Painting, above:  John Jay Homestead State Historic Site, Katonah, New York, home of John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States.  See Hour Four, The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817 by Myron Magnet

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Jim McTague, Barron's Washington, in re: the jobs number today.  The steam is coming out of the US economy, not clear why.  Every business in the US has the same Hail Mary pass in line: there'll be a new middle-class market in China to buy our products. But that's not happening. 

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Adam Nagourney, NYT, in re:  Severe Drought Has U.S. West Fearing Worst

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 1, Block C:  Lois Beckett, ProPublica, in re:   The PTSD Crisis That's Being Ignored: Americans Wounded in Their Own Neighborhoods  When researchers started screening for post-traumatic stress disorder at Chicago's Cook County Hospital - which treats about 2,000 patients a year for gunshots, stabbings and other violent injuries - they assumed they would find some cases. They just didn't know how many: Fully 43 per cent of the patients they examined - and more than half of gunshot-wound victims - had signs of PTSD.

Beckett reports that, just like veterans, civilians can suffer flashbacks, nightmares, paranoia, and social withdrawal. And while the military has made substantial progress in recent years - regularly screening for PTSD, working to fight the stigma associated with mental health treatment, and educating military families about potential symptoms - Americans wounded in their own neighborhoods are not getting treatment for PTSD. They're not even getting diagnosed.

Highlights from Beckett's report:

About 8 per cent of Americans suffer from PTSD at some point, studies show, but the rates appear to be much higher in communities where high rates of violent crime have persisted, like poor, largely African-American pockets of Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Post-traumatic stress can take a toll on relationships and parenting, lead to family conflict and interfere with jobs. A national study of patients with traumatic injuries found that those who developed post-traumatic stress were less likely to have returned to work a year after their injuries.

ProPublica surveyed a top-level trauma center in each of the 22 cities with the nation's highest homicide rates. Just one, the Spirit of Charity Trauma Center in New Orleans, currently screens all seriously injured patients for PTSD. At another, Detroit Receiving Hospital, psychologists talk with injured crime victims about PTSD.    [more]

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Sohrab Ahmari, WSJ, in re: With the 22nd Winter Olympics set to kick off Friday in Sochi, the WSJ publishes an appreciation of Arthur Koestler's 1941 anticommunist masterpiece, Darkness at Noon.  The book was both a warning about the nature of the Soviet regime, issued at a time when few in the West wanted to hear it, and a grand novel of ideas in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann.   The column, itself, is here.

Hour Two

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 2, Block A:  Mona Charen, NRO, in re: The Inequality of Marriage-Culture Collapse  The real disparity between the sexes is men’s worse fate after growing up fatherless. 

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Bill Whalen, Hoover, Advancing a Free Society, in re: Rescuing Obamacare: Leave It to Bieber

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago   Law, in re:  The name of my Defining Ideas column is “The Libertarian.” The title of my recent book on constitutional law is The Classical Liberal Constitution.  Clearly, I consider myself a proponent of limited government. So does Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has moved the term “libertarian” to the fore of our national political debates. In a recent New York Times analysis, “Rand Paul’s Mixed Inheritance,” Sam Tanenhaus and Jim Rutenberg treat him as today’s exemplar of libertarian thought. But Paul’s ideology is a far cry from classical liberalism, which is conceptually and politically superior to hard-line libertarianism. [more] (1 of 2)

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 2, Block D: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago   Law, in re:  The name of my Defining Ideas column is “The Libertarian.” The title of my recent book on constitutional law is The Classical Liberal Constitution.  Clearly, I consider myself a proponent of limited government. So does Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has moved the term “libertarian” to the fore of our national political debates. In a recent New York Times analysis, “Rand Paul’s Mixed Inheritance,” Sam Tanenhaus and Jim Rutenberg treat him as today’s exemplar of libertarian thought. But Paul’s ideology is a far cry from classical liberalism, which is conceptually and politically superior to hard-line libertarianism. [more] (2 of 2)

Hour Three

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 3, Block A:  Vernon Silver, Bloomberg Businessweek, in re:  THE APOLLO OF GAZA. This past August, a local fisherman discovered a six-foot tall bronze statue of the god Apollo dating back 2,000 years in the waters off the Gaza Strip beach. It might be the most valuable archaeological find of the century – it's the only classical Greek, bronze, life-size statue found in the whole Middle East to date -- and would be worth tens of millions of dollars . . . if it could be sold. Apollo's provenance will make it hard to establish who legally owns it, but it doesn't help that Gaza, which is holding the bronze, is governed by Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the US and EU.  Hamas can't sell Apollo legitimately or on the black market, and it can't smuggle it out; nor can the Islamists display it, since the statue is a nude. The future of this rare piece of art is now trapped by the geography, politics and religious beliefs of one of the world's most complicated patches of land. Article by Vernon Silver and Saud Abu Ramadan.  (1 of 2)

IMAGE, APOLLO OF GAZA Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 3, Block B: Vernon Silver, Bloomberg Businessweek, in re:  THE APOLLO OF GAZA. This past August, a local fisherman discovered a six-foot tall bronze statue of the god Apollo dating back 2,000 years in the waters off the Gaza Strip beach. It might be the most valuable archaeological find of the century – it's the only classical Greek, bronze, life-size statue found in the whole Middle East to date -- and would be worth tens of millions of dollars . . . if it could be sold. Apollo's provenance will make it hard to establish who legally owns it, but it doesn't help that Gaza, which is holding the bronze, is governed by Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the US and EU.  Hamas can't sell Apollo legitimately or on the black market, and it can't smuggle it out; nor can the Islamists display it, since the statue is a nude. The future of this rare piece of art is now trapped by the geography, politics and religious beliefs of one of the world's most complicated patches of land. Article by Vernon Silver and Saud Abu Ramadan.

Wearing shorts and a mask, and armed with a net, Jouda Ghurab climbed down a portion of Gaza Strip beach made steep by years of pounding waves, and dove into the Mediterranean. By his telling, it was Aug. 16 of last year, a Friday just after Ramadan. Ghurab, a fisherman, is 26, and has a wife and two sons. He left school at 13 and has been fishing since he was 17. He seeks his catch close to shore, either in a rowboat or by swimming out to patches of submerged rock. When the weather permits, he earns 20 to 30 Israeli shekels ($5.70 to $8.60) a day catching and selling a mix of sardines, squid, and bigger fish such as the prized gilt-head sea bream. He has enormous muscular hands and wears a close-cropped, black beard.

Deir al-Balah, where Ghurab lives and fishes, is about 8 miles southwest of Gaza City, just 10 miles up the coast from Egypt. For a while Ghurab made money digging some of the smuggling tunnels under the Egyptian border and helped shuttle contraband—from washing machines to hives of Egyptian honeybees—but that money dried up when Egypt cracked down on trafficking.

That day in August, as Ghurab recalls it, he noticed the currents were behaving unusually and had exposed some rocks. “The rocks looked strange,” he recalls. “The underwater waves had dug the sand and moved it out.” He paddled toward the . . .  (2 of 2)

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 3, Block C:  Tyler Rogoway, AviationIntel, in re: F-35 FLOUNDERS ON WHILE ESSENTIAL F-16 UPGRADE PROGRAM MAY GET AXED  More of the same from the DoD and USAF regarding borrowing from their existing fighter fleet’s capability to pay for their Death Star of boondoggles, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. There is a new information out highlighting the continuing “teething problems” with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Cracks in the jet’s motors and structures continue to plague the aircraft’s design, even though Lockheed has said for years that the cracking issues will be fixed in the near term. Then there are the same old usual suspects, the software is far behind schedule, data-fusion is unreliable, the helmet is still an issue and so on. The aircraft’s artificially fabricated and premature initial Operating Capability leaves so much to be desired that it is questionable what the aircraft’s role would be during any sort of combat operations. Then there is ALIS, the jet’s all-encompassing logistical support and mission planning networked database that is not even near being ready for prime time (and one has to think how vulnerable such an integrated system makes the aircraft in a wold of cyber warfare and weaponized malware). The aircraft’s vulnerability to battle damage is still . . .  [more]

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 3, Block D:   Mark Schroder, Stratfor, in re: Cameroon Tries to Stop Spillover Violence The African country is taking steps to ensure that instability in Nigeria and the Central African Republic does not seriously imperil it.    Nigerian Militants Threaten the Country's Oil Industry  Despite their claims, Niger Delta militants no longer have the political protection or organizational solidity needed to act on their threats that they had five years ago.

Hour Four

Photo, below: James Madison's home, Montpelier.

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 4, Block A: The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817 by Myron Magnet (1 of 4)

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817 by Myron Magnet (2 of 4)

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 4, Block C: The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817 by Myron Magnet (3 of 4)

Friday 7 February  2014 / Hour 4, Block D: The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817 by Myron Magnet (4  of 4)

 

 

 

Photos, below: The Gilmore Cabin was built by George Gilmore at Montpelier after emancipation (circa 1870).  His land was leased from James Madison's nephew.  In 1901, the Gilmores purchased the 16 acres of land and members of the Gilmore family lived on the farm until the early 1930s.  It is the first restored freedman's home in the United States.

      

    

 

 

 

 

 

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Music

Hour 1:  House of Cards. Oblivion. The Recruit.

Hour 2:  The Recruit. Madagascar. Robin Hood.

Hour 3:  Rome. Battleship. Wrath of the Titans.

Hour 4:  Revolution.