The John Batchelor Show

Friday 23 March 2018

Air Date: 
March 23, 2018

Photo: 
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 1, Block A:   Liz Peek, Fiscal Times and Fox News, in re: Didn't the Obama Administration and its friends lecture us endlessly on “secular stagnation” — Larry Summers — assuring us that we’d have a GDP growth under 2% per annum for the rest of our lives? 
Isn't it 3% now?    Those dour voices: silence. 
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 1, Block B:   Dan Henninger    Comey:  a year with nothing conclusive; either demonstrate something consequential, or fold the tent and close the investigation.  John Bolton: unusually well prepared for the position of National Security Advisor. He’ll enter the office with three major crises at hand; if anyone is able to manage these successfully, it’s he.
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 1, Block C:   Richard Epstein, Chicago Law, NYU Law, Hoover; in re:  Calpers / Calfire on “air time.”  Many Californian public employees get “defined benefit programs “ – take a designated number, multiply it by number of years of service, and then also by [the rate of inflation?].  As a result, many retirees from public service jobs get $100,000 per year for the rest of their lives. Air time:  you also may buy as much as five years’ extra retirement time. Ergo, you work fifteen years, buy five years of air time, and retire at the age of forty-two with 100K PA for the rest of your days on Earth.  Of course, this will cause the system to go broke.  “Financial ruination.”
In 1999, they created a way for retirees to be exempt from the American economy and drain public coffers.  This is a conflict between public workers and hard-working Californians of limited means.
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 1, Block D:  Richard Epstein, Chicago Law, NYU Law, Hoover; in re:   Grotesquerie of public unions’ having seized control of [the public weal].  When California’s legislature went to correct this shakedown — grossly disproportionate remuneration for services rendered —  the unions sued in court to stop it.   The public trust doctrine: government holds [wealth] in a fiduciary capacity. Must pay fair value for value received.  Need to be able to bring a citizens’s suit. 
In Jan 1962, JFK allowed public unions to negotiate with the govt.  If you don't happen to like what your fire dept is doing, you can't go hire another fire dept; monopoly.   Over time, they take significant control of the state‘s political process. Andy Cuomo is in their pocket. 
 
Hour Two
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: Barry McCaffrey, retired four-star Army general, astoundingly tweeted: “Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks.”  See:  Seven Days in May film.    This is part of the coup by what’s darkly styled as the deep state – elites interested above all in their own power — which Trump does, indeed, threaten. Driven not by ideology but by the threat that populism can represent to the elite. Coups d’etat fail more often than succeed. 
Exceptional vituperation.  Hostile Congress; [upper ranks of] military filled with Obama supporters; and the president is disconnected from DC power brokers, so doesn't hear relevant data and rumors. A restive and profoundly unhappy population. Hostile adversaries eager to do theatrical gunplay.  Springtime. And we have a volunteer as coup leader: John Brennan.
The Spanish civil war, the bloodiest in the Twentieth Century, was preceded by four or five coup attempts.
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 2, Block B:  Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re:  Seven Days in May novel.  In 2018, Brennan and McCaffrey suggest there’s a crisis at hand that can be solved by removing the president.  Richard Haas: “Trump is not now set for war on three fronts – Mueller (legal), Peter Navarro (economic), and Bolton (military).”    . . . There’s a large faction who believe that the case is ironclad against Trump, allowing them to do extraordinary interventions, Puzzle: How to do this in a Constitutional way?
How can you overthrow a regime without precipitating a civil war?  Trump opponents haven't thought of this. However, such a coup would much embolden our adversaries, who will be glad to step in to create mass chaos and [destroy the nation]. 
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 2, Block C:  Jeff Bliss, Pacific Watch, in re:  Homelessness in California. Housing problems are spilling over in to Nevada.  John Hennessey. SF Bay. Absolutely vast problem.  The Greyhound Therapy.  San Diego relocation.
Evergreen tales: the weather, of course, but the homeless and housing situations. Not only within the state, from the northern border to the Mexican frontier, but in neighboring states –Nevada, Arizona, etc. “Maybe we need to build a wall to protect Arizona.” People up and down the state worried about how to fix this: money for homeless, build new housing?   Sacramento and the feds are not paying much attention. Population is 130,000? Probably substantially more.  It's so common that it's now uncommon not to find someone standing at an on or off ramp.  People panhandling day and night.  Greyhound Therapy: same as patient-dumping.   Take patients, esp from mental health clinics, give them a few dollars and a bus ticket, send them to another city. San Diego has a program to send people back to where they came from: “family reunification program.” A shell game.
San Diego imported workers from LA for $179 per day to power-wash sidewalks under the depth of the hepatitis attack. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime were paid; much public indignation. Badly organized.
The Federalist:  The streets of SF are strewn with needles, covered w human waste, and it’s unsafe to park  your car on the street.   Look down a sidewalk, see glistening: it's broken car windows. There are apps telling you where to avoid because of human waste.  Needles all around. Horrendous.  Just where one-bedroom apartments cost a king’s ransom. “Not wanting to judge people; making excuses for those who commit crimes.”  Cops say they don’t have resources to catch people, can only show up later and write it u for your insurance co. 
In Joshua Tree, on e edge of the desert, a family of parents and three children living in a cardboard shack/lean-to; crowdfunded to get them a real home.
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 2, Block D:  Jeff Bliss, Pacific Watch, in re:  Jerry and his trains. He’s obsessed.  Next; an uber/lyft tax.  Bikes Spaceport. UFO. Governor Moonbeam’s swan song is the high-speed train (to nowhere) with madly-escalating costs.  He’s now frustrated and cursing in public. Editorial and pols across the lines all saying, “Stop.”
Travel alternative: bicycles spread across the landscape, “Dockless bicycles.” Pick one up, unlock it with a app, and leave it where ever. Chain it to a fence or a light pole; for $1, the company will go by once a day and fetch  it. Sidewalks are blocked, all sorts of problems. 
Space X currently makes its rocket in Hawthorne; will bld BFR (big rocket) in Port of Los Angeles.  People are most interested in bringing Elon Musk’s hyperloop to California. 
 
Hour Three
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 3, Block A:  Pax Romana, Adrian Goldsworthy
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 3, Block B:  Pax Romana, Adrian Goldsworthy
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 3, Block C:  Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Steve Coll
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 3, Block D:  Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Steve Coll
 
Hour Four
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 4, Block A: John Tamny, RealClearMarkets & Forbes, in re:  Catherine Rampell (Washington Post) wrote a column asserting that the tax cuts are too great. She went to Princeton, a gorgeous campus created by massive donations over generations; worked for the New York Times, which had been saved by a billionaire (Carlos Slim), then for WaPo, which was saved by the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos.  How extremely tone-deaf she is.
Only someone who works for the super-rich can rail against tax cuts since s/he doesn’t know what it’s like to need a tax cut to survive.  Rampell is totally a creation of the vastly rich.
“Massive redistribution of wealth” – as though the federal govt owns resources. 
Peggy Noonan has made the rich a target, reduced them to Hollywood characters. She claims that Trump’s election  . . .   Those whom Noonan disdains actually understand these economics better than [Noonan] does. Wealth is what gives us work and purpose.  The well-educated don’t see this because they've never been lost and had no way back in; only someone wholly insulated from what life is like away from wealth could write against it.  Peggy Noonan claims to have arisen from the working class; I don’t deny that, but she’s so thoroughly lost touch with working Americans that what she’s written is [stupid].
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 4, Block B:  John Tamny, RealClearMarkets & Forbes, in re:   [the economics of Hollywood filmmaking]. The inclusion clause.   . . .  For Heaven’s sake. Please see Shane.
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 4, Block C: Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack,com, in re: Space X: Berth 240, an 18-acrre lot at the Port of Los Angeles, for a booster (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) refurbishment facility in order to get them back to Vandenbergh.  West Coast usually used for polar orbits.   Taiwan . . . rocket had a lot of power relative to weight and launched more vertically than normal. Creat4e a circular shock wave above the US that had never been seen before; also the largest ever measured, being four times the size of California.  Put a hole in the ionosphere, in the plasma layer.
Alaska: a secret launch. A spaceport in the Aleutians, in Kodiak, trying to get a launch port there.  Will be a suborbital launch by a mystery company early this year. The supposed firm works with DARPA and NASA. Firefly is a firm that’s come back from the dead  after having been sued by a competitor – now trying to launch for $10 mil (very cheap) and aiming for a first test launch in 2019.  Chinese companies get huge govt subsidies. US firms naturally are concerned. 
. . .  Japanese looking to create a money-making operation with a billion-dollar fund to subsidize private space companies. 
Friday  23 March 2018 / Hour 4, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack,com, in re: Rover update!  Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. Curiosity roving around Vera Rubin Ridge, made of hematite. Seems to have quartz-like veins, suggesting water flow in the past. See nice panorama posted on BehindtheBlack,com to see the rough terrain.  Opportunity is halfway down the valley, looking for reasons for flow patterns in Perseverance Valley.
Did Mars once have oceans?  Maybe giant volcanoes repeatedly changed the climate to permit . . .
[Umuumuu? Sorry – dunno] Strange asteroid came zipping through our Solar System last fall.  Computer modeling theorizes this came from a binary star system, these being more likely to throw objects out.  The Ort cloud.