Photo, left: NYCHA - New York City Housing Authority - buidings. See Hour 1, Block C, Marian Wang, Propublica, NYC Public Housing: Fixing a Leak with a Bucket  
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 1, Block A: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, in re: Today's column on Atlantic City
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 1, Block B:  David Weidner, Marketwatch, in re: Why the California drought will be worse than everyone thinks

Photo link: NYCHA shower area. Mold infuses the entire apartment and floor of the building.
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 1, Block C: Marian Wang, Propublica, in re:  NYC Public Housing: Fixing a Leak with a Bucket     At Maria Santana’s public housing apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, dirty, black water has periodically poured in from the walls, from the pipes, from the radiator. She says the problems started two years ago. “It’s so much water, it looks like it’s raining in here. I am scared,” Santana said. She has placed buckets throughout her apartment. Her couch is covered in plastic to keep it from getting wet. Santana, 60, says she lives in fear that dripping water will come down on the electrical outlets and start a fire. She’s taped and covered some of her outlets with plastic as a precaution.
Her red folder is a testament to how many times she’s tried to get help from her landlord, the New York City Housing Authority. Inside, scrawled in Spanish and broken English, are long lists of ticket numbers and notes from her calls to NYCHA’s hotline. Workers would come to the apartment sometimes and make small fixes, she said, but they never actually solved the problems. “They gave me ticket, ticket, ticket, ticket, ticket,” Santana said, paging through her papers. “Over here too, ticket, ticket, ticket, ticket. They just give you tickets. But they don’t do nothing.” (NYCHA’s media office declined ProPublica’s requests for updates on specific tickets, directing us instead to make formal records requests.) Santana, who’s been in public housing for more than two decades, has seen the decline of the NYCHA, which was once considered one of the nation’s best-run housing authorities. The agency, which is the country’s largest public housing authority and home to more than 400,000 tenants, has suffered from a decade of underfunding and aging infrastructure.
To hear NYCHA officials tell it, though, the agency is making strides despite continued underfunding. Officials speak of improved customer service and quicker repairs. In recent years, NYCHA has issued press release after press release about its progress in clearing out a backlog of 330,000 repair requests, cutting it down by as much as 95 percent. "If you call us with a leak on Monday, what we’re saying is we’re going to send someone to your house within seven days,” NYCHA General Manager Cecil House told ProPublica. He said that the agency’s expectation is that even complex repairs of apartments should take about 15 days. “While NYCHA is a very large and complicated organization with more work to do,” House said, “I do think we’ve made a lot of progress.”
But residents and NYCHA’s own numbers offer a more sobering picture. Residents, housing attorneys and community advocates say that across New York City’s public housing developments, they’ve continued to fight for months, even years, to get the agency to fix falling paint, moldy walls and water leaks. (Check out the Daily News’ coverage, which has unearthed many such stories from residents over many years.) . . .   [more]
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 1, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Governor orders one week shut down of Thirty Meter Telescope project   Bowing to the demands of about two dozen protesters, the governor of Hawaii has ordered a one week halt in the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea.  Statements from the governor, the protesters, and the telescope’s project manager, are here. The statement by the telescope manager's statement outlines in great detail the negotiations over the past seven years between the telescope and the local community. This project was not forced upon them. They discussed it and agreed to it. As the statement notes,
Following an appeal of the permit and further contested case proceedings, the TMT project has proceeded in full compliance with the law. The TMT site was selected with great care and respect. There are no archaeological shrines or burial sites within TMT’s project site. Comprehensive research by expert hydrologists confirm there is no threat to the aquifer.
This is the same story we’ve seen for the past half-century with every telescope that's been built in territories where the local native population has some say in construction. Years of negotiation are ignored just as construction is about to begin by a small number of protesters demanding a halt. The protesters always claim a combination of religious and environmental concerns. In every case, these so-called passionate demands somehow vanish after they are promised some additional cash. It would a terrible tragedy for Hawaii, and the human race, if this $1.4 billion telescope ended up getting canceled because of the complaints of a handful of people who, to my mind, are behaving like extortionists. It will also be unfortunate if the government bows to this extortion and rewards them for this behavior.
 
Hour Two
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael Vlahos, Naval War College & Johns Hopkins, in re:  The Spanish Civil War.  (1 of 2)
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 2, Block B: Michael Vlahos, Naval War College & Johns Hopkins, in re:  The Spanish Civil War.  (2 of 2)
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 2, Block C:  Gene Marks, Washington Post, in re: Business Owners in Brooklyn Heights Start Subtle Lobbying of Clinton  Campaign ;   Indie Bookstores Turn to Crowdfunding to Stay Alive  ;  California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth  ;  Leonardo DiCaprio plans to build an eco-resort.  ;  How tech billionaires are using money and data to solve for death  ;   Some of today's billionaire tech titans believe they can defy death using technology  ; and data.
Instead of desk chairs built to handle a typical 253-pound employee, the  office manufacturing industry has created a new category: "large occupant"  chairs that can handle someone weighing 400-plus pounds.  ;  This Entrepreneur Launched 52 Businesses in One Year. Here's How He  Survived.
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 2, Block D:  Gretchen Morgenson, NYT, FAIR GAME  in re: Victims of Financial Wrongdoing Need a More Muscular S.E.C.  The regulator lacks the power to extract fines equal to the losses of harmed investors, often making class-action suits their best recourse.
 
Hour Three
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 3, Block A:  Gregory Copley, Strategic Studies director; GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; & author, UnCivilization, in re: Early Warning  - Europe, if It Still Exists, Cannot Survive the EU  (Analysis)  Much of Europe is still recognizable. Its iconic spires and bridges, two millennia or more in the making, remain; but it is the face of an old lover, still vaguely familiar, seen again in the half-light and unloved musk and mold of a dank asylum. It is like the onset of age: sudden and cruel in its transformation. 
Where are the beauty, vitality, civility, and wisdom that once we saw there? 
It was in the miasmic vapors clinging to the land after two world wars which, in the veil of regret, sorrow, and resolve, those afflicted blamed the carnage on nationalism. It was, sayeth the voice of Nevermore, the nation-state — that concept, too, millennia in the making — which created the vanity and ambition resulting in repeated wars. Thus began the great experiment to eliminate the sibling rivalries between states by ending the identity and pride in each of them. 
Europe was to be the great experiment. 
If we are to take the asylum simile further, it was as though the cure was to lobotomize each of the states, to rob them of their aggressiveness. Like the Soviet Union, within arm’s reach of Europe, the decision of the proponents was to create a uniform society, a new super-civilization, with the separate and beating cultures and smaller civilizations finally stilled so that they could compete no more. War no more. 
It was, ironically, the collapse of the similar experiment — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — in 1990 which introduced a new globalism, a world with fewer barriers, which infused proponents of a European superstate with new energy. But, as with the Soviet Union before it collapsed, the larger the body grew, the less its internal organs functioned. 
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 3, Block B: Gregory Copley, Strategic Studies director; GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; & author, UnCivilization, in re: Strategic Realities in the Post-Iran-Deal World  (Analysis) The Iran “nuclear” deal does not stop Iran gaining nuclear weapons. But it does have unintended consequences of global significance. Much hand-wringing by international commentators accompanied the revelation that a deal had been struck on April 2, 2015, between the Five-plus-One nations1 and Iran, ostensibly to limit the ability of Iran to build nuclear weapons. But what are the realities? Firstly, with regard to nuclear weapons and strategic military capabilities: 

• Iran already has a small stockpile of externally-acquired nuclear weapons (from Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: DPRK).2
• Iran, working with its key ally, the DPRK, has already built and detonated (on February 12, 2013) a nuclear weapon of Iranian design and manufacture.3
• Iran has sufficient technology and knowledge to build nuclear weapons, regardless of the new treaty; ramp-up time to production is zero, the only question, for sustained production of weapons, is the volume of enriched material available. 

Iran, like the DPRK, has developed ballistic missiles and command and control systems to deploy nuclear weapons through to a second-strike capability. 
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 3, Block C:  Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution Defining Ideas, Chicago Law, in re: The War Against Religious Liberty ( of 2)
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 3, Block D: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution Defining Ideas, Chicago Law, in re: The War Against Religious Liberty ( of 2)
 
Hour Four
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 4, Block A:  Allen Guelzo on, LIFE LINCOLN: An Intimate Portrait, by The Editors of LIFE (1 of 4)
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 4, Block B: Allen Guelzo on, LIFE LINCOLN: An Intimate Portrait, by The Editors of LIFE (2 of 4)
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 4, Block C: Allen Guelzo on, LIFE LINCOLN: An Intimate Portrait, by The Editors of LIFE (3 of 4)
Friday  10 April 2015 / Hour 4, Block D: Allen Guelzo on, LIFE LINCOLN: An Intimate Portrait, by The Editors of LIFE (4 of 4)