Friday 9 December 2016
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JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Liz Peek, Fiscal Times & Fox News, in re: Like LBJ, Trump Is Loving the Role of America’s Dealmaker. Think Donald Trump is a one-off? Not quite -- in many ways, he appears a successor to LBJ. Following the unprecedented election of Donald J. Trump, many continue to look for precedents. The real...
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Joshua Green, , in re: NIGEL FARAGE GOES TO WASHINGTON A day with Mr. Brexit, who has some radical international trade ideas for his new BFF, Donald Trump [Farage: pron FAR-ahzh, rhymes with British pronunciation of GARage] “I’ve been coming to this city quite regularly for quite a long time,” Nigel Farage said on Dec. 1, flashing a grin as he sipped coffee in a café at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington. “Speeches, lunches, dinners with groups of Republicans.” He rolled his eyes. “Not this trip,” he said, laughing. “For the first time in 20 years, I’m a free man.” A tourist approached to request a selfie, which delighted Farage—it’s his thing. Three days after the election, Farage tweeted a shot of himself and Donald Trump roaring with laughter inside Trump’s gold-plated elevator that went viral. Now everyone wanted one. http://twitter.us13.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=
a0fd6f3f123ded4f1a8830ee8&id=4ddb018c69&e=6226aef03e
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Dan Henninger, WSJ editorial board, in re: http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-as-lady-gaga-1481154430?tesla=y
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 1, Block D: Amos Guiora, Israeli-American professor of law at S. J. Quinney College of Law, University, & Salt Lake Tribune; in re: Op-ed: In this age of internet hatred, it’s time to revisit limits on free speech. Swastikas spray-painted on the door of a Colorado elementary school and on several college campuses. A rally for the president-elect of the United States featuring a "Heil Hitler" salute. A proposed registry for Muslims leading to unease and fear across communities.
Benjamin Kuperman, a professor at Oberlin College, awoke to sounds of tapping outside his home to find that a note behind his mezuzah (a small case that contains verses from the Torah, common for Jews to place on their door frames) that stated, "Gas Jews Die." A similar scenario unfolded at Harvard University, where a professor recently received a postcard stating, "Juden raus!" a phrase introduced by the Nazis that translates to mean "Jews out."
Take out the location and time stamp on the aforementioned examples, and it's easy to see why many are comparing the rise of white nationalists in the U.S. to Nazi Germany decades ago. To some, these incidents are clear-cut examples of hate speech. To others, expressing the viewpoint of the so-called white nationalist movement is a First Amendment right that should be allowed — and celebrated — as free speech without censorship.
The growing division between these schools of thought brings up a simple question with a complicated answer: How much intolerance should be tolerated?
Some may argue the issue was settled long ago in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 1969 when the court reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had advocated violence. Clarence Brandenburg was charged and convicted for advocating violence under Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute in 1964 for speeches he made.
At one rally, he stated "Personally, I believe the n----- should be returned to Africa, the Jew returned to Israel." He also commented, as several Klan members stood by with firearms, "We're not a revengent organization, but if our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken."
Brandenburg appealed his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming Ohio's statute violated his First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution. The court sided with him, issuing what is still considered today to be its most speech-protective holding. The ruling created a litmus test citing three factors when speech can be prohibited: 1) if the speech promotes imminent harm, 2) there is a high likelihood the speech will result in listeners’ participating in illegal action and 3) the speaker intended to incite others to participate in illegality.
The task of drawing the line in determining when speech incites others to behave is enormously complex.
The 1969 ruling came well before the digital age. We live in a time where clicks and shares spread hate and false information instantaneously across the internet.
Given the tone and tenor in society following the election of Donald Trump, I believe it is time to revisit limits on free speech.
The challenge is to determine what degree of extremist internet speech can be tolerated — in the context of freedom of speech — before determining that extremist speech poses a clear and present danger. Balancing is essential; the consequences of unjustified limitations of free speech are antithetical to a democracy. On the other hand, speech has the potential of harming. The adage "words kill" is neither amorphous nor abstract.
Speech must be handled with sensitivity, intelligence and honesty. When reasonable to assume speech will cause harm to others, we should prevent it. If unclear whether speech will result in harm, it must be protected; otherwise over-reach is the inevitable and problematic result.
Brandenburg must be understood to not only protect the speaker's rights, but to also ensure protection of potential targets. As has been made dramatically clear in the past weeks, there is potential danger to minority groups. They are deserving of our protection. We are living in a time when reports of hate are surfacing at an alarming rate.
This is not the type of society we should be comfortable accepting. We need a national conversation that asks: "What are the limits of tolerating hate?" We may find in these discussions that we have already well surpassed our acceptable threshold for these limits.
Amos N. Guiora is a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. He’s author of Crime of Complicity: The Bystander in the Holocaust (forthcoming) and Tolerating Intolerance: The Price of Protecting Extremism. http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4654643-155/op-ed-in-this-age-of-internet
Hour Two
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 2, Block A: Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-revi...
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 2, Block B: Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: http://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-buildup-in-kaliningrad-to-test-donald-trump-on-nato-1481279401
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Sebastian von Gorka, The Institute of World Politics, in re: On the eve of a new administration that has promised more aggressive counterterrorism operations, the Obama White House has released a lengthy compendium of its own policies governing the use of force.
The 61-page document outlines eight years of the administration’s legal opinions, executive orders and military directives. In a strong defense of the administration’s actions, it lists rules for lethal drones and terrorist detention and describes the international and domestic law that undergirds them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ahead-of-trump-white-house-obama-administration-releases-memo-outlining-use-of-force-rules/2016/12/05/5b234e3a-bb0f-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.8b133d1304ab
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: : Sebastian von Gorka, The Institute of World Politics (2 of 2)
Hour Three
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 3, Block A: John Tamny, RealClearMarkets & Forbes.com; in re: To 'Save' 800 Jobs, Trump Destroys Exponentially More Missed amid all the media hysteria about how Amazon's new grocery stores will "automate the American worker out of existence" is the historical truism that jobs are most abundant in the very locales where they're most rapidly being destroyed. If robots were really set to render us unemployable, there would be no investment in them to begin with. The rise of robots explicitly signals staggering amounts of new work forms that will be exponentially more productive than the work that exists today. As Say's Law makes plain, the goods and services abundance that robots foretell similarly signals the migration of previously underutilized workers into much more productive employment that will enable those previously displaced to consume at levels that will make the present seem impoverished by comparison.
Sorry Luddites, Amazon Go Will Be a Huge Job Creator "What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful or disastrous to the collection of individuals that make up a nation." Henry Hazlitt's assertion is one of the most powerful lines ever written in any economics book, and if politicians/economists understood it, the richest nation in the world would be exponentially richer. If Donald Trump is properly tutored on Hazlitt's quote he'll have a successful economic presidency. He's already good on taxes and deregulation, but protectionism always and everywhere hurts the individual, all the while weighing heavily on the value of the dollar that individuals earn. Trump's dollar stance is the big unknown. If he gets it wrong, he'll fail. If he follows the dollar lead of the Reagan and Clinton Treasuries, he'll succeed while proving all of his economic critics (including me) wrong. Law and Liberty.
What Will Donald Trump's Presidency Mean for the Dollar? Every book has value, and Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Alan Greenspan further disproves (albeit unwittingly) the popular - and false - notion that the Fed's low funds rate drove the housing boom of the 2000s. It didn't as the 1970s have long brightly shown. The problem with a very flawed book is that Mallaby wasn't the person to write about Greenspan. Rather than critique all the silly mysticism that informs economics, Mallaby plainly fell in love with his subject; and his crush grew the more that Greenspan trashed and/or departed from free market thinking. Mallaby's underlying theme is that the Fed centrally plans economic growth to all of our benefit, but if it had a fraction of the power that the author believes, the U.S. would be very poor. A book that accepts all the conventional - and discredited - non-wisdom embraced by economists is sure to show up on every "best of 2016" book list written by incoherent Keynesians and/or reviewers who never read it in the first place. Forbes.com. (1 of 2)
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 3, Block B: John Tamny, RealClearMarkets & Forbes.com; in re: The world would be a much better place if economists, politicians and pundits had this line from Henry Hazlitt memorized: “What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful of disastrous to the collection of individuals that make up a nation.”
It’s arguably the most important line ever written in any economics book. Hazlitt (1894-1993) was making the essential point that an economy is not a living, breathing blob; rather it’s a collection of individuals.
- See more at: http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/11/30/what-will-donald-trumps-preside... - See more at: http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/11/30/what-will-donald-trumps-preside... - See more at: http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/11/30/what-will-donald-trumps-preside... (2 of 2)
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 3, Block C: Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack, in re: China preparing for anti-satellite test? According to Pentagon officials China is preparing for a flight test of a new anti-satellite rocket. Test preparations for the Dong Neng-3 anti-satellite missile were detected at a military facility in central China, according to Pentagon officials familiar with reports of the impending test. Intelligence agencies were alerted to the impending test by China’s announcement of air closure zones covering the expected flight path of the DN-3.
The flight test could come as early as Thursday, the officials said. No other details of the missile test were available. A Pentagon spokesman and a State Department official both said, “We do not comment on intelligence matters.” One additional detail: The DN-3 rocket appears to be based on the Chinese commercial rocket Kuia-zhou, which a Chinese launch company is pitching to the international market as a vehicle for putting smallsats into orbit. (1 of 2)
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 3, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack (2 of 2)
Hour Four
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Holly Fretwell, PERC Montana and Montana State University at Bozeman, in re: Breaking the Backlog: 7 Ideas to Address the National Park Deferred Maintenance Problem This year, the National Park Service will celebrate its 100-year anniversary. But not all is well in our national parks. The agency will enter its second century with an $11.9 billion backlog in deferred maintenance projects, an amount five times higher than its average annual appropriations from Congress.
In this PERC Public Lands Report, we explore several creative ideas to address the deferred maintenance backlog in our national parks. These proposals are intended to expand the range of options for policymakers and park managers to consider as the nation turns its attention towards national parks in 2016. In particular, these reforms would enable parks to become more self-sufficient and less reliant on Congress for annual appropriations.
Stop acquiring more land for the park system and start prioritizing the care and maintenance of existing lands. — by Shawn Regan and Reed Watson
Dispose of unnecessary federal lands and use revenues to address the backlog. — by Shawn Regan
Continue to allow park managers to charge recreation fees and retain the revenues for maintenance and other critical projects. — by Holly Fretwell and Shawn Regan
Allow park managers to set their own fee programs without having to obtain approval from Congress. — by Holly Fretwell and Shawn Regan
Harness public-private partnerships for infrastructure needs. — by Leonard Gilroy
Outsource routine park operations to the private sector while maintaining public ownership and oversight. — by Holly Fretwell
Create a national park franchising system for new additions to the National Park System. — by Holly Fretwell Click here to download the full report (PDF). http://www.perc.org/articles/BreakingtheBacklog (1 of 2)
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Holly Fretwell, PERC Montana and Montana State University at Bozeman, in re: Breaking the Backlog: 7 Ideas to Address the National Park Deferred Maintenance Problem (2 of 2)
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Patrick Tucker, DefenseOne, in re: Global Engagement Act: to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation “counter disinformation with fact-based narratives” – this began as a specific block to counter extremism.
DARPA: Social Media under Rand Waltzman – how ideas spread online. Inability of US govt and DoD to fight damaging propaganda. US govt has access to laws but fears to use them; interpret US Code 153093
Michael Lumpkin at State: we use more and more data from Facebook, et al. Expansion of mission set. Even the mil acknowledges this is part of historical psyops. ISIS online. Podesta’s stolen emails, and cybercommand.
The US Is Losing at Influence Warfare. Here’s Why ; The Pentagon Wants Eye-Reading Software, X-Ray Tools, and A Virtual Facebook to Fight Terrorism
Friday 9 December 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Patrick Tucker, DefenseOne; in re: A big wearable robot: electric exoskeletons. Move, load weight around soldier’s body; stop bullets? Stochastic space. Iron man’s suit – needs to be easily donned using electrogels.
Ethan Hunt and minicamera glasses – need a transmitter (better capacitor) for a meaningful resolution. Portable lie detector to read face heat and eye movement: extract biometric signals for credibility assessment. Looking for algorithmic solutions. VTOL Boeing V22 Osprey: want its own little drone to provide 8.5 min of advance intell. [Ouch.] NATO and US forces much in harm’s way in Afghanistan, often land in areas where they have no intelligence, so this will vastly help. (2 of 2)
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