The John Batchelor Show

Friday 25 May 2018

Air Date: 
May 25, 2018

Screen shot:  Stefan A. Halper (born June 4, 1944) is an American foreign policy scholar and Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Life Fellow at Magdalene College and directs the Department of Politics and International Studies. He’s now at the epicenter of a national scandal in the US, where he’s increasingly being accused of having served as a secret cog in a domestic intelligence-agency machine whose goal was to discredit Donald Trump from the time of his candidacy up until the present. See: Hour 1, Blocks C and D, Lee Smith  of The Federalist and The Tablet.
 He served as a White House official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, and was reportedly in charge of the operation by the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign that became known as "Debategate." Halper, by what James Clapper called "spying ... on what the Russians were doing" has assisted the FBI and subsequent special counsel investigation into foreign meddling in the 2016 presidential election and Russian contact and alleged collusion with the Trump campaign.

He is the co-author of the bestselling book, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2004, and also co-author of The Silence of the Rational Centre: Why American Foreign Policy Is Failing (2007). In April 2010, his book The Beijing Consensus: Legitimizing Authoritarianism in Our Time, was published by Basic Books. Also a bestseller, it has been published in Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Taiwan.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
riday  4 January 2018 / Hour 1, Block A: John Tamny, RealClearPolitics, in re: China trade
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 1, Block B: Dan Henninger, WSJ editorial, in re: Starbucks
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 1, Block C: Lee Smith, The Federalist, The Tablet, in re: http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/25/code-name-crossfire-hurricane-evidence-fbis-russia-cover-story/
In my opinion, the [center] of Operation Crossfire Hurricane was and is the Steele dossier. the oppo research ordered and paid for by Mrs Clinton’s campaign.
Halper was tasked to get Papadapoulos to say something about the Clinton emails: it’d then be reported that “Trump advisor Papadapoulos confirms that . .  .”  — Halper’s job was to provoke and induce people to say things that could be reported thereafter as fact by the FBI and others in order to smear the Trump campaign.  Note that a lot of the action place  in London:
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 1, Block D: Lee Smith, The Federalist, The Tablet, in re: The FBII allegation that the Trump campaign was, or could be, penetrated by the Russians. Latest claim is that the FBI was merely protecting Trump.
Note that a lot of the action place in London: if you do intell gathering, needs to be overseas since US intell agencies are often forbidden to monitor US citizens.  John Brennan directed James Comey, then head of FBI, to focus on the collusion story, with that starting no later than August 2016. Steele and Simpson knew each other since 2009.  “They're trying to avoid being looked at closely by serious people in the US.” In a 4,000-plus-word piece in the New York Times, they managed to fail to look into the significance of the code name, Crossfire Hurricane.  The press is supposed to hold corrupt govt official accountable, whereas in this piece it looks as though the Times was trying to corroborate the words of corrupt govt officials.
 
Hour Two
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re:  Predicates for a civil war. “Halper will be demonstrated to have been a patriot; castigating him as a spy is a ‘lie’,” say the globalists.
On the other side, Chairmen Trey Gowdy and Devin Nunes hold that Halper is a traitor.
Phase 4 of the civil war: dynamic shift in the equilibrium between the two sides. Here. Blue wd hope that they win a great victory in the 2018 elections. Or cd be the unrelenting Blue attacks in media on Red, which seem to have soured — which betokens a [diminution] of trust.  Decline abetted by positive dvpts in the economy and elsewhere; puts Blue in the invidious situation of having to do something now, perhaps desperate, to avoid losing [greatly]. I worry abt the specter of “the deep state,” now become widely credible, with an ironical aspect, that this deep state has existed for a long time – see: J Edgar Hoover, who had horrible info on many Americans and was given permission by FDR to spy widely on citizens even though it was illegal. Intell agencies have always had an inclination to take sides and push one side against the other.
A British tale: A Very British Coup,  (in Britain, the financial oligarchs and other powerful persons) go after a left-wing person(whom they don't care for). 
The Republican Party is becoming the people’s/populist party, while the Democrats are in the most expensive neighborhoods, and their way of life is in gentility and aristocracy.  Blue-blood world view in the CIA.  This accounts for the intensity of the hatred held against them. Most important: hated is not self-reflective or self-aware.
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 2, Block B:  Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re:  The possibility that we’re already in a civil war and can't easily see it. Presenting issue: the man Halper; also, the FBI and the natl security apparatus’s reaching into American lives to damage or smear.  . . . All of a sudden, you’re informed upon – what you thought you’d said in private turns out to be in the hands of intell agencies, recorded and [even publicized].  Wilson era: The Sedition Act.  Wilson wouldn't even let Eugene V Debs out of prison.  J E Hoover created the massive state – same FBI apparatus we’re looking at today. One it's institutionalized, it becomes “culturalized,” so to  speak  subculture that feels it has the right to make ultimate decisions without reference to the chief executive – this brings up the phrase “American Gestapo.”  To define a way to rein them in, to disenthrall us, may not be possible, not be retrievable.
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 2, Block C:  Gene Marks, Washington Post Small Business, in re:  Small bz in America – details and true tales. 
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 2, Block D: Gene Marks, Washington Post Small Business, in re:  Small bz in America – details and true tales.   Two-thirds of Americans dream of opening their own small business; and forty-five per cent of them said they were fearful financially, and thirty-seven per cent said they feared actual failure.  / . . The IRS . . . . AI trucks, driverless vehicles.  BLS says 7.2% of Americans have two jobs.  . . . The Grass Ceiling: a male bias in smoke. Cheech and Chong – Mr Chong just turned 80.  Marijuana profits everywhere except among females.  The Marijuana Business Daily (note also, the Cannabis Times) surveyed 500-plus executive in the weed bz, found that fewer and fewer are female because the ever-richer pot companies are bringing in executives from other fields where, of course, males absolutely dominate and none thinks to hire a female.    
 
Hour Three
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 3, Block A: Gregory R Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, in re:  North Korea, the ups ’n downs of negotiations.
Beijing wants to be inside the discussions and DPRK to stay as a buffer state, and also to help secure the One Belt/One Road, which it sees as its coming economic mainstay. These supersede the discussions of nuclear weapons. The 12 June (or some time) talks will go ahead; the short-tem objectives are discussable but the long-term objectives are severely threatened by DC Neocons, esp John Bolton, who threatened “the Libya Option,” meaning that DPRK has to give up all its nukes and then Kim will be obliterated. A huge error.  Even in 1950, American bellicosity redounded against the US.
Strategic options include opening trade US-North Korea, N-S Koreas, North Korea-Japan, whereby we should see a step backward from nuclear war. Deterrence.  . . .  The not-as-stupid-as-portrayed Kim. 
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 3, Block B:  Gregory R Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, in re:  Xi  has put as much pressure as he can on Kim who assures Xi that he’s not moving into the Western camp but seeks economic prosperity and will continue to be [a minion trading partner] of China.  China cd then have on its doorstep a very prosperous North Korea and a route into South Korea. Real prospect that the US might reduce its mil capability on the peninsula, which would cheer Moon and Xi. US must then increase its [relations] with Taiwan, the Republic of China.  Also South Pacific and Micronesia; and New Zealand and Australia. New dynamism in the Indo-Pacific framework. Taiwanese air force getting F35s.  . .  . Kim can reaffirm his strident . . .    Xi is not threatened as long as it’s not mil.    Transit zone through North Korea to China would look good; even the economic expansion of China over the last decades constituted a major risk. 
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 3, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com, in re:
Deputy PM Rogozin, formerly Deputy Prime Minister in charge of defense and space industry,
was free from titles for a short time —  NASA could have grabbed him.  Instead, he was snapped up by the Moscow Kremlin: he’s taken over Roscosmos, tactical armament mfr and ____. His job will be to ensure that Putin friends get plum jobs and contracts.     . . . Cube sats in an L5 position .  . interplanetary space?  to Mars, to test relays from Mars to Earth Chinese trying to do something similar: “low-frequency astronomy”  . .  Loong Jiang . .  has a camera developed in Saudi Arabia.    Relay sat launched only in anticipation of later lunar missions, esp Long March 5.  . . . Solid rocket can be brought out any time and fired, no need to put in fuel.   NOAA has  problem: an $11 bil program to launch four new weather sats  — $3 bil per sat??   Oops, something terribly wrong with cooling eqpt; the infrared uses 13 of the 15 channels for data collection; dunno why it isn’t working.  The problem w govt-based space work, complex and costly and susceptible to bi-iiig , expensive problems.  NOAA extremely resistant to solutions.
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 3, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com, in re: Murray formation.  Curiosity on Mars.  Drill bit moves outward as it drills down; trying to solve. Now, extend it out and use the robot arm to . . .  Pluto: formed from an accretion of a billion comets?
 
Hour Four
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 4, Block A: Henry Miller, Hoover, in re:  on bees; on “canola” oil.  [No mention that rapeseed oil, a cheap industrial oil, is now refined a second time and re0named “canola” in order to sell it as a food oil at a higher profit margin.  Said to be quite bad for gall bladder and perhaps other organs.]
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 4, Block B: Jeff Bliss, Pacific Watch, in re:
Jokes about Breaking Bad University (IUSC) -  200 faculty ask the president to resign; many expressing deep lack of confidence.  A campus gynecologist, Georg Tindall – ouf.  . . .  . Homeless shelter in LA Koreatown.
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 4, Block C:  1956: The World in Revolt, by Simon Hall
Friday  4 January 2018 / Hour 4, Block D:  1956: The World in Revolt, by Simon Hall
 
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