Friday 31 January 2014
Photo, above: Reconstruction of a [Denisovan] Neanderthal female gripping a spear.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Liz Peek, The Fiscal Times & Fox, in re: What a shame that President Obama did not use his State of the Union address to propose a new jobs policy. Not the same old tired pitch for more education (worthwhile) or a higher minimum wage (counter-productive), but rather a new demand – that all our lawmaking and policy be focused on one objective: creating jobs. A bold message that we the people choose jobs over welfare – more public works and less food stamps – and that not all innovation constitutes progress. Alas, there is no progressive thinking in this progressive White House. Instead? Same ol', same ol'. . . . [and further]
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 1, Block B: John Tamny, RealClearMarkets, in re: Bernanke Arrived at the Fed Under False Pretenses, and Departs a Failure Ben Bernanke mercifully steps down today after two terms at the Fed. He got the job after claiming he was a 'Republican' in the way that Michael Bloomberg once did, and then by every measure in which Fed Chairmen are judged - unemployment, the dollar, and the health of the banking system - he's failed impressively. . . . Ben Bernanke will mercifully depart the Federal Reserve today after two tumultuous terms as its Chairman. To say that his time at the top of the world's foremost central bank has been marked by failure is to shoot fish in the most crowded of barrels.
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Dune Lawrence, Bloomberg, in re: Tor, which stands for "The Onion Router," is the software that provides the closest thing to total anonymity on the Internet. Engineered by the Tor Project, a non-profit group, built on open-source code and offered free of charge, Tor has been adopted by both agitators for liberty – such as Chinese citizens' seeking Internet access, and, some would argue, Edward Snowden -- and criminals -- like users of the Silk Road drug market. Tor is “perhaps the most effective means of defeating the online surveillance efforts of intelligence agencies around the world, including the most sophisticated agency of them all, the NSA. That’s ironic because Tor started as a project of the U.S. government.” Dune Lawrence meets Tor Executive Director Andrew Lewman and co-creator Paul Syverson, and looks at how Tor works, its indispensability for millions of users, its vulnerabilities, and what the U.S. government is doing to crack Tor (conspiracy theories and all). [more]
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Lisa Foderaro, NYT, in re: New York Wants to Banish a Symbol of Love: Mute Swans White, long-necked mute swans, the state’s largest birds, hurt water quality and threaten people and jets, environmental officials say.
Hour Two
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Daniel Henninger, WSJ, in re: Obama's State of Disunion
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Michael Gordon, NYT, in re: U.S. Says Russia Tested Missile, Despite Treaty The United States informed its NATO allies this month that Russia had tested a new ground-launched cruise missile, raising concerns about Moscow’s compliance with a landmark arms control accord.
American officials believe Russia began conducting flight tests of the missile as early as 2008. Such tests are prohibited by the treaty banning medium-range missiles that was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader at the time, and that has long been viewed as one of the bedrock accords that brought an end to the Cold War. Beginning in May, Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department’s senior arms control official, has repeatedly raised the missile tests with Russian officials, who have responded that they investigated the matter and consider the case to be closed. But Obama administration officials are not yet ready to formally declare the tests of the missile, which has not been deployed, to be a violation of the 1987 treaty. [more]
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 2, Block C: Coral Davenport, NYT, in re: Industry Awakens to Threat of Climate Change Coca-Cola and other corporations are starting to see global warming as an economically disruptive force affecting commodity costs and supply chains.
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 2, Block D: Laura Huggins, PERC, in re: Time to move beyond ESA to save species and economic interests It is time to move beyond the Nixon approach to the environment. The past 40 years have shown how good political intentions — or, at least, political maneuvering — in the name of environmental protection can create perverse economic incentives to do the opposite.
Hour Three
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 3, Block A: Javier Hernandez, NYT, in re: Lessons for de Blasio in New Jersey’s Free Pre-K
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 3, Block B: Bud Weinstein, SMU and Bush Center, in re: Here's the Speech President Obama Should've Made About Energy "My fellow Americans. In addition to speaking about growing income inequality and the need for a higher minimum wage, I want to use the podium tonight to talk about a topic that has been given short shrift during the first five years of my presidency: energy. True, I've pushed hard . . ." Click here to see this.
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Gary Libecap, Hoover, in re: An Impasse on Climate Change International efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions will continue to fail until the science is better. There are four major obstacles to curbing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). One is extreme scientific uncertainty about emissions, accumulations, impacts on climate, and effects on the environment and world economies. There is related uncertainty about the distribution of any effects across the planet. There also is uncertainty about the correct responses to take, if any, their costs, and the division of those costs among countries worldwide. Another obstacle is pronounced differences in preferences and perceptions of the problem among populations within and across countries. Rich and poor populations have very different views of the need for GHG controls, who should adopt them, and who should pay for the . . . [more]
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 3, Block D: . Brooks Barnes, NYT, in re: Universal Expands Chairwoman’s Power NBCUniversal extended the contract of Donna Langley and expanded her duties, making her an even more powerful force in Hollywood.
Hour Four
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 4, Block A: Carl Zimmer, NYT, in re: Paleogenomics. The Little Bit of Neanderthal in All of Us Two studies show how the legacy of Neanderthals endures 30,000 years after their extinction, finding Neanderthal genes in skin and hair that may have helped humans evolve.
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 4, Block B: Luke Johnson,Huggington Post, in re: Alexei Navalny, Putin's Biggest Opponent, Takes On Corruption In The Sochi Olympics : The chief opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin has set his sights on a new target -- the Sochi Winter Olympics. In an interview, Alexei Navalny, a lawyer, prominent anti-corruption blogger and 2013 Moscow mayoral candidate, described his latest project: a report detailing the cost of the games, which are by many estimates the most expensive in modern history. The website for the report, a sort of Wikipedia and Google Maps hybrid, launches on Monday. "In an interview not long ago Putin and [Prime Minister Dimitry] Medvedev claimed there are no facts about corruption. And if there are facts of corruption that you know you must report them," Navalny said, speaking in Russian from Moscow. "Our report is valuable in that situation, when we say, if you want these facts of corruption, we bring these facts of corruption and they are very obvious and they concern the close friends of Vladimir Putin." Navalny, 37, became well-known for using the Internet to expose corruption in a country where it's almost impossible to overstate its pervasiveness and where critics are often murdered or tortured. He launched a website, RosPil, designed to uncover corruption in state contracts. Soon after, he followed up with sites enabling residents to file government complaints over potholes and apartment conditions, and to press authorities to complete repairs.
Most of all, they want to go to this year’s Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. For the city’s power brokers, the National Football League championship on Feb. 2 is almost a mandatory event—a place to have the back of your head seen by competitors and a night to be recounted casually to colleagues. For Inside Sports, the game is a furious exercise in sizing up and serving its clientele. According to Jason Zinna, the partner in charge of Super Bowl sales, the company will handle as many as 3,000 tickets. It will buy them from the NFL, teams, players, fans, and other resellers, sort them into categories, and sell them, along with hotel reservations, transportation, parties, and meals, in packages that can cost as much as $25,000 per person. The game, Rybak says, will be the biggest event he’s handled so far, maybe the biggest of his career.
Rybak has been in the ticket business for 12 years. Born in Israel and raised in Westchester, N.Y., he attended Tulane University, where, by his account, he “didn’t do a goddamn thing other than drink and smoke weed.” After college he took a job as a marketing assistant at the National Basketball Association, where he mostly made photocopies and “bound a lot of presentations.” After 18 months he left for a corporate hospitality company called Superstar EXP. There he and a colleague, Alan Baum, were in charge of wrangling sports and concert tickets. Superstar’s founders soon had their hands full with a private flight booking service called Marquis Jet (now a division of NetJets (BRK/A)). So in 2004, Rybak and Baum branched out on their own as Inside Sports.
In the first days, the job was less about finding tickets than finding people who would pay for them. Rybak made dozens of cold calls daily. He would go to US Open tennis matches and circle the stadium writing down the names posted outside luxury suites. At golf tournaments, he would “borrow” the contact lists for hospitality tent occupants. He became a student of Hoover’s online company directory, which lists contacts and job descriptions.
Once he had a “qualified buyer” on the phone, he would come up with something to sell. As a newcomer, he figured he couldn’t outdo more established competitors on the marquee sporting events—the Kentucky Derby, the NCAA Final Four, the Super Bowl. He focused instead on events slightly more out of the spotlight—awards shows, film festivals, fashion weeks. When American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) wanted to reward the managers of its top-selling stores, Rybak took them to the Grammys and played tour guide for a night out in New York. To his surprise, clients took these unusual offerings as a show of strength: “They were, like, ‘Wow, you can get me the Grammys?’ ” Rybak recalls. “ ‘Then obviously you can do the Super Bowl.’ ”
Friday 31 January 2014 / Hour 4, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: In a spacewalk earlier this week, two Russian astronauts on ISS successfully installed the commercial UrtheCast cameras. The cameras cost $17-million and are capable of beaming down images and high-definition video from the Russian part of the ISS to UrtheCast, a small Vancouver company that struck a deal with the Russian space agency to have its devices blasted into space on a Soyuz rocket and installed in exchange for imagery captured over Russia.
There had been a problem installing these cameras on an earlier spacewalk last month, so this was the second attempt. Once operational, these cameras will also provide a continuous and free live feed of the Earth for anyone who wishes to view it. The competition heats up: The head of Russia’s space agency is in Vostochny to review the construction of Russia’s new spaceport there.
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Music
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Music
Hour 1: Infamous
Hour 2: Infamous, Crysis
Hour 3: Crysis
Hour 4: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare