The John Batchelor Show

Friday 27 May 2016

Air Date: 
May 27, 2016

Photo, left: 
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Liz Peek, Fiscal Times and Fox; in re: Bernie Should Hit Hillary with the Dubious Donations in ‘Clinton Cash’The FBI is investigating Terry McAuliffe’s ties to the Clinton Foundation, and donations made by a prominent Chinese businessman to both the Virginia governor’s campaign and to the foundation. Why are we not surprised?
The Clinton Foundation has come under scrutiny for years, charged with being a vessel for Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal political ambitions rather than their philanthropy, acting as a holding pen for the couple’s long-serving political warriors and a conduit for contributions they would rather keep under the radar. As even The New York Times acknowledged in 2013, an examination of the record reveals “just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future.” 
It is not clear that any evidence of impropriety will emerge from the probe. But it is clear that Bernie Sanders has erred by not hammering the seamy history of the foundation on the campaign trail. He often hints that Hillary’s wealthy donors – and especially Wall Street fat cats – might expect something in return for their largesse. It is high time he showed off the numerous instances in which companies donated to the Clinton Foundation, paid Bill Clinton lavish speaking fees and were seemingly rewarded by government assistance while Hillary was secretary of state.
Bernie has an almost impossible path to the nomination, but if he could gin up righteous anger about how Bill Clinton earned $105 million for 542 speeches from 2001 to 2013, he might indeed turn the heads of some of those slavish Superdelegates lined up behind Hillary. As he has pointed out, polling suggests he is more likely than Hillary to beat Donald Trump in a head-to-head contest. Isn’t that what Democrats want?  . . .  [see also:  the two years of research on the Clinton Foundation{s} by Charles Ortel.]  http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/05/25/Bernie-Should-Hit-Hilla...
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Joshua Green, Bloomberg Politics, in re: HOW TO GET TRUMP ELECTED WHEN HE'S WRECKING EVERYTHING YOU BUILT  Can the Republican Party Chair, Reince Priebus, put Trump in the White House? Does he even want to? http://buswk.co/ReincePriebusRNC
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block C:  George Melloan, WSJ, in re: The Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has provided the latest estimate of, as its title says, the “U.S. Fiscal Imbalance,” in a monograph for the Cato Institute. The gap is appalling. Looking 75 years out, he estimates that the present value of future U.S. government expenses exceeds the present value of future government revenues by $117.9 trillion. That’s trillions, in case you misread.
The retired Cato president John Allison notes in an introduction to the booklet that this enormous gap between government promises and any means of filling it exceeds the total annual production of the U.S. (GDP) by 6.8 times and by far exceeds the nation’s total private wealth currently of $63.5 trillion.  http://www.wsj.com/articles/inattention-to-the-deficit-disorder-1464300465
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/inattention-to-the-deficit-disorder-1464300465
Inattention-to-the-Deficit Disorder  By one estimate, the government will spend $117.9 trillion more than it takes in this century.   by GEORGE MELLOAN
Utopia for Realists is the title of a Dutch e-book now available online in English. The young author, Rutger Bregman, argues that technology has made those of us living in advanced nations rich enough that we should start taking it easier. The utopia he imagines, as the subtitle says, would have a “Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek.” 
But how rich are we, really? A good argument can be made that we seem richer than we actually are because we have borrowed so heavily from future generations. That’s not exactly an original idea. Young adults have been fretting for years that the government safety nets available to today’s elderly and infirm won’t be there when they reach old age.
What is less obvious is that the nation’s slow growth and rising debt are already reducing the opportunities for upward mobility. That could account for the political unrest so evident in the protest votes in today’s party primaries. 
Recent projections of the future cost of current government obligations certainly won’t relieve young people’s worries. Those promises have expanded far beyond any reasonable projection of the government’s ability to extract enough revenue to cover them.
Ironically, the default position—literally one might say—of the leftist politicians like Bernie Sanders is to promise more and more freebies. Judging from the improbable popularity of his presidential campaign, it wins votes. Maybe voters need a better understanding of the problem. 
The Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has provided the latest estimate of, as its title says, the “U.S. Fiscal Imbalance,” in a monograph for the Cato Institute. The gap is appalling. Looking 75 years out, he estimates that the present value of future U.S. government expenses exceeds the present value of future government revenues by $117.9 trillion. That’s trillions, in case you misread.
Retired Cato president John Allison notes in an introduction to the booklet that this enormous gap between government promises and any means of filling it exceeds the total annual production of the U.S. (GDP) by 6.8 times and by far exceeds the nation’s total private wealth currently of $63.5 trillion.
The gap estimate is not a fantasy number. It is based on entitlement laws already on the books, projections of the future number of pensioners relative to workers and estimates of economic growth. The costs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and ObamaCare are at or near record highs despite some success by House Speaker Paul Ryan and other budget hawks in bringing them under better control. The Congressional Budget Office projects a steady rise in “mandatory” (i.e., entitlement) costs as a share of GDP out into the distant future. 
Entitlement costs soared as a share of GDP during the 2009 recession, mainly because GDP fell sharply. The federal deficit ballooned to more than $1 trillion for four straight fiscal years, 2009 through 2012. An improved economy and congressional efforts lowered it to $439 billion in fiscal year 2015 but the CBO projects it will rise again this year by about $100 billion.
These huge deficits doubled the national debt in only seven years and rock-bottom interest rates ordained by the Federal Reserve expanded private debt as well. The upshot: Americans are deep in debt, mainly thanks to government excesses. Debt is deflationary because it devotes more income to paying for past consumption. The Fed, working against itself, is fighting deflation and trying to engineer inflation to devalue the debt. But inflation is no cure because it will expand the cost of entitlements. 
The only real answer is that the entitlement programs will have to be reformed, and sooner better than later, because the longer reform is postponed the greater the fiscal imbalance will become and the greater its drain will be on other important government functions, such as national defense. That reform can be done. For example, reprivatizing health insurance to restore market competition would be a big help.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump is out to lunch on this issue, as he is on most questions that require more than a fatuous sound-bite answer. As for Hillary and Bernie, forget about it. They want to add new entitlements, such as free college education.
As for Mr. Bregman, Utopia for Realists is better than it might seem at first glance. Respectable cases have been made for a universal income, even by the likes of that great free marketer Milton Friedman. But this was on the condition that it supplant other welfare programs and thus bring greater simplicity and market forces to bear. Powerful welfare bureaucracies would fight it like tigers. 
But as for utopia, we’re certainly not there yet. And we may be going in the opposite direction. 
Mr. Melloan is a former deputy editor of the Journal editorial page. His book, When the New Deal Came to Town,  will be published by Simon & Schuster in the fall.
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Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block D:  Kenneth Chang, New York Times, in re:  How Big Are Those Killer Asteroids? A Critic Says NASA Doesn’t Know.  More than 14,000 known asteroids zip through Earth’s neighborhood. They will all miss Earth in the coming decades.
But hundreds of thousands more have not yet been discovered, and whether any of those are on course to slam into our planet, no one knows. So finding and tracking all the asteroids that could cross Earth’s path would allow officials to issue warnings and potentially provide time to deflect dangerous ones. The community of scientists contemplating such doomsday possibilities is small and usually cordial — at least until Nathan P. Myhrvold barged in. Once the chief technologist at Microsoft, Dr. Myhrvold moved on to other endeavors like a six-volume, 2,438-page compendium of cooking knowledge that has been celebrated by chefs. (A sequel, about baking, is in the works.) He has also become a statistics scold of scientists.
His latest target is NASA, in a squabble over data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft. WISE, launched in 2009, snapped images of three-quarters of a billion stars, galaxies and other celestial objects, including the heat emissions of asteroids. An offshoot called Neowise used the heat data to calculate the size and reflectivity of 158,000 asteroids. Dr. Myhrvold contends that the Neowise analysis is deeply flawed.
. . .  “The bad news is it’s all basically wrong,” he said. “Unfortunately for a lot of it, it’s never going to be as accurate as they had hoped.” He submitted his own analysis of the Neowise results to the journal Icarus.
Dr. Myhrvold isn’t arguing that NASA has overlooked dangers from the known asteroids. But he does question whether scientists know as much as they think they do. He has also zeroed in on a proposed space-based telescope with a price tag of more than half a billion dollars, the Near-Earth Object Camera, or Neocam, a project headed by some of the same scientists whose work he is second-guessing.
Most of the millions of asteroids are found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but some dip closer to the sun. There is no doubt that some will hit Earth someday. The bigger the asteroid, the greater the potential cataclysm. The reflectivity of the surface — what astronomers call albedo — tells how easily it can be detected. “From the practical perspective of finding asteroids,” Dr. Myhrvold said, “it’s really important that we know the distribution of diameters and the distribution of albedos.” According to NASA’s scientists, the estimates of asteroid diameters made by Neowise are often within 10 percent of the actual size. But Dr. Myhrvold says the uncertainties are much greater, more than 100 percent in many cases.
Space agency officials disagree. “He’s a very smart man,” said Lindley Johnson, who oversees NASA’s efforts to protect the planet from space rocks. “But that doesn’t make him an expert in everything.” Dr. Johnson said NASA experts had pointed out errors and that Dr. Myhrvold had not fixed them. “It’s overly simplistic, and he makes some assumptions that are not valid,” Dr. Johnson said. Other scientists say that Dr. Myhrvold’s criticisms have merit. “I do think he’s performed a really very useful service,” said Alan W. Harris, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute, “to do the error analysis more carefully and alert people that you shouldn’t just take some of the data out of the WISE table and just assume they’re gospel.”  . . . http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/science/asteroids-nathan-myhrvold-nasa.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
 
Hour Two
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block A: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, NYU Law, in re: in re:  One of the most disturbing trends in the United States is the relentless concentration of power in the federal government. Ever since the New Deal, the classical liberal vision of limited government and strong property rights has taken a back seat to a progressive vision of a robust administrative state, dominated by supposed experts, whose powers are largely unimpeded by legal constraints. Wholly apart from Congress, the new administrative state has adopted and enforced its own laws and regulations, and is defined by unilateral actions by the President and other members of the executive branch, all of which threaten the system of checks and balances built into the original constitutional design . . .   (1 of 2) http://www.hoover.org/research/perils-executive-power
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block B:   Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, NYU Law, in re: in re:  One of the most disturbing trends in the United States is the relentless concentration of power in the federal government. Ever since the New Deal, the classical liberal vision of limited government and strong property rights has taken a back seat to a progressive vision of a robust administrative state, dominated by supposed experts, whose powers are largely unimpeded by legal constraints. Wholly apart from Congress, the new administrative state has adopted and enforced its own laws and regulations, and is defined by unilateral actions by the President and other members of the executive branch, all of which threaten the system of checks and balances built into the original constitutional design . . .   (2 of 2) http://www.hoover.org/research/perils-executive-power
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Jere Longman, New York Times, in re:  An accompanying Times Video also examines how the best marathoners run so economically in the pursuit of the sub-two-hour marathon.  Part One: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/sports/two-hour-marathon-yannis-pitsiladis.html
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block D:  Jere Longman, New York Times, in re:  An accompanying Times Video also examines how the best marathoners run so economically in the pursuit of the sub-two-hour marathon.  Part Two:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/sports/two-hour-marathon-kenenisa-bekele.html
 
Hour Three
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block A:  Paul Gregory, Hoover, in re: After 16 years of Putin, we are back to Kremlinology. Although we do not understand what is going on behind the scenes, Vladimir Putin is obviously pushing to make himself Russia’s first without equal, with a huge private army to make him invulnerable to demonstrations, riots and palace coups. Power is finite. What Putin takes for himself others lose, and, according to leaks from powerful organizations, many in Putin’s Kremlin are not happy. The push towards a private army betrays Putin’s increasing sense of vulnerability. Otherwise, why risk the ire of his own siloviki? But the charge, if only by implication, that two of Putin’s top loyalists are implicated in the murder of a top opposition figure cannot be taken lightly. Time will tell whether the Kremlin is going through a real power struggle or another hiccup that will soon be forgotten.   (1 of 2) http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2016/05/25/putin-for-life/#78e60bd27868
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block B:   Paul Gregory, Hoover, in re: After 16 years of Putin, we are back to Kremlinology. Although we do not understand what is going on behind the scenes, Vladimir Putin is obviously pushing to make himself Russia’s first without equal, with a huge private army to make him invulnerable to demonstrations, riots and palace coups. Power is finite. What Putin takes for himself others lose, and, according to leaks from powerful organizations, many in Putin’s Kremlin are not happy. The push towards a private army betrays Putin’s increasing sense of vulnerability. Otherwise, why risk the ire of his own siloviki? But the charge, if only by implication, that two of Putin’s top loyalists are implicated in the murder of a top opposition figure cannot be taken lightly. Time will tell whether the Kremlin is going through a real power struggle or another hiccup that will soon be forgotten.   (2 of 2) http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2016/05/25/putin-for-life/#78e60bd27868
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block C:  Hanika Rizo, Département des sciences de la Terre et de l'atmosphère, Université du Québec à Montréal. 
[Simple English summary: some of the rock that first formed the Earth, perhaps some of the material that initially coalesced to create this sphere, has been found—first ever—near Baffin Bay.  Until now, it's been assumed that all these earliest materials long ago were ground to naught and subsumed into the larger mass. Very exciting discovery.] 
Preservation of Earth-forming events in the tungsten isotopic composition of modern flood basalts, by Hanika Lucia Rizo Garza. How much of Earth's compositional variation dates to processes that occurred during planet formation remains an unanswered question. High-precision tungsten isotopic data from rocks from two large igneous provinces, the North Atlantic Igneous Province and the Ontong Java Plateau, reveal preservation to the Phanerozoic of tungsten isotopic heterogeneities in the mantle. These heterogeneities, caused by the decay of hafnium-182 in mantle domains with high hafnium/tungsten ratios, were created during the first ~50 million years of solar system history, indicating that portions of the mantle that formed during Earth’s primary accretionary period have survived to the present.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6287/809.full (1 of 2)
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block D:  Hanika Rizo, Département des sciences de la Terre et de l'atmosphère, Université du Québec à Montréal.     Preservation of Earth-forming events in the tungsten isotopic composition of modern flood basalts, by Hanika Lucia Rizo Garza. How much of Earth's compositional variation dates to processes that occurred during planet formation remains an unanswered question. High-precision tungsten isotopic data from rocks from two large igneous provinces, the North Atlantic Igneous Province and the Ontong Java Plateau, reveal preservation to the Phanerozoic of tungsten isotopic heterogeneities in the mantle. These heterogeneities, caused by the decay of hafnium-182 in mantle domains with high hafnium/tungsten ratios, were created during the first ~50 million years of solar system history, indicating that portions of the mantle that formed during Earth’s primary accretionary period have survived to the present.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6287/809.full (2 of 2)
 
Hour Four
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block A:  Kathleen Lingo, New York Times, in re:   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/opinion/transgender-at-war-and-in-love.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/opinion/my-enemy-my-brother.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/opinion/elder-a-mormon-love-story.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/opinion/the-public-square.html ( of 2)
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/opinion/transgender-at-war-and-in-love.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/opinion/my-enemy-my-brother.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/opinion/elder-a-mormon-love-story.html ; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/opinion/the-public-square.html ( of 2)
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Anne M Tréhu, Oregon State University, in re:   Tsunami earthquakes are rare events and are distinguished by an anomalously shallow source depth and slow rupture propagation speed. They can be particularly dangerous because they generate less high-frequency seismic energy than a normal earthquake; consequently, they are not preceded by the strong shaking that would warn coastal residents that a locally generated tsunami is on the way. A better understanding of the range of slip behaviors in the offshore portion of subduction zones is needed to constrain models and improve earthquake hazard forecasts. On page 701 of this issue, Wallace et al. present the first offshore geodetic data from a slow-slip event on the Hikurangi subduction zone offshore from New Zealand (see the figure). This segment of the Hikurangi subduction zone is unusual in that it experienced two “tsunami” earthquakes in 1947. Continuous global positioning system (GPS) instrumentation onshore indicates that the southern part of the subduction zone is locked above a plate depth of ~40 km, with slow-slip events occurring at greater depth, similar to what is observed in many other subduction zones. In contrast, the northern part of the Hikurangi subduction zone appears to accommodate plate motion primarily through geodetically detected slow-slip events at shallow depths. The up-dip extent of slow slip, however, cannot be determined from onshore data only, and offshore locking models depend strongly on model assumptions.  (1 of 2) http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6286/654
Friday  27 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block D:  Anne M Tréhu, Oregon State University, in re:   Tsunami earthquakes are rare events and are distinguished by an anomalously shallow source depth and slow rupture propagation speed. They can be particularly dangerous because they generate less high-frequency seismic energy than a normal earthquake; consequently, they are not preceded by the strong shaking that would warn coastal residents that a locally generated tsunami is on the way. A better understanding of the range of slip behaviors in the offshore portion of subduction zones is needed to constrain models and improve earthquake hazard forecasts. On page 701 of this issue, Wallace et al. present the first offshore geodetic data from a slow-slip event on the Hikurangi subduction zone offshore from New Zealand (see the figure). This segment of the Hikurangi subduction zone is unusual in that it experienced two “tsunami” earthquakes in 1947. Continuous global positioning system (GPS) instrumentation onshore indicates that the southern part of the subduction zone is locked above a plate depth of ~40 km, with slow-slip events occurring at greater depth, similar to what is observed in many other subduction zones. In contrast, the northern part of the Hikurangi subduction zone appears to accommodate plate motion primarily through geodetically detected slow-slip events at shallow depths. The up-dip extent of slow slip, however, cannot be determined from onshore data only, and offshore locking models depend strongly on model assumptions.  (2 of 2) http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6286/654
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