruthlessly brainwashed by MSM vermin. You know, the sort of scum that still insist that Oswald was the lone assassin of JFK.
Instead of trying to avoid falling as you grow older, I suggest that you practice falling. You can practice side falls, back falls, and forward rolls. It’s great core exercise, toughens your bones to withstand impact, and trains your nerves and muscles to new instincts to fall the correct way.
If you fall correctly you will not break bones.
That story with the squatters doesn’t make much sense to me. How would they have gotten keys and alarm code? Who rented the property to the young couple? I suspect funny stuff on both sides.
I believe Derb was an Anglican before he became areligious.
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Religion/faithfaq.html
******
Umm…
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/FamilyAlbum/Huntington2017/page.html
Actually I wasn’t thinking that tediously about it. I had confused in my mind the [n, 2n] that we are dealing with with [0, n] while thinking about shifts in the squares to give a square in addition. And so the logic in my mind was incorrect.
Since n >= 100, the number of perfect squares in [n, 2n] >= 5
So there are at least 3 perfect squares in any cutting of the deck in half.
i.e. I was thinking about the highest perfect square shifted down (b^2 – x) minus the lowest perfect square shifted up (a^2 + y).
The addition of these two would be b^2 – (y-x) + a^2.
And then I confused in my mind [a, b] with the original [n, 2n] (thinking [a, b] to be [o, n] inclusive – but of course it is not)
So a clusterfuck of thinking on my part. But something like this might give an elegant solution – which eludes me, actually!
You’re typing carelessly. What is of interest is the squares within [2n + 1, 4n -1], not [n, 2n].
First mistake– this happened at home, so you can only sue yourself. Not even the equipment maker.
Yesterday, my mother-in-law tripped and fell over a piece of loose asphalt. Not at home, but in front of one of the biggest chain stores in the land. In the handicapped parking space.
We don’t know what she’s going to do– she’s proud of having “pulled her weight” even in the toughest times. Her less-fussy half-brother has been living off a settlement for decades.
The tradition Pliny describes is called damnatio memoriae, and was usually declared by the Senate to erase from history the names of men who had had betrayed the state or the Roman people. Your list omits the world’s champion statue vandals, fourth century Christians, operating in the demoralized remnant of the once mighty Roman Empire under the patronage of Constantine’s fanatic son Constantius II and his successors. By imperial decree and by mob violence, they vandalized centuries of secular and sacred artwork., desecrated and demolished ancient temples, cut down centuries-old trees in sacred groves. They destroyed hospitals, theaters, and universities, murdered priests, priestesses, professors and doctors. And of course they burned books everywhere, while constructing a wildly exaggerated fable of their alleged persecution by the people whose tolerant, pluralistic culture they were industriously dismantling. Ultimately they replaced civil authorities with clerics, abolished elections, and finally made it a capital crime to acknowledge the old patron deities of the lost empire.
From the metal of thousands of melted statues, Constantius issued a flood of wretched little bronze-lead coins, most inscribed, with supreme irony “the return of happy times”. They are the commonest coins of the ancient world, dozens on eBay any given day, hardly worth more than a few dollars in average condition. These pitiful slugs contrast so vividly with the artistically engraved heavy brasses and bronze coins of the pagan empire, and its abundant silver and gold pieces: a perfect metaphor for the disaster that overtook the western world.
The shuffling and cutting of the deck is a typical obfuscation of this kind of problems. I know that, I was close to these circles in my youth.
Basically, if I prove that there exist three distinct numbers a, b, c within the interval [n, 2n] such that a+b, b+c, c+a are perfect squares, the problem is over. No matter how the deck is cut, one of the halves would contain two of those numbers.
So, I’ll try to prove my assertion: that [n, 2n] contains such three distinct numbers.
If I say:
a+b=X*X, b+c=Y*Y, c+a=Z*Z
then
a=(Y*Y+Z*Z-X*X)/2, b=(X*X-Y*Y+Z*Z)/2, c=(X*X+Y*Y-Z*Z)/2
As noted by other commentators, X, Y, Z must be between sqrt(2n+1) and sqrt(4n-1). For n = 100 this comes to these choices: 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. The number 15, 16, 17 are not good (“a” would be too low), but X=17, Y=18, Z=19 are ok. They yield: a=126, b=163, c=198.
Note that this works even if n=99, so the condition n>= 100 is somehow arbitrary. However, there should be a lower limit for n under which no choice of an X, Y, Z would be possible.
Of course this is incomplete, as we need to prove the assertion for a general n. My hunch is that if we choose the largest 3 natural numbers between sqrt(2n+1) and sqrt(4n-1) (taking care that two of them be odd), they would do. Now it’s just algebraic manipulations and proving of inequalities, and I’m too old to have patience for that. However, as n grows, the range for X, Y, Z also grows, and there will be plenty to choose from.
The insanity never ends. Oops, the word “insanity” was just cancelled by the National Association of Inmates as a meaningless social construct. Asylum administrators raised fists n took a knee then declared they are trading places with the inmates to show their solidarity.
Corruption fer sure. Men now have equal rights to s*** d*** but whites don’t have equal rights to a job. DC must be run by pod people.
Either way it is mobilization of forces for a coming ethnic war in the US.
I think you DID prove it generally with this.
Call the largest even perfect square in [2n+1, 4n-1] Z.
Choose a,b,c such that:
2c = Z*Z + Y*Y – X*X
2b = Z*Z – Y*Y + X*X
2a = -Z*Z + Y*Y + X*X
Then
2(a+b) = X*X
2(a+c) = Y*Y
2(b+c) = Z*Z
where Y = Z-2 and X = Z-4.
Thanks, Anon. Not actually much of a story. We’d been attending services for over a year. It’s a warm & friendly congregation, eloquent pastor, & we found the church filling something in us previously un-filled. So we decided to take the plunge [sic].
(((Chinaman,))) where have you been, breh? My favorite hasbara troll is back after being MIA for awhile. How is the weather in Tel Aviv, my small hat friend? Missed you, breh. Since you left the (((trolls))) have been rather boring. “Ulster36,” “Corvinus” is really a bore, some troll named Bardon K-something,” etc. Hey Grasshopper, there is another (((troll)))) who pretends to be a Black Hebrew Israelite and has a habit of saying “Old Sport,” do you know the feller?
Glad to see you back (((Chinaman))), you spazzed out and left all burt hurt before. We luv ya, man.
Ghengis Kahn conquered Ireland?