The John Batchelor Show

Thursday 17 March 2016

Air Date: 
March 17, 2016

Photo, left:  The persecuted church in the East: St. Elijah's Monastery south of Mosul, Iraq's oldest Assyrian Christian monastery, dating from the Sixth Century.  Continuing its onslaught against Christians in the Middle East, ISIS has laid waste to numerous Assyrian churches and homes in Iraq while vandalizing Christian monasteries and cemeteries throughout the region.
Last week, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria turned 10 Assyrian homes into ruins while injuring several in a bomb blast that also damaged a monastery of Assyrian nuns in northern Iraq, the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) reports. This was part of a new barrage of concerted attacks recently waged on Christians in the region by ISIS.   The terrorist group recently vowed to renew its attacks by threatening to bomb a number of other nearby villages.
ISIS also ransacked two cemeteries in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk the day after Thanksgiving, digging up and opening graves on the sites while destroying crosses and tombstones. Even though the destruction of the grave sites used by the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East was credited to ISIS terrorists, AINA reports that local authorities would not identify the individuals who vandalized the cemeteries.
The defiled graves and demolished tombstones were captured by AINA in published photos displaying graves that were smashed open by ISIS members, along with tombstones that were uprooted and knocked from their original placements. In addition to the destruction of cemeteries, ISIS recently attacked 11 other Assyrian churches and monasteries in the area, according to AINA.
ISIS’s continued attacks have come after it displaced nearly 200,000 Assyrians who fled their homes to avoid the ransacking Islamic terrorists once they occupied the nearby Nineveh Plains.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-hosts: Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board & host of Opinion Journal on WSJ Video. Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents.
 
Hour One
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Mary Kissel, in re:  Nina Shea of Hudson Institute  on the United States’s declaring that Da’ish has committed genocide.  Yazidis have  been treated with exceptional brutality, but this Adm has declined so far to declare genocide of Christians.    Only after two Americans were beheaded did this president choose to make any move at all. The retreat of the US from that part of the world has led to seriously negative consequences both for our allies there and for global security. / US Party delegates: choice is “sort-of democratic.” In PA. 54 delegates will chosen who’ll be unbound to any candidate at any point in the convention.  Today the WSJ published an article unfavorable to the leading GOP candidate, who reacted with threats.  WSJ will do the same tomorrow.
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block B:  Edward Hayes, Esq, criminal defense attorney par excellence, in re:  St Patrick and the celebrations and – as we do every year – a stirring rendition of Danny Boy.  Today’s parade was a pleasure: the mayor was there, and there was less drunkenness than hitherto.  When I was in my twenties, the Irish Troubles were still going on and the political scene her was riven and also more violent.  Now, Ireland is stable, well educated and prosperous.  I went there in the fall and found it charming.
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post opinion writer, in re: Political seasons are nonlinear.  Pundits need to have a little more humility – none of us has figured this out yet.  Candidates have come and gone. Not lived up to promise, and left the whole field unpredictable.   So much money was leveled against Rubio suggests that he’d be bowled over for a while.
We can’t defend democracy by electing a thug.  Six positive things GOP leaders on the Hill can do.  A lot of Republicans are in Lindsey Graham’s shoes   Graham is modeling grownup political behavior, making the best of available options.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/03/17/we-cant-defend-democracy-by-electing-a-thug/
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 1, Block D:  Mona Charen, NRO and senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; in re: . . .  questions on why Kasich decided not to participate in the upcoming debate after Trump pulled out.  Need only 50% + 1 between Cruz and Kasich. . . . All year long we’ve had people’s hubris ahead of the good of the country. I’m tired of it.  Exit polls show a strong percentage of voters in all recent states say that they would not be comfortable supporting Trump as the nominee.  I think you really will see the fracturing of the Republican Party.
Please Lie to Us  “I trust in the good judgment of the American people.” So said a radio host I admire (not one of the screamers) about six months ago when the rise of Trump was still notional. At this moment, looking at both parties, you have to ask whether judgment is being applied at all or whether we’re in the much more dangerous realm of emotional release.
Let’s start on the left. Democrats have made careers out of pretending that “government” has money to distribute, that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes, that most of the problems of black America are attributable to white racism, that deficits can be eliminated by raising taxes on the few at the top, that women are victims in need of government redress, and that climate change is the greatest national security threat we face. Fairy tales. In the past several years, partly due to President Obama’s destructive divisiveness, those delusions have deepened, and now, with the influence of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, a full-throated socialism commands the affections of Democrats under the age of 30. In Iowa, for example, Sanders won 84 percent of voters between the ages of 17 and 29.
Democrats have plunged lustily into a dumbed-down politics that appeals to the mammalian brain, not the reasoning one. The Black Lives Matter movement demands not justice but rote obeisance. No issue is ever presented in the terms that mature adults should manage, namely that there are inevitable trade offs in life, and that every policy has costs and benefits. No, now it’s “The billionaires are screwing you” or “The system is rigged against you.”
The Democrats’ likely nominee, insofar as she has any true convictions at all, has trimmed and tacked to the left. She has endorsed a $15 an hour minimum wage, declined to consider entitlement reform, and, in a marked shift, now opposes free trade.
Among Republicans, a similar conspiratorial mindset has taken hold. Our problems – slow growth, crime, increasing inequality – are the result of an evil cabal. The Democrats believe the cabal is on Wall Street. Large numbers of Republicans locate it in Washington, DC. And just as Democrats finger the wealthy and Republicans as the source of the ills of the middle class (no one is any longer shy about making class appeals in America), Trumpkins point to immigrants, crafty foreigners, and Washington. By sticking it to the Mexicans and the Chinese and the Muslims and Washington, Trump promises catharsis. Politicians in a democracy have little incentive to tell voters the truth – not when voters reward them for telling lies. In due course, voters howl that they have been betrayed, but it’s a betrayal they invited.
Has the middle class been stabbed in the back by Washington, DC? If so, it’s a very pleasant dagger: More entitlements, more spending, more regulation, and less concern for debt. The federal government is a vast engine for taxing (disproportionately) the rich and paying benefits to the middle class and the poor. Two-thirds of 2014’s $3.5 trillion federal budget went to payments to individuals. These included overlapping categories of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other entitlements.  The top 20 percent of taxpayers paid 69 percent of all taxes. The national debt is north of $18 trillion.
Truth serum: Our problems arise from demanding too much of government. We, the middle class, have asked government to make sure everyone (no matter how credit unworthy) can buy a house. We’ve demanded that government bring down the prices of health care and education – with the result that those two sectors have seen the steepest price increases of any in the American economy. We’ve demanded that corporations pay the highest tax rates in the developed world in the mistaken belief that someone else pays those taxes (when in fact we all pay through higher prices or in the loss of jobs as companies relocate to business-friendlier countries). We’ve demanded that disability payments become the new welfare, and that political connections substitute for merit among businesses. Every time we vote for a candidate who promises to go to Washington to “fight for you” rather than to shrink government, we’re voting for the kind of corruption that we claim to despise. We’re empowering those who excel at manipulating political power for private gain.
It is therefore sadly apt that the two nominees of the great political parties could well turn out to be two multimillionaires who’ve played the middle class for suckers all their lives.
 
Hour Two
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael Rubin,  , in re:  US has labeled Da’ish as genocidal against Christian and Yazidis, inter al.  Enablers of the cutthroats: Ankara, Erdogan, in the guise of being anti-Assad. Look to a possible breakup of Turkey, first time in a century.  Charismatic leaders, under Ataturk and others; Ataturk dies young, the others were pushed out of dead in office. Erdogan has held on.  Turks and Kurds fought in the 1990s; Turkey razed whole villages, leading to Kurdish settlement all across the country. Turkish lira has lost half its value; banking crisis on the horizon.  Kurds in Syria are working to coalesce control, with Russian help.  Turkey no longer able to supply al Nusrah in Syria.   1300 hotels for sale on the coast.  Turkey delayed school opening by three weeks to force Turks to take holidays and improve the economy.    PKK/Kurds have engaged in terrorism; Abdullah Ocalan, leader, captured in Kenya in 1999, now imprisoned for life in a prison in the Sea of Marmara.   X, W and Q (?) are letters used in Kurdish but not in Turkish – so it's illegal to use these letters! Turks opened a military office n Qatar.  Beware of water fights to come. 
Saudis pressuring Egypt to let Turkey work its (Ikhwan) way in Gaza?  Yes, and Egypt wholly refuses.  
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block B:  Sarkis Naoum, An Nahar senior columnist, political editor, and analyst on Syrian affairs, Lebanon, and the Levant; in re:  Da’ish.   Designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist group by the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council).   Of course, they've known this for years and done nothing at all till now. Gulf states suddenly noticed they're under threat from Iran, so they quit ignoring it, resent the US for doing nothing and fear a US-Iran agreement in the near future. Saudis cannot go backwards, so will be transformed into a military state. Neighbors tended to protect Lebanon and ask Lebanese to sacrifice themselves for the outside interest.  As long as we have no president, Parliament is closed – we're in danger of becoming a failed state. Most refugees are Sunnah; extremely volatile atmosphere.
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/behind-the-gccs-terrorist-designation-of-hizbullah
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/hezbollah-labeled-terrorist-by-gcc-states-but-what-do-their-people-think
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-begins-surprise-withdrawal-from-syria-as-peace-talks-get-underway/2016/03/15/fe3821fc-ea1a-11e5-a9ce-681055c7a05f_story.html
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/iranian-casualties-in-syria-and-the-strategic-logic-of-intervention
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Anna Borshchevskaya [Mrs Michael Rubin], Washington Institute, in re: Russia and Syria. Alawistan.  Russian liberal press has sarcastic comments: told “Syria is our sacred land.” Now that is doesn't seem to be any more, what next? Since it's not a real withdrawal, Putin has strengthened Assad in the Geneva talks. 
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block D:  Murad Ismael, Yazda.org executive director; in re:    Secy John Kerry declared that the US Sate Dept has committed genocide against Christians and Yazidis.  Nadia Murad is a survivor who in December spoke to the UN world leaders about her enslavement.   She was able to escape Mosul and eventually reach Geneva.  Thousands of Yazidis are now stuck on the border with Macedonia.  In ISIS captivity:  after 18 month, more that 3,400 girls and women and children are still in captivity; and many men of whom we have no news.  Children either sex slaves or in ISIS training camps.   Nadia has spoken in a dozen or so countries; leaders understand that her message is critical; unfortunately, there’s still  no action.  What’s needed is for the intl community to unite and deal with ISIS, which does not negotiate.  Need to have it destroyed now; they continue to commit crimes and the genocide continues.  It's an enemy to humanity.   Receiving Yazidis into the US or Canada: doors are still closed in font of them – no country has yet accepted any Yazidi refugee. Maybe a thousand families have reached families and some individuals in Germany.
 
Nadia Murad is a 21-year-old Yazidi survivor of ISIS captivity. She was one of the thousands of Yazidi girls and young women who were enslaved by the so-called Islamic State ("IS") and sexually abused by militants. Nadia is from Kocho, a Yazidi village in Sinjar, Iraq, where ISIS massacred all the men and enslaved all the women and children. Nadia was in IS captivity for three months, where she was treated as sex slave and abused by more than a dozen IS fighters. At the time Nadia was a sex slave she was bought and sold several times by various IS members and pressured to convert to their distorted version of Islam, that is, IS ideology. She lost six brothers in the Kocho massacre, and her mother was subsequently murdered along with 80 other older Yazidi women.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/17/politics/us-iraq-syria-genocide/index.html
http://www.wsj.com/articles/kerry-determines-islamic-state-is-committing-genocide-1458225090
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/may-clifford-d-call-it-genocide/
 
Hour Three
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block A:  Malcolm Hoenlein, in re: Huge attack, smuggling and rocket tunnels from Gaza in to Egypt and Israel:  North Korea has been active in almost all of these.  DPRK engineers in Gaza to build – for high pay, Multiple SCUD versions reaching Gaza, much of it via Iran. Also along southern Lebanon along the Israeli border. Also in Iran, the underground Fordow nuclear operation. Iran uses a DPRK workforce to build all these.    Soleimani has radically cut salaries of the al Qassam Brigades.  The appealed for more money; Iran said, “We’ll get back to you.”  Supposed to have been a secret mtg.   /   Both Hose and Senate on Iranian missile launches:  growing frustrated; Samantha Power speaks of “slowing down and degrading the program” – but these are intercontinental – ICBMs – to hit the US.  Russia to sell 30 Sukhoi jets to Iran, which clearly violates the deal.  Also needs Security Council approval.   . . . Prof Green, Briton, candidate for Special rapporteur on Occupied Territories
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block B:   Yoram Hazony is the President of the Herzl Institute president, director of John Templeton Foundation‘s project in Jewish Philosophical Theology; in re: his new book, God and Politics in Esther.   The story of how the young Esther with her uncle, Mordechai, managed to protect the Jews, who were facing total annihilation and instead were saved. Hamentaschen.  Purim:  revelry in costumes, lots of food. Celebrate in order to explore what happens when Jews no longer have a kingdom nor prophets.  What do you do when you no longer hear God’s voice?   Rabbis had to decide which books would go into t he Bible; how can you enter a book that never once mention’s God’s name?  This is a period after the destruction of the Temple, Jews scattered in Persia under an anti-Jewish monarchy.  For 2,000 years Esther was the story for Jews in dispersion.  It's a book for exile, a Book of Plan B.   The messages are highly relevant to today:  we still face a genocidal dictator in Iran who wants to destroy the Jews; it feels as though history is on an endless loop. Meant for all generations and people: Esther begins the story powerless, rises to the top of the hierarchy, has to decide whether or not to expend her power to save her people. 
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block C:  Dan Henninger, WSJ editorial; in re:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kasichs-art-of-the-deal-1458169558?tesla=y
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 3, Block D:  Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, in re:  Pennsylvania GOP delegates would be at the center of any contested convention   It’s been 40 years since Republicans have gone to their convention without a clear nominee, but when they did, Pennsylvania was right at the heart of the struggle – because of the state’s unusual process of assigning delegates.
Pennsylvania’s primary contest is unlike others. For years, the Keystone State primary has been a “preferential primary” – simply a beauty contest – and had no connection whatsoever to delegate selection. It’s not winner-take-all. It’s not winner-take-most. It’s not even proportional. The vast majority of Pennsylvania’s Republican delegates are technically “unbound” or “uncommitted.”
Used to be they all were, but this year party rules changed slightly, making 14 “at large” delegates bound to vote for the winner of the PA Primary, but on the first ballot only.
There are also three “automatic” delegate slots for the state party chairman (Rob Gleason), the National Committeeman (Bob Asher) and National Committeewoman (Christine Toretti). The remaining 54 delegates, elected by Republican primary voters in each of Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts (three per district) remain legally “uncommitted.”
  
Hour Four
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Richard Epstein, Chicago and NYU Law, and Hoover; in re:   The death of Antonin Scalia has set up a nasty battle over who shall occupy his vacant seat on the Supreme Court. The battle does not just involve the endless political skirmishes now taking place between the White House and the Senate. It also extends to the larger philosophical debate over the constitutional theory of originalism, with which Justice Scalia was so closely associated. Few of the attacks on originalism and Scalia have been as tasteless and ignorant as “Looking Back,” the broadside that the journalist Jeffrey Toobin recently published in The New Yorker. It is evident that Toobin is out for blood from his opening salvo: “Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy.” 
http://www.hoover.org/research/scalia-maligned (1 of 2)
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block B:  Richard Epstein, Chicago and NYU Law, and Hoover; in re:   The death of Antonin Scalia has set up a nasty battle over who shall occupy his vacant seat on the Supreme Court. The battle does not just involve the endless political skirmishes now taking place between the White House and the Senate. It also extends to the larger philosophical debate over the constitutional theory of originalism, with which Justice Scalia was so closely associated. Few of the attacks on originalism and Scalia have been as tasteless and ignorant as “Looking Back,” the broadside that the journalist Jeffrey Toobin recently published in The New Yorker. It is evident that Toobin is out for blood from his opening salvo: “Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy.” 
http://www.hoover.org/research/scalia-maligned (2 of 2)
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re:
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Please consider donating to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a  buying a regular subscription, as outlined in the tip jar to the right on BehindTheBlack.com. Your support will allow me to continue covering science and culture as I have for the past twenty years, independent and free from any outside influence.
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The uncertainty of science: Mathematicians have discovered that, among the first billion prime numbers, there is a peculiar uneven distribution that is not random to the last digit of each prime.
[I]f the sequence were truly random, then a prime with 1 as its last digit should be followed by another prime ending in 1 one-quarter of the time. That’s because after the number 5, there are only four possibilities — 1, 3, 7 and 9 — for prime last digits. And these are, on average, equally represented among all primes, according to a theorem proved around the end of the nineteenth century, one of the results that underpin much of our understanding of the distribution of prime numbers. (Another is the prime number theorem, which quantifies how much rarer the primes become as numbers get larger.)
Instead, Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan saw that in the first billion primes, a 1 is followed by a 1 about 18% of the time, by a 3 or a 7 each 30% of the time, and by a 9 22% of the time. They found similar results when they started with primes that ended in 3, 7 or 9: variation, but with repeated last digits the least common. The bias persists but slowly decreases as numbers get larger.
As the article notes, this pattern does not appear to have any practical use, though it definitely fascinates everyone who hears about.
In the first game of a best of five for a $1 million prize, the computer has beaten the professional Go player Lee Sodel. (1 of 2)
Thursday  17 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block D:   Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re:  Virgin Galactic in Waco. ULA caught up in intl politics; sudden resignation. Is Boeing/Lockheed Martin partnership to launch USAF rocket; et $1 billion PA.  TH e Boeing Atlas 5 uses a Russian engine in its first stage; John McCain demands no more Russki engines.   Two contracts to compete: Blue Origin and Airjet Rocketdyne.   A speaker was too honest:  ‘The sweet deal with Russia won’t work and we favor Blue Origins” – he was obliged to resign.
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Please consider donating to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a  buying a regular subscription, as outlined in the tip jar to the right on BehindTheBlack.com. Your support will allow me to continue covering science and culture as I have for the past twenty years, independent and free from any outside influence.
..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..
The uncertainty of science: Mathematicians have discovered that, among the first billion prime numbers, there is a peculiar uneven distribution that is not random to the last digit of each prime.
[I]f the sequence were truly random, then a prime with 1 as its last digit should be followed by another prime ending in 1 one-quarter of the time. That’s because after the number 5, there are only four possibilities — 1, 3, 7 and 9 — for prime last digits. And these are, on average, equally represented among all primes, according to a theorem proved around the end of the nineteenth century, one of the results that underpin much of our understanding of the distribution of prime numbers. (Another is the prime number theorem, which quantifies how much rarer the primes become as numbers get larger.)
Instead, Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan saw that in the first billion primes, a 1 is followed by a 1 about 18% of the time, by a 3 or a 7 each 30% of the time, and by a 9 22% of the time. They found similar results when they started with primes that ended in 3, 7 or 9: variation, but with repeated last digits the least common. The bias persists but slowly decreases as numbers get larger.
As the article notes, this pattern does not appear to have any practical use, though it definitely fascinates everyone who hears about.
In the first game of a best of five for a $1 million prize, the computer has beaten the professional Go player Lee Sodel. (2 of 2)
 
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