The John Batchelor Show :: Schedules: January 2011 Archives

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Monday 31 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 31, 2011 2:52 PM | No Comments

Co-host: John Avlon, CNN and The Daily Beast

Monday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Thaddeus McCotter, (MI-11), in re:

Monday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): John Loftus, Esq, in re: Julian Assange, who talks and talks and talks, while Mssrs Loftus and Batchelor are weary of lisening and listening and listening. Summer of 2010, Assange wore a dress to escape the press; 20008 State Dept cable about a youth activist planning a revolution? Gamal Mubarak ("Jimmy") went to a US political officer sauying he was nervous abt succeeding his father, wanted Tantawi (Min Def) and Suleiman (Intell) fired; when WikiLeaks leaked the cable reporting that conversation, Mubarak closed the Net, had no choice but to hire Suleiman as VP. Meanwhile, little Julian is on his way to prosecution in Sweden for sexual misconduct; and US Justice and US Army know that Manning needs to be convicted first of lesser counts, then encouraged ("Wanna do 60 years?") to rat on Assange.

Monday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Michael Giglio, Newsweek, in re: Centerpiece of events in Africa is social media. Mike has two relevant websites: April 6 Movement and Mysterious Anonymous. April 6 coordinated via Facebook for years; their call for demo tomorrow is credible. Protestors know that the group is authentic (not a false flag op) and knows what it's doing. Conference on best practices in use of social media attended by the "youth activist planning a revolution." This fellow thinks that social media have already fulfilled their role; now, it;s a matter of getting people in the streets. April 6 is not US-sponsored at all; individuals from London, Sri Lanka, Burma involved. Also 2009 conference in Mexico City. A blogger beaten to death in Alexandria last summer, began as a campaign against police brutality. He stays anonymous because he thinks this needs to be a pure movement and he wants no personal fame. JB: Elements in Egyptian opposition have reason to say that they represent youth. MG: Nothing here suggests that he represents Ikhwan or any other such group. El Shaheed does surveys. Thinks "they" are trying to track him, but he's a pretty tech-savvy guy. Has 400K followers. JB: If you don't have a plan, it's one-day event. JA: Change is not a plan. JB: These young men are planning terror: the fall of Cairo without a plan. That's a nightmare.

Monday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time): Wahid Monawar, former permanent representative of Afghanistan to the UN in Vienna; currently an associate of Zurich Partners; in re: bank robber in Kabul - almost a billion dollars - and nobody notices. Eight hundred million dollars are gone. "Losses at Afghan Bank Could Be $900 mil." Mahmoud Karzai is a shareholder; where'd he get the money originally to get in to the bank? Illicit practices. Most of the bank's investments were in Dubai, where the market crashed below the floor. Generally, in shady investments. The 800 mil came from deposits, savings of citizens. Dubai is the only place in the world where they have half-built buildings with hot and cold roaches running from the taps. Best place for laundering. Hassim Faheen another shareholder, brother of a former defense minister: Hamid Karzai fired him then brought him back, both to get additional votes and to get some of his money. JA: Probably US money to begin with; now they've lost it and ask us to bail them out. US accounting house: Deloitte Touche. One of the investors, the kleptocracy, is a famous poker player. AMb Ikenberry cabled to State, which cabled back, :Hush@! We can't stand ay more scandals!" Now H Karzai wants Ikenberry recalled. Deloitte did nada. Next: no bailout from the US; bank will fail.

Monday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Eliot Engel (NY-17), in re: Iranium, the film.

Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood: a terrorist, fascist organization that's been brutalized by the Egyptian government. ElBaradei has just been telling Christiane Amanpour that Ikhwan is a bunch of peaceful guys. Quite parallel to what happened in Iran in 1979, where Khomeini was called by France, many others, a nice guy; Andy Young notoriously called him "a kind of saint." Ikwan is no looking for a democratic government; rather, a foothold from which to take over and administer a rule of sharia and totalitarianism. "One man, one vote, one time," vide, Hamas in Gaza (Hamas IS the Ikhwan, being a direct offshoot of it).

The mendacious stooge of Iran, Mohamed ElBaradei, on the Ikhwan: ". . . this is total bogus that the Moslem Brotherhood are religiously conservative . . . they are no way extremists, they are no way using violence . . . you have to include them like the evangelicals in the US, like the Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem . . . ".

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"Jamaat-i-Islami and other fundamentalist movements characterize Islam as deen - a comprehensive way of life which covers the entire spectrum of human activity, be it individual, social, economic or political - while the conservative ulama confine Islam to the five pillars"

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Monday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Andrew Bostom, Assoc Prof Medicine, Brown University Medical School, in re: Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood. Tactical differences

between Ikhwan - operate primarily via propaganda, disavows violence except when it's likely to succeed - and the violent movements that evolved therefrom, e.g., al Qaeda.

In a survey of 1000 Egyptian Muslims, 67% of those desired an outcome, "To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or caliphate." Seventy-four per cent of this Muslim sample approved the proposition, "To require a strict application of shari'a law in every Islamic country." This is the context that explains why the Muslim Brotherhood is so popular in Egypt. The 1928 charter of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood states, "Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its Constitution; jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes." Hamas is a self-avowed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as proclaimed in its charter (article 2), "The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times." Finally, Sayyid Qutb was no more radical in his sacralized Jew-hatred than was the late Grand Imam of Egypt from 1996-2010, Sheikh Tantawi, who produced a 700-page work identifying and celebrating the most virulent motifs of Jew hatred in the Koran, hadith, and sira, Islam's sacred canon.

Ikwan's taking over Egypt is poison, but inevitable.

Monday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Col W Patrick Lang, former head of DIA Middle East analysis and operations, in re: Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the previously banned al-Nahda party, returns to his native Tunisia after 22 years in exile. US Senate has sent a special ambassador to Cairo: to shepherd Mubarak out, or keep him in government? Not sure of assignment, but the ambassador has a perfect disposition and has the friendship of Pres Mubarak; probably to help him on to greener pastures. In 1952, King Farouk was deposed by young officers; they and the intelligence apparatus constitute the government. Best case: the president would resign and depart; go to the Speaker of the National Assembly as interim president (required by the Egyptian constitution). I September, revision of document,s and an open election in which everyone could compete. JB: ElBaradei has been saying on TV that Ikhwan Muslimeen are not Islamists. PL: Well established; they and al Qaeda are enemies in how Islam should be viewed. Many varieties of Islam are practiced in Egypt, incl Sufis. All need to be weighed and factored in. The worst-possible outcome:yes, parallels between Egypt today and Iran in 1979. If this goes on long enough, many of the Muslim groups may begin to coalesce, which will countervail the secular populace. Most realistic scenario is closer to the best case. This does not solve Egypt's problem: the economy of the country doesn't contain enough resources to create enough wealth for the population. Riyadh: most worried about Mubarak, who's been a good friend to the US, is being abandoned; Saudis starting to expect the same for them from Washington. Saudi Kingdom has co-opted the populace with many benefits, will probably stay as long as the ulama (religious scholars class) doesn't turn against them.

Monday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): John Avlon, in re: Florida legal decision that Obamacare is illegal in its requirement for citizens to buy insurance. "Difficult to imagine that country that began [in opposition to British East India's monopoly in tea]" would require citizens to buy insurance; and the entire bill is now null and void. He used the analogy of a watch: if you take out one piece, the whole thing doesn't work.

Monday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): John Bolton, AEI, in re: Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood: a terrorist, fascist organization that's been brutalized by the Egyptian government. We have a history as a country of making bad situations worse. Our interventions often take friendly authoritarian regimes and turn them into unfriendly authoritarian regimes. In Egypt, can have catastrophic outcome for US national security interests. Best now: say as little as possible, evacuate Americans as needed, work behind he scenes to see what's really going on. The TV cameras are not catching the real struggle and out knowledge of these events is painfully inadequate. When ElBaradei was head of IAEA, he was overtly pro-Iran, surreptitiously altered reports, tried to stop Security Council action on sanctions, did hostile free-lance diplomacy and was repudiated by his successor.

Monday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ, in re: Venezuela; Chavismo.

Monday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): David H. Grinspoon, funkyscience.net‬ and Denver Museum of Nature and Science, in re: Enceladus (evidence is mounting that Saturn's moon Enceladus harbors a bubbly subterranean ocean where conditions might be friendly to life), then

Titan, then come back in to the inner system to touch on credible Mars organics, and a moment for the Moon and its reported liquid core. Geysers of ice shooting out from the south pole - comparatively hot, 200 degrees below zero (minus 330 F, is 72 Kelvin). Radius of 153 mi, abt 150K mi from Saturn. Energy source is the gravitational effect - torquing its interior - on the subsurface of Enceladus.

Picture: Jets of steam and icy grains erupt from deep fractures in the south polar terrain of Enceladus, making this tiny body one of only four places in the solar system known to have geologic activity in the present day. This artist's conception includes astronauts for scale. Image: Ron Miller

Monday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Dennis Overbye, NYT, in re: Kepler release of data for new Earths

Monday/Tues 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Noam Cohen, NYT, Wikipedia written 85% by young men; why?

Monday/Tues 1220A (920 Pacific Time): Bayless Parsley, Stratfor, in re: Cairo

Monday/Tues 1235A (935P Pacific Time): Jonathan Weil, Bloomberg, in re: financial inquiry commission

Monday/Tues 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Saturday 29 Sunday 30 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 29, 2011 2:50 PM | No Comments

Saturday 29 January 2011

Mohamed Bouazizi: Tarek al-Tayyib Muhammad ibn Bouazizi (March 29, 1984 - January 4,

2011), known simply as Mohamed Bouazizi ( محمد البوعزيزي‎), was a Tunisian street vendor who burned himself to death on December 17, 2010, in protest of the confiscation of his wares and the humiliation that was inflicted on him by a female municipal official. This act became the catalyst for the 2010-2011 Tunisian uprising, sparking deadly demonstrations and riots throughout Tunisia in protest of social and political issues in the country. Anger and violence intensified following Bouazizi's death, leading then-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down after 23 years in power.

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Mohamed Bouazizi in bandages before he died

Guest-host: Simon Constable
Co-host: Amity Shlaes

Saturday 905P Eastern Time: John Bussey, WSJ, in re: Egypt. Internal security forces ceding space to the army in Egypt. Omar Suleiman, intelligence head and now suddenly VP, is considered too close to Mubarak to be favored for permanent head. Hosni Mubarak (pron: huh-zni) has been in place for thirty years. Saudis publicly made clear that they favored Mubarak - the announcement was aimed at their own internal population. Don't overestimate how much of this is due to twitter and Facebook; rather, is the result of many years' oppression. Internet, faxes, cell phones made it go faster. Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, kept mum till Friday, when they endorsed the destabilization in mosques, but otherwise are lying low. Mubarak was able to shut down cell phones and the Net in an hour, which merely amplified the public rage. Enormous unemployment, esp among male youth. Amity Shlaes quotes writer saying that foreign aid is a worse curse than oil on a developing economy.

Saturday 920P Eastern Time: Paul Rivoche, rocketfiction.com, cartoonist for The Forgotten Man, in re: graphic representation of Amity Shlaes's book on the history of Great Depression. Computer drawings, panel by panel. Herbert Hoover huffing and puffing in gym shorts and T-shirt. Making economics accessible to all, in all languages.
Saturday 935P Eastern Time: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com in re: Apple in China. Thirty Chinese NGOs issued a report on environment and pollution. Apple, alone, stiffed them in responses; refused to reply at all. Uses hexane, a neurotoxin that cleans excellently and disabled perhaps fifty workers, many more fell ill. Apple subcontracts out its work and so claims it's innocent. Through Foxconn, alone, it probably uses a million workers; all together, perhaps several million. Apple puts financial pressure on its subcontractors, which causes the latter to cut corners. Speculate that trace elements left on products when they arrive to buyer are probably not significant. China has wholly inadequate worker-protection laws. Foxconn had to attach safety nets under dormitory windows to prevent employees from committing suicide by jumping out the window. Will move its mfrg from Shenzen to an inland site where people will work for less and not complain. Only if we as consumers put pressure on mfrs, and call Cupertino to say that we'll pay a few extra dollars in order to protect the workers (vide: Nike). Workers need the right to collective bargaining, to speak out. China's authoritarian system doesn't permit that; misgovernance.

Hexane in China: At issue is the cleaner the workers were forced to use, n-hexane, instead of the normal alcohol cleaner. N-hexane can cause nerve damage and paralysis. "Dozens of Wintek workers claim in a new lawsuit that they were poisoned by a chemical called n-hexane while cleaning glass screens of Apple's iPhone in a Chinese factory."

Saturday 950P Eastern Time: John Taylor, Hoover, in re: The Taylor Rule - an increase in inflation of 1% means that interest rate should go up 1.5%. Had Greenspan, et al., followed this, the housing bust probably would have been avoided. John Taylor is the shadow Fed right now - - and is quite critical of QE2 (printing money to jump-start the economy) - the Fed's purchase of hundreds of billions of US securities/Treasurys. Distinction between following rules and following one's discretion (i.e., educated whim). Rules-based behavior is stabler. Larry Kudlow says Egyptian food prices are so high because of Fed's policies: hard to prove. QE raises the risk of real inflation.

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In economics, a Taylor rule is a monetary-policy rule that stipulates how much the central bank would or should change the nominal interest rate in response to divergences of actual inflation rates from target inflation rates and of actual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from potential GDP.
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Saturday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): John Decker, Reuters TV, in re: Egypt; and State of the Union. More than a hundred protestors have been killed, VP Biden said that Mubarak wasn't a dictator. Long and troubled relationship with lots of destruction in t. This administration has had lots of trouble formulating a response to the protests. No elections in Egypt for thirty years. Intl aid carries with it a veiled threat; this administration may not be prepared to carry it out. Elections scheduled for September, Mubarak may not run.
Saturday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Financial roundtable: Alix Steel, TheStreet.com TV; Joe Brusuelas, Bloomberg senior economic analyst, in re: troubles in Egypt raise prices for gold. Concern that the Suez canal and a nearby pipeline would be disrupted - all only on fear, investors buying up oil. Would a new regime want to nationalize oil production. We're now producing more than we were before the crisis; expanded 3.2% based on pent-up consumer demand. As the price of oil increases, our economy can work with up to $100/Bbl; at $130, problems. Economies tend to grow faster in the early part of a recovery (which we've passed). Should be roughly 2.9% - but with our structural problems, need closer to 3 to 3.9% We need to admit that we have a structural problem - the system doesn't work; there's a mismatch between where the jobs were lost and what may be coming back online. Solution: not cut payroll taxes for consumers but employer; need training programs for employees.
Saturday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Matt Baglio, author, The Rite, in re: the newly opening movie, The Rite. Met an American priest: he'd been an enbalmer before he became a priest; had never seen an exorcism; travelled to Rome to learn to become an exorcist. I was raised Catholic but didn't much believe in such things as exorcism. Had lots of preconceptions. Journey: what is it, what's a demon, what's involved? The Church is sophisticated, requires psychological/psychiatric work before considering prayer and exorcism.

Saturday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Matt Kaminiski, WSJ, in re: Egypt, what it means.

Saturday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Bill Roggio, Long War Journal, in re: Terror, al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt. Jailbreak in Egypt at 3AM local time. People argue that calling the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization is wrong; but the Brotherhood when it wins will implement sharia and there'll be no more elections; it's a few steps away from al Qaeda. Mubarak crushed all legitimate dissent. Iranian ayatollahs claim to be progenitors of Arab unrest, and will be pleased with Egyptian regime change. Pres Bush was more vocal than is Pres Obama in calling for democracy in the Middle East, but in overall foreign policy there's little change from administration to administration. An absence of intl cooperation in opposing terrorists leads to weakened intell and operations.

Left: photo of Muslim Nazi soldiers praying, 1942

Saturday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Lou Ann Hammond, DrivingTheNation.com, in re: GM and Toyota
Saturday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secrets, part I
Saturday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secrets, part II. For four critical years, we had two CIAs: one was hunting Nazis; the other, hidden in the State department, was recruiting them. We wound up with British intell agents, riddled with Nazi war criminals. AmComLib awarded small red flags for passports of these people; Customs officer entered"ii," as in "intelligence interest." Byelorussians were sent mostly to a town in New Jersey, with a German Iron Cross behind the church, and their own Nazi cemetery.

Saturday/Sun 1205A (905 Pacific Time): John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secrets, part III. "In heaven, Allah; on Earth, Hitler."

Saturday/Sun 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): Michael Ledeen, FDD, in re: Egypt
Saturday/Sun 1235A: (935P Pacific Time):   Ina Parker, books maven; and Gloria Feldt, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Changes the Way We Think About Power.
Saturday/Sun 1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Buchenwald, April, 1945. The prisoner insecond tier with the post to 'his' left (seventh prisoner from the left) is Elie Wiesel

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Sunday 30 January 2011

Sunday 905P Eastern Time: Jodi Schneider, Bloomber tax editor, and Mona Charen, NRO, in re: POTUS in SOTU not anticipating demonstrations in the ummah: did he know and not say? Did he not know? Also: US economy.
Sunday 920P Eastern Time: continued. POTUS's "flaw" in the Obamacare act: Medical malpractice provisions were to require a small business to file a form any time it spent $600 or more; intended to save $17bil over ten years. Camel's nose in the tent?
Sunday 935P Eastern Time: Tony Dolan, chief speecchwriter for Ronald Reagan, in re: Reagan's 100th birthday celebration begins Feb 6
Sunday 950P Eastern Time: Aaron Klein, WABC, in re: reports from Egypt that tanks and military moving back to the Sinai/Gaza border, that Hamas is refusing to comment on the troubles in Cairo; that Israel most fretful of breakdown in peace treaty if Mubarak departs. The corrupt ElBaradei stands in a main Cairene plaza and claims to speak for Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood). has long been a champion of the organization; reconfirmed once again last week as he spoke with Der Spiegel: "Ikhwan hasn't committed any violent cat in five decades" - not; it generated Hamas and other groups. Muhammad Badi, new head of Ikhwan, spoke publicly of how to defeat the US Egyptian source; Egypt has now deployed tanks to the Gaza border, with the assent of Netanyahu. "Something very big ["unprecedented"] smuggled inside the Gaza Strip -- by Bedouin, who took advantage of the chaos. Dr al Zahar - maybe not in Gaza; had a different ring on his telephone - declined to make a statement on the Egyptian situation. It's known that people have been moved in in the past, so it seems to be an object. AK spoke with a senior Egyptian official: suspects that elements in the uprising are being coordinated by US State Department, that the White house is coordinating with ElBaradei. Egypt now has a larger ground force and navy than Israel, and a more advanced air force. Israel is highly nervous; also baffled by the Obama administration's lack of response to the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt. IDF has been on alert for weeks on the Lebanese border; now also the Egyptian order.

photo: The Gaza border

Sunday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): John Avlon, CNN and The Daily Beast, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re: last last night near Dupont Circle, farewell party for David Axelrod: A-list guests, all the electronic media were there with the president - as Cairo burned. No clear message from White House anent Mubarak. Secy Clinton was on all five Sunday TV talk shows. US policy is flying by the seat of its pants. JPA: the more access you have, the more information you can get, which makes you a better journalist; SZ and JB: not attend.

Sunday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): continued

photo: Pres Ali Abdullah Saleh (right) of Yemen

Sunday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Col Patrick Lang, Sic semper tyrannis blog, formerly head of Middle East functions at DIA, and Larry Johnson, No Quarter blog, in re: PL: Looks like Mubarak offering up various people to propitiate the populace and the US; if none is accepted, the military will give him a little shove and he'll leave, National Assembly will appoint a president pro tem till upcoming elections. LJ: Egypt will be pragmatic. If Mubarak goes, we face dangerous times. PL: we've been working with the Egyptian armed forces for twenty-five years, highly-developed relationships. If politics fail, US funding will diminish or cease, which would spell the end of the Egyptian armed forces. A general disintegration of Middle East security arrangements could lead to widespread war. LJ: Egyptian police have been making sure that the tourist industry, a vital part of the economy, functioned smoothly. PL: ISlam is a seamless garment - God is unified, and so is the rest of life. Ikhwan were driven underground by Mubarak; al Q and Ikhwan are enemies. Many Sufi groups in Egypt having professional members. LJ: ElBaradei went to main square today - didn't even have a speaker system, is clueless and in way over his head. PL: Situation today in Egypt is parallel to Iran in 1979. Shah appointed his last PM; street throngs threw the shah out, then Islamist threw everyone else in a ditch and took over. best way is to bring in people who were not flunkies of Mubarak - but a lot of people in the USA don't seem to want to do that.

Sunday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): continued. WH changes its positions. PL: Iran, First Gulf War - typical warning problem for a bog government; gradually, over time, a unified position enters their minds. At first, they didn't think it was serious; now they know it is. Appear to want to remove Mubarak and break as little crockery as possible. LJ: This is so serious; they would have been well advised to take the advice of Richard Haas; what POTUS did last night was delegitimize Hosni Mubarak; puts is in a no-win situation. PL: Even if they get to this new government, it doesn't solve the problem of the people in the streets, which is that the economy is no good; country doesn't have the resources to make the economic product that much bigger., so we'll go through this cycle again. Saudi arabia is a family-run business. The Saudi upper classes - the family and hangers-on - are concerned that once again the US is walking away from its faithful ally and perhaps they'll be next.

Sunday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang, Forbes.com in re: LangLang, pianist who in the White House played two agitprop song extolling the virtues of Chinese brutality in the Korean War, has been blithering for days about how innocent it was. Slap in the face of the Americans and Pres Obama - and he doesn't even acknowledge it. Chinese leaders are now become so arrogant they make strategic mistakes. Meanwhile, they're terrified of any fall-off in GDP, since the security of the Party depends on national prosperity. This is much of the explanation why they dumped goods on the international market and broke trade regs by illegally supporting industries. Chinese economy needs to grow with more internal consumption, but it's moving the wrong direction. Depending on exports, slowing because of world economy, and they depend on cheap money flooded into the domestic economy: heading to a crash, and the current lot, short-termers, is just trying to keep the game going for another year or two. Not enough money in the whole world to bail China out. No plan but a plane ticket out of China.
Sunday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: ElBaradei posits himself as he leader of the opposition - and is very close to Teheran. Mubarak spent the day with his military. Police have decided to return to the streets; all these are short-term solutions. Brotherhood very canny, behind the scenes - and they do not wear beards. The people are calling "Tunis is the answer" to avoid the standard, "Allah is the answer" and so upset the West. Widely reported that ElBaradei got $7mil from Iran to run against Mubarak. His reports from the IAEA were in accurate and repudiated by his successor. He's made many anti-Western statements.  PA's foreknowledge of the Gaza war? Lebanese are distraught at US abandonment of Hariri.
Sunday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): continued. The new Lebanese PM, having very close ties to the Assad family, is the 374th richest man in the world. All the events of the last weeks are interrelated. Lebanon : a great deal of sentiment that the West has abandoned them, throwing in the towel to Hezbollah. Arms widely distributed; concern lest a civil war break out. Demos today anent economic conditions. President called for a two-day consultation; Hariri declines. Symbolic March of the 300. Syria playing carefully, not being out front. Saudi king, recuperating on Morocco, called Mubarak to endorse him Riyadh feels the threats of Cairo and Yemen. Demos in Eastern Saudi opposing govt's mishandling of infrastructure during major floods. ElBaradei poses as a secularist, but his close associations with Muslim Brotherhood and the Twelvers in Iran suggest that's not accurare. Hamas IS the Muslim Brothers, show what the Brothers will be if they take over. Abbas fighting al Jazeera leaks. Hamas's border with Egypt is more or less open; much smuggling. Five police reported killed; Bedouin running freely in the Sinai; bedlam. Two-way street between Hamas and Egypt. Gamal Mubarak in exile in London. Tantawi and Suleiman on which to build the new regime. Two dozen private jets left Egypt today for the Gulf as the chaos increases. Islamists calling Suleiman and agent of the US. Potential impact is enormous. Even Chavez today attacked the US over Egypt, during a huge military explosion where 10,000 people had to run out of their homes. ten executions in Iran today: brutally assuring that no Tunisia-style political opposition arrises in Teheran
Sunday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Nanosail D (one arc-second). Light from a star puts pressure on objects; ergo, solar sails. A free power source within a solar system. Also: Icarus (Japanese) working its way toward Venus. Himalayan glaciers are not melting at an unprecedented rate: half of htem are expanding; vide Nature Magazine
Sunday/Mon 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Mike Giglio, Newsweek International, in re:
Sunday/Mon 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): Reza Khalili, author, A Time to Betray,
Sunday/Mon 1235A: (935P Pacific Time): Arif Rafiq, Pakistan Policy blog, in re: the mystery of Raymond David shooting to death two young Pakistanis with a Glock 17.
Sunday/Mon 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt. .

Friday 28 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 28, 2011 1:41 PM | No Comments

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Ummah on fire: Egyptian demonstation

Friday 905P Eastern Time: Joseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg senior economics analyst, in re: trouble in Cairo, possible oil price increase. Contraction in inventory restocking post-recession: restocking brought up GDP till it stopped. technically, the recovery has turned to expansion; realistically, growing at 3% won't increase the number of jobs that we need. Also, strongest post-recovery growth is early in the cycle. Investing in energy (POTUS spoke of in SOTU) will not increase the number of jobs. Education: real problems here; for any serious reforms , payoff will be years off. Infrastructure: we've lost 2.1 mil construction jobs; president has created a quarter-mil temporary construction jobs at $166,000 per job. In Egypt and the ummah, cost increases in food and fuel: countries that are commodity-rich and can subsidize the prices will get over in the short term; Egypt, Tunisia, Zimbabwe and poor countries cannot afford the increases.
Friday 920P Eastern Time: Sebastian Gorka, FDD, in re: In Egypt, the Moslem Brotherhood is seeing its wishes to come to fruition for the first time since 1928. Ikhwan has used religion to cloak its political acts in sophisticated ways - fascist politics and religiously reactionary. Excellent at information dissemination. Brilliant at using the intangible - exploiting religious meetings, using influence from overseas; will make it almost impossible for Mubarak to survive. Egypt has enjoyed the highest level of US financial support until September 11; in the UN, it supports the US less than Cuba does. Will the current change be positive for the United States? Mubarak says he's staying; the army is at his side.
Friday 935P Eastern Time: .Mark Reuss, president, General Motors North America; LouAnn Hammond, Driving the Nation.com, in re: GM's recovery; as we become more self-sufficient, the last thing we want to do is take money we don't need. The funds we were going to use from the Department of Energy is not necessary; we can stand on our own feet; it's an integrity issue. We're building plants to manufacture two models; a lake-oriented facility originally from the 1980-s that we've wholly refitted. Chevrolet Sonic, Buick Verano. New workers alongside workers we've brought back, and also restored the third shift in Flint. new team at Cadillac and a great dealer network; new coupe and wagon; will race next year.
Friday 950P Eastern Time: Rufus Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters; Bill Roggio, FDD; Arif Rafiq, ForeignPolicy.com, in re: Vary bad personal relations with Hamid Karzai; he contravened the constitution and appointed a special court; we should not be in a position where we have to mobilize the entire dip corp to attend a rump meeting. We do not have the same kind of leadership on the political side there that we have on the mil side in Gen Petraeus. Troop drawdown? See-sawing decisions by the US. Nothing in the State of the Union speech that was heartwarming to the US military. Afghans are thinking about a post-American Afghanistan.

Friday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: A lovely day in Cairo, tanks in the streets. The Ikhwan was preaching Friday prayers in advance of the massive demo. There are two Egyptian societies: the elites in their gated communities, with which the US deals; and the group that provides education, medical care and social services: the Muslim Brotherhood, which has become the new force of Egyptian identity. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928, produced the very first [post-colonialist] non-Western vision of identity in the Muslim world. Now, having survived the harshest suppression by Mubarak, its resurgence is phoenix-like. Egypt remains the most sophisticated center of Islamic thought and has created the only successful version of modern Islamic society -- quite unlike self-seeking government Islamism in Pakistan (and their Deobandi Red Mosques), or the harsh, un-Islamic puritanism of the Taliban; or the sclerotic, kleptocratic Shi'ism of Iran, or the nasty, two-faced fanaticism of Saudi Arabia.
I've often criticized the US government for failing to build connections with the Brotherhood; now, as in Iran in the late 1970s, we're on the wrong side. Of course, when Mubarak leaves this Earth, he'll be replaced by a man in a uniform. Yet the Egyptian army knows its limitations in this climate. If a struggle between the Brotherhood and the army can be deferred, there's a possibility for a sort of shared authority in governance -- or else its instabilities could lead to a new model. The army must understand that Mubarak's model cannot survive; Egypt itself requires a recalibration. Mubarak will need to leave after "a decent interval."
Friday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Bret Stephens, WSJ, in re: Keith Olbermann

Friday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): John Bolton, AEI, in re: Mubarak and Obama and the fires of Cairo
Friday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Alissa Leigh Cowan, NYT, in re: the houses of assignation of 1870

Artifacts unearthed in the United Arab Emirates dating back more than 100,000 years suggest that modern humans first left Africa much earlier than scientists originally believed.

An archaeological team led by Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tübingen in Germany now reports the discovery of stone tools 127,000 years old from a site called Jebel Faya in what is now the United Arab Emirates, just south of the entrance to the Persian Gulf. If the new tools were made by modern humans, as the researchers assert, then modern humans got out of Africa much earlier than believed. . . . a proposal advanced by Richard Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, that the emergence of some social or behavioral advantage -- like the perfection of the faculty for language -- was required for modern humans to overcome the surrounding human groups. Some kind of barrier had to be surmounted, it seems, or modern humans could have walked out of Africa 200,000 years ago.

Friday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Steve Moore, WSJ, in re: SOTU and "investments" instead of "spending"
Friday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): David Weidner, Marketwatch, in re: Financial Inquiry Commission report blames everybody
Friday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Nicholas Wade, NYT, in re: homo sapiens tools discovered in Arabia from 127,000 years ago.
Friday 1150P (850P Pacific Time):  Dennis Overbye, NYT, in re: earliest galaxy discovered by Hubble, 10 on the redshift.

Friday/Sat 1205A (905 Pacific Time):  Bill McGurn, WSJ, in re: Monuments to me by members of Congress
Friday/Sat  1220A (920 Pacific Time): Gretchen Morgenson, NYT, in re: US government pays lawyer bills of Fanne Mae officials being sued by US government
Friday/Sat  1235A (935P Pacific Time):  Richard Epstein, Hoover, in re: the SOTU, and is Obama a moderate?
Friday/Sat  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have peered further back in time than ever before, spotting a galaxy that formed less than 500 million years after the birth of our universe, making it the oldest and most distant ever seen.

Thursday 27 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 27, 2011 1:38 PM | No Comments

.

Cairo demonstration, 1942

.. .. ..

January 2011: In Egypt, protesters faced tear gas, water cannon and beatings from security forces on the streets of Cairo on Wednesday. Up to 1,200 people were arrested, including a number of journalists. Six people have reportedly been killed since Tuesday. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not criticize the Egyptian government, saying only that the country was stable and Egyptians had the right to protest, while urging all parties to avoid violence.

---Mostafa Omar, Egyptian-American activist and writer; courtesy democracynow.org

Co-host: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents

Thursday 905P Eastern Time: Chris Robling, Chicago, in re: Court decision to return Rahm Emanuel to the ballot: "What is the meaning of the phrase 'resided in' in the section of the Municipal Code requiringthat a candidate must have 'resided in the municipality at least oneyear next preceding the election' " (vide: Nineteenth Century Circuit law judge case: Smith v. People ex rel. Frisbie , 44 Ill. 16 [1867]) http://www.scribd.com/doc/47693837/Illinois-Supreme-Court-Decision-Rahm-Emanuel-Can-Run

Thursday 920P Eastern Time: David Drucker, Roll Call, in re: the advent of a Senatorial caucus ("An external arm of conservatives - Republicans and even Democrats - in which they can meet with Tea Partiers"). Robt Costa at National Review interviewed a leader of Tea Party Express. Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell agree to end secret holds. Harry Reid promised not to block amendments and Mitch McConnell promised not to filibuster so much. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/243308/utah-senate-primary-tea-party-vs-tea-party-robert-costa

Thursday 935P Eastern Time: Kamran Bokhari, Stratfor.com, in re: Jordan the the Cairo/Tunis problems. King Abdullah II and Queen Rania of Jordan. Palestinians integrated into the monarchical polity. Royal family manages competing interests within the Hashemite Kingdom. Protests are in keeping with the monarchy.
Thursday 950P Eastern Time: Aaron Klein, The Manchurian Candidate and WABC radio, in re: Cairo and troubles, Gamal Mubarak in London

Neda Agha Soltan: murdered by the Basij in the streets of Teheran on June 23, 2009, and long unremarked by the American president.

Thursday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: Mohamed Hussein Tantawi Soliman is a Field Marshal and the current Egyptian minister of defense and military production and commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces; seen as a possible contender for the Egyptian presidency.
Thursday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Dr. Robert Danin, Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; headed the Office of the Quartet Representative, with Tony Blair; in re: Palestine Papers and general analysis of events in Middle East. Events in Cairo on Friday (now) will be fateful: if the government comes down too hard it'll be booted out; if too softly, it'll get out of control.

Thursday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):
Thursday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Tom Harb, Secretary General of the World Council of the Cedars Revolution, in re: Lebanon, et al. The new PM nominee is one of the richest men in the world; is closer to Syria than Hezbollah. SDL, the Hariri investigation commission, will point to Hezbollah, shadowed closely by Damascus. Who planned the murder - Syria, which controlled Lebanon during the assassination, or Iran, which likely provided the logistics.

Thursday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Tarek Heggy, Egyptian liberal political thinker and

international petroleum strategist; in re: Egypt

Protesters in Sana, Yemen, waved Yemen's flag at a rally on Thursday. Many are calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down, but some opposition leaders seek less drastic change.

Thursday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Alex Traiman, director of the new film Iranium, a documentary about the Iranian nuclear threat. Banned, unbanned, rebanned, unbanned - in Canada. To be released on 8 February 2011 New York and in Washington in the Rayburn Office Building. From the incipient takeover by Khomeini to the present day: the profoundly anti-American ideology. Ahmadinejad has created a massive axis across the Muslim world extending to China and now to American borders. The 2009 demonstrators were desperately looking to America for support; Pres Obama sat silently, making clear to Iranians that the US approves the continuation of the mullahs. Militarization of the government of Iran, which now is close to having nuclear weapons with delivery systems to carry them around the region, to Europe, and elsewhere in the world.

Tomasz-Adam: night-shining clouds

Thursday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Robert Zimmerman, beyondtheblack.com, in re: Enceladus; night-shining clouds are getting brighter
Thursday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Sarah Lyall, NYT, in re: House of Lords filibustering

Thursday/Fri 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Pete Dupont, in re: Obamacare, SOTU, deficit

Thursday/Fri  1220A (920 Pacific Time): John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: al Jazeera Wiki-style leaks; Palestinian Papers
Thursday/Fri  1235A (935P Pacific Time):   Richard Epstein, Hoover, in re: Classical liberalism
Thursday/Fri  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 26, 2011 1:34 PM | No Comments

.

Sputnik 1, 1957

Co-host: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com

Wednesday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Mary Kissel, WSJ editorial, in re: SOTU and current politics; president's speech in Wisconsin
Wednesday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): continued
Wednesday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Tunku Varadarajan, Newsweek International and Hoover, in re: SOTU
Wednesday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time): Bill Whalen, Hoover, in re: anything in SOTU meant cash for California?

Wednesday 1005P Eastern (705P Pacific Time): Rodger Baker, VP Strategic Intelligence, Stratfor, in re: China; military and economic expansionism. China will find security reasons to defend its expanding interests.
Wednesday 1020P Eastern (720P Pacific Time): Jon van Dyke, University of Hawaii, in re: Law of the Sea and Chinese maritime expansionism
Wednesday 1035P Eastern  (735P Pacific Time): Kamran Bokhari, Stratfor, in re: Egypt
Wednesday 1050P Eastern (750P Pacific Time): Sewell Chan, NYT, in re: financial crisis commission report

Wednesday 1105P Eastern (805P Pacific Time): Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ, in re: candidate withdraws from Haitian election
Wednesday 1120P Eastern (820P Pacific Time): Charles Blahous, Hoover, in re: Social Security and the State of the Union speech
Wednesday 1135P Eastern  (835P Pacific Time): Carl Zimmer, NYT, in re: Nabakov's butterfly theory
Wednesday 1150P Eastern  (850P Pacific Time): James Taranto, WSJ, in re: the origin of the term, "Sputnik moment"

Wednesday/Thurs 1205A Eastern (905 Pacific Time): Gardiner Harris, NYT, in re: NHS starts a new pharmaceutical branch
Wednesday/Thurs  1220A Eastern (920 Pacific Time): Henry Miller, Hoover, in re: the unwise discontinuation of immunizations
Wednesday/Thurs  1235A Eastern (935P Pacific Time): Russell Roberts, Hoover, in re: cause of the 2008 housing crisis
Wednesday/Thurs  1250A  Eastern (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Tuesday 25 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 25, 2011 1:33 PM | 1 Comment

Egyptian police fire tear gas at demonstrators, who initially gathered in support of Tunis then turned against Mubarak.

State of the Union speech:
from 9 to 10:15 PM Eastern Standard Time

Tuesday 1015P (720P Pacific Time): Mary Kissel WSJ editorial, and Aaron Task, Yahoo Finance, in re: SOTU
Tuesday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Dan Henninger, WSJ, in re: SOTU
Tuesday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11) and Devin Nunes (CA-21), in re: SOTU

Chinese-occupied Mongolia: solar panel on yurt ("grr"in Mongolian)

Tuesday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Ben Zimmer, NYT, in re: language within SOTU. "Post-partisan, conciliatory; above the fray; togetherness." "Winning the future" - a book published by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s; Archibald MacLeish: "We who win this war will win the future."
Tuesday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: how China heard SOTU. White House staffer's disingenuous claim that it wasn't an insult for the buffoon Lang Lang to have played "My Homeland," which fetes the death of Americans in Korea. POTUS referred to solar panels without mentioning that China has sewn up the manufacture by using predatory trade practices. POTUS condemned tyrants, specifically in Tunisia, and neglected to speak of China, a country run by a thug elite, the Central Committee, that steals everything that can be siphoned off from the economy, greatly to the detriment of the Chinese people; or of Egypt, whose Army's chief of staff is even today in Washington reassuring POTUS that he'll keep the troops loyal to the very old and ill Hosni Mubarak. Human rights? Unhh . . . POTUS spoke of the South Korea free trade deal, but not a syllable on trade questions in China. Nothing on Tibet, Uyghurs, Chinese-occupied Mongolia, or the very current disaster in Lebanon.
Tuesday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: the 374th-richest man in the world is Lebanon's new prime minister, picked by Hezbollah in part to acquire telephone technology (how he made his money, along with some questionable activities) but primarily in order to boot out Saad Haririr from the prime ministership and refuse to accept the Hariri investigation's report, which shows that Hezbollah and Syria murdered Rafiq Hariri on 14 February 2005. In Egypt: demos in multiple cities, hundreds of thousands; began as support for event in Tunis; swiftly became anti-Mubarak - and not the Egyptian Brotherhood, but many young people who were inspired by Tunis. Watch Jordan, Algeria, others. Ramallah: the Palestinian Authority is now shaky because of the al Jazeera WikiLeaks: waved pix of Abbas, burnt pix of hte emir of Qatar, who authorized publication of the leaks. Thought it was he deed of Mahmoud Dahlan, who was purged from the PA some weeks ago, but turns out could be others. Also embarrassing to Netanyahu. Widespread damage, which is being fed on by Hamas. More executions in Iran, where two more dissidents were hanged today. No reference to the fact that Russia collaborates with Iran in matters, nary a word like "nuke." In the City of David, below the Temple Mont, up to a parking lt and underneath the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem, a water tunnel, that goes all the way to the Western Wall: exposed today by archaeologists, 2,000 years later. The state of the union is strong; Beirut, Cairo, and Tunis are burning.
Tuesday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: SOTU Sputnik moment. NASA tries ot become commercial (cash prizes to anyone who takes pix of nanosail-D. Kennedy Center in Florida (once Cape Canaveral) put out SPACE FOR RENT signs today.

Tuesday/Wed 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Mark Schroeder, Stratfor, in re: Côte d'Ivoire. ECOWAS trying to be intermediary between the truculent Gbagbo and the electoral winner, Uattara. The Obama administration has given the impression of supporting Uattara. The AU president (also Malawian president) met with both camps: "We need to have an African resolution." Uattara called for a voluntary cessation of export of cocoa beans.

Tuesday/Wed  1220A (920 Pacific Time): John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: the Palestine Papers (al Jazeera's School of WikiLeaks)
Tuesday/Wed  1235A (935P Pacific Time): Aaron Klein, The Manchurian President and WABC radio, in re: Cairo; secret meeting between Abbas and the UN. US sent messages saying it wouldn't oppose other countries unilaterally recognizing Palestine as a sovereign nation.
Tuesday/Wed  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt: Ann Marlowe, FDD, in re: Instead of promoting stability, Karzai has been creating chaos so he can solidify his rule (he becomes the problem in order to become the solution). He backed down on his earlier decision not to seat Parliament because of European pressure. The US was not much active; it was the UN and the Europeans. Possible that Mr. Karzai will bribe and threaten MPs once the Parliament is seated. He will likely use the threat of judicial oversight to intimidate MPs who oppose him: "I'll tell the judge to look at your election file" might work.

Chinese industry breaking WTO regulations. Probably not one of the manufacturers of solar panels that are being illegally subsidized by Chinese government funds, which has successfully put US factories out of business.

.

Monday 24 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 24, 2011 1:32 PM | No Comments

Russian massacres in Chechnya

Co-host: John Avlon, CNN and The Daily Beast

Monday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Paul Murphy, Allah's Angels, in re: Domodedovo airport bombing in Moscow today
Monday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): A O Scott, NYT, in re: preview of Oscar

nominations
Monday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time):   John F Burns, NYT, in re: political fall of Irish PM
Monday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time):   Bayless Parsley, Stratfor, in re: Tunisia

Monday 1005P (705P Pacific Time):   John Avlon, in re: news update

Monday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Chris Robling, Chicago, in re: Rahm Emanuel's mayoralty run being denied by a court ruling.

Monday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):   Stephen Cohen, The Victims Return, in re: Mosocow's major domestic airport, Domodedovo, hit by suicide bomb. Probably from or via the Chechen Emirate.
Monday 1050P (750P Pacific Time):   continued

Monday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):   Bill Roggio, FDD, and Arif Rafiq, ForeignPolicy.com, in re:
Monday 1120P (820P Pacific Time):   John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks & Stuxnet - Iceland, Sweden, China. iceland: someone left a computer next to Jonsdottir in order to bug the room; didn't quite work. Related to the Swedish server intercept? "Yes, Assange got a million documents from the Chinese cyber-warrior-hacker PLA."

Monday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Marc Morano, climatedepot.com, in re: end of the world according to Prof Chomsky, professor emeritus at MIT: the election of a GOP Congress amounts to a "death knell for the [human] species" (as published in The Nation). "If you don't fear carbon dioxide, you're a Nazi."

Language is defined as a "doubly articulated" system, in which signs are formed for objects and states and then combined syntactically in ways that determine how their meanings will be understood. Prof Chomsky's theory of generative grammar has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as universal grammar, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms." In this proposition, formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms.
Monday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): .Josh Kron, NYT, in re: Sudan

Monday/Tues 1205A (905 Pacific Time):   Miguel Helft, NYT, in re: Tim Cook, acting COO at Apple (currently CFO). Southerner originally from IBM;
Monday/Tues 1220A (920 Pacific Time):   Jed Babbin, RealClearPolitics.com, in re: SOTU
Monday/Tues 1235A (935P Pacific Time): Aaron Klein, Jerusalem, in re: Middle East report - Lebanon in a mess; Egyptian demonstration (80,000 people?) and succession; who leaked the Wiki documents to al Jazeera - Mohammed Dahlan ?

Monday/Tues 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt. NASA's nanosail: first solar sail on a crft circling our planet

Saturday 22 Sunday 23 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 22, 2011 1:30 PM | No Comments

Saturday 22 January 2011

Book show, postponed in response to the Tucson massacre

Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969

Saturday 905P Eastern Time:   Leigh Eric Schmidt, Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman, part 1

Saturday 920P Eastern Time:   Leigh Eric Schmidt, Heaven's Bride, part 2

Saturday 935P Eastern Time:   David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969, part 1

Saturday 950P Eastern Time:   David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Going Home to Glory, part 2

Saturday 1005P (705P Pacific Time):  Karl Gerth, As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Transforming Everything,  part 1

Saturday 1020P (720P Pacific Time):  Karl Gerth,

As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Transforming Everything,
part 2

Saturday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):   J. E. Lendon, Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins , part 1
Saturday 1050P (750P Pacific Time):    J. E. Lendon, Song of Wrath, part 2

Saturday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):   J. E. Lendon, Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins  part 3
Saturday 1120P (820P Pacific Time):   J. E. Lendon, Song of Wrath, part 4
Saturday 1135P (835P Pacific Time):   Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, Red Star over the Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy, part 1
Saturday 1150P (850P Pacific Time):   Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific, part 2

Saturday/Sun 1205A (905 Pacific Time):   Anthony Barbera, Jonah: In the Time of the Kings.

Saturday/Sun 1220A (920 Pacific Time):  Scott Hammond, Every Day Dad: The Guide to Becoming a Better Father.

Saturday/Sun 1235A (935P Pacific Time):  Roger Moorhouse, Berlin at War.

Saturday/Sun 1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Berlin at War

__________________________________________________________

Sunday 23 January 2011

Sunday  905P Eastern Time: Mary Kissel, WSJ editorial, Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, and Matt Gertken, Stratfor, in re: Chinese visit, where a Chinese pianist, Lingling, at the state dinner played a famous song celebrating the death of Americans; massive intentional insult to the American people. Also, Chinese governmental representatives in the US organized busses of student, at $75 a head plus all expenses, to appear in Washington and Chicago not only to welcome Hu Jintao but to drown out the expressions of other groups, who'd arrived to protest the malfeasance of the unelected Beijing thugocracy. ("On Hu's first day in Washington, 800 people were bused in from Philadelphia - about a three-hour drive away - to stand outside his hotel and welcome him, according to organisers of various groups.") Gordon Chang holds that that constitutes major interference in American affairs and the the US needs to deport a gaggle of the culpable embassy and consular staffs.
Sunday 920P Eastern Time: continued. Chinese commercial gang has bout 900+ rare earths mines; are in effect nationalizing them. China is developing multiple advanced systems; not yet challenging the US, but requires preparation, esp in the form of US collaborating closely with allies. This is a new period of Chinese aggression - harassing vessels in the ocean all around China, claiming islands from other states. Chinese grammar-school children are thoroughly trained to loathe the US. This visit slightly alleviated a few tensions from the past year - China made a few trade concessions and has pulled back its horns in North Korea - but no structural change.
Matt Gertken adds: Hu's visit brought temporary alleviation to strains in US ties ($45 billion in deals, pledges to address American economic and trade complaints, bringing Korean talks back online), but there were no structural changes, and deep disagreements persist (China will move slowly on reforms and not fulfill promises; will retain the ability to use North Korea as a lever against the US; and the US will not stop selling arms to Taiwan, so China will continue cutting off military dialogue with the US). US is growing ever more impatient with China's inability to meet international trade norms, and will eventually resort to punitive measures. US also cannot accept China's attempt to limit its access to the region militarily; this violates a strategic requirement for the US, which will resist it.
Sunday 935P Eastern Time: Jim McTague, Barron's, and James Taranto, WSJ, in re: SOTU; James gave the current score (Jets finally began to catch up)
Sunday 950P Eastern Time:   Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack,com, in re: California: rocket launches with secret payload http:// nyti.ms/emtuqm;

Nemesis star, stargrazer comets, NASA budget

Sunday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Jodi Schneider, and John Avlon, CNN and The Daily Beast, in re: SOYU, working together;; healthcare
Sunday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): continued
Sunday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):
Larry Johnson, No Quarter blog, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Record-Tribune, in re: Pittsburgh won. Eight degrees. Terrifying, pamati sandwiches (3" of Italian bread with meat, cheese, french fries, cole slaw). SOTU. Larry had predicted that the Steelers and Gang Green would win today.

Sunday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Arif Rafiq, ForeignPolicy.com, in re: more protests of drones, this time at Peshawar; Punjab Taliban the most ferocious.

Sunday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang and Joseph Sternberg, WSJ Asia, in re: Epoch Times writes about Langlang, pianist at State dinner, who at the White House played a song from a movie, Battle on Shangganling Mountain
,

that celebrates the death of Americans ("American jackals greeted by Chinese hunting knives"). White House duped. Chinese economy could perhaps become more consumer-oriented (although median income is >$4,300 PA), but that wouldn't suit the wishes of the Beijing potentates.

Sunday 1120P (820P Pacific Time):

Reza Kahlalil, author, A Time to Betray, in re: EU and UN talks with Iran nukes fail at Istanbul; no new date. Catherine Ashton, EU, whose door, telephone, and table remain ever open to Iran, seems blind to the obvious fact that Iran is stalling for time in order to weaponize its nuclear program. Stunning incompetence. Saed Jalili, new Iranian nuclear negotiator, is overtly rude to Ashton - won't even report to Teheran, insists on Iran's right to enrich uranium.

Sunday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:

Sunday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Wahid Monawar, in re: Karzai cuts a deal with Afghan Parliament -- or does he?

Sunday/Mon 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Jed Babbin, in re: short list, SecDef
Sunday/Mon 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): Sebastian Gorka, FDD, in re: Tunis and the soft jihad
Sunday/Mon 1235A: (935P Pacific Time): Aaron Klein, author, in re: Gaza, Ramallah, Beirut, troubles
Sunday/Mon 1250A: (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt

Friday 21 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 21, 2011 1:28 PM | No Comments

Friday 905P Eastern Time: Joseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg senior economic analyst, in re: Pres Obama visits New York to announce that he's appointing Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric CEO, to head his new outside panel of economic advisors. GE stock was $30, now is $19. What ho the country now? Also, Goldman cutting pay, still tops JPMorgan as Wall Street bonus season begins.

Friday 920P Eastern Time: Jeff Zeleny, NYT, in re: Obama moves to Chicago,

Friday 935P Eastern Time: Rufus Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters; Bill Roggio, LongWarJournal.org and FDD; Arif Rafiq, ForeignPolicy.com, in re: AfPakia. Protestors at Mirinshah, opposing drones killing civilians; probably not locally spontaneous, more likely orchestrated by Islamists under approval of Pakistani bureaucrats. Legislators vowed to open the new Parliament session as scheduled on Sunday, setting up a clash with President Hamid Karzai. Nine years after the murder of the American reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, a dozen of the militants involved in his murder remain at large. Suicide bombers launched a series of deadly assaults on Thursday against pilgrims marching toward a shrine sacred to Shiite Muslims, the police said. US soldier killed by Afghans.

Friday 950P Eastern Time: continued. WSJ: "Setbacks Plague U.S. Aid to Pakistan"

Friday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-review, in re: Keith Olbermann's contract ends immediately, tonight, under new Comcast owner.

Friday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: Julian Assange, the movie. Bradley Manning out of suicide watch. Elmer in trouble. Chinese PLA hackers in WikiLeaks?

Friday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): James L Buckley, author, Freedom at Risk, part I

Friday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): James L Buckley, author, Freedom at Risk, part II

Friday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Dan Henninger, WSJ, in re: Afghan and Iraq war: aid from US citizens

Friday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Sarah Lyall, NYT, in re: Cameron government reshapes national health

Friday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Pam Bellock, NYT, in re: wine cave in ancient Armenia

Friday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): David Weidner, Marketwatch, in re: Citi gives Vikram Pandit a raise

Friday/Sat 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Bret Stevens, WSJ, in re: Stuxnet will not end Iranian nukes

Friday/Sat 1220A (920 Pacific Time): Susan Ulliam, WSJ, in re: Raj Rahjaratnam and Danielle Chiesi, in re: seductress on the Street

Friday/Sat 1235A (935P Pacific Time): Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: Imperial Spain in the Seventeenth Century and imperial US in the Twenty-first Century.

Friday/Sat 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt. Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index, in re: Ronni Chasen case is not closed.

Thursday 20 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 20, 2011 1:13 PM | 1 Comment

Israeli Vulture

Spy Declared Innocent by Saudi Arabia

A vulture that was caught in Saudi Arabia last week and accused of spying for Israel's Mossad is to be released, a Saudi official said. Prince Bandar bin Saud Al Saud scoffed at the claims, as did much of the world when news came last week that the vulture tagged with a GPS tracker by Tel Aviv University had been caught in the kingdom and accused by the media and locals of partaking in a "Zionist plot." "We have taken delivery of this bird, but we will set it free again after we [have] verified its systems." The bird, identified as a Griffon vulture tagged R65, was called a bald eagle by Saud.

Co-host: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents

Thursday 905P Eastern Time: David Drucker, Roll Call, in re: Both Sen Kent Conrad (ND) and Sen Joe Lieberman (CT) will retire at the end of the 112th Congress. "Check your firearms at the door" at the Congressional entrance in the Nineteenth Century

Thursday 920P Eastern Time: John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks may have exploited music and photo networks to get data http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-20/wikileaks-may-have-exploited-music-photo-networks-to-get-classified-data.html

Thursday 935P Eastern Time: Dennis Berman, WSJ, in re: Apple holding huge amount of cash

Thursday 950P Eastern Time: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: Deng Hsaio-ping picked Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao to succeed Jiang; Hu, the soon-to-be-ex-unelected leader gained fame (notoriety) by suppressing Tibetans. China invaded and overwhelmed Tibet, to the continuing extreme distress of Tibetans; claims Taiwan; claims the South China Sea as far as Indonesia, a good chunk of Japan (incl Okinawa), has troops in North Korea and is eyeing Siberia. China is mad with expansionism.

Coptic children in Egypt celebrating Easter

Thursday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: SCIENCE INSIDER - Vulture Saudis Nabbed Was Third Israeli Bird Held Since 1975. The Middle East seethes with suspicion and conspiracy theories on all sides. So it's not surprising that getting busted by Arab authorities is an occupational hazard for birds tracked near Saudi borders.

Beirut tension: Saad Hariri's government fell last week, but Hariri going ahead to form a new government - to deliver the report on who killed Rafiq Hariri. Police dispelled a crowd on the West Bank with tear gas; a young woman who was not in the demonstration but was in hospital died at about the same time. (Note: no one in history has ever died from tear gas.) Medical results now show that she dies from an overdose of atropine. PA refused to give records or share the information. PA and Hamas accusing each other of stealing medicine that was supposed to go into Gaza - for a population today revealed to have received $1,000 per person in aid, the largest amount per capita in the world. Syria, Qatar and Turkey have given up on mediation between Hizbollah and the rest of the Lebanese polity. Emerging powers: Turkey. Qatar, and Iran. Arab leaders meeting in Cairo in a panic because of Tunis - Tunisia had he highest per-capita income in the region, twice Morocco's. They can see the whole region going on fire, with Iran holding the torch.

Photo: The very bright, highly educated and extremely competent Queen Rania of Jordan

Thursday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Asher Susser, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, in re: Jordan: the population is of two components - the original Jordanians and the Palestinians . The latter are middle-class, whereas the original people are suffering, are mostly government employees, and constitute the backbone of government support. Palestinians are highly prominent in the kingdom, to the dissatisfaction of Jordanians, and are taking a position on the right of return that's quite unsatisfactory to Jordanians. These want Palestinians to return to the West Back. For the last decade or so the rising powers of Iran and Turkey; in Lebanon, the fruition of Iranian regional clout (US has no say in this); the major players trying to work out a Lebanese settlement are Iran and Turkey. Other regional countries are in decline, as is the US, and as secularism long has been. Hard to imagine Prince Abdullah and Queen Rania fleeing to Riyadh; however, they have reason to worry about instability from the Jordanian Jordanians, who've got the short end of the stick economically.

Thursday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: Mubarak, sitting in his palace lazing, asks Suleiman, his intell chef, "What's that huge cloud of dust in the distance?" "It's your subjects marching on Jerusalem, m'lord." "Should we stop them?" "If we do, they'll march on us, sir." "Very well, replied Mubarak, and got another Coke.

A ceremony held on the weekend to raise the Palestinian Authority flag in Washington: brought to light harshly by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Also: the Marx Brothers in Teheran; Lavrov criticizes the sanctions. Stories on Stuxnet; Iran afraid to activate reactors on grounds that the worm may cause reactors to explode, Chernobyl-like. There are 350 companies fronting for Iran to buy illicit materials; big story in a Norwegian paper. "Wo benefits from the flight of Ben Ali, the screaming in Paris, the fear in the Magreb and Arab world" Iran. Not generated by Iran, but teheran benefits. One self-immolation in Tunis is blessed by imams; then in Algeria, Cairo - these are blessed, just as shahadis are, so it continues. ran announced today that it's bldg a new facility in Qum. Have taken over all publishers, a university executing one person every eight hours - that we know of. More aggressive externally, investing in Hizbollah in Africa, South America, elsewhere.

Vulture Saudis Nabbed Was Third Israeli Bird Held Since 1975. The Middle East seethes with suspicion and conspiracy theories on all sides. So it's not surprising that getting busted by Arab authorities is an occupational hazard for birds tracked near Saudi borders. Spy pelicans and spy vultures; spy sharks in the Red Sea; Sudan detained what it thought was an Egyptian spy vulture. Predecessors of today's drones.

Thursday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Charles Levinson, WSJ, Jerusalem, in re: Israel's domestic political situation; Israel vis-à-vis Iran. Barak Quits Israel's Labor Party (WSJ); Netanyahu Says Sanctions Haven't Stopped Iran (WSJ); Sanctions Slow Iran's Warhead Capability (WSJ).

Thursday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):

Mordechai Kedar, lecturer, former IDF milint; in re: Lebanon; general analysis on the recent events and the wider Middle East. The Lebanese govt will be operated by Hizballah and Nasrallah; all other activities make no difference. Lebanon is an island in the Middle East, surrounded by dictatorships. Created inthe 1940s to create a balance among hte Shiites, Sunni, Christians. Now Shiites constitute over half the population, have Iran supporting them with funds and thousands of missiles. Man in the street, esp unemployed millions in Egypt, Tunisia, elsewhere m no longer buy the notion that Israel is the central problem, used by regimes as a fig leaf to cover the real issue: unemployment. The Arab media, however, continue to blame Israel for everything and refuse to address human rights, political freedoms, the economy. Syria is an anomaly, and depends on the Golan Heights. "Mubarak every day does not get younger." Many Egyptians are convinced that when Mubarak approaches the end of his term in office will be the time to storm into the streets. ("We all pray for Mubarak's long life right now.")

See also interview on al-Jazeera about Jerusalem & Islam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHpMhAzj-Tk

Thursday 1120P (820P Pacific Time):

Tarek Heggy, international petroleum strategist, Egyptian liberal political thinker, in re: Egypt. Meeting of ministers in Cairo, all fretful after Tunisian uprising. "When you ask poor people at clinics if they can get anti-diarrheal medicine, they say, 'There's none left; it's all been taken by the Arab leaders.' " People in Tunisia live much better than Egyptians; if it happens in Tunisia, it can happen in Egypt- where the Islamists might take over. If I were in Mubarak's shoes, I'd worry. In Egypt there are 85 mil people, where half the people live on $2 day - an uprising would cause utter chaos. Many very, very angry people, esp the enormous mass of unemployed youth. Egyptian impact on the region is declining because of its problems; has been strong because of a large middle class, now deeply in decline. The continuous Islamicization of the culture is not good. Continuing, large-scale murders of Coptic Christians - 15% of the population; the regime ignores, does nothing.

The Copts, Egypt's indigenous Christians, like many other Eastern Orthodox Christians, celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, according to the Julian calendar. The midnight mass and Christmas day are joyous celebrations for Egypt's Christians, as they are for Christians around the world. But there was no joy among Christians in Egypt at the start of this new decade. As celebrants were leaving a Coptic church in Nagi Hammadi shortly before midnight on Jan. 6, a hail of machinegun fire abruptly changed the giggling of children and the well-wishes of adults into screams of pain and agony. Six people, aged 16 to 26, were murdered on the spot. Two others died later in hospital. A Muslim guard at the church was also killed. Over the next two days, more Christian families were attacked by Muslim mobs, resulting in widespread destruction of property and businesses.

Thursday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Betsy McKay, WSJ, in re: will the last, small batches of live smallpox, in the possession only of Russia and the US, be destroyed?

Thursday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: the astronaut Steve Bowen is to replace @Astro_Tim Kopra on the STS-133 space shuttle crew. Virgin Galactic's civilian space trip.

Thursday/Fri 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Bill McGurn, WSJ, in re: abortion and the poor in New York City

Thursday/Fri 1220A (920 Pacific Time): Matt Bai, NYT, in re: Sarah Palin and Barack Obama

Thursday/Fri 1235A (935P Pacific Time): Pooja Bhatia, The Economist, in re: Now Aristide wants to return to Haiti

Thursday/Fri 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Siberian landscape: some of the territory that China aspires to claim as it expands north, south, east and west.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 19, 2011 1:10 PM | No Comments

The American president finds another angle from which to pay mild obeisance, much to the amusement of the unelected president of China

Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, and Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index
Wednesday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Mary Kissel, WSJ editorial board, in re: China; Hu Jintao's visit; Washington's pusillanimity. Twenty-one-gun salute in face of massive human rights violations, ghoulish organ theft, imprisonment of Chinese Nobelist - Peace Prize - is one of many deeds that [suggest policy incompetence and bring shame on our nation].
Wednesday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang, in re: testified at Congressional hearing this morning on Congressional district - his voters - are taking questions on China to their representatives. "Predatory trade practices" is the dispositive phrase. A few decades ago, massive genocide in China (70 million citizens died), but now China is ruled by apparatchiks: authority has broken down, while the military, the PLA, is gaining more and more power. The Obama administration speaks of the J-20 episode, the violence of DPRK, the PLA in North Korea - a new picture.
Hu Jintao jets into Washington: http://www.nma.tv/hu-jintao-jets-washington-2/

Wednesday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Hotel California: Devin Nunes (CA-21), Jeff Bliss, and Debra Saunders, SF Chronicle, in re: Moving toward repeal of Obamacare: this is not a symbolic vote; if you want to get to a balanced budget - and we're borrowing a good deal from China - we simply will have to reduce expenditures. Tomorrow the Rules Committee will meet; I can commend Speaker Boehner for having an open process. I think that the process of writing a bill will immediately involve all representatives on the Committee, each of whom is welcome to submit language and amendments. California: Jerry Brown has a $25bil hole: will take sweetheart redevelopment funds, give them to ___________. He ought to be alarmed: the Chronicle Guild thought they'd slice off dental coverage - everybody immediately ran to the dentist and bills are going through the roof.
Wednesday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time):

Wednesday 1005P Eastern (705P Pacific Time): Melinda Liu, Newsweek International; Gordon Chang, in re: Pres Hu - he doesn't hear journalists; is he hard of hearing? He likes to feign not hearing questions, is notoriously averse to press conferences. At the White House today he botched it so badly that he said, "I did not hear the question about human rights." He managed a written answers to written questions with the WSJ. Chinese media delete everything that hints at a weakness in its leaders. Hu is a technocrat, a bureaucrat, intensely private, has no charisma; isn't even schmoozer-in-chief, the way Deng was. Stiff, awkward, stultifying. In 2012, we'll go tot he fifth generation - are we seeing a diminution of the gene pool? Probably the last apparatchik: the country has changed so much that it can't go on this way. Whole new ball game coming. Whom was the J-20 episode aimed at - offending the US? Hard to believe that the Chinese leader wouldn't know of it. Even though anything untoward will be edited out in Chinese reports, enough people are Net-savvy enough to find the real story.

Wednesday 1020P Eastern (720P Pacific Time): Joe Sternberg, WSJ, in re: Low domestic consumption is inherent in China's growth model; mechanism for widespread credit does not exist there. Result of policy choices that Beijing has been making for decades - favor foreign in investment, keep interest rates on bank accounts low, so credit goes to exporting companies. Analysts call this economic repression. Empowering consumers may be threatening to the Party, which would then lose more control over the economy, and thus of power in general. Would need to open up a service economy - thus opening pipelines for political dissent.
Wednesday 1035P Eastern (735P Pacific Time): Sadanand Dhume, AEI and WSJ, in re: India watching Hu's visit to the US; China has built a railway from Lhasa to Arunachal Pradesh. Projection of Chinese military power, assertiveness over the last eighteen months. China willing to disturb the satus quo. China-India border not yet fixed; 1962 border war, interminable talks. China calling Arunachal Pradesh (clearly in northeastern India) "Southern Tibet." Also, Chinese "string of pearls" strategy - dotting Southeast Asia with military ports (Burma, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) India, whose foreign policy is determined by a tiny elite - does not see itself as having a hostile relations with China; there seem to be Chinese factions that don't agree. Who's driving this? And what's in a railroad? It moves troops.

Wednesday 1050P Eastern (750P Pacific Time): Jeremy Zakis, Australia, in re: Australian floods prompt evacuation of towns in Victoria as levees weaken. Jeremy drives from Canberra to Brisbane (sixteen hours) to see what the floods have wrought.

Wednesday 1105P Eastern (805P Pacific Time): Ian Johnson, NYT, in re: China's leader has a message of harmony, but a limited agenda. Nearing the end of his tenure, President Hu Jintao will emphasize common interests during his visit to the United States, but may have little to offer on issues that most concern the White House. He doesn't want to talk about the J-20, and probably doesn't know much about it. He gets a full state dinner, twenty-one-gun salute; just wants a nice visit with no Falun Dafa demonstrators. Chinese editorial: "The only reason the US is in decline is because it's put itself in decline."

Wednesday 1120P Eastern (820P Pacific Time): Steve Moore, WSJ, in re: Mike Pence, Mitch Daniels Indiana, and Illinois and Georgia

Wednesday 1135P Eastern (835P Pacific Time): Paul Ingrassia, WSJ, author, in re: Detroit auto show,

Wednesday 1150P Eastern (850P Pacific Time): continued: Paul Ingrassia

Wednesday/Thurs 1205A Eastern (905 Pacific Time): Sue Craig, NYT, in re: Goldman Sachs earnings

Wednesday/Thurs 1220A Eastern (920 Pacific Time): Mark Schroder, Stratfor, in re: Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria

Wednesday/Thurs 1235A Eastern (935P Pacific Time): James Taranto, WSJ, in re: Kate Zernike, Sarah Palin.

Wednesday/Thurs 1250A Eastern (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Tibetan Buddhist stupa in Bloomington, Indiana, built under the auspices of Taktser Rinpoche, the brother of HH the Dalai Lama (Taktser Rinpoche was a Tibetan lama. Thupten Jigme Norbu, the brother of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet). A stupa is a holy structure containing Buddhist relics used by Buddhists as a place of worship.

Tuesday 18 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 18, 2011 1:35 AM | No Comments

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein might have shattered records with his $53.4 million paycheck in 2006, but in the end he took that burning hot wad and did nothing more than what any other Wall Street honcho would do: He went shopping for a mind-blowing home. First there was his gargantuan $27 million Upper West Side apartment. Now he's aimed his checkbook at the fabled "Old Trees" estate in Southampton and fired away, buying the place for a staggering $41 million. Not only is the 1911 estate located on swanky First Neck Lane, it's a spacehog, swallowing up 10.6 acres on Lake Agawam. There's a clay tennis court and an ocean-view swimming pool with a heated walkway from the main house--exactly the sort of adult playground gear you'd expect to find in tony Southampton. But even the "cottage" on this estate has 13 bedrooms and a dining room that seats 60. Another guest house, the modestly named "Tulip Cottage," has three bedrooms and a heated pool of its own. The "barn," built in the 1800s, has three bedrooms, too, and massive entertainment space

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC and WABC radio.

Tuesday 905P Eastern Time: Roben Farzed, Bloomberg, in re: :Goldman Sachs "blindsided" as Facebook hype derails private U.S. offering. Goldman has issued an edict saying that US nationals cannot buy the Facebook IPO because the SEC might grow irate. Ergo, Russian oligarchs, Chinese cadres, Laurent Gbagbo, Mexican drug lords, Saudi nationals camped in Waziristan caves - all these may buy in, but the entire US population, who very unwillingly bailed out Goldman Sachs, may sit on their hands and watch the unemployment figures.
Tuesday 920P Eastern Time: John Batchelor and Larry Kudlow, in re: Citi earning, bad; Apple earnings, good; Bernanke, bad.
Tuesday 935P Eastern Time: Joe Rago, WSJ, in re: in re: funding the healthcare bill; its attempted repeal
Tuesday 950P Eastern Time: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: a man who calls himself head of state of the Middle Kingdom has come to dine at the White House. Total silence by WH on massive human rights abuses in China. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner will dine with the monster who's jailing Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner. China sees the US as a nation in terminal, accelerated decline. Pirating our software, our technology; "in 2010, 140% of China's trade surplus was with the US." Hu knows he could not win a trade war with the US - razor-thin margins. Threaten a little bit and he'll back down. LK: US defense cutbacks at the moment China is revving up. GC: When the Chinese j-20 takes to the air, we need to speed up production of F-22s - which Gates has cut back. We need a navy that 's stealthy and underseas - subs, not huge, seaborne carriers

_________________________________________________________________
Hu Jintao is the face of a cultlike gang that does not lead or preside over or supervise the PRC; rather, just drains it of bribes and insider deals while admininstering terror and supporting bullies, slavish obedience and cynical obeisance. Hu's final state visit to the US is a measure of his defeat. Spoke Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, and learned again that the PRC does not command the US, rather the US consumer commands the PRC. Hu leaves the stage with no footprints, a failure of a leader, a servant, a shill, a bootlegger. The Communist Party is running out of time and energy. The next move may be to cut deals with the PLA to hold onto authority over the PLA. Gordon Chang has reason to believe that the military coup is over, the PLA wins. See the stealth fighter J-20 and Hu's apparent humiliation before SecDef Gates in Beijing when Hu claimed he hadn't known about the J-20 test. Hu exits a puppet of puppets of dark lords. The PRC is anarchy with a non-transparent bank too big to fail.
http://johnbatchelorshow.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=3941&blog_id=1&saved_changes=1
_________________________________________________________________

Tuesday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): John Fund, WSJ, in re: Reince Priebus, new head of RNC: "performance-based politics." PIMCO's Bill Gross took a bat to Bernanke at this weekend's Barron's roundtable. Richard Fisher of Dallas Fed is anti-Bernanke. "He has now power" with Ben. Ben is off the rails with his QE. Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, does not care for Ben Bernanke's Big Gov management style. From a Plosser speech: "Monetary policy cannot reverse the sharp decline in house prices when the economy has significantly over-invested in housing." He includes a Milton Friedman quotation in his introduction: "We are in danger of assigning to monetary policy a larger role than it can perform, in danger of asking it to accomplish tasks that it cannot achieve, and, as a result, in danger of preventing it from making the contribution that it is capable of making."
Tuesday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): John Batchelor and Larry Kudlow, in re: Citigroup posts first annual profit since 2007, but misses estimates. FCC approves Comcast's acquisition of NBC Uni, allowing for a joint venture that puts a vast library of television shows and movies under the control of the nation's biggest cable and broadband Internet service provider.
Tuesday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Miguel Helft, NYT, in re: Apple's earnings are good; Tim Cook, interim CEO, does a first-rate job.
Tuesday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Tunisia. Authorities are aware that corruption and unemployment sparked the revolt, and they doubt foreigners were involved, but nothing can be concluded until a current investigation is complete. As of today: No unity government; two old-guard factions feuding over power, and an Islamist-manipulated populace fighting to wrestle power from the old guard. Once the jihadist elite declared self-immolation to be "martyrdom" - just like martyrdom-bombing - there was no turning back the phenomenon. Today for he first time the PLO flag was flown in Washington, since WH allowed the PLO to call itself "The General Delegation of the PLO" - a significant move. Saudis have discovered not one but three vultures sent by the Mossad to spy on Saudis.

Tuesday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Mary O'Grady, WSJ, in re: Jeb Bush
Tuesday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Ravi Somaiya, Newsweek, in re: Assange and Rudolf Elmer, Bank whistleblower
Tuesday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Bolden's speech at MLK breakfast in Charleston, S.C.: http://tinyurl.com/6cppdmp http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/01/fall-of-rome-recorded-in-trees.html?ref=hp
Tuesday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Fouad Ajami, Hoover, in re: Copts and Egypt; also, Tunis trouble

Tuesday/Wed 1205A (905 Pacific Time):   Adam Nossiter, in re: Gbagbo needs cash
Tuesday/Wed  1220A (920 Pacific Time): John Burns, NYT, in re: Irish bank troubles
Tuesday/Wed  1235A (935P Pacific Time):   Nick Wade, NYT, in re: Chaser, the really smart border collie
Tuesday/Wed  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt: Eli Lake, Washington Times, in re: FBI persecutes AIPAC, 2004

Monday 17 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 17, 2011 1:33 AM | No Comments

Hu Jintao, elected president of: zip.

Unelected tyrant of Beijing

Co-host: John Avlon, CNN and The Daily Beast

Monday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): John Batchelor and John Avlon, in re: the "miraculous" recovery of Rep Gabrielle Giffords. The Rev Dr Martin Luther king's birthday. National discussion on mental illness. The shooter, J L Loughner, is unhinged. "Job-destroying economic recovery." We need a definition of "compassion" different from what's widely used here: in a large urban environment, its not compassionate to ignore people among us who are visibly in distress with anomalous behavior. Hu Jintao: not the elected leader of anything - is an unelected boss who's jailed a Nobel peace prize recipient. He's our banker; but the Twenty-first Century is one in which we don't want tyranny.

Monday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time):   Mark Field, executive vice president Ford Motor Company exec VP & president, The Americas; and LouAnn Hammond, Driving the Nation.com, in re: Yes, we're currently ahead of where we thought we'd be today; we're getting some benefit from the fact that we took no stimulus money. People inside of Ford are working together in an admirable, new way. You can actually name individuals who've made specific improvements. Everyone is working 24/7 to make this produce ready for electric. "Electrification? We've offering customers a broad choice of models and body styles." Mustang: last year, introduced two new power trains and a 5-liter, also a new 3.7 liter, excellent gas mileage. Explorer: re-invent the SUV for the Twenty-first Century; the game-changer: up to 25% better fuel economy. Truck of the Year at the Auto Show. Fourteen million units (industry-wide ) is the max possible; Ford can do very well at 12.9. Worked on the cost structure, capacity, right-sizing the workforce.
Monday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time):   David Corn, Mother Jones bureau chief, Washington, in re: mental health. In Washington, homeless people often decide rationally not to got shelters, which often are not safe. Decades-old battle over who may intervene and when. There are lots of people who want mental health help but can't afford it. For example, give parents some tools, something to work with. De-institutionalization: a lot of the institutions are not fit for humans; will need to have facilities worthy of being called humane - which will cost money. The "high burden of proof" gave a convenient out to states and the feds. We've reached a point where we need to have a national program to check gun-buyers before actually transferring the weapon into the buyer's hands; and there's no way a seller at a gun ship, let alone a gun show, can do that. Today's poll shows support for nationwide ban on high-capacity clips of the sort used by the Arizona shooter.
Monday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time):   Jed Babbin, RealClear Politics, and The Spectator, in re: G W Bush began nation-building, and Pres Obama, whose interests are fundamentally domestic, just said keep doing what you're doing. Andy McCarthy, Michael Levine, others, are coming to agree that we cannot do this - and in any case it puts us on the strategic defensive. The terrorists are the proxy; the real terrorists are the national sponsors of terrorism. Terrorism is global because it's sponsored by Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. The Republican Party is now bound to nation-building simply to avoid criticizing Pres G W Bush. At this rate, terrorists will only grow stronger. Solutions?Stuxnet virus, for starters. If I were king for a day, I'd dial 800 AIR COMBAT, and we wouldn't hear from those guys in fifty years. The WH is blocking Petraeus from coming to the Hill to report. We need to demand his presence and ask tough questions: how long will the gains last? (They're already falling apart.) Counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is to evict the bad guys from areas and then establish a real civil society, incl courts. Afghanistan has not done that. We need to divorce ourselves from the Bush brand and strategy in order to move forward.
Photo: Hu Jintao, president of China and weapons supplier to Sudan's General al-Bashir, with Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika. China: Partner in Genocide - African Union humiliates Sudan, but doesn't stop rapes and murders in Darfur. China has provided Khartoum more than $10 billion in commercial and capital investments over the past decade, even as it has been the regime's primary supplier of weapons, weapons technology, and weapons engineering expertise.

Monday 1005P (705P Pacific Time):   Victor Davis Hanson,Hoover, in re: James Madison: mostly liberals oppose the Second Amendment. They use crises to claim that the country needs a technocracy to run it soberly and judiciously. Senator and Candidate Obama did a lot of damage in his claims on the insurgency the surge, renditions. After he saw intell reports he changed positions, but the damage continues.
Monday 1020P (720P Pacific Time):   John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks in Holland. "What links Muammar Gaddafi and Teresa Scanlan, winner of Miss America 2011? The answer is they both made strong statements over the weekend against WikiLeaks." Julian Assange was at a microphone again today in London at the Frontline Club: a Swiss banker who returned voluntarily to Switzerland to testify. Rudolf Elmer claims he worked for a Cayman Islands bank; has CDs of 2,000 rich people with Cayman accounts to help politicos escape paying taxes; says he's tried to peddle this material to anyone who'd take it.   http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/16/swiss-whistleblower-rudolf-elmer-banks
Monday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):   Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, and Bruce Bechtol, Angelo State, in re: Hu Jintao has never been popularly elected to anything. He's part of a well-to-do criminal gang. This is kleptocracy meets thuggery, as he tortures Chinese citizens, jails the recent Nobelist, permits "organ harvesting" - the ghoulish theft of organs from live subjects - and is a violent despot in Tibet, West Turkestan, and Chinese-occupied Mongolia. He's not a legitimate president of anything. The message for him to take home to his gang? Not - why did we invite him in the first place - he slapped the face of the US SecDef; supplies arms to Taliban, nuclear weapons to Iran, and technology to DPRK. In Tokyo, Sec Gates said something new: US troops in Asia are there in part to deter China. Secy Clinton later said, China is neither a friend or an enemy. Why do the US media call Hu the head of a major nation? He's the guy at the top of a disintegrating Communist Part. Rather, PLA flag officers are now starting to make decisions that normally belong to a civilian segment. Claims are now extending down through Indonesia - Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Japan, South Korea, are all quite upset. Also, apparently in early december China sent fifty armored vehicles into North Korea to protect its interests. and today the Peoples Daily denied it. Old saying: "Never believe anything till Ren Min Jr Bao denies it." China is now violating UN sanctions. China owns our debt: their economy is geared to selling things to us, they're becoming more dependent on us - if they dump our debt, they have to buy something (euros, pounds) so then those nations would have to buy . . . dollars. TAIWAN - they're free, they have a democracy, they're capitalist, it works.

Monday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Jeremy Zakis, Australia, in re: Queensland floods

Monday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):   Pooja Bhatia, The Economist, in re: Duvalier - Baby Doc - arrives at Port-au-Prince
Monday 1120P (820P Pacific Time):   Josh Kron, NYT, in re: South Sudan
Monday 1135P (835P Pacific Time):   Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, part I
Monday 1150P (850P Pacific Time):   Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, part II

Monday/Tues 1205A (905 Pacific Time):   Brian Stelter, NYT, in re:
Monday/Tues  1220A (920 Pacific Time):   Steven Erlanger, NYT, in re: Paris and Tunis
Monday/Tues  1235A (935P Pacific Time):   Thomas McGuane, Driving the Rim
Monday/Tues  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Saturday 15 Sunday 16 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 15, 2011 1:31 AM | No Comments

Saturday 15 January 2011

Photo: The incipient liberation of South Sudan

Guest-host: John Avlon, CNN and The Daily Beast

Co-host: Matt Pottinger, Council on Foreign Relations

Saturday 905P Eastern Time: John Avlon and Matt Pottinger, in re: Sudanese elections, preview of tonight's show

Saturday 920P Eastern Time: Dave Wiegel, Slate, in re: Arizona shootings

Saturday 935P Eastern Time: Sen Alan Simpson, in re: Deficit Reduction Commission. Appointment of Bruce Reed as VP Biden's chief of staff' political fallout from Tucson shootings; new RNC chairman, Reince Priebus.

Saturday 950P Eastern Time: Pooja Bhatia, NYT, in re: Haiti, one year on from the earthquake

Saturday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Mark McKinnon, No Labels, and Kiki McKinnon, No Labels and Dem Balance - and Texas; in re: requisite new civility in US politics

Saturday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Stephen Carter, author, The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama, in re: just wars; Pres Obama and "the Bush point of view." The War on Terror. Nobel speech: the just war tradition. When diplomacy fails, Pres Obama fights with more ferocity than Pres Bush did. Divergence from Bush P.O.V.

photo: South Sudan referendum - jubilant Juba.

Saturday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): John Avlon and Matt Pottinger, in re: Sudanese

elections. Northern Sudan is predominantly Muslim, strong Arab influence, capital is Khartoum (an old stomping ground for Osama bin Laden); Southern Sudan is Christian and tribal. Aa little as three months ago, many observers thought this referendum couldn't be held. George Clooney (co-founder of Not on Our Watch) had an appreciable influence. Clooney and Prendergast have initiated Satellite Satellite Sentinel Project. When China realized that its investment in Sudan for oil was being monitored, it suddenly gave its support to the referendum. North has the pipeline to the sea; the South has the oil. Contested region of Abiye, in effect the Kashmir of Africa. This new nation of Southern Sudan can be a real ally to the US. The VP wears a cowboy hat presented to him by Pres G W Bush. This will be the 193d country in the world [in the UN]. Essential that we all keep our eyes on this story.

Saturday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): James LaSalvia, GOProud, representing gay conservatives, in re: Joseph Farah of WND, the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, Heritage, Focus on the Family, Concerned Woman of America - all left CPAC. "We're conservatives. I'd hate to see Heritage be unable to afford to be in CPAC; if needed, we'll be glad to pay for them." Who's less tolerant: straight conservatives or gay liberals? We daily get hate mail from the gay left.

http://cfk.unc.edu/images/clinic-cfk.jpg

Saturday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Rye Barcott, NGO head and former Marine; author of the memoir, It Happened on the Way to War and founder of Carolina for Kibera cfk.unc.edu; new documentary trailer at www.chasingthemadlion.org; in re: the intersection of community development and insurgency. Barcott in college took Ki-Swahili, then got fellowship to Kibera, massive slum community (half a mil people) in Nairobi. Learned that "Talent is universal; opportunity isn't." In Kibera, as in countering an insurgency, the means is not throwing cash one direction but establishing relationships. Amazing people from Kibera helped found the nonprofit. "Give me 2,000 shillings [$26] to buy vegetables - buy here, sell in another neighborhood for a profit," said Tabitha. Tabitha took the profits from that venture and established a medical clinic, now treats 40,000 people a year. Participatory development. The only solutions truly are local.

Saturday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Ted Alden, Council on Foreign Relations, in re: importance of immigration reform, and how prospects of such reform are grim in the new Congress.

Saturday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): E J McMahon, Empire Center, in re: States's financial obligations

Saturday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): John Pomfret, WaPo, in re: China; PLA top brass are now more aggressive than civilian leaders. Chinese military is now the last bastion for Americans - we have the least contact with the PLA, almost alone among Chinese ministries. Secy Gates's main proposal was for a security dialogue where PLA would speak with Chinese civilians; US offers to be present if that'll help. Following US arms sales to Taiwan in 2010, then Pres Obama's meeting with HH the Dalai Lama, the US began to see that it needs to be clear, blunt, direct with China rather than be delicate in favor of some sort of meeting of minds down the road. Wathcing US-China relations is like watching paint dry. In 2009, painted the room red; now it's white (expectations are not high); can't expect anything much from the upcoming summit in Washington - although they may invite Joe Biden to visit Beijing - unh-oh - and then reciprocally have the US invite the Chinese VP, China's next paramount leader.

Saturday/Sun 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Charlie Ornstein, ProPublica, in re: unqualified doctors who've received payments from Big Pharma

Saturday/Sun 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): Duane Baughman, producer and co-director of Bhutto, in re: the film Bhutto. Shocking information on the history and the assassination.

Saturday/Sun 1235A: (935P Pacific Time): John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project and co-author of The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes; in re: Sudanese elections. Humanitarian interest: has been the second-deadliest war in Africa; also strategic interest; also the economic dimension: a midlevel oil producer (third largest after Angola and Nigeria). Also a lot of unexplored areas to come. Nature of the new country: that region has a history of rebel movements who fight, then gain power, then clamp down on the people, seat a tyrannical honcho; here, however, there seems to be large popular participation, plus a genuine helping hand from the US. New official language of this state will be English.

What can go wrong: the regime in Northern Sudan, which is losing one-third of its territory and maybe 70% of its revenue: question of regime survival. Negotiations over ht e next few months will necessitate sharing resources to give the northern guys a soft landing. Abiye is roughly Sudan's Kashmir - a deal has to be struck soon or the local dynamics will consume the national polity. Also, need to find a process to demarcate the border. Recall Eritrea, born in 1993; never demarcated, now deeply ar war with Ethiopia. "Flash-to-bang theory" - one small incident can quickly lead to tans at the border. Deals to let the northern pastoral tribes cross the border to pasture their livestock; temporary palliatives that paper over the deep fissures between the two sides. Sat Sentinel: George Clooney and I were quite taken aback by the lack of UN presence: occasional overflights; Northern govt doesn't want eyes on the border area. George said, "We can pay for satellite observation; we're just now getting the imagery in, reports being analyzed, showing hte degree to which this border is militarized and troops are prepared to go across and fight. Fifty-five thousand troops at Abiye; can move at any moment. We may just show close-up shots to avoid giving away tactical arrangements. WATCH: satsentinel.org Birth of a nation; sign of hope in a troubled world.

Saturday/Sun 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Sudanese referendum on liberation from the North; at least 80% have voted for independence.

Needed a 60% turn-out threshold for referendum to be held valid.

A Message From George Clooney and John Prendergast A new state is being born in Southern Sudan against a backdrop of decades of war between the South and North of Sudan. A peace deal in 2005 ended the latest round of open conflict, but the possibility of a return to war remains high as Southern Sudan prepares for independence. One of the biggest risks in this dangerous moment is that an incident on the highly armed border could lead to wider conflict. The government in Khartoum has armed militias in contested bordering regions, the government air force has bombed border areas, and both sides have massed military units and equipment along the hottest border spots. These areas have witnessed some of the most deadly conflict in the world since World War II. The former director of national intelligence says that Southern Sudan is the place in the world most likely to experience genocide. We can't allow another deadly war, and we surely cannot stand by in the face of a genocide threat. We were late to Rwanda. We were late to the Congo. We were late to Darfur. There is no time to wait. With your support, we will swiftly call the world to witness and respond. We aim to provide an ever more effective early-warning system: better, faster visual evidence and on-the-ground reporting of human rights concerns to facilitate better, faster responses. This is why we have launched the Satellite Sentinel Project. There has never been a sustained effort to systematically monitor potential hot spots and threats to human security, in near real-time, with the aim of heading off humanitarian disaster and war crimes before they occur. Previously, when mass atrocities occurred in Darfur, the Government of Sudan denied its involvement. Since photographers could not get access, it took years to amass evidence of genocide. But now we can witness in near real-time and put all parties on notice that if they commit war crimes, we will all be watching, and pressuring policymakers to take action. We want to cast a spotlight - literally - on the hot spots along the border to record any actions that might escalate the chances of conflict. We hope that if many eyes are on the potential spoilers, we can all help detect, deter and interdict actions that could lead to a return to deadly violence. At the very least, if war crimes do occur, we'll have plenty of evidence of the actions of the perpetrators to share with the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council. The world is watching because you are watching. This is our opportunity to prevent a war, to deter genocide. Make your voice heard. Click here to take action in support of peace in Sudan: http://www.satsentinel.org/take_action and http://twitter.com/sudansentinel

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Sunday 16 January 2011

http://www.geekosystem.com/j-20-china-fighter/

Chinese J-20 Stealth fighter test flight

Sunday 905P Eastern Time: Mary Kissel, WSJ editorial board, and Mona Charen, in re: China. Hu Jintao's last state visit: implications. Did Hu in fact not know that the new Chinese J-20 stealth fighter was tested while the US SecDef was visiting China? If Hu and Wen don't fully have control over the PLA, that's "deeply worrying." Chinese hubris - "the Chinese system of capitalism," et al.; nonetheless, we must attend to what Hu says about the Federal Reserve and the mismanagement of the dollar - these are relevant and important. What does NSC director Donilon mean by China's "peaceful rise"? China may put troops in North Korea for first time since 1994; does that mean those troops become part of another provocation?

Sunday 920P Eastern Time: continued: Giffords; POTUS speech; healthcare vote; Hu comes to town. Chinese persecution of Nobel peace prize winner. "If the US does not get its fiscal house in order, we will not be able to defend human rights overseas." Father of nine-year-old in Tucson reports that his daughter's organs were donated to "a little girl in Boston."

Sunday 935P Eastern Time: Larry Johnson, No Quarter blog; Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re: Jets to Pittsburgh (JB: "The Steelers just got lucky, don't have to play the Ravens." SZ: "Saw Mike Hayden dressed in black and all painted up in the stadium last night." ) Ravens falling: Nostradamus in Heaven. Legislators are still dizzy from the events in Tucson; holding a calmer attitude than are the media. New Pennsylvania governor, 46th, to be inaugurated in Harrisburg. McCain calls Obama a patriot, calls for civil discourse. Giffords; POTUS speech; blaming Palin; healthcare. Schwarzenegger inconsistent on clemency.

Sunday 950P Eastern Time: Jim McTague, Barron's, in re: White House briefing on Hu Jintao coming to town; Tom Donilon's "peaceful rise."

Sunday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): John Fund, WSJ, and John Avlon, CNN & The Daily Beast, in re: Scott Brown won the Mass Senatorial vote a year ago today, and so opened the healthcare debate. JF: "He showed that you can fight back, and that the bully didn't have a Plan B." Giffords; POTUS speech; tense Tuscon townhall thanks to ABC staging http://www.kgun9.com/Global/story.asp?S=13849741 ; healthcare vote; Hu's state visit.

Sunday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): continued. New Republican National Committee Chairman: Reince Priebus, a corporate lawyer (who managed to get David Obey to resign).

Sunday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Rufus Phillips, author: Why Vietnam Matters; Bill Roggio, FDD & LongWarJournal.org; Arif Rafiq, ForeignPolicy.com, in re: Memorial celebration for Richard Holbrooke was the most astonishing memorial for a public official who never became Secretary of State. He was a "do-er," unlike most people in the Foreign Service. He set up a forty-nation contact group on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Eight gunmen attacked tankers carrying fuel for United States and NATO forces in Afghanistan, setting 14 of the vehicles ablaze on Saturday.

Sunday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): continued

Photo: French-Tunisian ocean liner travel poster, 1930. The deposed Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, has twice applied for refuge in France and twice been refused by Sarkozy, who is rationally concerned about the effect that would have on his banlieues, which might go up in smoke. M Ben Ali can now contemplate a life of powerless luxury under Wahhabism chez his new Saudi hosts.

Sunday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, and Bruce Bechtol, Angelo State, in re: "Hu is pitching the 'peaceful rise' malarkey pioneered by Pres Obama." Chinese armor in North Korea - according to a Chinese blog and a quotation of a DPRK defectors's paper: 50 armored vehicles and tanks into North Korea to protect their nationals and an installation of some sort. If this is true, it'd be unprecedented - combat forces haven't been in in DPRK since 1957.

Sunday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Jed Babbin, American Spectator & RealClearPoliticis, in re: Tucson and First and Second Amendment debates.

Sunday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Spreading flames: jihad on a roll, Algiers next; good thing Algiers doesn't have nukes yet. Egypt, Jordan and Algeria are next in line (major food riots in Algeria a few months ago; governments scrambling to lower food prices across the Arab world). However, the memory of the extremely vicious and bloody civil war still haunts the slums - so the progression is slower. What we see in Tunis masked as a populist uprising is in fact an Islamist movement, the jihad running the show. Islamist in Jordan are making demands; and in Egypt, large implications.

It's not just Tunisia - Hizbollah has made its move in Lebanon. Further, the Hariri Report is no longer imminent since there's no government to present it to.

Sarkozy: having twice refused political asylum to the French minion Ben Ali for fear of the Islamists at home, the French are in no position to dictate anything. Saudi Arabia forces all bloggers to get a license ; only Saudi Arabian nationals over 20 years old may blog about news. What replaces Ben Ali will not be friendly.

Today an IAEA team went to visit Iran and was refused access. Executions in the country, most for spurious reasons. Iran will soon take up chairmanship of OPEC, and then of the Nonaligned Movement. Brilliance of the Stuxnet virus. When FDR was asked by the media, where did those B-24s launch from? "From our secret base in Shangri-La."

Photo: Chinese soldiers patrolling at the DPRK border

Sunday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack,com, in re: Farside solar activity: for the past two days it's exploded repeatedly, hurling bright coronal mass ejections into space and sending shock waves billowing through the sun's atmosphere. Although the region can't be seen directly from Earth, NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft, stationed over the Sun's eastern horizon, has a great view. See http://spaceweather.com for movies and updates. For a text message when the sun flares and geomagnetic storms erupt, a new alert service, SpaceWeather Text: http://spaceweathertext.com

Sunday/Mon 1205A (905 Pacific Time): David Drucker, Roll Call, in re: one year since Scott Brown's election; also, Brown re-elect in 2012

Sunday/Mon 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): John Loftus, author, re Assange and Bank of America, and Muammar Gaddafi, and Miss USA

Sunday/Mon 1235A: (935P Pacific Time): Richard Epstein, Hoover, in re: Loughner defense attorney, Judy Clarke, and Judge Burns of San Diego; also, mental health defense

Sunday/Mon 1250A: (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt

Solar activity, far side

Friday 14 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 14, 2011 7:50 PM | No Comments

(Photo, above) Tunisian festival riders

Economics, then riots, in Tunisia: the protests started after an unemployed graduate set himself on fire when police tried to prevent him from selling vegetables without a permit. He died a few weeks later. Today, Friday, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali stepped down after 23 years in power as protests over economic issues snowballed into rallies against him; he and his family flew to Saudi Arabia. Tonight, the protestors ignored the curfew to celebrate on the streets.

Some traditional faces of Tunisia

Friday 905P Eastern Time: Joeseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg (see below), in re: economy recovering; growth, jobs above 9 for 2011. Europe at an existential moment: to develop a full fiscal and monetary union or not? Structural unemployment: of the jobs available, most unemployed people don't have the skill sets to fill them. We need to get people in to the junior colleges and get 'em retrained.

Joseph Brusuelas is Senior Economist at Bloomberg, LP. He produces the Bloomberg Economic Brief, a daily economic research product. You can follow him at Facebook and at Twitter(@joebrusuelas). A one-month, risk-free trial of Joseph's product can be found at www.bloomberg.com/brief.

.. .. ..

Okun's Law says that the demand side must grow sufficiently quickly to absorb not
only the growing labor force but
also the workers made redundant by increased labor productivity. Otherwise, we see a jobless recovery such as those seen in the United States in the early 1990s, in the early 2000s and in the two-year period after the 2008 economic meltdown. Recently, Lawrence Summers, former director of President Obama's National Economic Council, commented that "Okun's Law" may be incorrect. In the United States, employment rates decreased faster than Okun's law predicted. Although Okun's law suggested that the unemployment rate should be around 8.5 percent, it is around 10.0 percent.
.. .. ..

Friday 920P Eastern Time: Dan Henninger, WSJ, in re: Krugman, Packer, Dionne, and Alter blame the Tea Party for Tucson; Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Friday 935P Eastern Time: LouAnn Hammond, DrivingtheNation.com, in re: Detroit Auto Show week

Friday 950P Eastern Time: Christine Harper, Bloomberg, in re: bonuses, banks, higher, higher. Thousands of bank employees have got bonuses of a million dollars - 738 in Citigroup; 47 got bonuses of ten million or more.

.. .. ..

Inflammatory rhetoric in American politics

Senator Joseph McCarthy (photo, left, with his aide, Roy Cohn), June 1951: "How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men....What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence....The laws of probability would dictate that part of...[the] decisions would serve the country's interest."

.. .. ..

Friday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: Hu Jin-tao's visit to Washington; Gates's remarks in Asia about confrontation

Friday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Ravi Somaiya, NYT, in re: Assange in court; the case against extradition

Friday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): David Weidner, WSJ, in re: Charles Schwab in trouble

Friday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Brett Arends, WSJ, in re: stocks this year, buy the bottom

Friday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: Tucson, Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Whiskey Rebellion 1794

Friday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Ling-ling Wei, WSJ, in re: yuan trading and convertible currency

photo: Chinese ren min bi; not convertible

Friday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Henry Miller, Hoover, in re: biotech, Frankenfood, USDA, FDA, price of sugar

Friday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Miguel Helft, NYT, in re: twitter and Assange

Friday/Sat 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Bill McGurn, WSJ, in re: tale of two governors - Pat Quinn and Andrew Cuomo

Friday/Sat 1220A (920 Pacific Time): Lauren Goodrich, Stratfor, in re: Russia and the Middle East

Friday/Sat 1235A (935P Pacific Time): Anthony Tommasini, NYT, in re: classical music

Friday/Sat 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Thursday 13 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 13, 2011 7:48 PM | No Comments

Australian floods: Queensland recovery operation workers report that a bull shark was found in the flood waters around Ipswich

Co-host: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents
Thursday 905P Eastern Time: Jeremy Zakis, Australia, in re: Queensland provides 53% of the coal that Asia uses, and the larger part of coking coal. Livestock losses estimated at $5 bil. Govt has put forth a stimulus; construction industry obviously will be fully employed for a long time. It's 80+ degrees Farenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in Brisbane. Snakes in the walls, roofs, eaves of the house will find snakes and crocodiles - and now bull sharks in the floodwaters near Ipswich, forty-five minutes' drive inland from the sea.
Thursday 920P Eastern Time: John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks. The NSA recorded all of Assange's encrypted communications with Manning et al., using Pretty Good Protection - which is, in fact, pretty good unless you're facing the NSA. No info that Manning is cooperating; Assange now is threatening blackmail of Rupert Murdoch - who used to be an ally - and China's internal Net. He may have released all his data on the US. The Krypton Group says Assange is a major financial fraud. He's appeared in court, returned to a life of leisure with Mr Smith in the English countryside.
How to Prevent the Next WikiLeaks Dump http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703779704576074340363346676.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Thursday 935P Eastern Time: Jeff Klei, Continental AG/Continental Automotive, NAFTA region president (conti-online.com), and LouAnn Hammond, Driving the Nation.com, in re: Car mfrs are doing much better than formerly as, concomitantly, are the automotive suppliers. We're the third-largest tire supplier in the world; you can see Bose on the radios, but suppliers don't often show their brand. However, we provide parts of all kinds. We've been a big supplier of Chrysler for years and knew it was reviving. If the majors hadn't got bailed out - if any of the Big Three had gone down, most auto suppliers would have been in deep trouble. The Tesla: 0 to 60 in 3.6 Chevy Volt: Core power-train technology held by mfrs. If 14mil units were demanded right away, we couldn't keep up. Chips would be especially in short supply, also other raw materials. Light trucks as indexes of recovery: the segment called crossover blurs the line between passenger car and truck; it's taken over and bridged the gap. The Ford Explorer is now made on ht same platform as the Taurus.

Thursday 950P Eastern Time: Diminution of size of McMansions

Thursday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: Collapse of the Lebanese government; Khamenei unexpectedly spoke on the Hariri report; sent a msg to the US: we're in control in Lebanon. Today it's Iran calling the shots, not Beirut. In abeyance is the finding that Rafiq Hairiri, who was widely supported by Lebanese across confessional lines, was killed by Iran, Syria, and Hizballah. Iran now saying it won't accept Saad Hariri as a leader. There was even cell-phone evidence showing Hizbllah present at the site of the assassination. Assad will play this carefully, will not burn his bridges as he, also, is afraid of Iran; is enthralled by Nasrallah (who's charismatic to Assad, but not that many others). Hizb not eager to be provocative on Israeli border right now - they have 100 villages, massive armaments and equipment - but may in the near future.
Thursday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Hillel Neuer, UN Watch executive director, in re: Durban III. Some nations have organized a conference in commemoration of Durban I - "the worst demonstration of anti-Jewishness I've seen since World War II" --Tom Lantos; and then-Amb Colin Powell pulled the US from the conference - and Amb Rice identified Durban III as extreme bigotry and discrimination; Canada and others will not participate. Durban II: ten countries withdrew (Canada, Italy, Israel, Poland, New Zealand, others). Durban III to take place at the UN in New York several days after the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. Libya was just elected to the UN Human Rights Council; Saudis are members. A filthy circus.

Krakatoa stirs.

Thursday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: Gabrielle Giffords identifies herself as Jewish; is the descendent of a Lithuanian rabbi, Akiba Hornstein - who changed his name to Giffords, moved to Arizona. Gabrielle learned a bit later of her heritage, then went to Israel, returned, and joined a synagogue. Tunisia and Algeria: early chaos in Francophonie. Tunisia: looks like a policy split inside the regime. Rioters. Al Qaeda has been trying to penetrate the Sahel, incl in Niger, Côte d'Ivoire - and Lebanon, of course. French dabbling. Sarkozy has not done well. The onus being shifted to the US in this crisis. The new chair of OPEC will be Iran. Iran has made $11bil more this year than last. Using Lebanese agents and sending them into Africa. Iran smuggling weapons via Nigeria and Sudan. US government as the Post Office with guns.
Thursday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Naftali Bennett, Director-General of the Yesha Council (principal representative body for Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, a tall mountain range that dominates central Israel, thus strategically vital), in re: 1.5 million Arabs and ___ Israelis. Arabs live under their own legal system. Roughly 20% of Arabs work under joint Arab-Israeli enterprises. Both sides are exhausted and disgusted with the politics of the last decades, are making overtures toward cooperation. A tiny percentage of the West Bank is built upon by ether side. Jewish supermarkets are now receiving Arab families. IDF has less to do than formerly. In 1967, Israel took over the West Bank, expanded width from 9 mi to 30 mi. West Bank is not under Israeli law, under and interim law since 1967. Settlers are building only to amplify existing constructions, not an inch outside of existing acreage.
Settlers consider that Pres Obama is substantially disconnected from the reality of the West Bank. In all of the Gaza Strip, 8,000 Jews were expelled; in one settlement in the West Bank, Beit El, there are 8,000 Jews. Resettlement of them is unlikely.

Thursday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and formerly Deputy Head for Assessment of Israeli Military Intelligence, in re: Lebanon: Syrian and Iranian involvement in Hezbollah's arms buildup. Hizb has been arming itself great deal more than formerly: 50,00 rockets delivered by multiple channels, directed against Israel, only. Gen Madavi of IRGC sits in Beirut, exercises control over Hizballah. A hundred villages turned into bases; well prepared by next confrontation w Israel. Villages are only part of the bastion built. Also has now constructed a new commuications network that is threatening. The Assad family are Allawites, a version of Shia, have been playing a rôle, more a game, of intermediary between Iran and Lebanon; but Syria intends to possess Lebanon, does not welcome Iran there. Nasrallah has staged a coup in Lebanon; will look for a Sunnite of their own to make into president. Don't have a candidate, so this may take quite a while. Collapse, or neutralizing, of the Lebanese government in past days: US policy to Lebanon has long been hesitant, not a firm hand (which Lebanese were hoping for). Yes, a sort of failure - need black is black, white is white; didn't get that. The transitional govt relies on the army and the declaration of its commander ("Ill take care of violence in the street"), but this is not reliable. Hizballah can push forward at will.
Thursday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Yaakov Katz, military correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and Israel correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly, in re: Abu Rahma; Security Situation in the Palestinian Territories; Lebanon. The PA again tries to perpetrate a media hoax: young woman dies in house on the outskirts of a village; PA claims she diedof tear gas inhalation in a demonstration (from which she was physically distant). No human has ever died from tear gas inhalation. A meeting was arranged between PA and IDF: PA decided not to show up. When Israel got a copy of her medical records from a hospital, where she'd been a few weeks earlier, saw that she was receiving pharmaceuticals appropriate to cancer. Hizballah wants to take over Lebanon, and says so. Is currently capable of defeating ht Lebanese army in a few days, but want some sort of political legitimacy. Looks like a careful script orchestrated by Iran and Syria.

Thursday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: nemesis stars, cometstorms diving into the sun, NASA decline, China moon program,
Thursday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Bret Stephens, WSJ, in re: colonialism reexamined in Africa.

Thursday/Fri 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Bill McGurn, WSJ, in re: tale of two governors, Pat Quinn of Illinois and Andrew Cuomo of New York.
Thursday/Fri  1220A (920 Pacific Time): Kori Schake, Hoover, the analysis of the use of wartime civilian development programs, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thursday/Fri  1235A (935P Pacific Time): Mark Schroeder, Stratfor, in re: Tunisia turmoil, Nigeria election.
Thursday/Fri  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

The floods of Queensland knit the rivers together:

Wednesday 12 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 12, 2011 7:47 PM | No Comments

Chinese investments around the world

Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, and Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index

Wednesday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Pres Obama's speech from Tucson
Wednesday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): Mary Kissel, WSJ editorial board, in re: 1. Wrap-up of Tucson speech. 2.Hu Jin-tao's coming state visit: he should not be afforded this because, among other problems, he's recently locked up a Nobel laureate. While Secy Gates was in Beijing, trying fruitlessly to resume mil-to-mil relations with China, the PLA tested a J-22 Stealth fighter and Hu Jin-tao actually told Gates that he didn't know about it beforehand. Hu is either impossibly inept or villainously duplicitous. Good luck, Mr Gates.
Wednesday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Devin Nunes (CA-21), and Debra Saunders, SF Chronicle, in re: Hotel California. Gov Brown's new budget. His secret plan is to go back to the voters to ask them to accept taxes that they've already turned down. He's proposed redevelopment, which Republicans applaud. Rep Nunes's recently-introduced bill has mandated that all public-employee unions make public their budgets, esp where the employees's pension investments repose. No matter how this shakes out, it looks as though CAlifornia will have a $10bil budget hole - it's over for California. I don't know precisely what that'll mean, but it's coming and it's going to be harsh.
Wednesday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time): continued: Gov Schwartzenegger sneakily pardoned California's assembly speaker's son, who was involved in a knife fight and murder.

Wednesday 1005P Eastern (705P Pacific Time): Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow, International Assessment and Strategy Center, in re: China's military ambitions; Chengdu's new fighter. Hu Jin-tao wants to be seen as the leader of an incipient superpower, to be obeyed. The fifth-gen fighter is designed as an offensive weapon. First time since the Korean Conflict that the US may go to war and find a better plane than its own ruling the skies. Further, China is building twice as many as we have F-22s. China is building boomers, and a generally offensive military force. The new high ground for the PLA may, in fact, be the Moon. The J-20 may be joined by unmanned aircraft and trans-atmospheric spacecraft (e.g., the Shuttle). Need dual use: mil and non mil. Many US craft are obsolescent. US needs a careful assessment of where the PLA is going. PLA works overtime to be sure that the US does not find out what it's doing. We need to update our F-22, and work with allies on Moon shots. Was Secy Gates humiliated? You bet.
"China Stealth Jet Upstages Gates, Hu A test flight of China's stealth fighter overshadowed the U.S. defense secretary's visit and appeared to surprise President Hu, prompting concern about whether the civilian leadership is fully in control of the military." (see below*)

Wednesday 1020P Eastern (720P Pacific Time): Jeremy Zakis, Australia, in re: Brisbane floods worsen as death toll reaches 23 in Queensland; 67 missing. Town is snake-infested after quarry bursts. Death adder: paralysis immediately, then death by asphyxiation in six hours. Also brown snakes that're infesting Fernvale - in trees, your ceiling, everywhere. Red-bellied black snakes, too. Gordon Chang's grandmother's cat used to goto the creek, grab poisonous snakes, and drag them home to the grandmother (who went hysterical). Queensland horses are breaking free, kangaroos everywhere trying not to drown. Queensland coking coal is needed by China to run its iron mills; may be unavailable for months. There's no one scientific explanation for these mammoth, unexpected rains.
Wednesday 1035P Eastern (735P Pacific Time): Zahid Hussain, NYT in Islamabad and author, The Scorpion's Tale, in re: Zardari ally to succeed slain official in Pakistan: Sardar Muhammad Latif Khan Khosa was appointed to lead Punjab in place of the assassinated Salman Taseer. A minority of fanatics are still celebrating the murder. Nowhere in the world can a civilized nation allow this to happen. Our society is extremely resilient, having been diagnosed as about to dissolve multiple time since independence. China and Pakistan: China is a regional power bordering Pakistan and "will always have relations," whereas relations with the US are "seasonal." Deobandis (close to Wahhabists) and Braylwiyyah (Barelvi) Sufi Order are two extremist groups in Pakistan; the governor's murderer is Braylwiyyah.
Wednesday 1050P Eastern (750P Pacific Time): Bruce Bechtol, Angelo State and author, Defiant Failed State, in re: the North Korean missile threat to us: the US doesn't have a good missile defense; TaePoDong2 probably can reach the US West Coast. The MuSuDon can reach Guam; have tested this with Iran. Combining a Stealth fighter with boomers with a long-range, multistage missile - an aggressive collection. North Korea testing many weapons, and has a plutonium and and HEU program, thus having both the weapons and the platforms to carry them; China smiles and stays mum. Huge increases in Chinese-DPRK trade and dip exchanges. Washington can't get a grip on the fact that the Chinese may not be cooperating with US wishes.

Chinese deals that have fallen through

Wednesday 1105P Eastern (805P Pacific Time): Sadanand Dhume, AEI resident fellow, and WSJ columnist, in re: The Indian government has characterized media reports claiming Chinese troops have ventured into the Demchok area of Jammu and Kashmir's Leh district as baseless. According to an Indian External Affairs news release, there is no cause for concern, as China and India have differing opinions as to where the Line of Actual Control (LAC) is. Earlier on Jan. 10, Indian army chief V. K. Singh likewise played down reports that Chinese troops had entered Indian territory in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, and warned contractors to stop construction work in the area. Singh said the so-called intrusions occurred because of perceived differences in the LAC, an issue that is being addresses by the two countries through discussion. Powder keg. Both sides making noise about something both claim didn't happen. The world's two largest populations; India doesn't want to pick a fight with China. China probably moved troops into territory that's de facto Indian; ergo, carefully parsed language. In an ideal world, India would like everything just to be left alone. This is not an ideal world. Since in twenty years the Indian workforce will be much greater than China's, which probably is deeply alarming China, so Beijing may think it has to take aggressive steps now to nip Indian power in the bud. Also, in a few years China's population will be much older that the US's - China's one-child policy, and America is a land of immigration. This follows a classic pattern of a rising authoritarian power; jingoist. China seems to be taking on a bunch of big dogs: Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, the US, and perhaps Russia. The disquiet and concern are real, but discussed in whispers. India views its sphere of influence as extending broadly from Singapore to the Gulf of Aden, while China is developing its String of Pearls: Burma, Sri Lanka, Pakistan.

Wednesday 1120P Eastern (820P Pacific Time): Joseph Sternberg, WSJ, in re: rare earths - Beijing is poorly situated to win whatever game it's playing with resource supplies.
Wednesday 1135P Eastern (835P Pacific Time): Nick Wade, NYT, in re: oxytocin, the clan loyalty drug. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11hormone.html

Wednesday 1150P Eastern (850P Pacific Time): Adam Nossiter, NYT, in re: Côte d'Ivoire, death squads

Wednesday/Thurs 1205A Eastern (905 Pacific Time): Steve Moore, WSJ, in re: federal receipts rise
Wednesday/Thurs 1220A Eastern (920 Pacific Time): Mark Schroeder, Stratfor.com, in re: Tunisian curfew, Sudanese voting, Côte d'Ivoire violence, African turmoil

Wednesday/Thurs 1235A Eastern (935P Pacific Time): Aaron Klein, WABC radio, in re: Beirut government falls
Wednesday/Thurs 1250A Eastern (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

______________________________________________________________________________

China Global Investment Tracker: 2011

Published on January 10, 2011 by Derek Scissors, Ph.D.

China's investment overseas is increasingly important to the United States and the international community. The China Global Investment Tracker created by The Heritage Foundation is the only publicly available, comprehensive dataset of large Chinese investments and contracts worldwide beyond Treasury bonds. Details are available on well over 300 attempted transactions -- failed and successful -- over $100 million in all industries, including energy, mining, transportation and banking.

China's investment total could be higher. Close to $140 billion in proposed spending has been rejected by foreign or Chinese regulators or has failed due to mistakes by Chinese firms. However, the annual value of these failed transactions is falling and there are clear signs Chinese firms are learning to be better investors.

Download the dataset on large Chinese foreign investments: China Global Investment Tracker

For more information on the growing Chinese investments

Rebalancing Chinese Investment In The U.S.
Well over 90 percent of Chinese investment in the U.S. goes to low-yield government bonds. Investment is skewed toward the government due to the foolish and destructive American federal budget deficit, but also because political opposition blocks Chinese spending outside bonds. There are certainly sectors important to national security that should be off-limits but, beyond those, the U.S. should accept more non-bond investment.

Where China Invests, And Why It Matters
The PRC has hundreds of billions of dollars available for investment and a desire to lock up resources; the U.S. has several trillion already invested and a bigger, more multi-dimensional economy. Concerns about increased Chinese investment and business activity should be addressed by expanding American activity, from investment in Ivory Coast to trade with Taiwan.

Chinese Outward Investment: Better Information Required The debate over the nature of Chinese investment outside of bonds suffers from too much speculation and too few facts. Chinese non-bond investment is negligible as compared to the size of the American economy. There are other concerns, though, such as Chinese investment in Iran.

* The U.S. intelligence community has determined that Beijing has developed and deployed a series of missiles that would give China second-strike nuclear capability in any confrontation with the United States. The determination of a sea-based deterrent is said to have significantly increased Beijing's threat to the United States.    "It is clear to me that China is now embarking on a significant investment in a second-strike capability to ensure the survival and, thus, viability of its nuclear forces," said Richard Fisher, a researcher at the International Assessment and Strategy Center and a leading U.S. expert on China.    In a presentation to the American Enterprise Institute on July 11, Mr. Fisher said China has launched or tested a series of nuclear missiles and platforms.    He said the first Type 94 submarine ballistic nuclear missile has been equipped and launched.    The Type 94, which began construction in 1999, is designed to contain the JL-2 submarine-launched nuclear missiles. Each submarine is meant to contain 16 JL-2s, or DF-31s, with a range of 8,000 kilometers, which would allow Chinese submarines to target portions of the United States from areas near the Chinese coast.    The disclosure of the completion of the Type 94 submarine appeared to mark a significant acceleration in China's nuclear submarine program. As late as May 2004, the Pentagon asserted that the new Chinese missile submarine would not be operational until around 2010.    "The JL-2 SLBM has undergone a series of tests," Mr. Fisher said. "The potential for this to be armed with multiple warheads is there."    

U.S. intelligence sources agree with Mr. Fisher's assessment. They said Beijing has made the production of nuclear warheads and launchers a priority, with emphasis on mobility and decoys.    The Pentagon has determined that China plans to deploy the DF-31A, an extended-range variant of the mobile long-range DF-31, in 2007. The sources said the new three-stage, solid-fuel, mobile missile, with a range of 12,000 kilometers, could carry up to three payloads that would separate and overcome existing U.S. missile defenses.    "For China, nuclear weapons largely have four purposes: one, strategic deterrence; two, retaliation; three, counter-coercion; and four, great-power status," Rand Corp. senior analyst Evan Medeiros said.    Another Chinese missile, the DF-5 Mod 2, with a range of 13,000 kilometers, is said to have completed deployment in 2005. The sources said China has developed the two-stage, liquid-fuel missile to carry between five and 10 warheads.    Beijing has also sought to overcome the vulnerability of its fleet by building a huge naval base on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The sources said the base would contain an underground facility to shelter platforms, such as nuclear submarines, against any potential U.S. attack.    

Intelligence sources said Beijing has been developing an anti-ship ballistic missile. They said the weapon could be a sea-based version of the DF-11 Mod 1 land-based missile.    "One could easily imagine that there is a plan to drop, in a surprise manner, 10 to 12 warheads on either side of the continental United States in conjunction with a build-up to rescue Taiwan from whatever kind of attack China seems to be contemplating," Mr. Fisher said. "I can easily imagine, I do not know, President Hillary Clinton sitting in the White House wondering, 'Gee, we could not do anything to stop those 12 warheads that did not explode but landed off of all our major cities on both coasts.' And do we really want to be sending our single carrier that might be deployed with the Seventh Fleet into this maelstrom? That is the kind of coercion potential  that is out there.

A DF-31 missile. (fas.org)

Tuesday 11 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 11, 2011 7:46 PM | No Comments

Iron Market (Marché en Fer) in Port-au-Prince

Co-host: Larry Kudlow, Kudlow & Co, CNBC, and WABC radio

Tuesday 905P Eastern Time: Michael Boskin, Hoover; former chairman of Council of Economic Advisors.: 1. Encomia for Rep Dave Camp. 2. High corporate tax rate is an impediment to growth. US taxes are 50% greater than in the OECD. LK: lower tax rate should be better than neutral. MB: Broadening the base and lowering the rates: corp rate is 35%, but investments allow depreciations, by formulas based on asset, industry, nature of financing. Corporate tax rate winds up being a big obstacle to growth. LK: profits earned overseas should not be taxed twice, once overseas and one when repatriated. MB: Repatriation holiday needed. Pres Obama's
Tuesday 920P Eastern Time: Michael Derby, Dow Jones, in re: president of the Dallas Fed, Richard W. Fisher, said that QE2 will be the end of the Fed's interventions; he now has rotated into a voting position and is speaking modestly. Charles Plosser of the Philadelphia Fed also is not comfortable with Fe's policies, and also is speaking mildly for the moment. Charles Evans of the Chicago Fed guessed we'd have 4% growth in the next few years. Four per cent is not enough to get us out of this hole. LK: Zero interest rate and the rest - these constitute a high-risk strategy.
Tuesday 935P Eastern Time: Neil Schloss, Ford Motor Corp vice-president and treasurer; LouAnn Hammond, Drivingthe Nation.com, in re: December was a relatively strong month; we're projecting about 11.8 units in the US; 12.5 to 13.5 in Europe, better; globally, 75-85mil units. Keeps our profit margins as good as they've been - we've right-sized the business, matched supply and demand, took out a lot of capacity. The jobs we're adding are mostly labor in plants as bring new products in; also some engineering work. LAH: UAH? NS: contract is up in September, we'll keep the discussions pretty private. As part of GM and Chrysler bailouts, they had a no-strike provision; we do not have that. Share price was 28 at close today, a 10% improvement year to date. We're pleased with were we're at: the One-Ford Plan - everybody's working hard and together; we can be more efficient faster and everybody is accountable to everybody. The fact that we didn't take the bailout? First and foremost, its the product that customers favor. e have a much better-balances portfolio now.
Tuesday 950P Eastern Time: Joseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg senior economic analyst, in re: We're doing a litle better than expected. There was a release of pent-up demand; we may decelerate just a bit, then we'll get paycheck tax cuts and people will feel a tad richer, will spend some of it. Eventually, your car, washing machine, computer breaks down and needs to be replaced. Hosing headwinds won't diminish for a long time. Adding jobs at 150K/mo means we're stabilizing unemployment at ___ %. This recovery will be sluggish and disappointing. I wrote in my non-farm payroll report: we really need to see small business be resuscitated; I think they faced a near-death experience and are in shock. If oil goes over $100/Bbl, it'll harm growth, cause trouble. Gas at $4/gal will be a killer. Tomorrow: a 5:30AM bond auction. Japan will buy some eurobonds. ECB will bail out Portugal. [Who'll bail out Belgium? --ed.]

Joseph Brusuelas is Senior Economist at Bloomberg, LP. His produces the Bloomberg Economic Brief, a daily economic research product. You can follow Joe at Facebook and at Twitter(@joebrusuelas). A one-month, risk-free trial of Joe's product can be found at www.bloomberg.com/brief.

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Sloan Digital Sky Survey: outer regions

A map of stars in the outer regions of the Milky Way Galaxy, derived from the SDSS images of the northern sky, shown in a Mercator-like projection. The color indicates the distance of the stars, while the intensity indicates the density of stars on the sky. Structures visible in this map include streams of stars torn from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a smaller 'orphan' stream crossing the Sagittarius streams, the 'Monoceros Ring' that encircles the Milky Way disk, trails of stars being stripped from the globular cluster Palomar 5, and excesses of stars found towards the constellations Virgo and Hercules. Circles enclose new Milky Way companions discovered by the SDSS; two of these are faint globular star clusters, while the others are faint dwarf galaxies. Credit: V. Belokurov and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

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Tuesday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Liz Rappaport, The Wall Street Journal, in re: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703779704576074360288635474.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection

"In a 63-page report released Tuesday, Goldman says that for the first time in its 142-year-history, it will start disclosing how much revenue comes from the firm's own trading and investing." Ivanhoe: Goldman as a warm villain. The investment bankers are starting to resume control of the firm (from the traders). It was the traders who [trashed] Goldman's reputation. Blankfein not planning to step down soon, but Evans is a reasonable choice as a successor. The Angelides report may explain ill of Goldman; "Don't know how many grenades they have left in their pocket." One of the changes the Goldman report is putting forth is that the securitization market/shadow banking system is now under the investment banking arm. The Abacus deal suited a trade idea, not long-term benefit for investors. Facebook and its ilk: all rising together. Goldman guys are nimble.

Tuesday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): John Fund, WSJ, in re: This issue isn't politics; the problem is the public policy that allows a mentally ill person to buy a gun,; and there's no treatment. The fellow should have been detained long before the event. We need to do something about the people who need to be treated or incarcerated.
Tuesday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Bill Vlasic, NYT, in re: Chrysler/Fiat reborn at Detroit Auto Show.

Tuesday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks. "Assange Fears 'Guantanamo' Or 'Death Penalty' If Extradited to U.S." Attorney in London appeals to Britons; carefully scripted. A patently deranged claim.
Tuesday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Gene Countryman, KNSS, News radio 1330 in Wichita, in re: snow in Kansas ("flat and happy"). The west side of Wichita got about 4"; here on the east side we got 5" or 6". Not windy. "Kansas snow looks a lot like New York snow: white and cold." The Tucson massacre: what everybody here speaks of is the nine-year-old girl. The reporting in general has been atrocious - John, your reports have been clear and accurate. The national news media seem to have collapsed into a lynch mob; they don't seem to have the talent or will to report the news. People here don't like the blame attached to different people, including Sarah Palin, when the blame attached to the person who's in custody. The sheriff of Pima County has spoken [injudiciously]. Children here had their snow day today.

Tuesday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Robert George, Princeton, Hoover, in re: Sheriff Wipnik of Tucson, pops off.
Tuesday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Russian space program; discovery of Colz Zones in the cosmos where stars are born; giant clusters of galaxies discovered.
Tuesday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Brian Stelter, in re: TV everywhere: marriage of TV and Internet.

Tuesday/Wed 1205A (905 Pacific Time): James Taranto, WSJ, in re: NYT editorial and Paul Krugman: blame Tucson on the Right.
Tuesday/Wed 1220A (920 Pacific Time): Roben Farzad, Bloomberg and Business Week, in re: Verizon iPhone
Tuesday/Wed 1235A (935P Pacific Time): Pooja Bhatia, NYT, in re: Haiti renovates its Iron Market (Marché en Fer); dedicated ribbon-cutting for Bill Clinton and Denis O'Brien, billionaire of Digicel (Haitian phone service) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/world/americas/11haiti.html

Tuesday/Wed 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Snow in Kansas

Monday 10 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 10, 2011 7:44 PM | No Comments

Monday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): David Drucker, Roll Call, in re: the Tucson shooting and Congressional response, and David Drucker's conversation with Jon Kyl.

Monday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): Mike Lillis, The Hill, in re: the weapon, and Arizona gun laws
Monday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Nancy Gioia, Global Dir, Electrification, Ford Motor Co., and LouAnn Hammond, Driving the Nation.com, in re: C-Max minivan (hybrid), & C-Max Energy (plug-in hybrid) Focus Electric. NG: Make electrical transportation practical and affordable. The all-electric we had at the Consumer Electronics Show has lithium ion energy battery directly drives the motor. Plug into a 240 outlet for four hours to recharge. Focus Electric will be in showrooms later this year (Transit COnnect Electric, a small van, already available); in 2012, C-Max hybrid and plug-in will be available. Ford is adding jobs at the Michigan assembly site over 1,200 jobs on electric vehicles. Other products, fantastically fuel efficient, will all together add 7,000 jobs. Our plug-in hybrid uses the same architecture a others with a larger energy battery, can charge on a 110 outlet. First you use the energy from your overnight charge; thereafter, use gas, so you;ll get well over 500 miles on a tank of gas. LAH: We're importing $113 bil per annum for gas we don't need to buy in the US. NG: We'll be launching products n Europe half a year after the US; then Asia. We're electrifying our highest-volume platforms - ten different models, will produce 2million-plus in several year on multiple plants around the world. Ford: Affordable transportation for the masses.

Monday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time): Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11), in re: Giffords; Brady proposal to make it a Federal crime to threaten Members of Congress: the public square must have free speech; Shuler carrying a pistol at events; Clyburne calling for TSA protection; Second Amendment material on the Glock 19 with extended clip (was this in original Brady bill 94?).

Monday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Rep Tom Rooney (FL-16) (this is Port St Lucie - the Mets!), in re: Hard to explain Tucson events to my nine-year-old son. OK for Congressmen to have more protection in the DIstrict, but to do my job need to be able to move around my district unimpeded. Heated exchanges are not at all necessarily threatening. After Gabby, it runs through your mind, if I just show up somewhere with staff, will they be endangered? I've been surprised to see how kind Members are n ht floor of the House; that it's only on TV that the gloves come off. Shout-out to former Speaker Pelosi: we can pass the gavel from political party to political party peacefully in this country; the threats that mar other countries - that's not how it works in America. We iron out our differences by voting, not by violence.

Monday 1020P (720P Pacific Time):   John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: next hearing feb 7 or 8, support request for extradition. Unless something almost incredible up the WikiLeaks sleeve, Assange will be on trial in Sweden in three month or so. The fellow who initially took the WikiLeaks site has turned against Assange, claims that Assange is trying to run one of the hugest financial scams in history; if he's losing over $600K per week, what was he actually making? Article in the Tribune de Geneve quoted Assange as claiming to lose €600K per week. A Swiss whistle-blower who ran the Caribbean operations of Julius Barr signed his name to the docs: "My bank is using the Caymans as a front for clients around the world to avoid paying taxes." Assange has hired a publicity firm, which has told the lawyer to shut up. Jonathan Pollard: Marty Peretz is exercising his Constitutional right to be stupid.
Monday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):   Lara Brown, Villanova, in re: history of shooters in the US, esp presidential shooters, over the last hundred years, as well as others. Hinckley comes to mind. Secret Service report in 1999 looked at this from 1949-1996, eighty-three persons. All fit: warped desire for notoriety, for revenge, and find a way out of their pain and personal problems. Mostly white, male, single, no children, not served in the military. The mean is about thirty-five years of age; this one is kind of a young failure. Not organized political conspiracy; lone wolves. Planned in advance. This attacker seems to be living in a delusion where he's the star of a dark opera.
Monday 1050P (750P Pacific Time):   Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Tucson shooting; the shooter's parentage - his father is Jewish; also report on Israel.

Monday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):   Jeremy Zakis, Australia, and Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: Queensland floods - increasing disaster. Flood update from this morning: eight people killed overnight in a flash flood in Toowomba, a hundred miles west of Brisbane. The water was described as an 'inland tsunami'; thirty-plus people remain missing and death toll is expected to rise. Floods expected to worsen today and more rain likely over the next twenty-four hours. Meteorologists are calling this a 'super rainstorm' and have had to re-do their weather models because it's at the top of their extreme weather range. The situation is changing every minute. Brisbane being evacuated. As water rises, lethal snakes abound - incl the brown snake, the red-bellied black snake and the death adder; also alligators - being washed downstream by floodwaters; they try to land on any dry land, which happen to be remaining islands where people are. The snakes are insanely aggressive: if you make a ruckus to cause them to flee, they attack. The skies are all dark gray, the humidity is 100%; like a call to Noah's Ark. Flood zone is extending to New South Wales. is currently the size of France and Germany, and will be growing one-third in the next day or so. Meteorological computer models have to be expanded every fifteen minutes.

Asian economy is growing more dependent on export of commodities from Australia, incl iron ore and coal. Meanwhile, Secy Gates has been publicly dressed down by his Chinese counterpart and he must be starting to take seriously the real threat of China to the US. Also to Taiwan. The balance of power once was in favor of Taiwan, now has shifted to Beijing.
Monday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Gretchen Morgensohn. NYT, in re: bad mortgages and audits of banks too big to fail.

Monday 1135P (835P Pacific Time):   Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Kepler has found a planet only 1.4 the size of the Earth.   http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/keplers-most-recent-discoveries
Monday 1150P (850P Pacific Time):   Steve Erlanger, NYT, in re: Niger killings and Sarkozy, and French Sahelian colonies.

Monday/Tues 1205A (905 Pacific Time):   Guy Chazen, WSJ, Alaska pipeline shut
Monday/Tues  1220A (920 Pacific Time):   Matthew Garrahan, FT, in re: Tucson gun laws
Monday/Tues  1235A (935P Pacific Time):   Mark Schroeder, Stratfor, in re: Vote in Southern Sudan; murders of three French citizens in Niger; Gbagbo refuses to leave, has Golf Hotel under siege, still ECOWUS.
Monday/Tues  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 8, 2011 7:42 PM | 1 Comment

Saturday 8 January 2011

Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-8)
Saturday 905P Eastern Time: Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11), in re: the attempted assassination of Rep Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, where she had set up a card table in a supermarket parking lot. A Federal judge, U.S. District Judge John M. Roll, is dead, with Christina Taylor Green, a nine-year-old girl born on September 11, 2001, and four others, in this massacre; eighteen wounded. Jared Lee Loughner, the twenty-two-year-old killer, bought a 9mm Glock 19 legally. He had the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Too early to figure out exactly what happened; this is a time to pray. When we have all the information, we can look at plans. McKinley was shot by an anarchist; Teddy Roosevelt was shot by John Schrank, also deranged.

Saturday 920P Eastern Time: Margaret Hoover, Fox News, in re: political implications of the massacre

Mark Kelly and Gabrielle Giffords, wedding photo

Saturday 935P Eastern Time: Devin Nunes (CA-21), in re: have been acquainted with Gabrielle Giffords, who's respected by both sides of the aisle. Nineteen people were shot. "U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is married to Mark Kelly, a veteran astronaut who is scheduled to command the planned April 1 launch of Endeavour to the International Space Station. The Endeavour crew aims to deliver a large cosmic ray detector that will be mounted outside the outpost." Gabrielle Giffords was pleased to join in reading the Constitution at the beginning of the 112th Congress, especially to read the First Amendment.
Saturday 950P Eastern Time: JimMcTague, Barron's, and Sean Miller, TheHill.com, in re: Is the Tea Party responsible in any way for this event? Her opponent in the recent election was Jesse Kelly; "Rep Gabrielle Giffords' 2010 Congressional opponent held a June event that encouraged participants to 'Get on Target for Victory in November. Help Remove Gabrielle for Office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.' " Jim McTague avers that every headline writer in the US uses "crosshairs" in copy. The main issues in the Southwest are immigration, healthcare.

Saturday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Rep Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11), in re: in political discourse, the vernacular is often used; I've been told there's a target on my back. I agree that questionable; can't say it's cause and effect of events. We cannot isolate our elected officials from the electorate. It takes courage, same as it does for an eighty-year-old woman who walks on a dangerous street to get home. Cannot let fear rule your life. It's routine for Congresspersons to be threatened frequently, it's something we live through.
Saturday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): John Fund, WSJ, in re: The shooter appears so far to have acted on his own. His high school classmate remembers him well as a "left-wing radical and a pothead" - which is fragmentary, and the report of one person. Politics, being war by other means, includes a lot of martial metaphors. In this early stage, it's a reach to say that Sarah Palin's crosshairs were instrumental. Am at a conference right now with a number of Congressmen - who've already got communications from the Capitol police, and they have more security now than they had this morning. Gabrielle Giffords's father, in much grief, did say that Sarah Palin was partly responsible for this murder. John Fund was born in Tucson.

Saturday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Rep Eliot Engel (NY-17), with Lara Brown, Villanova, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re: Have been close colleagues with a good friend of Gabby, who's one of the loveliest people in Congress. We're supposed to decide our democracy by ballots, not bullets. We need to tone down our political rhetoric a great deal and swiftly. When Gabby was shot, I was on a sidewalk shaking hands in front of a delicatessen, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. This is what Congressmen do. It's routine for Congressmen to be threatened frequently; it's something we live through. Congress is the people's house, and that won't change.

Saturday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Lara Brown, Villanova, and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re: it's the normal landscape for Congresspersons to get threats; as a reporter, I've got threats several times and had to take measures. This is not new, it's happened a lot in the past, but because of the way we transmit news we know more about it sooner. Jared Lee Loughner's political disagreements definitely suggest a mental disorder. LB: Jared Loughner, reminiscent of McKinley's assassin, seems to be not politically acute but deranged. There was a journal of opinion at that time named Liberty, promoting an anarchist movement (it had split from a communist wing). The premise was that it's the rulers who are the problem, not the system or the lesser persons. SZ: Congresspersons say that physical danger is part of the job. JB: Jason Altmire (PA-4), a conservative Democrat like Giffords, also voted against healthcare and other Pelosi programs.

photo: Judge John M Roll. "Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik said Roll, 63, who was a close friend of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, had just
attended Mass at a nearby church and decided to stop by and say hello. A gunman opened fire, killing six and wounding 12, including Giffords."

Saturday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Ben West, Stratfor.com, in re: Weapon purchased legally in November 2010 in Tucson. More than a dozen people were shot by this Glock 19, with a magazine extension giving him thirty or thirty-five rounds. Suspicious object found, might be like a coffee can with writing on it. Loughlin ran from the scene and was tackled. His YouTube videos suggest that he was on a suicide mission where someone, perhaps the police, would shoot him. YouTube postings: incoherent, antifederalist remarks - peculiar, immature, raving. Reminiscent of Joseph Stack who, furious with the IRS, crashed his small plane into an Austin, Texas, federal office building. In Pima County, southern Arizona, there are anti-immigration groups, willing to commit violence to stop it. Right now, Stratfor has him as a lone gunman.

Saturday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Larry Johnson, NoQuarter blog, in re: Our democracy has weathered many assassination attempts and actual assassinations. We need to keep historical perspective.

Saturday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt, part 1
Saturday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt, part 2

Saturday/Sun 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Arif Rafiq, Pakistan Policy blog, in re: shooting of the governor of Punjab Province by his bodyguard. Growing culture of violence in Pakistan and, now, in the US.
Saturday/Sun 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): Devin Nunes (CA-21), in re: have been acquainted with Gabrielle Giffords, who's respected by both sides of the aisle. Nineteen people were shot. "U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is married to Mark Kelly, a veteran astronaut who is scheduled to command the planned April 1 launch of Endeavour to the International Space Station. The Endeavour crew aims to deliver a large cosmic ray detector that will be mounted outside the outpost." Gabrielle Giffords was pleased to join in reading the Constitution at the beginning of the 112th Congress, especially to read the First Amendment.

Saturday/Sun 1235A: (935P Pacific Time): Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11), in re: the attempted assassination of Rep Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson, where she had set up a card table in a supermarket parking lot. A Federal judge, U.S. District Judge John M. Roll, is dead, with a nine-year-old girl (born on September 11, 2001) and four others, in this massacre; eighteen wounded. Jared Lee Loughner, the twenty-two-year-old killer, bought a 9mm Glock 19 legally. He had the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Too early to figure out exactly what happened; this is a time to pray. When we have all the information, we can look at plans. McKinley was shot by an anarchist; Teddy Roosevelt was shot by John Schrank, also deranged.

Saturday/Sun 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt: Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index

05-06-2009, 07:33 PM My leap to the 21st century was the purchase of a Glock 19. I also purchased an after

market magazine extension for a Model 17 magazine that slides over the magazine to provide a pinky extension. This is adjustable and tightened down by a hex screw, but the adjustability is very limited and the magazine often hangs going in and out because of the tight fit, so off it came. Is there a better brand or make, or does Glock make an extended magazine for the 19 like it does for the 26?

photo: 9mm Glock 19 with 30-round extension

Showing 3 of 16 Customer Review(s)

Glock 19 Pistol, PI1950201, Black, RH, 9MM, 10rd, DAO, 4.02", Polymer, Fixed

By RL

Review Date: 07/27/2010
Rating:
Purchased From This Site: Yes

My Glock 23 in .40 S&W can hit a quarter at 60 YARDS. Seriously - I''ve done it. I expect nothing less of the Glock 19 which uses 9mm ammo that is available at half the cost. The .40 is my CCW gun but I can''t afford to practice as much with it as I would like so the 19 is the perfect compromise. It allows me to practice at half the price and in a pinch it can act as my CCW. Guns at cost got it to my quickly and at a great, great price.

3 of 3 found this review helpful

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Great pistol

By Steve

Review Date: 07/25/2010
Rating:
Reviewer Experience: Military Experience
Reviewer Location: CO

Having had almost 4 years in the US Army Infantry, along with being a gun enthusiast, I have to say that the G19 as well as most other Glock models I''ve fired are some of the most reliable pistols I''ve ever had the pleasure of shooting. I''ve shot Rugers, Berettas, SIGs, Springfields, Colts Tack on that they''re light, cheap, and accurate and you have a pistol brand that''s well worth any praise it gets.

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Just Awesome

By Stevo3051

Review Date: 07/15/2010
Rating:
Reviewer Experience: Weekend Shooter
Reviewer Location: NJ

I had a chance to put through a hundred rounds through my G19 today and it is accurate as can be. Also, for all of you worried about recoil there is barely any. I have small arms and wrists and the recoil was no problem. I would suggest this model to anyone looking for a range weapon or home security. Good job glock. Also Glock World sent my order quickly to my FFL and I saved at least $100 going that route.

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________________________________________

Sunday 9 January 2011

Queensland floods: mud for as far as the eye can see

Sunday  905P Eastern Time: Jodi Schneider, Bloomberg; Jim Mc Tague, Barron's; Mona Charen, NRO, in re: the Tucson massacre; uncivil and inflammatory speech; "I'm no fan of Sarah Palin, but she didn't encourage the gunman to shoot Rep Giffords. This is a lynching."
Sunday 920P Eastern Time: continued
Sunday 935P Eastern Time: John Loftus, Esq, author: America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks, the Justice Department letter requesting Twitter accounts of Assange, Birgitta Jonsdottir, a Dutch hacker and Jacob Appelbaum, a US citizen.
Sunday 950P Eastern Time: Mary Kissel, WSJ editorial, in re: Facebook and Goldman Sachs

Sunday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): John Fund, WSJ, and Aaron Task, Yahoo Finance, in re: Rep. Robert Brady will offer bill to expand protections for members of Congress. Itnemperate political language and possible results.
Sunday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): continued
Sunday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Larry Johnson, NoQuarter blog; Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index; Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in re: It's not a federal crime to threaten a member of Congress. A classmate of Loughner long ago warned that he was likely to carry a gun into school. SZ: people are reckless with their words, even people in the limelight. We see the course that political correctness has taken in the last twenty years - inflammatory speech on once side, fear of saying anything on the other. LJ: Olberman, Limbaugh, Levin - violent speech from all sides. Giffords has proudly proclaimed her ownership of guns.
Sunday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Abheek Bhattacharya, WSJ Hong Kong, in re: Indian airline prices increased by 100% one month; yes, some evidence of collusion between ministers and constituents. Crony capitalism. Allows foreign investment but not foreign airline investment - carriers thus are hampered by inability to bring in Cathay Pacific, Singapore, and other good carriers. Is there a political constituency that reform creates? Looks as though voting for reform is coming in. Private sector to be able to provide goods and services to t he 1.2 billion people of India.

Sunday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Gabrielle Giffords, Jewish member of Congress; Iran sanctions; Israeli spy buzzard with robo-yarmulke (the control mechanism, we think).
Sunday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Jeremy Zakis, Australia, and Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: the Queensland floods

English: Map showing political regions of Sudan as of July 2006. Voting in the South, the turquoise region..

   Darfur
   Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile
   North Sudan
   South Sudan
   Eastern Front, area of operations July 2006
   Abyei, as defined by the Permanent Court of Arbitration

Sunday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): John Avlon, CNN and Newsweek, in Juba, Sudan, in re: Southern Sudan election on the question of secession from Khartoum's corrupt regime - liberate itself from the depredation of the North. Sunday was the first of a seven-day process; will be overwhelmingly in favor of separation. After, it will take till July to creat a government; it's then that Khartoum is considered likely to interfere and try to destroy the fledgling state. Nonetheless, the tone of optimism yesterday was ebullient. English will be the the national language, and the new president was wearing a cowboy hat given him by George W Bush. Oil pipeline between the South and the North: mutual self-interest, also because of 2005 peace accords negotiated by the Bush Administration. A pivot point: the experts o the ground doubted even three months ago that this referendum would occur; but public opinion, international pressure and, crucially, Chinese agreement to accept the results. That was because of a possible new southern pipeline through Kenya. Refining capacity is still in the North, in Khartoum. I've travelled to Abieh with George Clooney and Pendergast; the province can't vote, but is likely to secede to join the South. Tribal wars are initiated and designed to become regional war, but much self-discipline has prevented provocations form doing this. The wounds are fresh; frustration is real; children are still abducted and here are still village-wide murders and rapes. People wearing brightly-colored suits to polls, waving hats and voting cards. A privilege to be here.

Sunday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Lake Vostok is a half-mile under the Russian territory in Antarctica; Russians have been trying to drill in to it for years, are nearly there, but huge environmental concerns - organisms alive from fourteen million years ago, and who may have evolved as since then no sunlight has reached them and they'd have to have survived by another energy source.
Mapped the surface a mile under the Greenland ice cap; grooves from thirty to hundred feet deep. The ocean has been growing cooler since 2001; don't know why for sure.

Sunday/Mon 1205A (905 Pacific Time): David Drucker, RollCall, in re: the Senate and the shooter
Sunday/Mon 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): Sean Miller, The Hill, in re: the House and the shooter
Sunday/Mon 1235A: (935P Pacific Time): Aaron Klein, WABC Radio, in re: Gabrielle Giffords and Zimmerman, center of major concern in Israel because they're Jewish. Zimmerman's death, at 3o, is a catastrophe. Also, Syria and Jerusalem housing
Sunday/Mon 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

http://earthsci.org/education/Lake_Vostok/new_vostok_cartoon_low.gif

Lake Vostok (Russian: восток, "east") is the largest of more than 140 subglacial lakes found under the surface of Antarctica. It is located beneath Russia's Vostok Station, 4,000 metres (13,000 ft) under the surface of the central East Antarctic ice sheet. It is 250 kilometres (160 mi) long by 50 kilometres (31 mi) wide at its widest point, thus similar in size to Lake Ontario, and is divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The average water temperature is around −3 °C (27 °F); it remains liquid below the normal freezing point because of high pressure from the weight of the ice above it. Geothermal heat from the Earth's interior warms the bottom of the lake. The ice sheet itself insulates the lake from cold temperatures on the surface.

In April 2005, German, Russian, and Japanese researchers found that the lake has tides. Depending on the position of the Sun and the Moon, the surface of the lake rises between 1 and 2 cm. The researchers assume that the fluctuation of the lake surface has a pumping effect that keeps the water circulating, which would promote the productivity of microorganisms if there are any.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Friday 7 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 7, 2011 7:40 PM | No Comments

photo: Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer

Friday 905P Eastern Time: Joseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg senior economic analyst, in re: employment figures. "Slow, painful steps in the right direction."

What to watch for today: US The standout release will be the labour market report for December (13.30 GMT). We do not believe that non-farm payrolls rose last month by as much as Wednesday's strong ADP survey suggested. Other indicators, such as the employment component of December's ISM non-manufacturing survey, point to a more modest improvement in labour market conditions. We think that an employment gain of between 150,000 and 200,000 is the most likely outcome. That may be just about enough to reduce the unemployment rate to 9.7%, from 9.8% in November. Nonetheless, we don't expect the unemployment rate to fall much below 9% either this year or next. Otherwise, after having no change in November, we wouldn't be surprised to see average hourly earnings rise by 0.2% m/m. Unfavourable base effects mean that would push the annual growth rate up to 1.9%, from 1.6%. But with so much spare capacity in the labour market, we doubt that would mark the end of the steady downward trend in wage growth. Finally, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke makes his first appearance before the new Congress. Although the title of his testimony is "The Economic Outlook and Monetary and Fiscal Policy", given that he is talking to the Committee on the Budget the focus will be on fiscal rather than monetary matters. On this subject, Bernanke is unlikely to do more than suggest the US needs a long-term fiscal plan. (Paul Ashworth & Paul Dales) .
Friday 920P Eastern Time: Louise Story, NYT, and Jeff Bliss The Bliss Index, in re: CALPERS
Friday 935P Eastern Time: Paul Taylor, National Automobile Dealers Association chief economist, and LouAnn Hammond, Driving the Nation.com, in re: NADA's top five factors that'll boost 2011 auto sales

Friday 950P Eastern Time: Ben Casselman, NYT, in re: US report on BP failure with TransOcean and Halliburton. Seven of the nine failed decisions were by BP, whose internal investigation report accepted one such and blamed its contractors for the rest. The US Presidential commission identified BP as the more culpable while pointing to widespread, systemic industry problems, evinced also by Halliburton and TransOcean.

Friday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Sebastian Gorka, , in re: AfPakia, the struggles of COIN, the perception of progress, the fresh deployment of Marines into Kandahar. WikiLeaks. Disconnect between what's being communicated in the public policy realm and what emerges from real briefings. What's enshrined in the Petraeus and McChrystal doctrine - counterinsurgency - is not at all what we're dong; we're doing nation-building. See: http://www.ndu.edu/press/COIN-and-Counterinsurgency.html Why did we deploy - to prevent another attack on the US? To make Afghanistan into a Westphalian nation state? Can we reverse the heavy mission creep from the Bush administration? As for Somalia, replace "tribe" with "clan." The Somali clan structure is quite adept at unconventional warfare; in Afghanistan, same thing with older roots. Afghanistan: note rogue nuclear state next door. Pakistan is more complicated, in that we see individuals on the road to radicalization who've gone to Pakistan and then returned to attack the West from within. And the mushroom-cloud-shaped threat hanging over all this is the possibility of war with India.
Friday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): John Loftus, Esq, author, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer, is now fighting a US Justice Department attempt to get hold of her private messages on Twitter. She has ten days to get legal help to respond; seems to be a decent person who grew dissatisfied with Assange. She's worked against slave trafficking in Iceland; collaborated with Manning for a while.
Someone has assanged Assange. Assange threatened to sue the Guardian to prevent it from publishing "his" confidential cable information given to the Guardian under restrictions, only to discover that another WikiLeaks volunteer had gone behind Assange's back and delivered a second set of cables to the Guardian without any restrictions. Hilarious. We have a WikiLeaks version of Private Mannning, who betrayed Assange, leaving the Guardian free to betray its solemn promise to Assange of publication restrictions. And now the Guardian is upset that Assange "betrayed" the Guardian by giving some of "their" cable information to TV news. They all do deserve each other, don't they?

Friday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Rufus Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters; Bill Roggio, FDD, and Arif Rafiq, ForeignPolicy.com, in re: 1. Islamabad assassination: elite bodyguard of the Punjabi governor murdered him on the ground that the governor had spoken ill of the Prophet Mohammed. Murderer is in prison, is becoming a national folk hero. 2. US Vice President Joe Biden will visit Pakistan on Jan. 11 for an overnight stay at the invitation of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. Biden will meet with Gilani and the Pakistani President, Asif Ali Zardari, as well as Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani. Pres Zardari will also be visiting the US for up to ten days. Let's guess that the Secret Service won't allow an armed Pakistani bodyguard within two miles of Biden.

Friday 1050P (750P Pacific Time):  continued

Friday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):   Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: post-the American Century, and post-the American Decade, we're entering into the Millennium: promised to be a new American Century but we'll be lucky to get a decade out of it. The US has become the greatest Middle Eastern power - like the Ottomans, a caliphate - and is distracted from what it needs to focus on. By pursuing counterinsurgency as the highest goal, we're selling out our true interests and ignoring emerging rivals, like China.
Friday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): David Weidner, , in re: Facebook/Goldman
Friday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Matt Kaminsky, WSJ, in re: Pakistan murder
Friday 1150P (850P Pacific Time):   Christine Harper, Bloomberg, in re: Dodd Frank, and no change for bankers-too-big-to-fail

Friday/Sat 1205A (905 Pacific Time):  Greg Zuckerman, WSJ, in re: Facebook/Goldman

Friday/Sat  1220A (920 Pacific Time): Josh Barbanel, WSJ, in re: Manhattan real estate prices
Friday/Sat  1235A (935P Pacific Time):  Mike Wolraich, author, Blowing Smoke
Friday/Sat  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

credit: http://www.ndu.edu/press/COIN-and-Counterinsurgency.html

Thursday 6 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 6, 2011 7:37 PM | No Comments

photo: Malcolm Hoenlein in a hat. "Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, has returned from a trip to Damascus where he met with Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad. Hoenlein, in a brief interview with Politico today, said that he met with Assad 'not as a negotiator or a mediator' but to 'have discussions about humanitarian issues' "

Co-host: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents

Thursday 905P Eastern Time: Rep Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11), in re: 112th Congress

Thursday 920P Eastern Time: Nick Hinkley, NYT, in re: minivan revival

Thursday 935P Eastern Time: Alexander Edwards, strategicvision.com, and LouAnn Hammond, DrivingtheNation.com, in re: Alternative Fuel Interest in 2011; US customers's choices in the future; products from China

Thursday 950P Eastern Time: John Loftus, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: WikiLeaks

Thursday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: Malcolm's trip to Syria, visit with Assad; Palestinian woman who died; Iran sanctions

Thursday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): Mark Dubowitz, FDD, in re: Iran sanctions

Thursday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: Egypt; the Copts & riots after the murders

Thursday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): Mitchell Bard, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) exec dir, in re: recent book, The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America's Interests in the Middle East

Thursday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Lt. Col. Jonathan D. Halevi, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, in re: : Talking to Hamas? Increasing expressions of genocidal intent by Hamas leaders against the Jews; public perceptions of Israel, of Arab nations and organizations. Media silence on, for example, the appalling speeches of members of Hamas; media silence, then visits to and embraces of Hamas by politicians (John Kerry, among others).

Thursday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Capt. Barak A. Raz, North American desk, IDF Spokesperson's Office, in re: unfortunate death of Palestinian woman and misreporting thereof. Jawaher Abu Rahma, 36 years old, died overnight after being teargassed by Israeli troops at a West Bank protest: no human in history has ever before died from being teargassed; a contradictory version of the story is that she "was not even present at the that protest. She did not die of tear gas inhalation but of cancer, the IDF found, and had been lying in a hospital bed for ten days before passing away." According to this version, "Among the East Jerusalem Arab population, cancer is accompanied by a sense of shame and fear of genetic transmittance. Secrecy prevails as knowledge of the patient's sickness among the wider society might harm family members' marriage prospects. Keeping the secret is related to society's expectation of the individual to remain calm, suffer quietly, not show signs of weakness and protect the family's interests. Concealment makes it difficult for patients to seek and receive external help, especially through participation in support groups." ---Hanan Qasem

photo: gigantism

Thursday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Bennedict Carey, NYT, in re: mental toughness and life's tragedies

Thursday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Dan Henninger, WSJ, in re: line-item veto will save the budget

Thursday/Fri 1205A (905 Pacific Time): John Bolton, AEI and WSJ, in re: North Korea and the Obama administration

Thursday/Fri 1220A (920 Pacific Time): Azzam Ahmed, NYT, in re: Dealbook, Facebook, Goldman, and the rules

Thursday/Fri 1235A (935P Pacific Time): Gina Kolata, NYT, in re: John Byrne gigantism

Thursday/Fri 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt: Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index

Wednesday 5 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 5, 2011 7:35 PM | No Comments

Le Golf Hôtel, Abidjan, est situé dans le quartier de la Riviéra, à une demi-heure de l'aéroport international Félix Houphouet-Boigny
Alassane Ouattara is co-claimant to the office of president of Côte d'Ivoire. His election is recognized by major world leaders and the United Nations. He and his supporters are caught in the Golf Hotel while the universally-recognized illegitimate claimant, Laurent Gbagbo, surrounds the hotel with military forces, some of whom evidently have slaughtered hundreds of civilians.

Site of Monsier Alassane Dramane Ouattara: http://www.ado.ci/accueil.php

Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, and Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index

Wednesday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Mary Kissel, WSJ editorial board, in re: North Korea; Wah Sze-to
Wednesday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): George Pipas, Sales Analyst for Ford Motor Company, and LouAnn Hammond, Driving the Nation.com, in re: Ford; Detroit; design; the economy.
Wednesday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Devin Nunes (CA-21) (HR 6484 - no one knows why the Teamsters are involved - they're not public) and Joe Garofoli, SF Chronicle, in re: the inaugurations, Gov Brown's lack of mental reservations, drained budgets and banks accounts at risk. "We've been paying the price for socialist Utopian democracy for a long time. California has the largest ag area in the world. If the farmers could take the weather and their land, and leave - to anywhere, the Dakotas - they would. But they can't. Bad situation, gonna require a lot of leadership. We hope Gov Moonbeam gets some kind of idea how to fix it."
Wednesday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time): continued: HR 6484. All the bill does are; the Fed government will not come in and bail out States and localities; we're setting up websites for the 2,500 pensions across the country to show their books - assets and liabilities. It's not even a mandate; it's just an offer: show us your books. Absent these data, however, don't bother applying to the Feds for money. Like smoking ferrets out of holes. No one wants to show us their numbers. A lot of private unions already have to report this info; now the Teamsters and SEIU and AFSCME are [bumping into reality]. The NYT bz writers favor the bill; every major paper in the country thinks this is a [wise and simple] proposal. J Bliss; Why not go directly to the people to explain what we're trying to do? DN: Yes. Am doing that, am still under attack. Very odd. I think many people don't understand that the Obama stimulus bill basically went to bail out a lot of state and local govts - we've backfilled what state & locals should have been doing, anyway. JG: There's another $30 bil we're in the hole. With global warming, South Dakota will be the new California. J Bliss: On a guess: it's twice $30 bil.

H.R.6484 - Public Employee Pension Transparency Act To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for reporting and disclosure by State and local public employee retirement pension plan.

photo: Rep Devin Nunes (CA-21)

Wednesday 1005P Eastern (705P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang, in re: Beijing closes Skype, also local Chinese small VOIP telecoms. PLA navy announces ship-to-air ABMs. Apparent Chinese Stealth fighter (apparently tested as far as take-offs, the penultimate test before flight test). Chinese proverbs: farmers laughing at US. Hu Jin-tao visiting US on 19 Jan. Wants to intimidate not only the US, but also Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea Japan. Projection of power into East China Sea and South CHina Sea. Execution of very old game plan.
Wednesday 1020P Eastern (720P Pacific Time): John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: Assange uses al Jazeera to threaten releasing more cables, as he scorns Guardian, Le Monde, NYT, at al., for having neglected to publish the documents on Israel - although he also released all the docs to the Hizbollah paper, which apparently also is soft on Israel. Assange also says that there's info about a sniper and a killing - Suleman, Assad's associate? Dump of 260K cables; how to evaluate one low-level doc that may be a quotation of State telling Syrian something. In fact, the guy was a Mossad informant who was whacked by Hizbollah. Note yesterday's story about the Israeli vulture caught by the Saudis with a spy camera; and don't forget the sharks that the Mossad purportedly sent to a Saudi beach. Is Assange working for someone? He said he likes Havana and Moscow. Bizarre.
Wednesday 1035P Eastern  (735P Pacific Time): Keith Bradsher, NYT, in re: rare earths. China produces 99% of "heavY rare earths, the most important ones. Over the past 18 months, China's decided to limit production: for its own use, and to be sure to limit or halt shipments to other countries. Coming this year: 35% reduction compared to 2010. Forcing high-tech mfrg around the world to move factories to China - where China can then arrogate the intellectual property. Further, China can vastly increase prices. Non-Chinese people are speaking strongly of WTO regulations, which this violates. China switches tune from, "Move your factories here" to "we're conserving our natural resources." Turns out they're not mining less, they're just exporting less - internal sales will rise 74% by 2015. Time to develop mines in Mongolia, and other places on Earth.
Wednesday 1050P Eastern (750P Pacific Time): Gordon Chang, in re: new Chinese leader

Wednesday 1105P Eastern (805P Pacific Time): David Drucker, Roll Call, in re: Senate meets for 112th; what to look for.
Wednesday 1120P Eastern (820P Pacific Time): Mike Lillis, The Hill, in re: Speaker Pelosi becomes Minority Leader Pelosi
Wednesday 1135P Eastern  (835P Pacific Time): Ann Marlowe, Forbes.com, and Johan Freckhaus [French businessman Johan Freckhaus, who was kidnapped in southern Afghanistan in May, has been let go as well as two Afghan colleagues, the French Foreign Ministry has revealed. The French businessman was kidnapped in Ghazni province between Kandahar and Kabul, but it is not known who his abductors were.], in re: possible improved plan for US goals in Afghanistan
Wednesday 1150P Eastern  (850P Pacific Time): Adam Nossiter, NYT, in re: Côte d'Ivoire troubles

Wednesday/Thurs 1205A Eastern (905 Pacific Time): Matt Bai, NYT, in re: Republican presidential choices
Wednesday/Thurs  1220A Eastern (920 Pacific Time): Judy Dempsey, International Herald Tribune, Berlin, in re: Free Democrats weaken in Merkel coalition?
Wednesday/Thurs  1235A Eastern (935P Pacific Time): Kamran Bokhari, Stratfor.com, in re: assassination of the Punjabi governor, Salem Taseer
Wednesday/Thurs  1250A  Eastern (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt

Washington Post -- This just in: Saudi Arabia has arrested a bird on charges of spying for Israel. According to the newspaper Al Weeam, the alleged Mossad agent is a vulture that was captured in a rural area of the country. It was discovered to have a transmitter and a leg bracelet marked "Tel Aviv University." Some might be tempted to believe Israel's story, which is that the bird was part of a scientific study tracking the movements of vultures in the region. But not the Saudi press, or any number of Arab websites that were quick to jump on the story. The vulture, said al Weeam, was most likely part of "a Zionist plot." This is hardly the first time that Arab media -- or governments, for that matter -- have jumped to conclusions about the Mossad's technological prowess. Two other birds tagged by Tel Aviv university, a vulture and a pelican, were accused of being spies when they were captured in Sudan. And just last month the governor of Egypt's Sinai peninsula claimed that a shark that killed a tourist near the resort of Sharm al-Sheikh was a Mossad plant.

photo: Hebrew-speaking, Mossad-trained shark as it surfaces near a Saudi beach. Note yarmulka cleverly concealed aft of the central fin.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 4, 2011 7:33 PM | No Comments

Pahlavi family, Shah's children. Princess Farahnaz (center) is seen with: Princess Leila and Prince Ali-Reza Pahlavi (both of whom have committed suicide); to her right are Reza Pahlavi II and his wife, Yasmine.

Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC and WABC radio

Tuesday 905P Eastern Time: David Kotok, Cumberland Associates, in re: BofA buying bad mortgages back from Fannie and Freddy

Tuesday 920P Eastern Time: Gillian Tett, Financial Times, in re: GT: seems unlikely that the US will come to its senses until it awakens by suffering a shock from countries such as China, flexing muscles. I hope that I'm wrong in my cynicism. LK: I think you're wrong, and overlooking an early action in the lame duck - prevention of a $1 trillion spending bill

Tuesday 935P Eastern Time: Don Johnson, VP US Sales Operations at General Motors, and LouAnn Hammond, CarList.com, in re:

photo: David Kotok's element: Patagonian fly-fishing. "Larger Chernobyl ants seem to work better than smaller ones without regard to the size of the fish. Clearly larger is better for big fish. I've also used the Chernobyl as a strike indicator when nymphing. You need something floating to signal a strike, why not make It something that might be attractive?"

Tuesday 950P Eastern Time: Dennis Berman, WSJ, The Game, in re: comparing 1841 state defaults with today

Tuesday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Rep Mike Rogers (MI-8), Intelligence Committee Chair, in re: upcoming plans for the 112th; plans for cutting spending
Tuesday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secret, in re: Jonathan Pollard
Tuesday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Steve Moore, WSJ, in re: Pres Obama's search for the new Larry Summers
Tuesday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): John Bolton, AEI, in re: endorses Ann Wagner for RNC chairmanship

Tuesday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Arif Rafiq, Pakistan Policy blog, in re: A leading politician from the ruling Pakistan People's Party who had recently spoken out against the country's blasphemy laws was assassinated by a member of his security detail in a market in Islamabad.
Tuesday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): Bret Stephens, WSJ, in re: Egyptian backwardness
Tuesday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: space weather; moving toward a solar maximum in what we think is an eleven-year cycle.

Tuesday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Steven Greenhouse, NYT, in re: municipal union bosses push back against new governors.

Saudi woman are buried up to their neck, battered by heavy stones, and die in excruciating pain - sometimes for having been raped. A quaint cultural version of sharia, the inferred legal system built up by Wahhabists and Salafists from Quran. Here. picture of a Saudi woman who was subsequently killed for using Facebook.

"A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook. The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man, the al-Arabiya website reported. The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the "strife" the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation. Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki has emerged as the leading critic of Facebook, claiming the network is corrupting the youth of the nation. "Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food," he said."

Photo, below: Pres G w Bush busses Saudi king

Tuesday/Wed 1205A (905 Pacific Time): Bill McGurn, WSJ, in re: municipal unions vs ironworkers and private enterprise unions

Tuesday/Wed  1220A (920 Pacific Time): Roben Farzad, , in re: Facebook and Goldman's ploughing in half a billion dollars
Tuesday/Wed  1235A (935P Pacific Time): Daniel Pipes, , in re: Saudi Arabia, changes in gender bias
Tuesday/Wed  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt: Jeff Bliss, the Bliss Index, in re: spin emanating from yesterday's inauguration; the fellow's body found in the landfill; suicide of Prince Alireza Pahlavi

Toward a solar maximum: Solar wind observations collected by the Ulysses spacecraft during two separate polar orbits of the Sun, six years apart, at nearly opposite times in the solar cycle. Near solar minimum (left) activity is focused at low altitudes, high-speed solar wind prevails, and magnetic fields are dipolar. Near solar maximum (right), the solar winds are slower and more chaotic, with fluctuating magnetic fields. (Courtesy of Southwest Research Institute and the Ulysses/SWOOPS team)

Monday 3 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 3, 2011 7:21 PM | No Comments

Co-host: John Avlon, CNBC, The Daily Beast

Monday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Rep Thaddeus McCotter (MI-11), in re:
Monday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): David Drucker, Roll Call,and Matt Pottinger, in re:

Monday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time):   Tony DiSalle, Volt marketing director, and LouAnn Hammond, Carlist.com, in re: the new Volt - "All we did was talk to consumers" and create what they want.
Monday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time):   . John Loftus, author, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: Assange and WikiLeaks; PFC Bradley Manning and his unenviable position. Btw, where's Holder?

Monday 1005P (705P Pacific Time):   Taegan Goddard, PoliticalWire.com, in re:
Monday 1020P (720P Pacific Time):   Jim McTague, Barron's, in re: The Washington, D.C., area is home to fabulous wealth (Prince Georges in Maryland and Fairfax in Northern Virginia are the richest counties in the nation). Why not move those high-paying jobs to hard-hit areas?

(photo) PM Vladimir Putin has named his new male puppy Buffy, picking a name suggested by a five-year-old boy in a nationwide competition. The large, cream and caramel-colored Karakachan pup was given to Putin as a gift by his Bulgarian counterpart in November, after Moscow and Sofia signed a series of natural gas accords. Buffy shares his name with a sexy vampire slayer on the eponymous U.S. TV show. Putin, cast as Russia's "alpha-dog" ruler in U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, signed a football for the boy. The Karakachan breed originates in Bulgaria and can grow to 55 kg (121 pounds); traditionally was used to guard sheep and goat herds. Buffy will have to share the canine spotlight with Putin's beloved aging black Labrador Koni, who's 11. "He drags her by the ears and tail non-stop," Putin said of Buffy's affection for Koni.
Monday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Stephen Cohen, NYU and author, The Victims Return, in re: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former Russian oil tycoon who became a prominent political symbol in jail, will stay behind bars beyond the end of his current prison term next year. No surprise: Putin wanted him out of the way ahead of 2012 presidential election. A Moscow judge yesterday obliged by convicting Mr. Khodorkovsky on a fresh batch of embezzlement charges. The verdict, in fact, is on Mr. Putin's Russia. The Kremlin again chose to flout the rule of law, its political opposition, and human rights. Beginning with Khodorkovsky's arrest in 2003 on tax fraud, he's been the target of a political vendetta. Soon after taking power in 2000, the KGB colonel who became Russia's ruler set out to bring down some of the country's most successful businessman [and arrogate rake-offs from multibillion-ruble natural resources mining and production.--ed.].
Probable that Khodorkovsky was arrested because he was on the verge of selling part of Yukos to an American oil giant, which alarmed Putin. Rigged trial; and Khodorkovsky was sent illegally to prison in Siberia. Western shareholders bringing suits in Western courts need Khodorkovsky to testify,which could cost Russia $200bil. Also, the tug between the people around Putin, who want Khodorkovsky in jail, and the people around Medvedev, who want him free. Now obvious that Washington has zero influence on these events. How much does Putin have? No way to know with any accuracy - see: kompromat, the business of circulating villainous information about a public figure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat "Three years ago, my wife, Katrina van den Heuvel, and I were invited to the Kremlin to speak with a top Putin advisor: 'How to improve US-Russian relations?' 'When you released Sakharov, that contributed to a favorable surge.' 'Should we release Khodorkovsky before or after Medvedev becomes president?' "

Monday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): continued. Merkel: "Political motives played a part in the trial." Moscow thought it had Obama's assurance that there'd be no missile defense emplacements near Russia; then for domestic political reasons, Pres Obama agreed to put missile sites in Eastern Europe.

Monday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):   John Bolton, AEI, in re: Middle East peace policy failure after two years of Obama Administration diplomacy
Monday 1120P (820P Pacific Time):   Ben Casselman, WSJ, in re: drilling regulation
Monday 1135P (835P Pacific Time):   Marc Marano, Climate Depot.com, in re: Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) was founded in order to suck in carbon-credit contacts. Price per unit went from $7.50 per metric ton to five cents. Went belly-up. "Al Gore invested all together $5bil in what he thought would be an obligatory market of cap-and-trade; now has lost a huge amount." Now Pres Obama is trying to regulate CO2 via the EPA.
Monday 1150P (850P Pacific Time):   Eric Lipton, NYT, in re: WikiLeaks cables show us that the government is a sales rep for Boeing in competition with Airbus

Monday/Tues 1205A (905 Pacific Time):   Graham Bowley, NYT, in re: high-frequency trading centers make New Jersey the functional center of Wall Street, and make speedy communication among computers the new quest for markets.
Monday/Tues  1220A (920 Pacific Time):   Wahid Monawar, Zurich Group, in r: Karzai government not credible; parliamentary election results.
Monday/Tues  1235A (935P Pacific Time):   Marc Schroeder, Stratfor.com, in re: Cote d'Ivoire crisis, and Southern Sudan vote
Monday/Tues  1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt, with Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index, in re:  Jerry Brown's inauguration today.

.

Saturday 1 New Year's Day and Sunday 2 January 2011

By John Batchelor on January 1, 2011 7:09 PM | No Comments

Best of John Batchelor Show Saturday JAnuary 1.

Saturday 905P Eastern Time: The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science - by Douglas Starr.

Saturday 920P Eastern Time: continued.

Saturday 935P Eastern Time: The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America - by Mae Ngai.

Saturday 950P Eastern Time: continued.

Saturday 1005P (705P Pacific Time): Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To - by Sian Beilock

Saturday 1020P (720P Pacific Time): continued.

Saturday 1035P (735P Pacific Time):Madison and Jefferson - by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg

Saturday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): continued.

Saturday 1105P (805P Pacific Time): Madison and Jefferson - by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg

Saturday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): continued.

Saturday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor.

Saturday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): continued.

Saturday/Sun 1205A (905 Pacific Time)

Invisible Energy: Strategies to Rescue the Economy by David Goldstein.

Saturday/Sun 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): continued.

Saturday/Sun 1235A: (935P Pacific Time): Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World by Nir Rosen.

Saturday/Sun 1250A (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

John Batchelor Show Live, January 2

Sunday  905P Eastern Time:   Jim McTague, Barron's, and John Avlon, CNN and The Daily Beast, in re: 112th Congress; Washington has surged to be the richest city in the country
Sunday 920P Eastern Time:  continued
Sunday 935P Eastern Time:  John Loftus, Esq, author, America's Nazi Secrets, in re: Pollard: Jonathan Pollard jailed for 25 years for leaking documents he never saw; was kept inside because the Russians used him to cover their spies. WikiLeaks: The Loma transcripts make it clear that Manning was getting a good deal of guidance.  Manning is childlike - actually, an idiot. Some of the WikiLeaks have caused a Nigerian opposition politician to targetted for assassination.
Sunday 950P Eastern Time:  Toshi Yoshihara, Red Star over the Pacific, in re: ABSM, antiship ballistic missile; Chinese Navy DongFeng21. A possible Twenty-first Century scenario where 1200 missiles to lift off from Mainland and hit Taiwan; most hit their mark. All Taiwan has left is the Kadina airbase in Okinawa - and the USS Nimitz, as it sorties Japan. China is, in fact, developing a carrier-killer missile. Has a growing arsenal of cruise missile, many specifically designed to hit US targets. China has built a layered defense; e.g., subs, missile, ASBM, all supplemented by radars and communications, unmanned aircraft. The DF21 is and ASBM that can be launched form the Mainland, then come back to Earth's atmosphere at mach 10, and guide itself in pinpoint fashion to a base or a ship. Uses Earth's gravity using the loft it gathered from descending from so high. Very difficult to shoot down. Chinese is building incrementally to confront the US. China has demonstrated its capacity to shoot down US satellites, and so to blind us in the Asia-Pacific region. A thought: eight hours after China launches against Taiwan, klaxons sound on the Nimitz - incoming missiles.

Sunday 1005P (705P Pacific Time):  Bill Roggio, LongWar Journal; Rufus Phillips, author, Why Vietnam Matters; Arif Rafiq, Pakistan Policy blog and New York Times political analyst, in re: borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan; the Pakistan government is the question - large state, nuclear weapons, activists. The second-largest party, MQM, has left the government, which throws into question the PM. IMF forcing government to impose unpopular measures. The past year, 2010: 117 Predator strikes, distinct from 53 in 2009
Sunday 1020P (720P Pacific Time):  continued. US has proclaimed that it'll figure out the future of its commitment to AfPakia in July 2011 - the middle of the fighting season.
Sunday 1035P (735P Pacific Time): Larry Johnson, No Quarter blog, and Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index, in re:
Sunday 1050P (750P Pacific Time): continued
Left: scene from the Barnes Museum

Sunday 1105P (805P Pacific Time):  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: main story in China; Villagers & police clashed outside a small village in southern China after village chief, defending peasants's land, was held down on the road by two masked men in white gloves and tun over by a truck, his head severed. http://www.edition.cnn.com/
China moves to block Skype telegraph.co.uk -  Beijing says all VOIP must be government-controlled. Hu Jin-tao will visit DC on 19 Jan and get a 21-gun salute. Why? He's a bloodless tyrant; all he wants are images sent back to China of him standing next to Pres Obama in order to solidify his regime. Very bad decision by the president. WikiLeaks showed how ineffectual Bush and Obama policies have been in regard to China.
Top Ten China Mass Protests of 2010 theepochtimes.com;  "Nearly 600 fugitives involved with economic crimes such as fraud and embezzlement have fled China and are hiding in other countries, a top security official said." - look for them in Princeton, New Jersey, where they've bought expensive homes.
Sunday 1120P (820P Pacific Time): John Anderson, Art of the Steal, in re: The Barnes Museum in Philadelphia
Sunday 1135P (835P Pacific Time): Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:
Also: Yasser Arafat's widow, Suha, complained to the US ambassador in Tunisia about the loss of her properties and Tunisian passport, blaming the Tunisian president's wife, Leila Ben Ali. It turned out the reason for her daughter's and her expulsion was the fact she had contacted Jordan's Queen Rania to try to stop the marriage of Leila's niece to the Emir of Dubai, who was already married to the Jordanian king's sister.
Sunday 1150P (850P Pacific Time): Bob Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: spectacular failure in the Indian space program.

Sunday/Mon 1205A (905 Pacific Time): David, Roll Call, in re: US Senate roll-back of health care
Sunday/Mon 1220A: (920 Pacific Time): Rich Tullo, Albert Fried, in re: 79% Rasmussen poll against Net neutrality
Sunday/Mon 1235A: (935P Pacific Time):  AaronKlein, WABC radio, and author, The Manchurian President, in re: Dennis Ross, Beirut, Damascus, Cairo.
Sunday/Mon 1250A  (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.

Qien Yunhui, murdered horrifyingly by goons who opposed his championing villagers' land rights

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