Friday 24 October 2014
Photo, above: When Tendulkar broke free in the Headingley gloom Sachin Tendulkar belongs as much to the Bombay school of batting as he does not. Now whether the Bombay school of batting a myth or a reality is anyone's guess, but we all grew up on narratives about how Bombay batsmen rarely bothered about the means as long as they achieved their end. For them, batting was about scoring runs and not losing their wicket. Apparently other aspects of batting were mere fodder for cricket writers.
For a cricketer hailing from this school of batting and living with the burden of expectations that few athletes can relate to, it's a reflection of his extraordinary confidence that Tendulkar turned out to be the attacking batsman that he is. He was not a rebel but inherited the Bombay legacy without diluting his natural attacking style. To borrow the words of Peter Roebuck, over the years (or should we say decades), Tendulkar provided an unsurpassed blend of the sublime and the precise. . . . [more] See Hour 4, Block D, Tunku Varadarajan, Hoover Institution.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, in re: New York and New Jersey Tighten Ebola Protocol The governors of New York and New Jersey said all travelers who had had direct contact with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, Liberia or Guinea would be quarantined.
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, in re: Muslim convert in NYPD ax attack was pro-ISIS and called for jihad He was a one-man jihadi army. The ax-swinging madman who was shot dead after attacking NYPD officers Thursday in Queens defended ISIS rebels and spewed radical Islamic anti-American hate online, sources said Friday. Former college student and Navy reject Zale Thompson, 32, called for jihad on American soil in a comment responding to a YouTube video criticizing a Los Angeles-based imam.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/harry-siegel-cuomo-n-y-progressives-article-1.1981163
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Liz Peek, The Fiscal Times & Fox, in re: Obama’s Bully Tactics Force Campaign Donors to Give Secretly It’s the Big Whine of 2014 – the charge that Republican billionaires will “buy” the U.S. Senate, that somehow they’re not playing fair. Campaign spending – including that unleashed by the much-maligned Citizens United Supreme Court decision -- has not visibly tilted in favor of either party. Rather, six years of the Obama administration has led many political donors to seek anonymity, for good reason.
Democrats rail about the “secret money” flowing into political campaigns, alarmed that Americans are allowed to donate anonymously to political causes. A recent front-page piece in The New York Times breathlessly reported that more than half of all campaign advertising was being funded by organizations that “disclose little or nothing about their donors.” They claim that such funds have “overwhelmingly benefited Republican candidates.”
What they don’t say is that . . . [more]
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 1, Block D: John Ross, WSJ and author, Enduring Courage on Eddie Rickenbacker; in re: They Fought for the Skies Compared with infantry slowly rotting away in the trenches, World War I pilots appeared as knights-errant. A review of Samuel Hynes’s The Unsubstantial Air.
Hour Two
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-iraq-and-the-us-are-losing-ground-to-the-islamic-state/2014/10/23/201a56e0-5adf-11e4-bd61-346aee66ba29_story.html (1 of 2)
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-iraq-and-the-us-are-losing-ground-to-the-islamic-state/2014/10/23/201a56e0-5adf-11e4-bd61-346aee66ba29_story.html (2 of 2)
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 2, Block C: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, & via The Libertarian, in re: The Libertarian: “Innovation, Regulation, and Airbnb” (1 of 2)
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 2, Block D: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, & via The Libertarian, in re: The Libertarian: “Innovation, Regulation, and Airbnb” (2 of 2)
Hour Three
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 3, Block A: Seb Gorka, Marine Corps University & Breitbart, in re: Ottawa shooting: Cpl. Nathan Cirillo's body en route to Hamilton The procession left Ottawa shortly after 2 PM and was expected to arrive in Hamilton . . . [more]
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 3, Block B: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Increasing activity at Comet 67P/C-G Data from Rosetta in the past month has been showing a steady and gradual increase in dust emissions from the surface. While images obtained a few months ago showed distinct jets of dust leaving the comet, these were limited to the ‘neck’ region. More recently, images obtained by Rosetta’s scientific imaging system, OSIRIS, show that dust is being emitted along almost the whole body of the comet. Jets have also been detected on the smaller lobe of the comet. “At this point, we believe that a large fraction of the illuminated comet’s surface is displaying some level of activity,” says OSIRIS scientist Jean-Baptiste Vincent from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany.
The last two images at the link compare the same location with one image overexposed to make the jets visible. What is interesting is that the source of the jet is not evident in the other normally exposed image. It is almost as if surface material is simply heating up and then using that extra energy to simply throw itself off the surface. Why that then forms jets however is puzzling.
Titan’s atmosphere is unexpectedly unbalanced The uncertainty of science: New data from the ground-based telescope ALMA suggest that certain organic molecules in Titan’s atmosphere are not evenly distributed through the atmosphere as expected. At the highest altitudes, the pockets of organic molecules were shifted away from the poles. These off-pole concentrations are unexpected because the fast-moving, east-west winds in Titan’s middle atmosphere should thoroughly mix the molecules formed there. The researchers do not have an obvious explanation for these findings yet. I would not take these results too seriously, as the data are very sketchy. With better data, many . . .
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Veronique de Rugy, adjunct scholar at Cato Institute & senior research fellow at Mercatus Center, in re: a new piece out in the Daily Beast: "Who's Regulating the Regulators?" She uses the secretly taped convos between Goldman Sachs and the Fed regulator in NYC to show that the policing of these "too-big-to-fail" companies is happening on a piecemeal basis, if at all. And that more often than not, consumers are being cheated and their options are being severely curtailed. These big firms know they can cheat and extort the system; and not only that, the regulatory system serves them well by keeping smaller competitors out of the ring because of their limited resources and inability to field the heavy cost of regulation:
Take the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example. Its stated role is to protect public health by assuring the safety of foods, medicines, and cosmetics. In practice, however, its regulations tend to harm consumers by reducing the availability of needed medications while increasing prices. In separate studies, the economists Sam Peltzman and Steven Wiggins find that specific FDA regulations raise costs and lower the number of new drugs introduced. In practice, regulation tends to have the opposite effect of the pro-consumer policies the agency claims to promote.
It is one problem if regulations merely hurt consumers instead of helping them; it is quite another if they also help large corporations at the expenses of the others. Unfortunately, this is often the case. Study after study produced by the leaders in law and economics—like, again, Sam Peltzman Richard Posner (PDF), or Bruce Yandle (PDF)—shows how private interests too often benefit under the guise of public welfare. In the case of the FDA, large, established pharmaceutical companies might grumble in public about the cost of new regulations, but they are well aware that their competitors will bear these same burdens. Smaller upstarts, however, are thwarted by the heavy cost of regulation before they even get a chance to enter the market.
The Best Regulator? That’s Easy. It’s the Market. As the Goldman Sachs tapes show, regulators almost always fail. In other cases, they cheat consumers out of choices. Leave it to the market.
Many people simply take it for granted that government regulation achieves its intended ends. National political debates often reflect this: Doe-eyed Democrats position themselves as the forthright champions of the little guy, selflessly tying unscrupulous businessmen to the mighty yoke of the regulatory state. On the other side, smooth, corporate Republicans appeal to our inner entrepreneurs, decrying the lost productivity and forgone trickled-down growth that would torture our nation’s shackled conglomerates under the proposed new round of regulations. Whether you’re pro-regulation or anti-regulation in America depends more on affiliation than reality. For better or worse, the truth is more insidious; regulators are often captured by the industry they regulate at the expense of everyone else.
Consider the recent revelation that the regulators at the Federal Reserve in New York were cozying up with one of the nation’s biggest financial institutions it was supposed to oversee. Secret recordings made by Carmen Segarra, a bank examiner for the Fed in New York—parked at Goldman Sachs—exposes the degree to which Fed regulators were actually failing the taxpayers they allegedly protect against the “too big to fail” corporations that the government created. For instance, in the recording, one can hear Fed officials explain how they suspect a Goldman deal with Banco Santander to be “legal but shady”—and then fail to challenge the firm. One can even hear both the regulators and Goldman executives acknowledge that the deal should have required Fed approval.
But then the regulators cave to the firm’s opinion that it is above the rules. This is not a unique event, Segarra reports. In fact, according to her, it was common belief among Goldman employees that, depending on the client, they could choose which consumer rules to follow—or not follow—without any fear of consequences from the Fed. . . . [more]
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 3, Block D: Philp Terzian, Weekly Standard, in re: Biden Cocaine Scandal Mirrors Joe McCarthy Scandal
Hour Four
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 4, Block A: Robert Graboyes, Mercatus, in re: “Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care” Dr. Graboyes' related op-ed, "How to restart health care reform" is in today's McClatchy-Tribune. (1 of 2)
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 4, Block B: Robert Graboyes, Mercatus, in re: “Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care” Dr. Graboyes' related op-ed, "How to restart health care reform" is in today's McClatchy-Tribune. (2 of 2)
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 4, Block C: Tanvi Misra, CityLab Atlantic.com, in re: "What If We Had Measured Poverty Differently for the Past 50 Years?"
Friday 24 October 2014 / Hour 4, Block D: Tunku Varadarajan, Hoover Institution, in re: Final Test is a chastening, and occasionally rather amusing, account of how a team game can be hijacked by sentiment toward one man. Cricket has always been the least collective of all the team sports, but this last Test of Tendulkar’s came to be such a brazen one-man tamasha that all the other players—and there were 21 of them—were reduced to supernumerary status. Spare a thought for poor Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the Guyanese batsman, whose one hundred fiftieth Test match this was. No other West Indian had reached this milestone—Courtney Walsh, long retired, is the next best at 132 matches—and yet there was scarcely a public acknowledgement of Chanderpaul’s feat in all the fanfare over Tendulkar. The full piece, yours to read or ignore:
Reading greedily about the game is the mark of a true cricket devotee. In India, however, cricket- writing is a bastion of journalistic mediocrity, which forces the literate Indian fan to survive on a diet of foreign writing. The best of this is to be found in the London newspapers (accessible online), where the game is still paid its due respect by writers of real pedigree. The correspondents on India’s sports pages are invariably trundlers—the Paras Mhambreys and Suru Nayaks of the keyboard—who specialise in a banal and un-penetrative form of medium- paced reporting, with no swing, no cut, no seam, and no variation.
The Indian cricket fan, ill-served for years by Indian cricket writers, has, at last, a reason to rejoice: Dilip D’Souza, a Mumbai-based journalist, has published a book called Final Test, on Sachin Tendulkar’s last Test match for India in November 2013. It is an unusual cricket book, being both . . . [more]