The John Batchelor Show

Friday 13 February 2015

Air Date: 
February 13, 2015

Photo, left: Rafik Hariri, assassinated by agents of Mullah Khamenei in Teheran as part of a larger strategy to have Hezbollah, Iran's wholly-owned subsidiary, take over Lebanon.   See Hour 3, Block C,  Ronen Bergman of NYT Magazine on the findings of the investigation into the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 1, Block A:  Aaron Task, Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief, in re  https://finance.yahoo.com/?u
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 1, Block B:  Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, in re:  http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/harry-siegel-policing-new-york-article-1.2111804

Wednesday morning, 27-year-old officer Peter Liang left his house in Bensonhurst and drove to downtown Brooklyn to first turn himself in, and then plead not guilty to manslaughter, official misconduct and other charges for killing a 28-year-old man who’d committed no crime.

In November, Liang and partner Shaun Landau had been in East New York’s Pink Houses on a vertical patrol — going to the roof of a housing project and then walking down the stairs and out the lobby — intended to ensure a building’s common spaces are safe for residents.

When they entered the stairwell, the light on the eighth-floor landing was out and Liang drew his gun. Akai Gurley and girlfriend Melissa Butler, in the hall one flight below, got tired of waiting for a slow elevator. They opened the stairwell door to walk down.

Liang’s gun went off, and a bullet ricocheted off a wall and struck Gurley in the chest. With no idea who’d shot, the couple sprinted down the stairs. The officers ran into the hall, where — horrifically — they talked for minutes about whether or not to call in the shooting. When they finally went down the stairs, they offered no care to the man they’d shot as he lay dying.

If that account of Liang’s actions, as conveyed by Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, holds up, the actions of the young cop — with just 18 months on the job — are morally indefensible.
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Defining Ideas, Chicago, NYU and more, in re: McDonald's vs. NLRB (1 of 2)
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 1, Block D: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Defining Ideas, Chicago, NYU and more, in re: McDonald's vs. NLRB (2 of 2)
Hour Two
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: The Geographical Pivot of History, sometimes simply as The Pivot of History, is a geostrategic theory also known as Heartland Theory. "The Geographical Pivot of History" was an article submitted by Halford John Mackinder in 1904 to the Royal Geographical Society that advanced his Heartland Theory – the theory of the World Island. In this article, Mackinder extended the scope of geopolitical analysis to encompass the entire globe. According to Mackinder, the Earth's land surface was divisible into: 
The World-Island, comprising the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was the largest, most populous, and richest of all possible land combinations.
The offshore islands, including the British Isles and the islands of Japan.
The outlying islands, including the continents of North America, South America, and Australia.
The Eurasian Heartland lay at the center of the world island, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. Mackinder's Eurasian Heartland was the area then ruled by the Russian Empire and after that by the Soviet Union, minus the Kamchatka Peninsula region. [Sir Halford John Mackinder PC {15 February 1861 – 6 March 1947} was an English geographer, academic, the first Principal of University Extension College,  . . .]
Vlahos criticizes Mackinder as using the Mercator Projection to make Russia, especially, look overwhelmingly huge compared to the Southern Hemisphere or Britain, Western Europe and the United States. 
Marathon talks produce Ukraine peace deal; cease-fire Sunday  Russia-Ukraine Cease-Fire: What Did Putin Agree to?  .... Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gestures as he ... Hollande, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel ...
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: Michael Vlahos,  Naval War College, in re: who commands the Heartland commands the World Island.  Meeting in Minsk, Byelorus, of Putin, Poroshenko, Merkel and Hollande.  Russia's paltry and weak economy; a declining power. The US encroachment on Ukraine was the last straw; France and Germany understand this.  . . . Mackinder was spot-on about the decline of sea power and the importance of the railroads.  US can influence the ocean but cannot go into the heart of various places and re-make societies. 
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The Geographical Pivot of History.  Sir Halford John Mackinder PC (15 February 1861 – 6 March 1947) was an English geographer, academic, the and Director of the London School of Economics. He is regarded as one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy.
Four of the ideas mentioned in “On the Scope and Methods of Geography” are key to understanding Mackinder’s subsequent geopolitical writings.
First, Mackinder expressed his view that the goal of a geographer was to “look at the past [so] that he may interpret the present.”  Second, he noted that man’s great geographical discoveries were nearing an end; there were very few “blanks remaining on our maps.”  Third, Mackinder described the two kinds of political conquerors as “land-wolves and sea-wolves.”   And, fourth, he recognized that technological improvements made possible “the great size of modern states.”  Upon the foundation of those four ideas Mackinder later constructed his famous global theory.  . . . Nations, in other words, could no longer safely ignore major events that occurred in far away places of the globe.
Mackinder’s avowed purposes in writing the “pivot” paper were to establish “a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations,” to provide “a formula which shall express certain aspects… of geographical causation in universal history,” and to set “into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics.”
Mackinder pictured Europe and Asia as one great continent: “Euro-Asia.” He described Euro-Asia as: “a continuous land, ice-girt in the north, water-girt elsewhere, measuring twenty-one million square miles….” The center and north of Euro-Asia, he pointed out, measure “some nine million square miles, … have no available waterways to the ocean, but, on the other hand, … are generally favorable to the mobility of horsemen…. ” To the “east and south of this heart-land,” he further explained, “are marginal regions, ranged in a vast crescent, accessible to shipmen.”
Mackinder noted that between the fifth and sixteenth centuries, a “succession of … nomadic peoples” (Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Mongols and Kalmuks) emerged from Central Asia to conquer or threaten the states and peoples located in the “marginal crescent” (Europe, the Middle East, southwest Asia, China, southeast Asia, Korea and Japan). Beginning in the late fifteenth century, however, the “great mariners of the Columbian generation” used seapower to envelop Central Asia. “The broad political effect” of the rise of sea powers, explained Mackinder, “was to reverse the relations of Europe and Asia….” “[W]hereas in the Middle Ages Europe was caged between an impassable desert to south, an unknown ocean to west, and icy or forested wastes to north and north-east, and in the east and south-east was constantly threatened by the superior mobility of the horsemen,” Mackinder further explained, “she now emerged upon the world, multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea surface and coastal lands to which she had access, and wrapping her influence around the Euro-Asiatic land-power which had hitherto threatened her very existence.”
Often unappreciated, however, Mackinder believed, was the fact that while Europe expanded overseas, the Russian state based in Eastern Europe and Central Asia expanded to the south and east, organizing a vast space of great human and natural resources. That vast space would soon be “covered with a network of railways,” thereby greatly enhancing the mobility and strategic reach of land power.
With that geo-historical background, Mackinder identified the northern-central core of Euro-Asia as the “pivot region” or “pivot state” of world politics. He placed Germany, Austria, Turkey, India and China, lands immediately adjacent to the pivot region, in an “inner crescent,” and the insular nations of Britain, South Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada and Japan in an “outer crescent.” He then warned that, “[t]he oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight.” Mackinder suggested that either a Russo-German alliance or a Sino-Japanese empire (which conquered Russian territory) could contend for world hegemony. In either case, “oceanic frontage” would be added to “the resources of the great continent,” thereby creating the geopolitical conditions necessary for producing a great power that was supreme both on land and at sea.
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Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 2, Block C:  Henry Miller, Hoover, in re: Biomarkers identify diseases or tendencies having clinical importance at the molecular level.  "Research consortium" is basically a humongous database on patience, cost the Feds maybe $250 million. Kaiser, at al., already have this; but the president and his people misunderstand how to make public policy for more salubrious for public health.   . . . Bureaucrats when asked about the efficacy of their procedures usually decide that nothing much needs to be changed. 
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 2, Block D:  James Gorman, ScienceTake, in re: Training Birds to Aid a Scientific Breakthrough  In a first, researchers directly measured the aerodynamic force of a flying animal, as parrotlets were taught to fly into a box and to a perch.
Hour Three
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 3, Block A: Daniel Henninger, WSJ WONDER LAND, in re: Vaccines and Politicized Science. Because many Americans have never seen polio and other lethal epidemics, much of the population apparently thinks it need not accept vaccinations against what can be disastrous medical problems.  Science and politics.
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 3, Block B: David Davenport, Forbes, in re:  Time to Leave Federalizing of Education Behind
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 3, Block C:  Ronen Bergman, NYT Magazine, in re: NYT Mag story on the findings of the investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.  One is Hassan Habib Merhi, born in Beirut in 1965. Prosecutors can find no bank accounts in his name, and they know he has paid cash even for his children’s school and university tuition. Merhi joined Hezbollah in 1986, and in 2003 was appointed commander of Hezbollah’s special forces in Lebanon, which would place him among the top commanders of the Hariri operation. Israeli intelligence officials say he was behind the abduction of two Israeli soldiers on July 12, 2006, which set off the 34-day war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah.
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 3, Block D:   Coral Davenport, NYT, in re: Climate Is a Big Issue for Hispanics, and Personal. Hispanics are more likely than whites to view global warming as a problem that affects them personally and to support policies aimed at curbing it, a New York Times poll has found.
Hour Four
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 4, Block A: Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics, by Michael Wolraich (1 of 4)
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 4, Block B: Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics, by Michael Wolraich (2 of 4)
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 4, Block C: Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics, by Michael Wolraich (3 of 4)
Friday  13 February 2015  / Hour 4, Block D: Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics, by Michael Wolraich (4 of 4)