Photo, left: First pitch in historic first baseball game at North Pole, 25 August 1960.
Crew members of the nuclear submarine USS Seadragon play the first baseball game at the North Pole on August 25, 1960. With cold calculation, YNC (SS) Richard W. Caron, USN, unwinds the first toss in the historic premiere North Pole ball game. The umpire with the frozen stare and cold heart was HM1(SS) A. V. Jarvis, USN. [http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/spring/baseball.html]
Seadragon (SSN-584) arrived at Honolulu, Hawaii, on 14 September 1960, after completing her voyage from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the North Pole via the Parry Channel Northwest Passage. While in the Arctic basin, Seadragon made hydrographic, oceanographic, and other scientific observations. The submarine surfaced several times in Baffin Bay, the Parry Channel, and  Arctic Ocean, and stopped at the North Pole on 25 August long enough for her crew to play the world's first polar ball game.
An excerpt from "World's First Baseball Game at The North Pole":  We first chose two teams of nine players each. We then laid out the baseball diamond on the generally flat yet still quite rugged ice surface with a base placed at each point of the diamond. The baseball pitcher's mound, which is located in the center of the diamond, was positioned at our best estimate of the North Pole. The baseball diamond was then aligned such that the following interesting/amusing things would occur during the course of the game. First, if the batter hit a homerun, he would circumnavigate the world as he ran around the bases to home plate. Second, if the batter hit the ball to right field, the ball would go across the International Dateline into "tomorrow." And, if the ball player from the opposing team in Right Field caught the ball and threw it back towards the pitcher's mound, he would be throwing the ball back into "yesterday!" During the game, sliding into the bases (on the sea ice!) took on new meaning, and we were never sure just what day we actually completed the game. The baseball we used is supposedly in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
USN photo # USN 1050056, courtesy of the National Museum of the U.S. Navy, via flickr.com. 
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Dan Henninger, WSJ editorial board, in re: Charles Koch’s Warning  What he knows could prevent Donald Trump from being just a fringe candidate like Ross Perot or George Wallace.  Donald Trump should want to know: Why did Charles Koch tell a reporter for ABC News, before Mr. Trump locked up the nomination, that it was “possible” he could support Hillary Clinton ?  He did go on to note some misgivings about her rhetoric, but message sent: He’s not a happy conservative camper.
Charles Koch is also one half of what the Left simply calls “the Koch brothers”  [pron: coke], a phrase that evokes in their heads a galactic right-wing conspiracy. The other brother is David Koch, who lives in Manhattan and whom Mr. Trump knows.
It would be a very good idea before the general election if Mr. Trump talked about politics—more specifically, the point and purpose of politics—with Charles Koch. He’d find that the reasons Mr. Koch said supporting Hillary was possible are more counterintuitive than he would expect. It doesn’t have much of anything to do with her. It has a lot to do with challenges he will face in a general election.
Now 80, Charles Koch has been around politics long enough to be called one of the wise heads of the conservative movement. Not the Republican movement, the conservative movement. Like Mr. Trump, Charles Koch is in fact an outsider, no matter how many progressive books say that he personally operates the Republican Death Star. What one hears in Mr. Koch’s comments about Hillary is disappointment at where the conservative project has ended up in 2016. And if Charles Koch is disappointed, you can multiply that across the entire national base of conservative contributors. For anyone whose job now is to unify the Republican Party after its neutron-bomb primary, the problem doesn’t run just down-ballot, but also down-donor. There is a risk the donors might start turning off the party’s financial oxygen, down or up ballot, when Donald Trump needs more of it than even he’s got.
Understand, this isn’t about the money. It’s about the reasons behind the money. Sentenced as he’s been to hang out with Republicans and compete against Ted Cruz the past year, Mr. Trump by now has heard of “the donor class.”
Allow me to explain.
The idea of a “donor class” was conjured by the people who picked Ted Cruz as their candidate to take control of the Republican Party—essentially, a coup. Also folded in as a target of this largely manufactured anger was the “Establishment.” Mr. Koch at some point must have noticed these people really weren’t distinguishing between crony capitalists, his own bête noire, and conservative contributors.
Their historic bad luck is that Donald Trump stole the real anger, and they lost everything—the party, the presidency and credibility.
Saying amid the GOP primaries that it’s “possible” he could support Hillary was a Kochian shot across the bow of the manic Republicans.
Charles Koch’s history, like that of hundreds of other “donors” from his generation—most of them builders of their own businesses—runs parallel to the rise of the conservative movement as a political force since Ronald Reagan.
These men and a not insignificant number of women would say they’ve been in the business for decades of finding out how to make America great again, and keep it that way. That movement ran alongside the Republican Party and at times overlapped with it. Mr. Koch years ago helped start the Cato Institute. Other funders were behind the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the original Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and many state-based think tanks. These donors wanted a politics based on ideas, not just data-slicing votes by neighborhood. Those ideas—on taxes, regulation, public pensions, commercial liability, welfare, education, policing—fed into a long list of often unlikely electoral victories.
Most recently, it has produced Republican governors in Democratic states: Bruce Rauner in Illinois, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Larry Hogan in Maryland, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts, Chris Christie in New Jersey and Scott Walker in Wisconsin. The Left demonizes something called “the Koch brothers” because this movement turned the Democrats into losers. A remarkable number of these governors, like Mr. Trump, were businessmen, party outsiders. But they absorbed the ideas of successful conservatism. Whether this was “presidential” or “gubernatorial” is beside the point. It worked.
The counterpart to all this is the galaxy of wealthy liberal donors who will pay for Hillary’s war on Donald Trump to protect what they achieved in the Obama years. Some are saying the Trump primary victory means he has “redefined” the Republican Party. That is an overstatement, and not always friendly to Donald Trump. He has captured right-of-center unrest in the eighth, bummed-out year of Barack Obama. Bernie has done it on the other end. Unless Mr. Trump discovers the wellsprings that lifted Reagan and many, many others who came after, he could end up being remembered as an entertaining fringe candidate like Ross Perot or George Wallace.
Donald Trump should talk to Charles Koch.   http://www.wsj.com/articles/charles-kochs-warning-1462400425?tesla=y
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block B:  Jim McTague, Barron’s Washington; in re:  Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 160,000 in April, the weakest gain since September, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 5%, but the share of Americans participating in the labor force dipped after earlier signs of stabilization. Employment gains have now averaged 192,000 a month so far this year, down from 2015’s average of 229,000 jobs added monthly. After declining steadily from a post-recession peak of 10% in late 2009, the jobless rate has plateaued since last fall at a historically low level. http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-payroll-gains-slow-in-april-adding-160-0...
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block C:   Liz Peek, Fiscal Times and Fox, in re; An Economic Agenda for Disruptor Trump  What happens if nothing changes? With tens of millions of voters supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ promises of political revolution, will the country accept the status quo? That’s what . .  .
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 1, Block D:  Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Wall Street Journal, in re: Uber Hits a Buenos Aires Pothole   Taxi owners and union bosses fight to stop the company in a nation hungry for growth.   Wealth-creating economies welcome innovation. And then there’s Buenos Aires, where Uber says it has been waiting more than four months for a tax-identification number. Now the company is under investigation for operating its ride-sharing business illegally. Uber’s difficulty with the city government is good news for taxicab owners and union bosses who want to keep the company out of the market. But it is bad news for Argentina, a nation hungering for jobs and the productivity gains necessary for higher living standards.  Center-right President Mauricio Macri, of the Republican Proposal Party (PRO), who was inaugurated in December, has promised an economic revival. But if entrenched interests win protection from the technological revolution, he isn’t likely to deliver.
On April 12, Uber ran out of patience and began offering its ride-sharing services in Buenos Aires without a permit or a tax-identification number. A group of taxi unions immediately filed a lawsuit demanding that the city prohibit Uber. The city responded with a legal action against the company for the misdemeanor of “improper use of public space for profit.”   Uber spokeswoman Niki Christoff says that on April 15 police raided the offices of its lawyers, “taking all Uber files and information they found.” Ms. Christoff says that the next day police broke the lock on the door of the home of the local Uber general manager, raiding the premises and taking some electronic equipment and documents.   From April 15 to April 20, Uber offered free rides in Buenos Aires, hoping to create demand for its service and counter the taxi union, which has used roadblocks and protests to pressure city regulators to ban the company. Uber says it is now operating normally and believes its business is constitutionally protected. It emphasizes that it is neither a car service nor a taxi business and says Argentina needs a new regulatory regime for companies that provide a ride-sharing platform. 
Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s vice president of public policy and communications says that “the resistance in Buenos Aires has become among the fiercest that we have experienced anywhere in the world.” But consumers are eager to give it a try. The company says there have been 250,000 downloads of its app in Argentina, while 120,000 riders have opened accounts and there were around 175,000 trip requests during the first week of operation. Uber will also bring jobs. According to Ms. Christoff, in Mexico City about half of its drivers were previously unemployed. In Argentina, she says that there were 10,000 sign-ups in the first 36 hours of driver enrollment, a record for any Uber launch in Latin America. In all, some 35,000 Argentines have enrolled as Uber drivers, the company says. The job also provides flexibility to the underemployed who are looking for a second source of income. 
Other platforms that match buyers and sellers are already changing the Argentine economy. Airbnb, for example, makes every property owner into a potential innkeeper.  Uber says Latin America is its fastest-growing market. It also has competition. The Spanish company Cabify—which is also an app-based mobility service—already operates in Peru, Chile and Colombia. Its director for Latin America, Ricardo Weder, told the Argentine daily La Nacíon in April that Cabify will launch in May in Buenos Aires and in the city of Rosario.  Ms. Christoff says the company requested a meeting with Buenos Aires’s chief of government more than a week ago but has not heard back. In a written response to my request for comment on the Uber case, the city’s transportation department told me . . .    http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-hits-a-buenos-aires-pothole-1462139744?tesla=y
 
Hour Two
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael E Vlahos, Global Security Studies program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Arts and Science; in re: Petty Officer Keating Died 2 Miles from the Syrian Front. How Far Are You?: In America, Syria barely exists. On the TV airwaves in the United States, the brutal fighting has barely broken through in a news cycle dominated by unfiltered Donald Trump speeches and endless 2016 campaign coverage and political autopsies. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argues that this has consequences, especially in the case of Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV, whom lost his life in combat, but not as part of a "combat mission" because he was two miles from the border. Gayle writes: "Two miles. We sent Keating to stand and fight two miles from the battle. That's a lot closer than the great distance most of us in this country stand from this war. The war came to him. What will it take for it to reach the rest of us?" (1 of 2)
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block B:  Michael E Vlahos, Global Security Studies program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Arts and Science; in re: Petty Officer Keating Died 2 Miles from the Syrian Front. How Far Are You?: In America, Syria barely exists. On the TV airwaves in the United States, the brutal fighting has barely broken through in a news cycle dominated by unfiltered Donald Trump speeches and endless 2016 campaign coverage and political autopsies. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argues that this has consequences, especially in the case of Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV, whom lost his life in combat, but not as part of a "combat mission" because he was two miles from the border. Gayle writes: "Two miles. We sent Keating to stand and fight two miles from the battle. That's a lot closer than the great distance most of us in this country stand from this war. The war came to him. What will it take for it to reach the rest of us?" (2 of 2)
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block C:   Patrick Tucker, DefenseOne, in re: story on how traffic to this year-old jihadist video called "Black Flags of Islam and Imam Mahdi" predicts ISIS attacks. Narrated in English, the 26-minute video calls to "soldiers of Allah" and promises "killing upon killing upon killing." Patrick spoke with the managing director of Predata, a predictive analytics company, which says, "For some ISIS fighters, it's their version of listening to AC/DC before weight-lifting." 
For example, on December 18, this video saw a spike, receiving enough views to reach about 70 per cent of its best day's traffic. Eight days later, an ISIS-affiliated suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt at an Ahmadi mosque in the Bangladeshi town of Bagmara—an unexpected uptick in Islamic State tactics in the country.   Full report: http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/05/how-traffic-youtube-video-predicts-future-isis-attacks/127962/ (1 of 2)
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 2, Block D:     Patrick Tucker, DefenseOne, in re: story on how traffic to this year-old jihadist video called "Black Flags of Islam and Imam Mahdi" predicts ISIS attacks. Narrated in English, the 26-minute video calls to "soldiers of Allah" and promises "killing upon killing upon killing." Patrick spoke with the managing director of Predata, a predictive analytics company, which says, "For some ISIS fighters, it's their version of listening to AC/DC before weight-lifting." 
For example, on December 18, this video saw a spike, receiving enough views to reach about 70 per cent of its best day's traffic. Eight days later, an ISIS-affiliated suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt at an Ahmadi mosque in the Bangladeshi town of Bagmara—an unexpected uptick in Islamic State tactics in the country.   Full report http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/05/how-traffic-youtube-video-predicts-future-isis-attacks/127962/ (2 of 2)
 
Hour Three
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block A:  Jed Babbin is a former United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense during the first Bush administration, and is author of Inside the Asylum, Showdown, and In the Words of Our Enemies; also contributing editor to The American Spectator;  in re: Neglecting our combat air forces and being worn out by fifteen years of war constitute a major national security danger.   http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/2/jed-babbin-shrinking-us-military-budgets-threaten-/print/
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block B:   Markos Kounalakis, via Sacramento Bee, in re:  In Choosing Female Leaders, U.S. Trails Many Nations  Every election brings new questions about the qualities and character of national leadership, in the United States and abroad. In the 2008 presidential election, the big question was whether America could elect a nonwhite man – in this case, an African American – as president. Up until then, all U.S. presidents had been white Christian males of European descent.
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block C:  Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director; GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs; & author, UnCivilization, in re: Erdoğan reject EU’s demand that Turkey reword its definition of “terrorist” [to remove Kurds from the likelihood of being slaughtered]; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who accepts oceans of money from the EU, said, Nope. You go your way, we’ll go ours.”  Erdoğan disagrees and squabbles or fights with everyone who doesn’t knuckle under, while buying oil from ISIS and pushing vast numbers of refugees through Turkey to Greece  in order to destabilize first Greece, then the EU. Erdoğan has just got rid of his PM, Davitoglu.  The Aleppo offensive is driving hundreds of thousands of Syrians into Turkey.   Turkey’s economy is in tatters; former PM Davitoglu was working sedulously on having Turkey join Schengen – but now every Euro leader but Angela Merkel (who still kowtows to Erdoğan) has been horrified by him.  Brits are getting seriously alarmed at the thought of hordes of Turks’ sweeping across the Channel – which will affect the Brexit vote.   If yes to Brexit, Scotland probably will stay in Great Britain [?].   If anyone can make Mr Putin look moderate, it's Erdoğan.  There’s a civil war in Turkey and his solution is to double down on Kurds, get rid of them – even though they’re legion, filling much of the east of Turkey. The Turkish military is emasculated by Erdoğan: it cannot go into Syria or even protect the areas of the Med that Turkey claims, although the Turkish air force has made many entries into Greek airspace in the last year.  The PKK, the Kurdish rebels.  On April  28, a huge outburst by a Kurdish pol who complained in Parliament about violent depredations, and his political foes said they’d kill him before he left the building; Parliament is now in chaos with no PM.  Erdoğan now calls himself an “executive president “ – which happens to be blatantly unconstitutional (and translate: a violent dictator)—and the EU finally has awakened and got afraid of this monster. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36229468
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 3, Block D:    Ken Croswell, astronomer and author in Berkeley, California.  PhD in astronomy from Harvard for studying the Milky Way's halo. Now primarily a writer on astronomy and space topics, and author of six books on astronomy, including The Alchemy of the Heavens and Planet Quest; in re: Ghostly galaxies are light on stars but heavy on dark matter.  . . .  An ultra-diffuse galaxy can be as large as the Milky Way but as dim as a dwarf. The galaxy’s few stars are spread out, so it looks ghostly, making it hard to study.
Although observers spotted the first few examples three decades ago, they didn’t have a name until 2014, when a team led by Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University discovered 47 of them in the Coma galaxy cluster. Other astronomers studied this cluster with the giant Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and found hundreds more. Van Dokkum’s team argued that the galaxies had to consist of at least 98 per cent dark matter for gravity to hold them together. Otherwise, the many other galaxies in the Coma cluster would tear them apart.
Dark matter is thought to make up about 80 per cent of the mass in the universe overall, so that would be an impressively dense concentration of the stuff in a small space. But until now no one had directly measured an ultra-diffuse galaxy’s mass. Now Michael Beasley at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, Spain, and his colleagues have weighed an ultra-diffuse galaxy in the Virgo cluster named VCC 1287. The galaxy’s main body is too dim to study easily, so instead they observed seven of its globular clusters – bright, tight-packed gatherings of stars that move around the galaxy. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2082010-ghostly-galaxies-are-light-on-stars-but-heavy-on-dark-matter/
 
Hour Four
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block A:  Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War Attack Submarines, by Alfred Scott McLaren (1 of 4)    “America’s nuclear submarines could be said to have become boringly reliable and relentlessly capable and powerful. That may well be so now but, if you have talked with some of the captains of the earlier versions of those ‘boats’ or read this book, you will soon learn that was not always so. The author graduated from diesel subs and then served on and commanded a number of nuclear boats from 1958 to 1965. Among his many adventures was the first underwater―and largely under ice―transit of the Northwest Passage aboard USS Seadragon. They were pioneering days and a spirit of adventure prevailed. McLaren and his colleagues were explorers at heart and the new technology enabled them to go, as they say, where ‘no man had gone before.’ In an unpretentious, almost laconic, way he weaves a vivid and fascinating tale of those early days when the nuclear learning curve was so steep. A delightful, informative and educational tale.”―Baird Maritime.com
“Silent and Unseen is a very enjoyable book. By reading this book, young officers can gain more realistic knowledge of submarine service and understand more clearly how important our modern nuclear submarines are to the safety of our country.”―The Daybook, Hampton Roads Naval Museum     http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Unseen-Patrol-Attack-Submarines/dp/1612518451/ref=la_B001JS5OJY_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462577715&sr=1-1
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War Attack Submarines, by Alfred Scott McLaren (2 of 4)
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War Attack Submarines, by Alfred Scott McLaren (3 of 4)
Friday  6 May 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War Attack Submarines, by Alfred Scott McLaren (4 of 4)
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