The John Batchelor Show

Thursday 16 April 2015

Air Date: 
April 16, 2015

Photo, left: Milky Way, Summit Lake, West Virginia; credit to: ForestWander.com.  See Hour 2, Block D, Liner: Sid Perkins, Science Magazine – there are 219 million stars in the Milky Way – our home.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Co-host: Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal editorial board & host of OpinionJournal.com.
 
Hour One
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 1, Block A: Mary Kissel, in re: Claudia Rosett on air today demolished the very odd White House assertion that Cuba is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism, despite a fearful list of conspicuously illegal and life-threatening deeds.
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 1, Block B: Rich Lowry, National Review, in re: Tom Cotton,, et al., wrote something that had the force of an op-ed and addressed it to the Supreme Leader and his mullahs. A week ago the Democrats castigated Cotton as a traitor; now, with no longer enough votes (67) in the Senate, the president and his Party acquiesced to the Corker-Menendez Bill on the requirement that any international agreement having the force of a treaty be offered to the Senate for approval. Mrs Clinton is taking foreign policy stands very close to Pres Obama's positions. Do we now have two leaders in the Democratic Party? The president's attitude, "Hey, you don't like this? Come and stop me."  Tom Cotton stood up well under pressure; impressive.  Remember When the Cotton Letter Was Going to Drive All Democrats Into the Arms of the White House on Iran? That’s not the way it turned out.  Although the Corker deal basically reverses the threshold for approval of a major treaty from two-thirds to approve to two-thirds to disapprove.
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Brett Healy, John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, in re: Wisconsin: Gov Scott Walker's budget proposal to the Joint Finance Committee is $68.3 billion – which is 2.4% less than last year.  . . .  He proposes to spin off the University of Wisconsin system into a public-private agency  ("a public authority") and remove the thousands of employees from the state budget. Provide much more independence to academics and staff, and somewhat lighten the tax burden on citizens. All coupled with a tuition freeze for two years. If this proposal fails, the budget will increase by over 4%.  meanwhile, bonding is down, and 400  state positions are to be removed.  Young Republicans are taking on  government mandates.
Scott Walker's 2015-17 Budget Proposal: What You Need to Know
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 1, Block D: Abbas Milani,, Hoover and the Atlantic, in re: In Iran, secret jazz clubs, plays, parties – all available and more-or-less safe because attendees are paying off the local sheriff.  People arrange these using social media, which the regime is desperate to control. In a poll of several days ago, 90% of the population disapproves of the regime's intl intransigence. The more Westerners – civilians, govts, NGOs – facilitate contact, the better for liberty in Iran. The Iranian birthrate has plunged disastrously in the last few years.  Birth rate is below 2; regime again desperately trying to increase. Some 60% of the university students are women, and with more-educated women, the need to have nine children has much diminished.  Does the regime allow sites of resistance in order to maintain control and dull dissent? Even though that might be the goal, the dissent is so pervasive that eventually it will succeed. Of the two million who protested in the Green Movement, some are in prison, some under house arrest, some are expatriates, and some are  bravely carrying forward with efforts to unseat the regime and install a free and democratic government.  Iran's Incremental Revolution Through rap music and nude sketches, ordinary Iranians are quietly resisting their regime.  . . . And yet it was Ahmadinejad’s second term, which was in many ways even more destructive than his first for Iran’s economy and status in the world, that helped bring about the election of the reformist Hassan Rouhani. No less importantly, Iran’s new politics was born of the clerical regime’s relentless effort—stemming from the Islamic Republic’s founding principle of Velayat-e faqih, or rule of the Shiite jurist as the representative of Allah on Earth—to micro-social-engineer life and culture in Iran. When a country’s rulers try to dictate everything from sartorial style to sexual ethics—as Iran’s Islamic conservatives have consistently done by, for example, mandating that women wear headscarves in public and pressuring men not to wear ties—then every one of those details of daily life becomes a potential flashpoint of resistance.   . . .
Hour Two
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block A:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:  The annual March of the Living in Cracow: thousands of Jews and Gentiles assemble in commemoration of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Richard Heideman, in Nissan 5775 (Hebrew calendar): The young people who come have the opportunity to walk hand in hand with survivors of h concentration camps, most liberated by the US and European armies, some by the Russian army, The  young people's live are changed as they grasp the meaning, the magnitude of the horror; and they forward to make a better world. Today we had the Minister of Education of Austria, the Chief Rabbi of Israel, and the US president's ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council. He and I walked arm in arm as he saw the barracks, the rail lines whence people would be moved from cattle cars to either slave labor or death in a crematorium. April 15, 19945, was the day that British troops first liberated Bergen Belsen camps,  HH the Pope sent a message of peace and fraternity  to Auschwitz-Birkenau . Welcome to join the March of the Living next year in the Hebrew month of Nissan:   motl.org  
Israel comes to a standstill as sirens sound for Holocaust Remembrance Day  ; Holocaust Remembrance Day, which began with an official ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday night, concludes with a speech by . . . Holocaust Remembrance Day, which began with an official ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday night, concludes with a speech by . . .
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Onbly  hours after Corker-Menendez Bill , Putin sells the system – extremely powerful – to Iran. Another chink in  sanctions regime, which soon enough will include France and Italy [and Germany].  Of course, Russia made a deal before then rescinded it, had to pay a cut fee to Iran. Will Russia deliver his time?  In the last two weeks, two shiploads of North Korean missile parts unloaded in Iran, which is not downgrading tensions.   Thought that the sanctions will, in fact, be lifted, incl by presidential waiver; this, plus the $100 bil that could be released over time, would make a huge difference in Iran's status.  Treasury says it will not waive Senate sanctions for years to come.  . . .  So many deeds by Iran to stoke instability and promote terror in ht region – Houthis, Syria, Sinai, et al.  Tunnels along h e Gaza border are being rebuilt . Hamas says plainly that it considers it to be it's legal right o kidnap Israelis and hold them for ransom. Hamas is using all available cement to build tunnels.  Arms shipments for Iran to Hamas via Sudan and multiple other locations. Many kinds of missiles now being produced in Gaza.     Putin Defends Missile Deal with Iran, Says No Russian Troops in Ukraine
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block C: Bret Stephens WSJ GLOBAL VIEW, in re: Hillary and the Liberal Way of Lying.  Pres Obama: "All options are on the table," or "No deal is better than a bad deal" -  obvious, amazing mendacity.  . . . The Iran negotiations have been boiling a frog slowly: Iran will have the bomb so get used to it.  Cf.: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Liner: Ocean over oceans? Earth.  Sedimentary rock.
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block D:  Lee Smith, The Tablet & Hudson Institute, in re: Middle East: Inside Obama’s Meeting with Jewish Leaders   What he said, what they said, and what America is now saying to the world about exterminationist anti-Semitism . . . [more]
Liner: Sid Perkins, Science Magazine – there are 219 million stars in the Milky Way – our home.
Hour Three
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block A:  Joe Sexton.  Propublica, in re: The death of Etan Patz in Soho, newly-chic downtown Manhattan, in 1979. Police work form 1979 diminishs confidence that the police now have the right man. Prosecutors have a theory: he was on his way to school, lured into a bodega, then strangled by Pedro Hernandez and disposed of in an alley. Problem: Hernandez is said to have fled soon thereafter, but the police interviewed him after he'd theoretically fled. [Much more in podcast.]
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block B: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: An engineering analysis of the Falcon 9 first stage landing failure   SpaceX founder and chief technology officer Elon Musk tweeted that “excess lateral velocity caused it [the booster] to tip over post landing.” In a later tweet that was subsequently withdrawn, Musk then indicated that “the issue was stiction in the biprop throttle valve, resulting in control system phase lag.” In this statement, Musk was referring to “stiction” — or static friction — in the valve controlling the throttling of the engine. The friction appears to have momentarily slowed the response of the engine, causing the control system to command more of an extreme reaction from the propulsion system than was required. As a result, the control system entered a form of hysteresis, a condition in which the control response lags behind changes in the effect causing it.
Despite the failure of the latest attempt, SpaceX will be encouraged by the landing accuracy of the Falcon 9 and the bigger-picture success of its guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system in bringing the booster back to the drone ship. The GNC also worked as designed during the prior landing attempt in January, which ended in the destruction of the vehicle following a hard touchdown on the edge of the platform.
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block C: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, in re:  A quick Google search for “same sex wedding venues” revealed about 369,000 entries in that niche. For example, GayDestinationWeddings is “created expressly to serve the needs and exceed the expectations of the LGBTQ community.” From the website, it appears that it discriminates against traditional heterosexual couples. This reads like a flat-out violation of the new civil rights laws, but who cares? The fact that every entrepreneur does not choose to enter every niche in the larger wedding market is at most an irrelevant detail to the overall health of the market. The abundance of competitive alternatives means that federal and state governments never have a legitimate interest in forcing unwilling people into business with others.   http://www.hoover.org/research/problem-antidiscrimination-laws (1 of 2)
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block D: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, in re:  A quick Google search for “same sex wedding venues” revealed about 369,000 entries in that niche. For example, GayDestinationWeddings is “created expressly to serve the needs and exceed the expectations of the LGBTQ community.” From the website, it appears that it discriminates against traditional heterosexual couples. This reads like a flat-out violation of the new civil rights laws, but who cares? The fact that every entrepreneur does not choose to enter every niche in the larger wedding market is at most an irrelevant detail to the overall health of the market. The abundance of competitive alternatives means that federal and state governments never have a legitimate interest in forcing unwilling people into business with others.   http://www.hoover.org/research/problem-antidiscrimination-laws (2 of 2)
Hour Four
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block A: Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, by Robert L. O'Connell (1 of 4)
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block B: Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, by Robert L. O'Connell (2 of 4) 
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block C: Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, by Robert L. O'Connell (3 of 4)
Thursday  16 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block D: Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, by Robert L. O'Connell (4 of 4)
.