The John Batchelor Show

Wednesday 19 March 2014

Air Date: 
March 19, 2014

Photo, above: See Hour 4, Block DJohn Roskam, Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne, Australia, and Paul Collins, historian and author, The Birth of the West; in re: News conference under aegis of Tony Abbott, Australian Prime minister; spokesman: John Young of the Australian Maritime Authority.  Objects found in the southern Indian Ocean. Both guests in Australia, on PM Tony Abbott's announcement a moment ago at news conference: two objects, possibly related to the Malaysian plane, have been located in a debris field. An Orion plane has flown there to look into it.  

At least one piece is about 24 meters long – much lager than a ship's container that may have fallen off – so it merits checking.  Border of the Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean,  1,500 mi SW of Perth.   Aircraft from multiple nations. Seas are moderate but visibility not good.  Australia cautious but investigating thoroughly.

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com; Dr. David M. Livingston, The Space Show.

Hour One

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, in re:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2573077/Angela-Merkel-declines-accompany-Xi-Jinping-Holocaust-memorial-visit-fears-used-propaganda-Chinas-row-Japan-Second-World-War-crimes.html

 

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Kelley Currie, senior fellow with the Project 2049 Institute, in re: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10700146/Michelle-Obama-tries-to-take-the-politics-out-of-US-China-relations-with-family-trip.html

 

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Hotel Mars, episode n. Roger D. Launius, Natl Air & Space Museum,
Smithsonian, in re:

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block D:  Joshua Green Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek, in re: Florida Senator Marco Rubio is trying to stand out from the presidential pack and win over voters in an unusual way: by flaunting policy expertise. Following a series of policy-themed events in the U.S. and abroad, orchestrated to burnish his image and broaden the public’s perception of him, he’s emerged as an ardent foreign policy hawk and conspicuous counterpart to both Rand Paul and President Obama. He’ll decide whether it worked—and whether to run—“by this point next year.” Bloomberg Businessweek's Joshua Green writes: "As presidential strategies go, this is the opposite of campaigning through dramatic stunts. It’s a self-conscious nod to the old notion that ideas, expertise, and experience are prerequisites for the White House—and a bet that, despite today’s poll numbers and headlines, voters will eventually come to agree."  Full story here.

Hour Two

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Anne Stevenson-Yang, J Capital Research, and author, China Alone: The Emergence from, and Potential Return to Isolation, in re: Beihai is near the Vietnamese border, contending to bld a big oil port (huge contract with Angola for oil); Beihai wants one of the big ports.  Huge real estate bubble n the 1990s – from $500K per mu fell to $800 per mu.  Abt 200 real estate dvpts; this one has 5,600 units.  Have started to sell.  Groups of buyers combine capital, buy 10 units at a time, then go home and sell them to northerners.  It’s a port, but the water is too polluted to swim in.  Think Death in Venice.   New construction starts down 28.7% this year. So many unit in China, no secondary market; no one actually buying second-hands units, just speculators.  Ren min bi depreciated this week, will eat further into the markets.  Perfectly reasonable small homes have been razed t build constellations of ghost apartments  Police seized 30 tons of precursors to crystal meth.   Massive illicit drug trade lies underneath the "prosperity': a bit to the West, heroin coming in and making its way through part of society.  I've been in towns that replicate Niagara Falls, Paris, Holland – they imitate ral cities. and villages.  Breaking Bad Beihai. 

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Reggie Littlejohn, founder & president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, in re: UN Commission on ht Status of Women:  "The basic family planning principle has not changed; no timetable for allowing every couple to have a second child.  Women being forcibly aborted right now, even at the ninth month. Also forces sterilizations and killing infants born "out of plan."  Murder!   Best Practices: Infanticide – a report on ob/gyns on Chinese website, physicians' debating how best to kill infants.   Obligation to wait for given intervals between children – if you get pregnant to soon, your baby will be killed.  JB: This is the face of tyranny : more control over populace than population control.  The ability to reach into the house and   Have 37 million more men than women – result of massive female infanticide. When the police was instituted thirty years ago, terror was an offshoot of the policy;; now, it’s the main purpose.  If a woman exposes on the Internet the fact that she was forcibly aborted, she and her entire family can be abused by the regime. 

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block C: Sadanand Dhume, AEI, in re: India's Conservative Party Still Harbors Fanatics   Narendra Modi's BJP, likely to rule after May's elections, hasn't parted ways with Hindu nationalist extremists. Behind Modi is a party troubled by forebearance for many of India's citizens. BJP is nationalist, right-wing; has an extremist element, one that doesn’t accept pluralism, esp Islam.  My bet s that when BJP wins, they'll be ditched, and will be very peeved by that. Modi has made himself a viable candidate by abandoning identity politics –  that worked in Gujarat – and focusing on the economy.   Many people live in history – the Mughal invasion a thousand yeas ago; not that history is irrelevant, but not front and center right now.  By contrast, Pakistan is [a bit stuck in identity politics] and can’t grow, India is essentially a pluralistic society, broadminded, democratic and open.  About 10% of Muslims nationwide are willing to give Modi a chance; recall unfortunate riots of 2002.  Chief minister of West Bengal refused to meet the US ambassador because the leader of a mosque said the congregation would be upset if he did.  Modi is seen as a pragmatic, honest business administrator.

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block D:  Joseph Sternberg, WSJ Asia editorial board, in re: All these Chinese offerings on foreign exchanges: Chinese stock mkt has  been in downward trend since 12010; govt doesn’t favor domestic listings because that'd take money from the economy and the extant market.   . . . GC: This is what De Toqueville wrote about.   Democracies try to avoid conflict, get backed into a wall, and something ugly happens.

Hour Three

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block A:  Monica Crowley, Fox News, in re:

Rand Paul Says He's 'More of a Target' Now That He's Topping the Polls

In the age of reality politics, Rubio finds his voice  By the time Marco Rubio arrived in Washington in 2011, his story was legend. Here was the 39-year-old son of a bartender . . .    [more]     Chris Christie has problems, but he's still atop the 2016 GOP ...



Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, in re: A Celeb Is Not a Cause  
The kids are all right. ObamaCare's not so hot. 
  Take the Senate, Please

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Joshua Teitelbaum, Hoover & Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, in re:  Saudi-Israeli Relations: Balancing Legitimacy and Security EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: There is much speculation on a warming of relations, and even collaboration, between Saudi Arabia and Israel in the aftermath of the Iran nuclear deal. Both countries perceive a nuclear Iran to be a great threat. However, given its history and concern for the legitimacy of its rule, the Saudi royal family is more likely to draw closer to Iran than to Israel.  Following the signing of an agreement on Iran’s nuclear development on November 24, the press speculated that Saudi Arabia and Israel – the most important US allies in the region and the countries most jilted by Washington – would increase their cooperation. But given its history and concern for the legitimacy of its rule, particularly after the Arab uprisings, the Saudi royal family is more likely to draw closer to Iran than to Israel.

Real and Rumored Saudi Contact with Israel   Since the 1980s, Saudi officialdom has demonstrated a relatively conciliatory stance towards Israel. Prince Fahd’s initiative of 1981, the Fez plan of 1982, and King Abdullah’s plan, which became the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, all offered recognition to Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state and full withdrawal from all territories captured in 1967. Israeli leaders publicly demonstrated some interest, and the press reported secret meetings between Israeli and Saudi officials in 2006-2007 with an eye towards making the initiative more palatable to Israel. In 2008 Olmert offered to include Saudis in a committee of religious leaders administering Jerusalem’s holy sites.  The Sunday Times has been the source of several stories of  . . .

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: The first test flight of NASA’s Orion capsule has been delayed from September to December.

The supposed reason is to allow a military launch to get the best launch opportunity first. I find this excuse to be quite lame, and instead suspect that the NASA program needed more time but did not want to admit this publicly.

The delay moves the launch until after the November elections. Watch the political pressure continue to build to end this expensive, bloated, and not-very-useful boondoggle.

According to the former CEO of Arianespace, now head of the French space agency, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 costs significantly less to launch than the Ariane 5.

How big is the difference? Jean-Yves Le Gall, who until mid-2013 was chief executive of Evry, France-based Arianespace and is now president of the French space agency, CNES, addressed the point in Feb. 25 testimony to the French Senate. According to Le Gall, launching a satellite on an Ariane 5 costs around 100 million euros ($137 million). After subtracting the amount of European Space Agency subsidies to Arianespace, the per-satellite cost drops to about $100 million, he said.  Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, he said, would charge $60 million to $70 million to launch the same satellite aboard the Falcon 9. In fact SpaceX has charged even less than that to its first few commercial customers.  It's for this reason that Arianespace is struggling to decide how to build its next generation rocket. They have find a way to do it cheaper, something that is very difficult for this multi-headed European conglomerate to do.

The competition heats up: Swiss Space Systems (S3 USA Operations) is planning to offer zero gravity airplane rides at the Kennedy Space Center in direct competition with Zero Gravity Corp.

The next Dragon launch to ISS has been delayed for two weeks because of the detection of contamination that could affect some of its research cargo.   [T]he launch was put on hold, sources said, when engineers noticed contamination of some sort on the Dragon’s lower unpressurized trunk section. Two of six electrically powered payloads aboard the Dragon are mounted in the trunk section — a first for this mission — and engineers were concerned the contamination might “outgas” in orbit and cause problems for the station-bound hardware.

The competition heats up: Arianespace and the Russian-owned Sea Launch are seeking to get the restrictions against them removed so that they can sell their services to more customers.

Arianespace wants to sell its launch services to the U.S. government, something it is not allowed to do right now because of U.S. restrictions. These are the same kinds of restrictions that has prevented SpaceX from launching military satellites and which that company is now contesting.

Russia meanwhile wants to use Sea Launch for its own payloads, but because Sea Launch’s platform is based in California, the Russian government won’t allow their payloads on it because of security reasons. They want the platform moved to Russia so that they can use their own company to launch their own satellites.

The article also describes how Japan is trying to reduce the cost of its H-2A rocket by 50% so that it can become more competitive.

All in all, I'd say that the arrival of SpaceX has done exactly what was predicted, shaken the industry out of its doldrums. How else to explain this sudden interest in open competition and lowering costs? These companies could have done this decades ago. They did not. Suddenly a new player arrives on the scene, offering to beat them at their own game. It's not surprising that they're fighting back.

Hour Four

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block A: The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century by Paul Collins, Part 2  (1 of 4)

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century by Paul Collins, Part 2  (2 of 4)

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block C: The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century by Paul Collins, Part 2  (3 of 4)

Wednesday  19 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block D: John Roskam, Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne, Australia, and Paul Collins, historian and author, The Birth of the West; in re: News conference under aegis of Tony Abbott, Australian Prime minister; spokesman: John Young of the Australian Maritime Authority.  Objects found in the southern Indian Ocean. John Roskam of IPA, and Paul Collins, both in Australia, on PM Tony Abbott's announcement a moment ago at news conference: two objects, possibly related to the Malaysian plane, have been located in a debris field. An Orion plane has flown there to look into it.  

At least one piece is about 24 meters long – much lager than a ship's container that may have fallen off – so it merits checking.  Border of the Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean,  1,500 mi SW of Perth.   Aircraft from multiple nations. Seas are moderate but visibility not good.  Australia cautious but investigating thoroughly.

..  ..  ..

Music

Hour 1:  Matrix. Star Trek. Brothers Grimm.

Hour 2: House of Flying Daggers. Passage to India. Breaking Bad.

Hour 3: Inside Man. Dexter.  Enemy of the State.

Hour 4: Centurion.