The John Batchelor Show

Monday 29 August 2016

Air Date: 
August 29, 2016

Photo, left: Hotel Mars, episode n; David Livingston, Space Show, and Scott Sanford, NASA, on Osiris Rex
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes
 
Hour One
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD, in re:    Taliban storms district in eastern Afghanistan   The US military continues to extol Afghan security forces as they continue to lose ground to the Taliban. In the last 24 hours, the district of Jani Khel in Paktia fell to the Taliban.   ;   Zawahiri says jihadists should prepare for guerrilla war in Iraq ; In the third episode of his "Brief Messages to a Victorious Ummah" series, Ayman al Zawahiri calls on "the mujahideen of the Levant" to help the jihadists in Iraq "reorganize themselves" for a "protracted" campaign of "guerrilla war." Zawahiri clearly expects the Islamic State's caliphate claim to be rendered moot and he wants jihadists to follow a new strategy in Iraq going forward.
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD, in re: 
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 1, Block C:  Gordon G. Chang, Daily Beast & Forbes.com, in re:  The two most populous countries in the world are now going at each other: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2016/08/28/indias-grand-gamble-with-china/#621f19804f63   Duterte wants to set aside ruling on South China Sea — for now  (The Philippine Star)
President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday expressed his willingness to temporarily set aside the ruling of an arbitral tribunal in settling the country’s dispute with China.  During his speech at the National Heroes Day rites at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, Duterte told Chinese Ambassador Zhao Jinhua that he does not want to go to war with China. The president said he will stay silent on the matter of the South China Sea dispute as it might lead to the suspension of talks with China.
“I will not use the judgment [of the] arbitral [tribunal] now but I would one day sit in front of your representative or you and then I will lay bare my position  and I would say that this paper, I cannot get out of the four corners of this law and that is the arbitral judgment,” Duterte told the Chinese envoy.
China's 'Red Line' Warning to Japan on South China Sea FONOPs ...  Reiterating China's previous position on Japan's involvement in the disputes in the South China Sea, Wu added that “Japan is not a concerned ...
The lesson Hong Kong must learn from the South China Sea ; S China Sea ruling: Turning point in Chinese foreign policy?  ;  China wants what we have, so it won't risk a spat ; China Plans More Island-Building in South China Sea ; China factor in the Asean stage
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 1, Block D: Josh Rogin, Washington Post, in re:    Cha said the latest North Korean rhetoric is not substantively different from what the regime was saying before and that those who see signals of a new, more open stance from Pyongyang are engaged in wishful thinking. “In the past, you didn’t have to work as hard to find those signals,” he said.
The closest U.S. officials came to actually meeting directly with North Korean officials was in June, during a private conference in Beijing called the Northeast Asian Security Dialogue. Sung Kim, the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, was there, while Choe Son Hui, deputy director general of the North Korean foreign ministry’s U.S. affairs department, led Pyongyang’s delegation.
The State Department has said no formal meeting took place, but one participant told me Kim and Choe may have talked on the sidelines. During the conference, Choe laid out terms for a resumption of dialogue, according to that participant. Choe said Pyongyang will no longer discuss giving up existing nuclear assets but could strike a deal stopping a future buildup.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/inside-the-secret-us-north-korea-track-2-diplomacy/2016/08/28/ef33b2d4-6bc0-11e6-ba32-5a4bf5aad4fa_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.10a701a1dafc
 
Hour Two
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 2, Block A:   David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent; John Fund, NRO, in re:  Politico: “His task, GOP insiders readily concede, seems close to impossible. In an interview Wednesday night, Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, recognized how long it may take to improve the public’s negative perceptions of the GOP nominee, likening her turnaround project to turning a tanker.”
“Trump may not have that kind of time. Early voting begins in 28 days in Minnesota and in 32 other states soon after that. And already as summer inches to its end, 90 percent of Americans say they’ve decided. For all the televised daily drama this race has provided, the final outcome itself is shaping up to be less dramatic than any presidential election since 1984.”
Never-Ending Clouds:  “A series of newly released State Department emails obtained by ABC News offers fresh insight on direct contact between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s inner circle while she was Secretary of State.”
“In one December 2010 email chain with Clinton’s closest aide Huma Abedin, then-top Clinton Foundation official Doug Band offers names for a State Department lunch with Chinese President Hu Jintao scheduled for January 2011. On the list were three executives from organizations that have donated millions to the Clinton Foundation: Bob McCann, the then-president of wealth management at UBS; Dr. Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation; and Hikmet Ersek, the CEO of Western Union.” (1 of 2)
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent; John Fund, NRO (2 of 2)
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Hotel Mars, episode n; David Livingston, Space Show, and Scott Sanford, NASA, in re; Osiris Rex (1 of 2)
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 2, Block D: Hotel Mars, episode n; David Livingston, Space Show, and Scott Sanford, NASA, in re; Osiris Rex (2 of 2)
 
Hour Three
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 3, Block A:   Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board & host of Opinion Journal on WSJ Video; in re: Opinion Journal: Florida Primary Showdowns  The Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes previews Tuesday’s key Congressional primaries in the Sunshine State. http://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-journal-florida-primary-showdowns/E02B7...
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 3, Block B:   Paul Gregory, Hoover, in re:   http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2016/08/29/under-russias-new-extremism-laws-liking-my-writings-on-ukraine-could-mean-jail-terms/2/#6f7cd952b5a2
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 3, Block C:   Coral Davenport, New York Times, in re:  . . . In turn, lawmakers in Virginia created the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, which has spent nearly $1 billion. The commission and similar programs helped send some young people like Mr. Widener to college. It also spent money on projects similar to what Mrs. Clinton proposes: building broadband networks and retraining in fields such as computer repair. It lured a major government contractor, Northrop Grumman, to build an office here, and built call centers for Verizon and TurboTax.
But southwest Virginia is still suffering. “The government can’t really help Appalachia,” said Gary Lambert, a retired coal machinist who also sold his tobacco farm to the federal government. “The tobacco settlement was a rip-off. They ripped us up one side and down the other.” The settlement did pay for one of his sons, Thad, to go to college and become a teacher at the local high school. Another son, Brad, is back in the firing line: He’s a coal miner. “I guess if you want to survive, you have to change,” Mr. Lambert said outside Pat’s Kountry Diner in Lebanon. He said things had gotten so bad that methamphetamine was so cheap that no one even made moonshine anymore.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers say her plan to save coal country is informed by the lessons of the tobacco programs. Trevor Houser, the plan’s chief architect and an energy economist who grew up in coal-dependent Wyoming, spent two weeks last summer traveling through coal towns there and in Appalachia, meeting with miners, mayors and local boards and councils, to get an understanding of what is needed, what works and what does not. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/us/politics/coal-country-is-wary-of-hillary-clintons-pledge-to-help.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 3, Block D: Henry Fountain, NYT, in re:   ESTEVAN, Saskatchewan — So much soot belched from the old power plant here that Mike Zeleny would personally warn the neighbors. “If the wind was blowing in a certain direction,” Mr. Zeleny said, “we’d call Mrs. Robinson down the street and tell her not to put out her laundry.” That coal plant is long gone, replaced by a much larger and cleaner one along the vast Saskatchewan prairie. Sooty shirts and socks are a thing of the past.
But as with even the most modern coal plants, its smokestacks still emit enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, the invisible heat-trapping gas that is the main contributor to global warming. So this fall, a gleaming new maze of pipes and tanks — topped with what looks like the Tin Man’s hat — will suck up 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from one of the boilers so it can be shipped out for burial, deep underground.
If there is any hope of staving off the worst effects of climate change, many scientists say, this must be part of it — capturing the carbon that spews from power plants and locking it away, permanently. For now, they contend, the world is too dependent on fossil fuels to do anything less.  http://nyti.ms/1yT6S2N
 
Hour Four
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 4, Block A:   The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia by David Reid.   Part I of II  (segment 1 of 8)  A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia.
From 1900 to 1929, New York City was a dynamic metropolis on the rise, and it quickly became a cultural nexus of new architecture; the home of a thriving movie business; the glittering center of theater and radio; and a hub of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing. In the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and World War II would send some of Europe’s most talented men and women to America’s shores, vastly enriching the fields of science, architecture, film, and arts and letters—the list includes Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, André Kertész, Robert Capa, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Lukacs.
Reid draws a portrait of the frenzied, creative energy of a bohemian Greenwich Village, from the taverns to the salons. Revolutionaries, socialists, and intelligentsia in the 1910s were drawn to the highly provocative monthly magazine The Masses, which attracted the era’s greatest talent, from John Reed to Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis. And summoned up is a chorus of witnesses to the ever-changing landscape of bohemia, from Malcolm Cowley to Anaïs Nin. Also present are the pioneering photographers who captured the city in black-and-white: Berenice Abbott’s dizzying aerial views, Samuel Gottscho’s photographs of the waterfront and the city’s architectural splendor, and Weegee’s masterful noir lowlife.
But the political tone would be set by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman. James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, would be influential in establishing a new position in the cabinet before ascending to it himself as secretary of defense under Truman, but not before helping to usher in the Cold War.
With The Brazen Age, David Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in the history of New York City in the mid-twentieth century, a period of time that would ensure its place on the world stage for many generations. https://www.amazon.com/Brazen-Age-American-Politics-Bohemia-ebook/dp/B00SPVZBI2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1472515913&sr=1-1#nav-subnav
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 4, Block B:  The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia by David Reid.   Part I of II  (segment 2 of 8)
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 4, Block C:  The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia by David Reid.   Part I of II  (segment 3 of 8)
Monday 29 August  2016 / Hour 4, Block D:  The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia by David Reid.   Part I of II  (segment 4 of 8)