The John Batchelor Show

Wednesday 25 July 2012

Air Date: 
July 25, 2012

 India is home to about half of the world’s tiger population, an estimated 1,700, down from 100,000 in the country at the turn of the last century.

 JOHN  BATCHELOR SHOW

Wednesday 905P Eastern Time (605P Pacific Time): Richard McGregor of  the Financial Times and author of The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers,  in re:  murder of Neil Haywood.  Patrick Devillers; the French architect, associate of Gu Kailai (Bo Xilai's wife), shared a flat with her I the UK. HE'd settled in Cambodia, China wanted him back, negotiated his return, filmed his exit from the country, from Phom Penh to Beijing, where he was taken into police custody.  Gu is in the criminal justice system; Devillers is in the Party justice system. Princelings – who all cleave to the Party but don’t much like each other - rush to cover tracks, to plunder what's left.  It may take years for Devillers to go through first the Pary system, then the criminal justice system. May take ages to resolve.

Battle of Okinawa, 1945.

Wednesday 920P Eastern Time (620P Pacific Time): Toshi Yoshihara, John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies Strategy and Policy at the Naval War College and co-author of Red Star over the Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy, in re: Okinawa, Japanese prefecture for hundreds of years.   Global Times, Chinese Communist Party paper, claims Ryukyu islands. 1. China was there first, and 2. Japan claimed them by annexation, which is inherently illegal.

Long ago, Japanese kings paid tribute to the Chinese court; if you use this argument, think of all other tributary states – Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet.   Chinese overreach again, Beijing is strategically tone-deaf.  Ryukyus are substantively different from Senkakus, and this loony claim is likely to irritate the Japanese a whole lot.  Ryukyus, Taiwan and Philippines are the First Island Chain; PLA Navy needs to penetrate this to reach Pacific; Okinawa is the easiest route.

We're now seeing  regime in which the hardest-line elements are in the fore.  For the first time in decades, Japan increases subs from 16 to 32 – to deal with Chinese naval power.  Three submarines in port allow one at sea. If it came to closing Chinese access to Pacific, it'd have to be Japan plus its ally the US.

Wednesday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Hotel Mars, episode n, David Livingston, the Space Show, and Amaresh Kollipara, NewSpace Business Plan Competition Bootcamp (winner gets $100,000), in re:  Earth 2 Orbit: to open the space frontiers through private enterprises. We're geared toward revolutionizing private space; the whole industry is in a fluxion point.  Space Angels Network – 26 angel investors.  Analogy is the Internet in the mid-1990s.  India has one of the largest launch programs in the world; I'm going to Bangalore next week.  Each launch credentializes other companies; investors come out of the woodwork. Every six months we learn a lot more.

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"Amaresh is a Founder and Managing Partner of Earth2Orbit, LLC, which is a global provider of satellite launch services.  Earth2Orbit is working with the Indian Space Research Organization to provide commercial launch services to a variety of satellite clients.  Amaresh is fascinated by the science of space exploration and believes that involvement from the entrepreneurial sector, via emerging applications such as nanosatellite based services, is an essential enabler for continued exploration.  In addition to his role at Earth2Orbit, Amaresh serves as a management consultant and financial advisor to a new generation of entrepreneurs by helping them develop viable businesses and navigate the world of venture finance.  As part of this role, Amaresh serves as the Team Lead of Commercial Operations for Orbital Outfitters, a company devoted to providing spacesuits and services to government and commercial clients.  In another role, he spearheaded a project examining the commercial feasibility of Space Solar Power by comparing the economics between SSP and terrestrial power generation options.  Amaresh’s vision to provide management guidance to space entrepreneurs led him to co-produce the first and second annual Space Venturing Forum, an entrepreneurial event hosted by the National Space Society.  In addition, he co-produced the Space Frontier Foundation’s 2006 Business Plan Competition.  Amaresh often speaks at conferences on topics related to the business and economics of the commercial space industry. Amaresh also enjoyed a successful career with the Strategy group of Accenture, where he managed key strategy offerings and developed recommendations for Global 500 clients such as Cisco, HP, and Siemens.  He specialized in creating business cases, operational plans, Internet strategies, and M&A assessments.  He has been influential in pricing multi-million dollar private equity deals as well as in assisting clients to strategically allocate large-scale investments.  Amaresh's diverse background includes roles as a biotechnology researcher, planetarium presenter, and physics teacher.  His professional experience extends to international locations such as Argentina, England, India, Japan and Mexico.  Amaresh holds an MBA degree from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.  He also earned a B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Neurobiology from the University of California at Berkeley."

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Wednesday 950P Eastern Time (650P Pacific Time):  Gordon Chang, in re:  Daniel A Bell at Tsinghua University [photo: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/danielabell {yikes}] – "political meritocracy and Chinese Communist  conduct are perfectly compatible."  Bell is a leading proponent of [his version of] Confucianism – you don’t need democracy, you just need a nondemocratic meritocracy with important people at the top. Leaders chosen by  . . . 

Bell is an apologist for the Communist Party. Contemptible. 

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The Great Learning (traditional Chinese: 大學; Wade-Gilles: Ta Hsueh) was one of the Four Books in Confucianism. The Great Learning came from a chapter in the Classic of Rites, which formed one of the Five Classics. It consists of a short main text attributed to the teachings of Confucius and then ten commentary chapters accredited to one of Confucius' disciples, Tseng-tzu. The ideals of the book were supposedly those of Confucius; however, the text was written after his death.

The Four Books were selected by the neo-Confucian Chu Hsi (朱熹) during the Sung Dynasty as a foundational introduction to Confucianism and examinations for the state civil service in China.

Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung are two of the central texts of early Chinese thought, encapsulating the Confucian philosophy of the Way of moral cultivation and spiritual attainment. Traditionally held to be the work of two of Confucius’s closest disciples, the books were compiled in their present form late in the Second or First Century BC and have occupied a central position in educational, political, and cultural life throughout East Asia for almost a thousand years. The texts focus on the connection between internal self-cultivation and the external realization of one’s moral core in the fulfillment of the practical aims of Confucian life: the observance of ritual, the proper conduct of personal relationships, and the grand enterprise of maintaining order in the state and the world.

​Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam

Wednesday 1005P Eastern  (705P Pacific Time): Walter Lohman. Director, Asian Studies Center, Heritage Foundation, in re: Hanoi wants the US Seventh Fleet to visit – at Vietnam's convenience – and to build up military capacity as convenient to Vietnam.   In 1979, Vietnam humbled the Chinese.  Vietnamese don’t really want the US at Cam Ranh Bay, nor the Seventh Fleet, nor a US grand strategy to contain China; but they're interested in access to US weaponry.  "If you can't give us the access we need we can’t give you the weapons you need. In the meantime, let's have discussions so that when things get hot with the Chinese, we'll be ready to work together."  More than half the world's oil passes through the South China Sea. (Russia lurks nearby but isn’t really a factor.) Even if we agree on the strategic picture, we have to negotiate the Vietnamese into reciprocally releasing what we need; if we just give them everything they ask for, we'll get nothing in return

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/07/us-vietnam-defense-relations-investing-in-strategic-alignment

 

Wednesday 1020P Eastern (720P Pacific Time): Daniel Tudor, The Economist, in Seoul, & author of Korea, the Impossible Country, in re: dictator gets married to a musical trouper (not to "Excellent Horse-like Lady, a former sweetheart) but to anther paramour. 

Wednesday 1035P Eastern  (735P Pacific Time): Heather Timmons, New York Times, New Delhi Bureau, in re: save the tigers, ban the tourists. (Ajay Dubey filed a public-interest petition to the Supreme Court, which is waiting for all the tiger parks to file their responses.)

Wednesday 1050P Eastern (750P Pacific Time):  Joseph Sternberg, WSJ Aisia editorial board, in re: "Quite the Deal for Cnooc, Eh?"  Canada is the next stop in China's mercantilist global energy tour. China National Offshore Oil Corporation / CNOOC's blockbuster deal for Nexen ("Getting a lot of bathwater with the baby"), if nothing else is a stark indication of how far the goal posts have moved not only for Canada's oil patch, but also for world oil demand. Only four or five years ago, the notion that a state-owned Chinese company could buy -- lock, stock and barrel of bitumen -- one of Canada's premier oil names was politically unthinkable. Any such deal was sure to be turned down by Ottawa under its Foreign Investment Review Act (not to mention the hue and cry that would come from Alberta's provincial government).  Today, that's all changed. CNOOC's $15-billion offer for Nexen follows a number of major foreign transactions in Canada's energy sector. Among others, Malaysian energy giant Petronas is paying $5.5-billion to get at Progress Energy's natural gas reserves in British Columbia. Earlier this year, PetroChina completed a two-pronged deal for Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. that tallied $2.5-billion. In 2010, Sinopec paid $4.65-billion for a 9 percent stake in Syncrude, which runs Alberta's largest oil sands mine.

Wednesday 1105P  Eastern (805PPacific Time): John Bolton AEI, in re: the Obama administration's Syria policy and why it doesn’t work; the WMD of Syria, then and now; Axelrod attacks Bolton - why?  For the US to support the Syrian opposition, there should be a requirement that that oppo group formally renounce all of Assad's efforts to build up chem/bio/nuclear weaponry.  Russia is prepared to shed a lot of Syrian blood in order to keep Assad in power.

Wednesday 1120P Eastern (820P Pacific Time): Jeff Bliss, the Bliss Index, in re: the riots in Orange County, the fundraiser for OFA in Oakland, foie gras corndogs in D.C.

Wednesday 1135P Eastern  (835P Pacific Time): The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners that Shape Who We Are Today by Rob R. Dunn, 1 of 2

Wednesday 1150P Eastern  (850P Pacific Time): The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners that Shape Who We Are Today by Rob R. Dunn, 2 of 2

Wednesday/Thurs 1205A  Eastern (905 Pacific Time): Richard McGregor of  the Financial Times and author of The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers,  in re:  murder of Neil Haywood.  Patrick Devillers; the French architect, associate of Gu Kailai (Bo Xilai's wife), shared a flat with her I the UK. HE'd settled in Cambodia, China wanted him back, negotiated his return, filmed his exit from the country, from Phom Penh to Beijing, where he was taken into police custody.  Gu is in the criminal justice system; Devillers is in the Party justice system. Princelings – who all cleave to the Party but don’t much like each other - rush to cover tracks, to plunder what's left.  It may take years for Devillers to go through first the Pary system, then the criminal justice system. May take ages to resolve.

Wednesday/Thurs  1220A Eastern (920 Pacific Time): Toshi Yoshihara, John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies Strategy and Policy at the Naval War College and co-author of Red Star over the Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy, in re: Okinawa, Japanese prefecture for hundreds of years.  Now, about the Ryukus: Global Times, Chinese Communist Party paper, claims these islands. 1. China was there first, and 2. Japan claimed them by annexation, which is inherently illegal.

Long ago, Japanese kings paid tribute to the Chinese court; if you use this argument, think of all other tributary states – Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet.   Chinese overreach again, Beijing is strategically tone-deaf.  Ryukyus are substantively different from Senkakus, and this loony claim is likely to irritate the Japanese a whole lot.  Ryukyus, Taiwan and Philippines are the First Island Chain; PLA Navy needs to penetrate this to reach Pacific; Okinawa is the easiest route.

We're now seeing  regime in which the hardest-line elements are in the fore.  For the first time in decades, Japan increases subs from 16 to 32 – to deal with Chinese naval power.  Three submarines in port allow one at sea. If it came to closing Chinese access to Pacific, it'd have to be Japan plus its ally the US.

Wednesday/Thurs  1235A  Eastern (935P Pacific Time): Hotel Mars, episode n, David Livingston, the Space Show, and Amaresh Kollipara, NewSpace Business Plan Competition Bootcamp (winner gets $100,000), in re:  Earth to Orbit: to open the space frontiers through private enterprises. We're geared toward revolutionizing private space; the whole industry is in a fluxion point.  Space Angels Network – 26 angel investors.  Analogy is the Internet in the mid-1990s.  India has one of the largest launch programs in the world; I'm going to Bangalore next week.  Each launch credentializes other companies; investors come out of the woodwork. Every six months we learn a lot more.

Wednesday/Thurs  1250A  Eastern (950P Pacific Time): Exeunt.  James Taranto, WSJ, in re:  Mike Bloomberg calls for a NYPD strike against guns, what?

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Music (using Eastern broadcast times)

9-hour:   Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

10-hour:  Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Skyline.

11-hour: 

midnight hour: