The John Batchelor Show

Tuesday 29 March 2017

Air Date: 
March 28, 2017

Photo, left: Arch of Titus
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
 
Hour One
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block A: Bill Whalen, Hoover, in re: Domestic politics. Anent Obamacare:  https://www.forbes.com/sites/billwhalen/#7ea290a46146
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
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block B: Bill Whalen, Hoover, in re:  GOP needs a win — one win, on any count — to move forward. Perhaps use the nuclear option now to get Judge Gorsuch confirmed for the Supreme Court. Paul Ryan unexpectedly tripped on the healthcare vote. 
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block C: Stephen Moore, CNN, & Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Heritage Foundation; in re:  Tax Reform Is Already In Trouble?
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 1, Block D:
 
Hour Two
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block A:  Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord; author: Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, & The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin; in re: Enemies of détente then, in the US and USSR; and now, in the US and Russia.  (1 of 4)
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord; in re:  Marginalizing dissidence.  Andrei Sakharov. 
 (2 of 4)
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord; in re:  . . . Bizarre lack of basic knowledge (What’s Gazprom?) by Comey of the FBI.  (3 of 4)
Tuesday  21 March 2017 / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, NYU & Princeton professor Emeritus; American Committee for East-West Accord; I n re:  Everyone denouncing Devin Nunes for revealing what he did, that in fact there was surveillance going on. . .  With Soviet samizdat, everyone knew how to read between the lines of official texts. Called “reading Aesopianly.”  Here, now, in the US, we’re bombarded with data of all sorts and most Americans haven't yet learned to read Aesopianly.   (4 of 4)
 
Hour Three
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 3, Block A:   John Tamny, Political Economy editor at Forbes, editor of RealClearMarkets, a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research & Trading, senior Fellow in economics at Reason Foundation; author of  Who Needs the Fed? and Popular Economics; in re: Why the Soviet Union failed from its beginning: because of its failure in economics. The popular TC V show, The Americans, about a couple in DC who grew up in the USSR, run a travel agency by day and are spies by night. 
       It should be said up front that F/X Network’s hit show The Americans is one of television’s best.  Not only is the story of two Soviet spies living as an average American couple (Elizabeth & Philip Jennings) in Cold War era U.S. highly original, the weekly storylines over the first four seasons have generally been riveting.  Posing as travel agents in a Washington, D.C., suburb by day, these Americanized Soviets fight the Cold War by night in all manner of disguises and with all sorts of names.  The voluminous praise heaped on the show has been well-earned.
     Unknown, however, is whether the fifth season of the television thriller will measure up to the previous ones.  It’s unknown simply because the producers of the show have chosen to make U.S. grain sales to the former Soviet Union an underlying theme.  In doing so, they’ve managed to reveal a misunderstanding of basic economics.  In fairness to the producers, President Trump’s chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, shares their confusion.
Navarro believes, as do the Jennings (and by extension, the Soviet foreign policy establishment), that dependence on foreign producers represents a national security threat.  The Jennings believe that the U.S., a seller of grain to the Soviets, could starve the U.S.S.R.’s people by virtue of its agricultural scientists creating a bug that would compromise its grain crop.  In response, they’re spying on a Soviet defector who is working as a consultant to the U.S.D.A., plus they've murdered an American scientist who has helped produce the bug. Basic economics says they needed to do neither since grain, like oil, automobiles, t-shirts, and anything else, is produced globally, and can be sourced globally.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2017/03/26/fxs-the-americans-flun...
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 3, Block B:  John Batchelor, in re: AI teams Learn to Work Together Faster than Plain I teams. To the scientists’ chagrin, no algorithm was capable of collaborating. But then they turned to evolutionary biology for inspiration. Why not, they thought, introduce a key element of human cooperation—the ability to communicate? So they added 19 prewritten sentences—such as “I’m changing my strategy,” “I accept your last proposal,” or “You betrayed me,” —that could be sent back and forth between partners after each term. Over time, the computers had to learn the meaning of these phrases in the context of the game using their learning algorithm.
This time, one of the 25 algorithms, dubbed S# (pronounced S sharp), stood out. When given a description of a previously unknown game, it learned to cooperate with its partner in just a few turns. And by the end of the game, the machine-only teams worked together almost 100% of the time, whereas humans cooperated an average of about 60% of the time. “The machine-learning algorithm learned to be loyal,” Crandall says.  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/computers-learn-cooperate-better-...
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 3, Block C:  Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director; GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; & author, UnCivilization, in re:  The Decisive War of Democracies The conflict between different views of democracy has threatened the Westphalian nation-state concept, and the Westphalianists are responding, with history on their side
Democracy these days is seen as merely one man/one vote. If you vote while neglecting sovereignty of land [you’ll lose it].  The democracy we now have is that of the Hellenic city-states, which predictably developed into mob rule; eventually swept away by Philip of Macedon.   Urbanites tend to ignore the balanced city-state.  Theresa May emphasizes sovereignty and national unity. UK urbanites keep saying, “This can’t be right; I don't accept it.”  They forget that the long-term strength of the state depends on the balance. Recall the New Guinea cargo cult: they just sat there and waited for cargo. Our urbanites are similar in that they expect the [largesse] to which they’re used simply to continue.
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 3, Block D:  Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director; GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; & author, UnCivilization, in re: New democracy - Brexit and Trump - and the old democracy, exemplified by New York City. Resources:  Britain needs to maintain access to resources; eke the US.  Threat from China and the US because they don't quite have all resources needed?  Yes and no – Russia does. All great nations must be great trading nations.  Brexit will be less a divorce and more an annulling of a marriage while living together. Will probably revive dynamic global trade to a huge degree – competition, new efficiencies.  — What I meant above all was water, of which China doesn’t have enough. Most of China’s groundwater is polluted.  To manage China, power will have to devolve down to the villages- under Mao, to warlords.  Food shortages from water shortages will create large unrest. National identity community is rising worldwide.  Thailand, Russia, everywhere.  Not global war ‘twixt major powers, but more within countries.
Saudi-Egyptian Rivalry in Washington ... Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Fails to Sway the White House
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The Decisive War of Democracies 
The conflict between different views of democracy has threatened the Westphalian nation-state concept, and the Westphalianists are responding, with history on their side 
Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs. Democracy, in many forms, became the dominant form of political legitimacy in the 20th Century. It also became, by the early 21st Century, just a word to cloak political ambition and the institutionalization of power structures. 
There is now little accord as to what actually constitutes “democracy”, or how it has evolved conceptually. We have reached a point, as strategic thinker Dr Assad Homayoun notes, where “democracy” — whatever it is — is not working, but dictatorship is un-acceptable. And yet “democracy”, as a word, has increasingly become a semi-religious touchstone to which all must pay obeisance. It is a sacred cow to be valued, because it has become the essential image to legitimate power. 
But “democracy”, as Plato saw it, and as it became practiced in the early 21st Century, grows merely into the legitimization of mob rule. Little wonder that it became the catch-cry of urban élites in the 20th Century as it was in the Hellenic city-states 2,500 years before. It now stands solely for the periodic voting power just of human concentrations, and pays scant heed to the broader rôle of geography in the viability of the nation-state. And by its periodic, prescheduled granting of “mandates” of power, it became less nuanced; less responsive 
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Hour Four
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 4, Block A: Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring; by Andrew Lownie. Part I of II; segment 1 of 4
Guy Burgess was the most important, complex, and fascinating of "The Cambridge Spies"―Maclean, Philby, Blunt―brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.
     In this first full biography, Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess's chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration and betrayal of the British Intelligence Service. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years.
     Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin's Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colorful, tragi-comic wonder.     https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Englishman-Burgess-Cold-Cambridge/dp/1250100992/ref=la_B001HPC122_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490753275&sr=1-1
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 4, Block B:  Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring; by Andrew Lownie. Part I of II; segment 2 of 4
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 4, Block C: Bob Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com, in re: SpaceX Changes the Games.  Update: The countdown and static fire test has been completed, apparently successfully. The launch however is now set for Thursday.
SpaceX today plans to do the first static fire dress rehearsal countdown of a Falcon 9 rocket using an already used first stage.
The static fire process for SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket is one of the last critical components in the pre-launch flow ahead of liftoff. For SES-10, the Falcon 9 and mated second stage will be moved to the launch pad on top of the TEL (Transporter Erector Launcher) and will be taken to vertical at historic launch complex 39A. Once the Falcon 9 is vertical, technicians and engineers will complete all of the connections between the TEL/launch mount and LC-39A and proceed into countdown operations on Monday morning.
For this particular static fire, SpaceX has up to an eight-hour window. If all goes well, they plan to do the actual launch on Wednesday.
The article, by the way, also provides a nice, detailed history of the first stage.  http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/reused-first-stage-static-fire-dress-rehearsal-today/ (1 of 2)
Tuesday  28 March 2017/ Hour 4, Block D:   Bob Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com, in re: SpaceX Changes the Games.   (2 of 2)
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