Photo, left: Bravissimi, viejospellejos.   Translation: "When do you suppose the blockade against us [Cuba] will be lifted?"  "When the US president is Black and the Pope is Argentine like Che." "Oh, don't pull my leg!"
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block A:  Francis Rose, NationalDefenseWeek.com (WMAL) and francisrose.com, and now Channel 7 in Washington; and Channel 8 daily: "Government matters";  in re:  Trump Stunts Birtherism with VA Masquerade.  The Long Challenge of Zika. @FRoseDC.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-admits-obama-was-born-in-us-but-falsely-blames-clinton-for-rumors/2016/09/16/301430d0-7c24-11e6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html
“. . . What does it say about the state of the Department of Veterans Affairs when the agency can’t even be trusted to tell the truth to the president of the United States? That’s precisely the situation at the Little Rock, Ark., VA medical center. There, VA employees lied about patient wait times, then lied to federal investigators about doing so, and Little Rock VA leaders refused to fire those responsible.
“But apparently VA officials were too ashamed to admit no one would lose their job over the hospital’s fraudulent wait times. Instead, they tried to hide the truth from veterans, the public and even the president of the United States, falsely telling federal Office of Special Counsel investigators, who were preparing a report for President Obama that they planned to fire one of the responsible employees.
“Similar instances of dishonesty and incompetence continue to play out at VA health care facilities across the nation, with little to no consequences for the responsible employees. That’s because dysfunctional federal personnel rules are forcing the VA to keep bad workers on the payroll, doing a disservice to the many hardworking and honest VA employees, the taxpayers that fund the department, and the veterans VA is charged with serving.
Indeed, nearly every day the VA is engulfed in a new crisis or scandal, yet the department is unable to discipline the employees responsible.
“At the San Diego VA medical center, an inspector general investigation found that a veteran attempted suicide after the facility repeatedly cancelled his mental health appointments. The same investigation revealed  employees had instructed hospital schedulers to falsify wait times, potentially affecting hundreds of veterans’ mental health appointments. Still, no one was fired.
“The tragic human toll of this broken status quo is evident in the stories of delayed and bungled health care procedures that routinely emanate from the VA. But this grim reality is also costing taxpayers. In fact, VA’s incompetence has cost taxpayers $848 million in legal settlements – many of which were associated with medical malpractice – in the past five years alone.
“Enough is enough. If the VA is ever going to change its culture, we have to give its leaders the ability to hold their worst employees accountable. That’s exactly what H.R. 5620, the VA Accountability First and Appeals Modernization Act of 2016, would do. It would provide VA leaders with the tools they need to finally reform the department into an organization truly responsive to the veterans it is charged with serving.
“That includes delivering swift responses to disability claim appeals. For years disability claim appeals have languished in the VA because of an antiquated appeals process. This backlog has been greatly exacerbated by mismanagement.
“In the words of VA’s former top benefits executive, a complex maze of bureaucratic red tape makes it ‘almost impossible’ to discipline problematic employees. That’s why the VA is forced to keep sex offenders and armed-robbery participants on the department’s payroll, no matter how egregious their behavior. And on the off chance the VA is able to successfully discipline an employee, the process can take years to complete because the standard of evidence the VA must meet is similar to what’s required to convict a criminal in a court of law.
“H.R. 5620 would replace this madness with common sense, while protecting the due-process rights of employees. The bill would shorten the firing/demotion/appeals process for rank-and-file VA employees from more than a year on average to no more than 77 days. It would provide VA whistleblowers with a means to solve problems at the lowest level possible, while offering them protection from reprisals and mandating strict accountability for those who reprise against them. “It would give the VA secretary the authority to recoup bonuses and relocation expenses from misbehaving employees and reduce the pensions of senior executives convicted of felonies that influenced their job performance.
“For too long, VA bureaucrats who can’t or won’t do their jobs have used every trick in the book to keep themselves firmly entrenched in the agency’s bureaucracy. H.R. 5620 gets rid of these loopholes, which have been unfairly forcing veterans and the many good VA workers to deal with deadwood employees for years.
“This week, the House will vote on H.R. 5620, and we will be proud to support it. It’s a commonsense solution to an obvious problem that provides a Better Way of doing business at the Department of Veterans Affairs. America’s veterans and taxpayers deserve no less.    http://www.insidesources.com/fixing-va-starts-with-accountability/
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Dr Henry Miller, Hoover Institution, in re: 
A Zika Vaccine Poses a Number of Problems   A vaccine designed to protect patients against Zika could inadvertently provoke more cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome.   Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist, seems to be unaware of the many obstacles to the development of vaccines to prevent Zika (“The Coming Trials of Generation Zika,” op-ed, Sept. 7). Increasingly defensive about accusations that drugs and vaccines are inadequately tested for safety, the safety-obsessed FDA regulators in recent years have required massive, hugely expensive and time-consuming clinical trials designed to detect even very rare side effects, especially for vaccines administered to healthy subjects, as would be the case for Zika vaccines.
Safety is an important and complicated issue for vaccines against flaviviruses, a group that includes Zika and dengue fever, because of a phenomenon called “antibody-dependent enhancement.” In many areas experiencing Zika outbreaks, dengue infections are endemic, and it is known that people previously infected with dengue are at risk of developing a much more severe disease when infected with a second, related dengue strain. This is apparently due to the pre-existing antibodies binding to immune cells and enhancing the ability of the new strain to infect them. Therefore, the possibility exists that via a similar mechanism, Zika vaccination could also lead to enhanced disease, rather than protection, when a person subsequently encounters the dengue virus.
A vaccine designed to protect patients against Zika could inadvertently provoke more cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), an autoimmune condition marked by a progressive but usually reversible paralysis. Preliminary evidence suggests that Zika exposure may cause GBS via some sort of aberrant immune response from the body in which immune cells attack a component of neurons. Vaccine developers and regulators are concerned that in a small percentage of subjects a vaccine could elicit a similar immune response that will give rise to GBS. This happened after administration of the swine flu vaccine in 1976.   http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-zika-vaccine-poses-a-number-of-problems-1473889648?mod=itp&mod=djemITP_h  /   Takeda Enters the Battle to Develop Zika Vaccine
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, NYU Law, in re: Apple vs Europe  @RichardAEpstein. @HooverInst.   “. . . My initial judgment—always subject to revision on the strength of additional information—is that the EC was correct in its decision. In making this assessment, I admit that I harbor a deep suspicion of the EC in its multiple roles. In general, there is much to the charge that the EC’s policies are prejudiced against American companies that do business in the EU. But it is one thing to start with a strong presumption, and another to put the pieces together in a prudent fashion.
The first query is whether an antitrust outfit like the EC should be making judgments about tax policy in the first place. In this instance, the answer comes from Article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which provides, with multiple exceptions not relevant here, that “any aid granted by a Member State or through State resources in any form whatsoever which distorts or threatens to distort competition by favouring certain undertakings or the production of certain goods shall, in so far as it affects trade between Member States, be incompatible with the internal market.”
The internal market refers to the free flow of goods across national boundaries among EU members. In this connection at least, the EU operates more like an open trading union and less like the top-down Brussels establishment whose regulatory abuses strengthened the case for Brexit. Harmonization in the EU is always harmonization-up rather than harmonization-down. In contrast, Article 107 is directed toward the issuance of selective benefits to individual firms, and, as such, does not prevent any member state from setting its general tax rates as high or low as it wants, so long as it does so on a nondiscriminatory basis.
The EU’s general nondiscrimination policy allows for members to compete for new business by offering an attractive tax environment. Indeed, the EC only demanded that Ireland impose its generally low 12.5 percent corporate tax rate on the revenues that escaped taxation elsewhere in the EU or, indeed, even in the United States. There was no effort to require Ireland to raise its overall tax rates so as to reduce its competitive advantage.” http://www.hoover.org/research/europe-gets-apple-right
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block D: Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution, Chicago Law, NYU Law, in re: Apple vs Europe (2 of 2)
 
Hour Two
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block A:  Henry J. Hendrix ("Jerry"), Ph.D,. an active-duty United States Navy Captain, is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security; in re:  The Russians Are Coming!  The Russians Are Coming! What is to be done? @JerryHendrix11, @CNASDC.  “. . . It may not be 1984 again, but it certainly is not 1994 or 2004 either. Incorporated into what appears to be an overarching strategy to assert Russian primacy in their self-identified “near abroad” the Russians are doing several things simultaneously, the most important of which may well be the large-scale exercises in Crimea as part of an apparent larger strategic war game. While many may argue the relative merits of various aspects of Russian power, sanctions, diplomatic isolation and other lines of effort, there is no denying that Russia is synchronizing a strategy to keep Europe off-balance, potential allies encouraged and possible enemies deterred from the Baltic to the Black Sea and further afield.
Russia, as Winston Churchill and others have noted, is particularly enigmatic. This is only heightened by the fact that Western Europe and the United States have not produced a cohort of Russia-focused strategists since the mid-1990s. Academic and government institutions that produced droves of Soviet Union specialists during the Cold War are as empty as the runways of former U.S. air bases in England and Western Europe. What was the academic-industrial scale production of “Russia hands” has, at best, become a boutique or niche product.
The Crimean exercises show that while Russia may have endured a rather tumultuous decade from 1993 until the middle of the 2000s that period is finished. Granted, shore to shore amphibious exercises are not the same as say, Operation Torch (Allied World War II invasion of North Africa) or Operation Iceberg (the invasion of Okinawa), but they nonetheless require a great deal of planning and sophisticated execution. The Russians used to land perhaps a battalion of naval infantry during the U.S. led BALTOPS from 2004-2007 as participants in the exercise….”
https://news.usni.org/2016/09/14/analysis-russian-military-activities-fr...
 “. . . Adm. John Richardson said today at the Center for American Progress that close encounters at sea from both the Iranians and Russian ships and planes are “potentially destabilizing” and can only produce negative outcomes.
“The closer and closer you get with those sorts of things, the margin for error gets smaller, and human error can play a bigger and bigger role, so I think it’s very important that we eliminate this sort of activity where we can because nothing good can come from it,” he said.
Richardson stressed the need for “leader-to-leader dialogue” to resolve the situation – though the U.S. has no formal diplomatic relationship with Iran, and interactions with the Russians are limited to certain high-level positions.
“We’re working to sort of think our way through what are the possibilities there, both with the Iranians and also I would say with the Russians, who have exhibited this behavior as well, so that we can get up on the line and have a conversation,” Richardson said.
“We’ve got the Practices to Prevent Incidents at Sea with the Russians. That is a living agreement in place today and so it’s discussed annually with the Russians and kept relevant each time, and every time we get together we talk through these sorts of close encounters – and, again, stressing that they’re not helpful.”. . . https://news.usni.org/2016/09/12/cno-calls-cues-like-rules-iranians-russians-deter-aggressive-moves  (1 of 2)
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block B:  Henry J. Hendrix ("Jerry"), Ph.D,. an active-duty United States Navy Captain, is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security (2 of 2)
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block C:  Gene Marks, Washington Post, in re:  (Photo: A pizza just removed from an oven, with a close-up view of the cornicione [the outer edge]). Business Humans Doubtful. Pizza-Making Robot Confidence. @GeneMarks, @WashingtonPost
Harvard report: Main Street has starkly more negative views of economy than big business
// CNBC   Small businesses are getting left behind, according to a new report from the Harvard Business School.  Hungry start-up uses robots to grab slice of pizza   http://mashable.com/2016/09/14/robots-making-pizza/#SV6HuOrpP05x @mashable
“. . . Zume is one of a growing number of food-tech firms seeking to disrupt the restaurant industry with software and robots.
 “We’re going to eliminate boring, repetitive, dangerous jobs, and we’re going to free up people to do things that are higher value,” said co-founder Alex Garden, a former Microsoft manager and president of mobile game maker Zynga Studios.
Inside its commercial kitchen in Mountain View, pizza dough travels down a conveyer belt where machines add the sauce, spread it and later carefully slide the uncooked pies into an 800-degree oven.
The startup will soon add robots to prep the dough, add cheese and toppings, take pizzas out of the oven, cut them into slices and box them for delivery.
“We automate those repetitive tasks, so that we can spend more money on higher-quality ingredients,” said Julia Collins, Zume’s CEO and cofounder. “There will always be a model here at Zume where robots and humans work together to create delicious food.”. . .
Potential for a great pizza place but they’re missing some fundamentals of great pizza-making. Zume claims to be the future of pizza and they indeed have gone out of their way to prove that fact.  Their pizza's are partially made by robots, offer unique topping choices, deliver the pizza in 20 minutes, and the pizza's themselves come in a very cool box.  Let me talk about how cool this box is: It's made out of bio-degradable plant fibers that traps heat in, keeping the pizza warmer, longer.  The box is built with small grooves on the bottom that trap excess grease, preventing the pizza from getting soggy.  And the box top can be placed underneath the box trap to transform the box into a serving platform for easily dispensing pizzas.  A lot of thought went into this box!
Unfortunately, boxes, speed, and robots have no effect on the most important part of pizza: the taste.  I sampled four different pies: Saul Goodman, which had a nice savory and crunch flavor; the Sweet Corn Elote, which came out overly sweet and bizarre-tasting; the El Camino, which came out tasting like your run of the mill mid-grade pizza; and Lucky Bueno, which had a nice sweet and spicy flavor.  Out of all four, the Saul Goodman was the only one I'd recommend, as the others were either not tasty or too boring.  The biggest factor is the dough and crust, which is soft, but bland.  Similarly, the tomato sauce used in the pizzas lacked onion and garlic flavors.  
One more thing to consider is the price.  With tax, be expecting to pay $16-$20 per pizza.  It's very convenient if you need a pizza as soon as possible, but I wouldn't rely on Zume if I was planning a party, as it would quickly bankrupt my funds.  
If Zume can improve their pizza recipes, get better dough and sauce, and lower the price down to be more competitive to other pizza delivery places, then it could very well be the next Domino's or Pizza Hut.  The next big thing in pizza.   https://www.yelp.com/biz/zume-pizza-mountain-view
Coworkers, benefits matter most to employees http://www.benefitnews.com/news/coworkers-benefits-matter-most-to-employees   @aeis17 @EBNmagazine
Twitter app aims live-stream video at your TVhttps://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-launches-new-app-for-apple-tv-amazon-fire-tv-and-microsofts-xbox-one/  @terryscollins @CNET
Americans are ditching giant restaurant chains like Cheesecake Factory and Olive Garden http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-ditching-big-restaurant-chains-and-eating-local-2016-9   @RobertBryan4 @themoneygame
Small businesses seek delay of overtime rule   http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/09/13/small-businesses-seek-delay-overtime-rule/90323124/   @PDavidsonusat @USATODAY
Why farmers are lobbying for student-debt relief  http://on.wsj.com/2cSSsPD   @WSJ, @JMitchellWSJ
Amazon one-hour delivery threatening traditional grocers    https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/amazon-one-hour-delivery-threatening-traditional-grocers/
Ford moving all production of small cars to Mexico   http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/09/14/ford-moving-all-production-small-cars-mexico/90354334/  @usatoday  (1 of 2)
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: Gene Marks, Washington Post, in re:  Small business report (2 of 2)
 
Hour Three
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block A:  Sebastian van Gorka, Institute of World Politics, and Katharine C Gorka, Threat-Knowledge Group; in re:  Rising Threat: The Islamic State’s Militarization of Children (by Dr. Sebastian L. Gorka,
Katharine C. Gorka, Claire Herzog [http://thegorkabriefing.com/rising-threat-islamic-statess-militarization...
Child soldiers; ISIS drafted 400 small children in 2015 to blow themselves up.  Similar practices by LRA in Africa, Powder Monkeys of the British Royal Navy, et al.  ISIS has built a total system where women are recruited to breed jihadists and in growing up know nothing else. See screen shots of readers using Kalashnikovs to learn to count. Children as executioners of hostages in orange suits.
Al Qaeda did not use children, believed that minors didn't have the skills of maturity to be on the battlefield.  ISIS takes the opposite view: aggressively and deliberately abducting, training, and breeding small children to kill.
Look back at the old Islamic precedent: the Ottoman Mamluks in the Ninth Century: they took children to create slave-soldiers – although these had a special warrior status, and became very, very strong. Over time, the Mamluks had devastating effect: sometimes conquered their masters, and also turned back the Crusaders. Powerful for a thousand years.
Wrap explosives around children with mental deficiencies: in Nigeria with Boko Haram.  ISIS tends to use foreigners to self-explode more than locals, see the children as the lion cubs of tomorrow.
ISIS schools have been created in Afghanistan to train children: ISIS sees the children’s  long-term value to the caliphate as greater than for immediate use in Mosul, for example. 
The US has very restrictive rues of engagement, have not made allowance for child jihadis.  Problem for US troops; will affecs us not only in the region but here in this country Around 60% of ISIS supports arrested in the US have been between 16 and 25 years old: can get under the security radar screen, can move around borders and in airports. 
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block B:  Sebastian van Gorka, Institute of World Politics, and Katharine C Gorka, Threat-Knowledge Group; in re:  Rising Threat: The Islamic State’s Militarization of Children (by Dr. Sebastian L. Gorka,
Katharine C. Gorka, Claire Herzog [http://thegorkabriefing.com/rising-threat-islamic-statess-militarization...
The TSA makes exceptions for minors at security checkpoints. In August, the young Ali Shukrin Amin was sentenced in Virginia for having provide material support to ISIS.  . . .  If we expect children to be the front line of domestic attacks in the US, are we prepared?  To use or not use lethal force against a potential exploding vehicle? 
ISIS has explicitly warned us: Beware, “Our orphans are growing, they feed their thirst for revenge in rage”  Also, in the US children under twelve, actually, under eighteen  don’t need to show ID to fly. And at border: we’ve welcomed many severe vulnerabilities.
The Black Widows of Chechnya in Moscow at the theater – widows or daughters of the dead, out for revenge.
See the recent arrest in France of completely female jihadi cell. The modern jihadi movement is in part the creation of Abdullah Azzam, Ph,D. from Cairo:  ; his 1979 fatwah, “In defense of Muslim lands”:  “You must be a jihadi, you don't need anyone’s permission, you don't even need your husband’s permission” (this constitutes a shocking revision of ancient custom). ISIS is the rebranding . . .
..  ..  .. 
The rate at which the Islamic State is recruiting, training, and exploiting children presents a new set of challenges for U.S. warfighters and law enforcement.
Not only do we risk overlooking the threat posed by children, assuming their innocence, but we also run the risk of moral injury and increased rates of PTSD to those who must confront this threat.
This paper looks at how the Islamic State is militarizing children in order to better prepare the United States to face this new and rising threat.
REPORT: Rising Threat: The Islamic State’s Militarization of Children (pdf)
 
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block C: Sean Wilentz, author, The Politicians and the Egalitarians; Princeton; in re: Current campaigns for the presidency.  . . . The candidates tripped over their legs – Mrs Clinton tried to push ahead with walking pneumonia. Richard Nixon banged his knee while campaigning and had to go to hospital, but these days everybody has a videocam. There’s no privacy in the US anymore – esp in New York, Note: You are  naked.  Clinton campaign hasn't realized this and winds up bumbling and stumbling. A political miscalculation.  The Democratic Party is doubtful of Mrs Clinton: nervous.  Also, third parties. Not surprised that Dems are showing dissatisfaction; things are volatile.  
Hilary Clinton has the skills and programs to identify her as a left-of-center egalitarian – and it’s the Dems who accuse  her of Wall Street and being a war profiteer. 
No no, it all comes out of the Sanders campaign, which went ’way overboard. Now he grudgingly supported her and has created an uncontrollable monster.   Clintons now pay for their errors in that period. Clinton Foundation: Oh no! it took money from rich people! No evidence of corruption therein. 
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block D:  Sean Wilentz, author, The Politicians and the Egalitarians; Princeton; in re:  A self-described non-politician, Mr Trump: gathers media for a presser at his new hotel, brings in veterans to endorse him, accuses Mrs Clinton of having invented the birther controversy (a falsehood), then pronounces that Mr Obama was born in the US. He’s a patent fraud, and people like him for that – the clown is the star of the circus.  When Pat Paulson ran for president, it was funny since he was a comedian – this is like a race-baiting Pat Paulsen and it’d be funny if he weren’t possibly going to win.
The Europeans are as obsessed wit this as we are.  Birthers: he brought it up to keep it alive. It's part of his shtick.  Mexicans. Black presidents – “people we don’t like.”  The core of Trumpism.  John C Calhoun – “the only Mephistopheles in my writing.”
 
Hour Four
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Kori Schake, Hoover, in re:  Cuba. Castro has been a “challenge” since 1960.   In Cuba in an amusement park,, a framing of what Castro has done: it used to b e  Coney Island, today is broken-down roller coaster. Really simple engineering but there it sites in disrepair, Encapsulates a sad illustration of bad governance.  This is what happens when govt gets in the way of a dynamic people. Children still visit as though it was working . . .  The Malecon, beachfront walkway:  no jet ski, yacht, commercial container ship – “The govt doesn't let people own boats because they fear the people might fish too far.”
..  ..  .. 
Castro dies, takes his suitcases to the Pearly Gates, knocks.  St Peter comes out, says, “No, this isn’t for you; you go to the other place.”  “OK,” says Castro, and he does down to the gates of Hades. 
The Devil welcomes him – “Come in, come in, compadre; I’ve been waiting for decades!”  Then Castro realizes he’s left his luggage at the Pearly Gates; “Hang on, I’ll just nip up and get my bags.”  “Unh, no, it doesn't work that way; but as a professional courtesy to another devil, I’ll send some of my interns up as bellboys.”
So two little devils trot up to Heaven; St Peter sees them coming and thinks, “Oh no! Castro’s been there only twenty minutes and already there are refugees.”
..  ..  .. 
Most Cubans I spoke with saw Castro as a typical caudillo (strongman); this is autumn of the patriarchs.  Cubans delicately say, “a biological solution.” As though people are holding their breath, waiting for all Cuba to become Miami.  With Venezuela going belly-up, Castros realized they need to be more self-sustaining. Irony: what keeps the state afloat is remittances from the US.
An intell analyst:  the mil will have a choice to take over the economy and try to make it work like East Germany [eek)], or try to be a transition? Military runs 6% of the Cuban economy; reminiscent of the IRGC in  Iran, which surely does not want to open it up.
Krushchev made “the secret speech”: after Castro goes, will there be a secret speech? Not only the Castros, but families, the FARC, many malign influences in this many-decades abuse. A truth and reconciliation commission? That’d be a wonderful societal closure  But quite rare. 
         At the Pearly Gates St. Peter said to Fidel, “No. The other place.” The Syrian Cease that Won’t. @KoriSchake. @HooverInst.  “. . . When you’re in Havana, you can stand at the harbor and survey the entire ocean horizon without seeing a single ship. No fishing trawlers, no speedboats, no yachts, no jet skis. As my guide diplomatically put it, “The government fears they will fish too far.” Boats are prohibited to Cubans because they’d likely make a run for Florida. After President Obama’s opening of diplomatic relations, the whole country feels as though it’s holding its breath, waiting for three momentous events to occur: first, “the biological solution,” by which they mean Fidel Castro’s death; second, an end to the American embargo; and third, the end of Raul Castro’s presidential term in 2017, with the possibility of military rule after it…” http://www.hoover.org/research/dispatch-havana
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Kori Schake, Hoover, in re:   Worries: Russians will accept US intell in the Syrian joint work and utilize it for their own ends n Syria, Turkey, Iraq—as an enemy of the US.  John Kerry implied that the military was insubordinate for not signing up and handing everything over This is nuts.  Concerns:
1: If we provide intell to Russia for use in Syria, doesn’t that make us complicit in barrel-bombs?  Russians purposely and repeatedly target civilians in Syria.
2:
3: Congress, after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and deeds in Ukraine, passed law forbidding US collaboration. If the SecDef helped Russia he’d be on the hook.
Have we just signed up to be Assad’s air force? Yes, and worse: Iran’s air force, too.  People all over the Middle East see that we're assisting the murderous al Assad and Iran to be the redial hegemon.
So we’ll be on both sides: we're funding anti-Assad groups. So we become our own enemy.
Kerry admitted that the only people who can influence Assad are the Russians, so the US needs to meet the Russian terms  A blanket admission of policy failure by the Obama administration.  Horrifying. 
“…The bad news: This agreement virtually ensures success by the Syrian government in destroying rebel forces fighting against it, rewards Russia’s military intervention in Syria with a decisive role in determining the course of events, makes the United States complicit in atrocities committed by both Syria and Russia, and will further damage America’s image in the region….”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440069/syria-ceasefire-agreement-j...
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block C:  Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director; GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; & author, UnCivilization, in re:
The way Pres Obama handled the G20: a failure? PLA navy and Russian navy conducting joint exercises in the South China Sea.   Was a culmination; tangible work of G20 is meaningless; was  a PR gesture, Pres Obama was taken unaware that China would snub him and make him look foolish. His people shd have been aware; showed the impotence of the US and esp of the Obama Adm. The airport snub was entirely calculated; China had broken out of a century of containment. Problems compounded by his repeated mishandling of, for example, Duerte. Did the same thing in Addis Ababa – inept handling of the president of Djibouti, causing him to invite China in to bld a naval base. Here, Obama has driven Duterte into the arms of the Chinese.  Obama had pointedly been rude to Duerte, who wound up cursing Obama. Philippines have walked away from the US, just as Egypt did when Obama tried to force el Sisi to accept the Muslim Brotherhood.
This is the last great opportunity that China has while Obama is president to make the US look weak because they don’t know what they’ll get next. If Clinton, will continue their practices. If Trump, will have to think carefully about how to go nose-to-nose. This act of supreme confidence by China is a strategic necessity.
 
China  faces major economic problems and a critical water shortage. The US also has huge problems.
Duterte: a certain diplomatic logic, but looks as though China has persuaded Duterte to stand down after the Hague court decision. 
The Walls Street Journal said, Australia is doing everything the US demands but it's not enough. US has to put all its eggs in the baskets of Japan and India. Japan is stuck n this, but India has other options and its own agenda. Modi is putting supersonic missiles, incl antiship missiles, in Vietnam.
India also is solicitous of the Republic of China, Taiwan – with which the US has important strategic obligations but which this White House has carefully ignored for eight years.
US flew B52s over South Korea to show support while the Blue House threatened to obliterate Pyongyang if it thought Kim would nuke South Korea. Problem is, nukes are not good war-fighting weapons. Needed: a creative new approach vis-à-vis North Korea. Try to see the situation from North Korea’s paranoid perspective. 
Friday  16 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block D:  Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director; GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; & author, UnCivilization, in re:   The pending Syrian ceasefire. Profound reluctance of US mil to share intell with Russians. Russians to get targeting info for Russia to target – anybody; unknown.  Can these two work together? They could, but I wonder if US has better battlefield intell in Syria than Russia does. The left hand of the US forces doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. In Iraq, a surfeit of US generals, and not one knows what it's doing. US forces that were embedded with one group found themselves in a firefight with another group in which US forces also were fighting – Americans shooting at one another!
..  ..  .. 
Results of this Administration’s policies in Syria:
US forces that were embedded with one group found themselves in a firefight with another group in which US forces also were fighting – Americans shooting at one another!
..  ..  .. 
If I were Russian I'd be wary of giving away intell to the US.  Turkey has withdrawn support for Da’ish (bigger fish to fry in the Black Sea) so all Erdogan is doing is fighting against Kurds. Da’ish is angry – Turks created and fed it, along with the US and Saudis and Qatar; now Da’ish lashes back at its former sponsors. Turks leave Assad to victory, are trying to talk with Assad.