The John Batchelor Show

Friday 15 June 2018

Air Date: 
June 16, 2018

Photo: 
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 1, Block A: Andrew C. McCarthy III, National Review; served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; and Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes; in re: The release of the Inspector-General’s 568-page report on Secy Clinton’s highly unusual conduct in respect of email, server, etc.  (1 of 2)
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 1, Block B: Andrew C. McCarthy III, National Review; served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; and Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes; in re: The release of the Inspector-General’s 568-page report on Secy Clinton’s highly unusual conduct in respect of email, server, etc.  (2 of 2)
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 1, Block C: William Watson, former professor of economics McGill; in re:  1960s Canada saw bitter disputes between farmers in different provinces about
“imports” of out-of-province eggs and broilers (i.e., chickens). As Adam Smith taught, producers generally abhor competition. Our constitution does include a kind of Interstate Commerce Clause but our weaker federal government has been reluctant to enforce it.
The political solution to the disputes was parcelling-out of output by national marketing boards: Since the 1970s farmers have needed “quota” in order to produce and sell legally. With time, demand grew for milk, cheese, eggs, butter and turkey—all now “supply-managed.” Quota grew more slowly, not surprisingly since that meant prices rose, never a bad thing in producers’ eyes.
Imports from the US would undercut higher Canadian prices. So to protect supply management we imposed another kind of quota: import quotas. On a modest amount of imports we imposed modest tariffs. Beyond that, we simply forbade imports.
Part of the 1995 WTO agreement was that countries had to replace such prohibitions with tariffs, which would then be negotiated down. In fact, our 270 per cent tariffs (including 265 per cent on ice cream! what kind of country taxes ice cream?) used to be 330 per cent and higher. 270 is actually an improvement.
The political problem: Most dairy farmers are in Quebec. And any farmer less than 70 years old bought his quota. If we simply open up to US imports, farmers suffer large capital losses.
We should: abolish quotas, open the border, and compensate farmers, as Australia did in a phase-in starting in 2000. Politically, American insistence we do this makes it more difficult.
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 1, Block D:  Lee Smith, The Tablet and American Greatness ; in re:
 
 
Hour Two
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: The Horowitz report.  Peter Strzock and Lisa Page, correspondence: exchanging tweets in summer 2016 about Donald Trump.  “Just went to a southern Virginia WalMart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”
Suggests that those who support Trump are undereducated, not very clean, shop at WalMart – by a man extremely powerful, who can get a GISA warrant and surveille you and all your friends forever. He treats people who voted for his about-to-be president with disregard [to put it charitably].
Is this the civil war incipient?  A great deal of a civil war is a widening, yawning gap between people and elites, and smugness of the latter that they were born to rule.
The basis of American identity was fro the American Revolution, created an extraordinarily strong, dominant mythic narrative of America as a country of absolute equals.  Your [gallant participation] shows how patriotic you are.  Then I found myself at Yale, where I was profoundly shocked: the towering bastion of privilege, and how contemptuous this American aristocracy was of those dying in Vietnam while pretending they, themselves, were superior and enlightened.  An emotional whipsaw. The main reason I signed up for mil svc after graduation, as I was so sickened. Fifty years later, it's got worse, and is as blind and oblivious to this dissonance as it was then.
Peter Strzock commanded the FBI; . . .  Strzock and Page in their facile indifference to [Americans], . . .    8 Aug 2018: “. . . No, he’s not [i.e., Trump won't become president]; we’ll stop it.”
British [society] was much affected by the Normans.  The champions of chattel slavery pre-Civil War were aristocrats, esp in New York City. Made the Romans look altruistic!
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 2, Block B:  Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: The Horowitz report.  Peter Stzock wrote: “Now I need to fix it.”  We?  Who’s we?  How’ll you stop it?? Entitlement and noblige are the inner core of the American elite; it’s in the Ivy Leagues and is predominantly blue. The red are never-Trump types; mirrors that of old British antecedents.  Lineage from the Democrats of 1850s, who supported slavery.  [As though] They were born to rule. No elite can possibly understand how out of touch they are with those whom they rule, who’ve come to hate them. Czars.  Strzock, Comey, the New York Times. Being right is absolutist – no wiggle room.  Absolutism is a defense mechanism.
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 2, Block C:  Richard Epstein, Chicago Law, NYU Law, Hoover Institution,  in re: GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations), from Europe; intended to permeate the Solar System. Social media; Internet; ability of individuals and or corporations to send me information – but the EU wants t protect me from that? No, protect only EU citizens – from you and me, too. Can fine a company for up to 4% of it annual revenues – which could be most of its profit.  Safe harbor is [complex]. 
In Europe if qqun has info on you stored in a file, even inaccessible, that’s considered a form of harm. Is this because of Zuckerberg,  or Cambridge Analytica?  . . .  Need to deal with such problems only if there’s a systematic problem.   From 2010 to  2015, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook allowed Pres Obama’s campaign to use their data, which is how they succeeded so well.  . . .  My attitude on privacy is that if there’s something I don't want others to know I don't put it on Facebook.  . . . An Austrian privacy activist!   Consider the Twentieth Century.
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 2, Block D: :  Richard Epstein, Chicago Law, NYU Law, Hoover Institution,  in re: GDPR – recall that 70 years ago we saved the Europeans from [disaster].  Now we’re being repaid with .  .Austrian privacy activist, Maximillian Schrimms[?], who’s suing US corporations. A big pecuniary interest here.  Need to disaggregate the notion of constraint into smaller bits.;  Schrimms says, You need to provide the service and then charge for it later[?].  How can you charge customers based on intensity of use?  If you  [customer] get the info for free and then forbid the company to use your data to provide ads,, the business model [dies] and then Internet users will have to pay.  European Commission’s ability to make regulations is one reason the Britons chose Brexit. There’l have to be a business push-back where the firms that essentially pay for the EC refuse to go along, creating a political necessity. Not that one of the geniuses of he EU have not been able to create a single new major corporation in the last fifty years. 
 
Hour Three
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 3, Block A:  Jack Hitt, creator and a co-host of the 2018 Peabody Award-winning podcast “Uncivil”; in re: Joyce’s Ulysses.  In Manhattan, Symphony Space will hold a reading of Ulysses in toto.  At Symphony Space on 16 June, listen for: great jokes, hilarious riffs; notice that the reader makes the story as much as Joyce did. 
“The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar.”  Two decades ago, a renowned professor promised to produce a flawless version of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated novels: “Ulysses.” Then he disappeared.
Some 16 years ago, The Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with pigeons to whom he had given names: Checkers and Wingtip and Speckles. The article could have been just another human-interest story about our society’s failing commitment to mental health, except that the man crouched in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.
Kidd had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of “Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal: producing a perfect edition of the text. I saved the Boston Globe story on my computer and would occasionally open it and just stare. Long ago, I contacted Kidd about working on an article together, because I was fascinated by one of his other projects — he had produced a digital edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all available to the reader at a click.
Joyce once said about “Ulysses” — and it’s practically a requirement of any article about the novel to use this quote — “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” And that has always been part of how the novel works. For most of the book, what you are reading are the fractured bits of memory and observation kicking around in the head of a single schlub named Leopold Bloom as he wanders about Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904. It’s the sensation of putting these bits together and the pleasure, when it happens, of suddenly getting it — the joke, the story, the book — that compels you throughout.
This is why “Ulysses,” through most of the 20th century and into this one, still catches up all kinds of nonacademic readers who . . .    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-miss...
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 3, Block B:  Jack Hitt, creator and a co-host of the 2018 Peabody Award-winning podcast “Uncivil”; in re: Joyce’s Ulysses .  .  .  .
Jack’s last feature for the New York Times magazine was about the battle over the Sea-Monkey fortune.   At Symphony Space on 16 June, listen for: great jokes, hilarious riffs; the reader makes the story as much as Joyce did.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-miss...
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 3, Block C:  Dr David Livingston, The Space Show, and Dr. Jason Kalirai, Space Telescope Science Institute, in re:  WFIRST telescope.
Kalirai is the project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope at STScI and an associate researcher at the Center for Astrophysical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University. He received a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of British Columbia in 2004 and was then selected as a Hubble Fellow postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  Kalirai has been cited for his contributions to the field of stellar and galactic astrophysics. His research has led to new insights on the life cycle of stars like our Sun. Kalirai has also devised new methods to measure the age of our Milky Way galaxy. Dr. Jason Kalirai Selected as One of Baltimore's Future Visionaries ...  http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/2013/10/21/dr-jason-kalirai-selected-as...
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 3, Block D:  Dr David Livingston, The Space Show, and Dr. Jason Kalirai, Space Telescope Science Institute, in re:  WFIRST telescope.  . . .  High red shift galaxy. 
David Livingston’s summary of the two segments:   “John Batchelor and I welcomed Dr. Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute and member of the WFIRST team to this Hotel Mars double segment.  During the first part of our double segment program, Dr. Kalirai explained WFIRST to us, why and how it differs from other space telescopes including JWST and Hubble and what it can with its new instrumentation such as the Coronagraph and the  Wide Field Instrument.  In addition, Jason talked about the technical specs and capability differences with WFIRST as compared to the other space telescopes.  You can learn much more about WFIRST, the special mission it has, and its value by visiting https://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov.  For the second segment of the program, we focused on the Dark Energy capability of WFIRST.   As explained to us, WFIRST will carry out three types of surveys to attempt to answer dark energy questions.  More detail about the dark energy capabilities of WFIRST can be found at https://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov/dark_energy.html.”
 
Hour Four
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 4, Block A: Dan Henninger, WSJ Wonder Land and editorial board, in re:  Singapore summit, the undistinguished dictator of a failed state.  Trump handled Little Rocket Man with lavish flattery. . . . Trump’s disruptive style.   
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 4, Block B: Peter Berkowitz, Hoover, in re: Civil rights vs religious freedom.   Masterpiece Cake Shop, civil rights, the Colorado civil rights commission.  Two gay men asked for a highly special cake to be made for their wedding; they asked a committed Christian baker.  Colorado favored the customers, Supreme Court ruled in favor of the baker, an artist of patisserie. First Amendment speaks of religious freedom – speech, press, assembly, petition, and religion, which receive special protection.  Two Justices (Sotomayor & Ginsburg)  hold that there’s no special exemption for religious freedom – ignoring the intent of the First Amendment.   They demanded that the baker participate in the wedding – using the power of he state to force [a novel version of] moral actions.
Justice Kennedy: In this case, we detect hostility to religion. Colorado wrote [horrid] comparisons to religious freedom – the Holocaust, inter al.  Progressives await the day when a majority of the American population loses interest in/favor for religious liberty, so the state can compel [anti-religious] behavior.
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 4, Block C: Phil Stewart, mil affairs for Reuters; in re: AI at the Pentagon. Focus on rogue state launch of a nuke, or such.  “Finding a needle in a haystack.”  Program for $83 mil; many others . Hundreds or thousands of them. Classified.  Even the targets are hard to discuss. Game-changing if it works. Problem: computers may make decision to launch. Not good. 
AI putting us on the escalation ladder? Right now, the program can spot indications of incoming missiles; if there’s an alert in North Korea, we might start to prepare – but not launch by robot! It accelerates decisions and doesn't allow a climb-down. The guy who helped invent SIRI is now at DARPA, creating AI systems that can explain themselves. Currently, all they can do is reach conclusions.  China has a specific plan to be world leader in AI by 2030; Putin also in the race. Chair of House Armed Svcs Committee thinks that China and Russia are spending more and moving ahead of the US.
MIT student can fool a machine to think a turtle is a rifle.  Spoofing AI systems! 
Friday  15 June 2018 / Hour 4, Block D:  Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics; in re: Control center at Kennedy Center, 300-foot tower at space port.   .  .  .  Falcon 9; SpaceX.  . . . Spacceport Earth. 
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