Photo, left:  Ceres, false color to evidence permanent ice in a permanent shadowed crater.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes
 
Hour One
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block A: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD, in re:  US military confirms death of al Qaeda commander  The US military said Qari Yasin was responsible for the deaths of two US Marines in the Sept. 2008 suicide assault on the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, and confirmed he was killed in Paktika province. 
Assad regime bolstered in Hama province by Iranian-controlled Iraqi militia  The Tehran-controlled Iraqi militia Harakat al Nujaba announced today that it is joining pro-Syrian regime forces in Hama province. Insurgents launched a massive offensive in the northern countryside of Hama earlier in the week.  /  Analysis: Insurgents launch major offensive against Assad regime in Hama province  (1 of 2)
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block B: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD (2 of 2)
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block C:  Gordon G. Chang, Daily Beast & Forbes.com, in re: Mark Clifford, former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and a Hong Kong resident since 1992; anent the Beijing-appointed Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, Executive-designate of Hong Kong.
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block D: 
 
Hour Two
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block A: John Fund, NRO, in re:  
•    Freedom Caucus Is Acting Like a Separate Party
•     Tax Reform Is Already in Trouble
•     How the Freedom Caucus Held Firm
•     White House Aides Now Fear Government Shutdown
 
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block B:  John Fund, NRO (2 of 2)
 
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block C: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block D: Indiana Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:
 
Hour Three
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 4, Block A:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents. Thaddeus McCotter, WJR
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 4, Block B:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents. Thaddeus McCotter, WJR
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 3, Block C:   Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World by Adrian Goldsworthy; Part 5 of 6
“The reign of Augustus—when the Romans learned to stop worrying and love the emperors—is the center of Adrian Goldsworthy’s powerful reassessment of Roman imperialism. Goldsworthy is well known for his books on the Roman army and on Roman warfare and is the author of vivid biographies of some of Rome’s greatest generals, so peace might seem a surprising topic for him. But Pax is not peace, or not quite peace as we know it. . . . The Roman peace was an unusual calm after the violence of prehistoric and classical societies. How calm it really was is difficult to say, but Pax Romana offers a measured answer for which we may be grateful.”—Greg Woolf, Wall Street Journal
https://www.amazon.com/Pax-Romana-Peace-Conquest-Roman/dp/0300178824/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490136951&sr=1-2
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 3, Block D:   Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World by Adrian Goldsworthy; Part 6 of 6
“The reign of Augustus—when the Romans learned to stop worrying and love the emperors—is the center of Adrian Goldsworthy’s powerful reassessment of Roman imperialism. Goldsworthy is well known for his books on the Roman army and on Roman warfare and is the author of vivid biographies of some of Rome’s greatest generals, so peace might seem a surprising topic for him. But Pax is not peace, or not quite peace as we know it. . . . The Roman peace was an unusual calm after the violence of prehistoric and classical societies. How calm it really was is difficult to say, but Pax Romana offers a measured answer for which we may be grateful.”—Greg Woolf, Wall Street Journal
https://www.amazon.com/Pax-Romana-Peace-Conquest-Roman/dp/0300178824/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490136951&sr=1-2
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Hour Four
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 4, Block A: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News.
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 4, Block B: Michael Ledeen, FDD.
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 4, Block C: Oriana Pawlyk, Military.com.
Monday 27 March 2017 / Hour 4, Block D: Jed Babbin, American Spectator.
..  ..  ..
 
 
 
 
Volunteers for Astronomy Rewind. Host —“Turning historical scientific literature into searchable, retrievable data is like turning the key to a treasure chest,” said Alyssa Goodman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announcing the project, in a statement.
Learning about time-variable celestial objects, such as stars that erupt as novae more than once or hurtle across their galaxies, requires observing them over long periods of time. But observations published in journals before roughly 1995 —  when the AAS went digital — are rarely indexed in online image databases. And few journal images, even today, are stored in a way that makes them easily searchable, says Goodman.
Astronomy Rewind is designed to tap into humans’ prowess, relative to computers, at recognizing astronomical images among scanned journal pages, which are a mixture of text and multiple graphics. The project is hosted on the ‘Zooniverse’ platform, a citizen-science web portal that includes more than 1 million volunteers. Contributors — five for every page to ensure reliability — identify image types and look for text that gives the orientation, scale and coordinates of each object. So far, ‘zoonizens‘ have taken to Astronomy Rewind with zeal, processing an entire batch of more than 6,500 images, which organizers had anticipated would take months, in a single day. “The Zoonizens reaction to this project has astonished us all — in a good way,” says Goodman.
http://www.nature.com/news/citizen-scientists-to-rescue-150-years-of-cosmic-images-1.21702
 
 
 
Leaks — and other abuses of FISA — continue. Just hours after Nunes’s Wednesday statement, CNN published a report that said it was told by U.S. officials, “The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.” The report went on to say that, according to its “U.S. official” source, “This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia, according to one source.”
There are two possible reasons for CNN to publish that story. One is that CNN made it up in another fake news report. More likely is that someone in the FBI leaked it to CNN with the intention of counteracting Nunes’s statement that there had been surveillance of Mr. Trump and his team.
Former Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) was the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and led the Senate rewrite of FISA when the law was last redone in 2007-2008. He told me, “If someone from the FBI said that [what CNN reported] they should be fired and perhaps prosecuted under the felony statutes” covering such conduct.
Bond said during the FISA rewrite, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal) wanted to apply FISA’s restrictions to all legally authorized intercepts of communications. That would have restricted the president’s constitutional authority to conduct intelligence operations. Eventually, Pelosi’s lawyers relented.
 
https://spectator.org/spy-vs-spy-vs-trump/