JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Daily Beast, and David Livingston, The Space Show
 
Hour One
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 1, Block A:  Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, in re:  Chinese military is growing at breakneck speed; no one is speaking of the 80,000 to 90,000 Chinese killed each year for organ harvesting. “These numbers are irrefutable.” The prisonlike Sinificati0n of East Turkestan creates a place for no religion of any kind. Buddhist structure are destroyed or covered; equally, Christian sites.  Like a robotic nation; closing of the mind; return to the worst of the 1950s in China, which was horrific. “The most evil regime since the Third Rich” on Arthurs’s Youtube.
The Chinese regime is removing all traces of Buddhist and Christian symbols in temples and churches, replacing them all with pictures of Xi Jinping.  Western leaders & talking heads are afraid to face the reality of the malignity of that regime, and especially its heavy focus on race, much reminiscent of the Third Reich.  Slavery &  undercutting freedom; like  pathogen that must be denied access to our society.   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-future-of-americas-con...
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 1, Block B:   Stephen Yates, former deputy national security advisor to Vice President Cheney and currently CEO of DC International Advisory, in re:  the Taiwan elections. Last published legal poll had Pres Tsai Ing-wen ahead by ten points.   Taiwanese watching the people of Hong Kong stand up for their own freedoms, see the failure of the vaunted “one country/two systems.”  The dominant feature is the extremely negative vie of Mainland, including the torture and death of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang, and the destruction of Tibet. 
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 1, Block C:  Hal Hodson, The Economist, in re: The PRC has not comfortably mastered the combustion engine: perhaps more complicated than we attribute to it, The concert of moving arts and  . . . Catching up with a VW or other that has decades of practice . . . In China, the top two are still Honda and VW. Electric cars are still primitive.  There’s a long road of development ahead.  Further, it's a simpler beast; all sorts of things from a combustion-engine car not needed in an electric vehicle such as a drive train.   The Shanghai factory is a success for Elon Musk and China.  AI is exploiting the poorest in China, the poorest in the state. Generally known that you pay low-wage workers to do this kind of labelling work; the US equivalent is ScaleVI[?].  The internet means that a company can tap in to labor pools in China and India. In this work, 300,000 people are tasked to see the difference between a croquet set and a cat.  Pay $350-$00/mo; which is about double the current wage, but it’s disturbing to do this work.
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 1, Block D: Michael Yon, @michael_yon,  veteran war correspondent who’s been covering the Hong Kong protests, in re: The protests. On Jan 1, police arrested 420 people.   Jan 11 elections in Taiwan, a sister democratic republic, although Taiwan is outside the claw of Beijing, Hong Kongers are watching closely. Another referendum on what people believe about [liberty]. Hong Kong is the key battleground, Taiwan critically important; we need to unite these disparate parts in one battle. On 13 Aug the police may have murdered people next to the Mong Kok police station, run by Bradley Rice, a bad actor with a British accent.  Why does he have the luxury of holding dual passports?
 
Hour Two
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 2, Block A:  Cleo Paskal, non-resident senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in re: India's new logistics deal with Moscow. . . . If you buy a Russian defense system, it’s not at all clear that it’ll help you if Chinese missiles start flying at you. India’s trouble is economic.  Russia must be saying, If you buy a Russian S400 system, the US wont sanction you as it hasn't done so to Turkey.  Russian technicians accompany the system, so you can't fly sensitive eqpt anywhere near the S400.  The S400 is generation in its impact.
https://www.timesnownews.com/india/article/after-us-india-set-to-sign-pa... Also:
https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/us-india-declaration-sino-subtext
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 2, Block B:  Bruce Bechtol, professor at Angelo State University and author of North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa: Enabling Violence and Instability, in re: the connections between Iran and North Korea. The QIAM, a modified Scud C; proliferated by the North Koreans; later, helped the Iranians to modify it more, for a longer range and less accuracy: the Qiam. We now see weapons that the North Koreans sold to Iran being used to kill Americans.
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 2, Block C:  John Yoo, Berkeley Law, AEI and Hoover; in re:  Exec Order 12333, by Ronald Reagan: No person acting on behalf of the US shall engage in assassination.   Is the death of Soleimani an assassination?  Wrong on both sides of the aisle:  Going to war or not is different from how to go to war.  Killing a member of an enemy armed force is not Constitutionally an assassination—which is committing murder for a political reason.
Pres Obama ordered air strikes against Libya. Congress passed no law authorizing that. The question is, Has he US used forced in a Constitutional way?  If the country is attacked or about to be attacked, it’s fruitless for Congress to declare war. No declaration of war since Dec 1941.
Yamamoto shot down; is that a precedent?  The young naval intell officcr who monitored that was John Paul Stevens, perhaps authorized by Nimitz. Soleimani was a member of the Iranian armed forces, and thus a legitimate target. Should Congress debate this?  Politically, a good idea— would show unity to Iran and be a good sign of political commitment by Congress; but Constitutionally, we don't need it.  We’ve had only five declarations of war since our founding. 
Missile strikes can send signals, but we can’t overthrow a regime with a few missiles, so Trump couldn’t invade without Congress paying for it.
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 2, Block D:  Myron Ebell, Competitive Enterprise Institute, in re: Australian fires
 
Hour Three
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 3, Block A:  Salena Zito, Washington Examiner, “The Middle of Somewhere” column; in re:  West Virginia:  it’s a red state, and that’s spilling over its border.  The reddening of W Va: it’s been trending GOP since 2004; 93 W Va. House members changed party to Republican or Independent.   It gave Trump one of he most lopsided endorsement in in 2016, along with Wyoming. PA, WI, MI, WV and OH have a sense of rootedness in place, and also skepticism about politicians. . . .  How does impeachment translate into the small-town Midwest?  Media have calculated that they're not paying attention – wrong.  Citizens think of the impeachment as an extension of [sour grapes].  Do not see what Trump did to Soleimani through a partisan lens; they see it as a good thing for the US. 
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 3, Block B:  Salena Zito, Washington Examiner, “The Middle of Somewhere” column;  in re:  Western Pennsylvania. The miracle of fracking taking the US out of dependence on the Middle East for energy.  Warren said on her first day in ofc she’d ban fracking. Eke Bernie. 
Last week, Biden in Keene, NH, said that energy workers need to “learn to code”; also that he’d indict and jail energy executives.  I spoke with union leaders and fracking leaders: all much frustrated by this tone. Democratic union voters: we can't vote against our community.   Current economic success has re-opened schools and churches.  If a Democrat doesn’t win western PA, won't win the state. 
Tone-deaf Biden: he’s surrounded by Washington elites more than the people he grew up with. 
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 3, Block C:   Hotel Mars, episode n;
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 3, Block D:   Simon Constable, UK reporter in Edinburgh, in re: Brexit
 
Hour Four
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 4, Block A:  Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 4, Block B:  Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 4, Block C:  Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee
Wednesday 8 January 2020 / Hour 4, Block D:  Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee
..  ..  ..