Friday 29 January 2021
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 1, Block A: Jeff Bliss: @JCBliss, #PacificWatch, in re: California Christmas lights: “Merry Christmas to all except Gavin Newsom.” Seven weeks to go before the Newsom recall petition runs out of time. Newsom depends heavily on teachers’s unions for support. San Francisco: “School Names Research.” Did the person for whom this school was named have a shred of racism? Galileo Academy will not be renamed. Will lose name: Abraham Lincoln High School (Native peoples); Thomas Edison (maltreated animals); Paul Revere; others.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 1, Block B: Francis Rose,@FRoseDC, Host of @GovMattersTV @ ABC7News & WJLA 24/7 News. Washington D.C., in re: Gregory B. Starr, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security: how State and DoD think about risk differently. American Academy of Diplomacy, focused on what is the risk-mgt posture of the State Dept? It's completely averse to risk, and therefore unhealthy. A dip had to go engage with a local leader, was forbidden to because of potential risk to his safety. This is at odds with US national security. The reason to be in-country is to bein the country. Deborah Lee James, and Shawn O’Keeffe. Secretary Mattis’s challenge seemed to forget he was running a department, not a command. Secretary Austin: less concern; and his asst secretary has profound credentials, will be a strong COO.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 1, Block C: Gene Marks, @genemarks @Guardian #SmallBusinessAmerica @Guardian, Philadelphia Inquirer, and at TheHill; in re: In LA County, restaurants and bars open for the Superbowl. Gov Cuomo of New York under severe investigation for his requiring elders with the flu to be admitted to care homes—leading directly to perhaps 13,000 deaths. Many businesses moved to Internet, changed products, innovated; did surprisingly well. Optimism is strong. Focus now on racial inequity. Work at home will be considered a benefit. Number of start-ups is exploding. Green sprouts; old businesses will recover and new ones will start. Mobile Table tracks restaurant reservations.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 1, Block D: Gene Marks, @genemarks @Guardian #SmallBusinessAmerica @Guardian, Philadelphia Inquirer, and at TheHill; in re: Grants if you’ve lost income from sba.gov—could be as high as $15 million, esp for companies with fewer than 15 employees. Shuttered Venue Operator Program. Kruger has a grocery cart that you can just push through the censor and you pay automatically; then to your car. Obvious innovation is put in place now because human labor has become so expensive.
——https://www.sba.gov/search?q=Shuttered%20Venue%20Operator%20Program
Shuttered Venue Operators Grants - FAQ Frequently asked questions about the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) program
/document/support-shuttered-venue-operators-grants-faq
——https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relief-options/sh...
Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Emergency assistance for eligible venues affected by the COVID pandem
Hour Two
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 2, Block A: Devin Nunes, @DevinNunes, CA-22, Countdown to Socialism,in re: Two years ago I didn't know tht today we’d be regulated by social media companies Michael Anton, natl security and now Hillsdale College. Amazon, which took down Parler; Amazon controls one-third of server farms. In the course of human history we’ve never seen anyone worth as much as Bezos. We pioneered voter fraud in California; started in 2014--could get an absentee ballot easily; then one-party control took over: everyone who goes to the DMV and registered you, even if you demand not, and then the DMV mails a ballot to your house. Nonvoters get hounded and harassed at their door and on phone. GOP seat ere immediately educed, down to four and then up to eleven, We went to churches, gun shops, hardware stores, and door to door. Democrats sued the GOP but had to drop the suit. Legacy media: 95% of content is controlled by oligarchs. Mail-in ballots are susceptible to irregularities [fraud]. Canada and France forbid all but the most necessary absentee ballots. Newsom may not be recalled, but he’s viewed with disfavor. Facebook says: nothing about the recall will be permitted on Facebook. A lot of the content is consumed on Apple products. A funnel. The oligarchs have a power-sharing agreement with the left. Those who may disagree have their job and sometimes their physical safety threatened.
PODCAST: https://devinnunes.podbean.com
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 2, Block B: Devin Nunes, @DevinNunes, CA-22, Countdown to Socialism,in re: President Bien has been signing executive order: noteworthy, freezing the Keystone Pipeline—losing thousands of Canadian jobs. Even the very left Trudeau Junior spoke out against this. Candidate ran an unprecedented a campaign from his basement; no serious questions; he now appears occasionally, a lot like the Politburo. We also lost well over 11,000 US jobs. Putin is delighted: he’ll sell his gas to Europe with no competition from the US. Everyone in energy or transportation will be affected. National security problem. The failure of blue-state governors is now evident. Cuomo’s creating thousands of deaths of elders; and the mask/distancing hoax, instructions whimsical and not working. Now, Newsom says, “Restaurants may open”—but many have already opened without permission simply to avoid bankruptcy. PODCAST: https://devinnunes.podbean.com
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 2, Block C: Chris Riegel: @Scala, @STRATACACHE; in re: What will businesses look like in the future. “10,000 stores will close in 2021,” from CNN. Reopenings to come in California and New York. How will these stores re-emerge? Apparel, esp, is caught between Amazon and covid. Also, the rethinking of traditional office tower and space: if half the population works from home. City of London: a 30-storey tower with homes, ofc, retail, public art and restaurants. Sustainability [renewable energy and environmentally friendly] in new construction. Ultra-hip in Chicago. Absent crime control, people won't go. Industrial bldgs are the primary candidates for conversion. Millennials and GenZ will demand space where they can be together. They're used to device-first comms; need to learn from each other and mentors for basic professional development. In San Francisco and New York, people fleeing to Florida and Texas.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 2, Block D: Dana Wheeler, @PlyrotechInc, Plymouth Rock Technologies; Defense and Homeland Security specialist; in re: We’ve done well during the pandemic; we applied for PPP help, which helped. The workforce: work came in from our aerowave division with govt orders. People working remotely in the UK, daily zoom calls. X1 drone: battery-operated or gas-powered. “About the size of a modest dining-room table.” We have refrigeration units to fly vaccines and even organ delivery. Ours was the only shoe-scanner technology accepted. Coda1: a stand-off radar that can detect weapons under your clothes—even at 50 meters. The size of an iPad. We can scan unstructured crowds from the air. With drones, we could have dispersed the crowd at the Capitol before they even got in. Plyrotech.com
Hour Three
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 3, Block A: Veronique de Rugy, @veroderugy, Mercatus Center, in re: The $160 billion toward virus is the least problematic. In Virginia, our governor makes one stupid decision after another in distribution; centralization has been proven not to work. Teachers’s union: every possible way not to bring teachers into the classroom. In France, my niece has been in school five days a week since August. Increases in revenue during the depth of the lockdown. CARE Act plus the $600 bonus: many are making more than they would have had they held their jobs. Disincentive to working. Means-tested with a high threshold. Emergency unemployment benefits. Some of this will delay the recovery, and certainly not stimulate the economy with supply so constrained. Is President Biden pushing this money through in order to expand government? Yes.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 3, Block B: Dan Henninger: @DanHenninger, @WSJOpinion; editorial board and Wonder Land column; in re: Contrast the 2020 demonstrations at the White House and the unacceptable conduct on 6 January at the Capitol. Press corps focused on right-wing characters, QAnon, et al. But note Seattle, where left-wing anarchists are attacking federal buildings. WSJ: one person arrested in the Capitol, a cop, wrote: “I can protest for what I believe in and support you demonstrating for what you believe in.” In practice the country has a double standard, engendering cynicism; doubting equality before the law. A sense of grievance.
Lady Justice is blindfolded and holds a balanced scale. If the blindfold drops and there’s a thumb on the scale . . . Seattle has a new chief of police, but the city attorney refuses to prosecute. If no criminal is prosecuted, they assume they can get away with anything they want.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 3, Block C: Lev Golinken, #levgolinkin; author, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka;in re: Nazi monuments around the world. A battle over WWII as it becomes history; found 320 monuments and street names of Nazi collaborators in 16 countries: people who directly participated in the Holocaust. Statues everywhere. In the US: Bandera and Shukovitz—both from the Ukraine, served in Nazi police battalion, murdered 100,000 [??] Poles. Draja Mikhailovich. The American public is uninformed. A Lithuanian statue, opened with the help of the Lithuanian embassy. He ran a unit that murdered Jews en masse. A Soviet general, captured by Nazis, became a collaborator. Monument in a monastery where there are graves of White Russians. Rat lines where the collaborators fled to. Estonia. Now very advanced in tech; young people must not know that there’s a monument to the Waffen SS—they ran the most savage and barbaric event in history. The Estonian national media covered the unveiling of the bust of a man who received a Nazi cross.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 3, Block D: James Holmes: @NavalWarCollege, first holder of the Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and blogger at The Naval Diplomat (https://navaldiplomat.com/); andGordon Chang: @GordonGChang, Daily Beast, in re: Do Chinese admirals always worry about Japanese admirals? They look back at conflicts of a century and more ago; still trying to rectify Chinese losses. Do historical lessons apply to PLA Navy planning? Do Chinese speak of Mahan and the total-destruction battle? Systems vssystems; network forces vsnetwork forces. China taking out US assets in space so the US is blinded? An all-encompassing concept—yes, will go after our satellite comms. Does the US Navy have a plan for 2050? Battle Force 2045—a 355-plus-ship navy, with many unmanned craft to reach over 500. AI. Units caught out of contact with the central force will still know what to do.
WWII in the Pacific was so awful that . . . As China becomes an increasing problem, Japan is more willing to think of [how to counter that].
Hour Four
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 4, Block A: Michael E Vlahos: @JHUWorldCrisis; Johns Hopkins; in re: Are we in a civil war? The Catiline conspiracy, 64 BC. A mournful tale of what happens to a society, a republic, where the elite come to think of themselves as separate from the rest of society, and their power beyond any sort of claim from the people. A hermetically-sealed upper class out of touch with society; one that runs everything. If they disapprove of someone, he’s expelled. Catiline was thus expelled. Soon thereafter, dictators. Eventually, Caesar, who despite being autocratic understood the needs of the people and brought the elite to heel. Today in the US, a completely self-absorbed and selfish elite that controls 90% of the wealth, has crushed the one leader who’s emerged who actually spoke for the people.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 4, Block B: Michael E Vlahos: @JHUWorldCrisis; Johns Hopkins; in re: The New Yorkercalls Trump and supporters traitors, wants to try all of them for treason. Facebook announces it will carry no word on the past election. Bezos and ballots. Americans are being reduced to the gig economy where they incomes are declining and they have no future. When 90% of the people are desperate and being maltreated by a tone-deaf elite: a dictator emerges. He’ll bring the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses to heel, all brought on by the complete selfishness of the elite class. Trump and Catiline were never the point, which was that there was no fairness. To keep their position, elites will have increasingly to resort to violence to keep the people down. At some point, all the people will join together to overthrow a benevolent tyrant who speaks of the people being lifted by his divine grace.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 4, Block C: Clyde Prestowitz, president, Economic Strategy Institute; author, The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership (January 26, 2021); in re: Xi at Davos, “worried about a new cold war.” Do all these Chinese leaders perform with a smiling face saying things we know aren't true? In 1982,no cars on he road; the country was extremely poor. Friendly, kind. Deng sent in tanks to T’ien An Men. I expected Bush to be tough—but he sent Scowcroft to Beijing to reassure Deng. WTO entrance, US-China Business Council threw a big party at a DC hotel, full of top-level US CEOs. A woman walked in and everyone stood up, as though the president had arrived. By that time, the tone had much changed. By 2004, five-year plans, aviation, high tech. Confidence grew, and the attitude grew tougher. Xi as a good propagandist. The cold war with China never ended. In 1991, Deng said, We need a second cold war. The Great Firewall. We’ve been in a cold war for a long time and not recognized it, but Xi knows it well.
The Economist: “we made the wrong bet.” We thought that all free trade would bring [excellent politics]. All the US academics and pols held this.
Schwarztman and Ray Dalio recently in Beijing: “The future is China”; they can't wait to make money.
Friday 29 January 2021 / Hour 4, Block D: Clyde Prestowitz, president, Economic Strategy Institute; author, The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership (January 26, 2021); in re: China has infiltrated US leadership. Biden wants to form a united front with out allies—but the Europeans are not committed; Merkel pushed though a deal with China that Biden had asked her to wait on. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang: one of my close friends is Jimmy Lai, wil probably die in some hellhole Chinese jail. We should open our borders to Hong Kong people.. The Uyghurs are a tragedy, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Apple is increasing its work in China, so is Schwartzman. China sees us as ineffectual.
In 1972, we agreed there’s one China and Taiwan is part of it. We need to encourage Taiwanese [liberty] but not antagonize Beijing. China today looks like the Ch’ing Dynasty; let’s not tempt Xi to take over Taiwan.
.