The John Batchelor Show

Monday 2 October 2017

Air Date: 
October 02, 2017

Photo:
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, the Great Voice of the Great Lakes
 
Hour One
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 1, Block A: Tom Joscelyn, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies; & Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal; and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD; in re:  Terror and Las Vegas.
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 1, Block B: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal and FDD; and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD; in re: Air strikes n Libya. AFRICOM. US waged an air campaign, Odyssey Lightning, last year; helped dislodge ISIS from Sirte, its Libyan city, In Jan, US stuck a camp south of Sirte. Now not clear what presence ISIS has in Libya right now. DoD: 800 or so fighters there?  Formerly, State said 1,700.    Before, was estimated at 6,000.
SIGAR has an annual attrition rate of one-third! Those killed or wounded are more.
Lessons learned from 15 years in Afghanistan: SIGAR ; BY PHIL HEGSETH | October 2, 2017
The Congressionally mandated Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued a detailed report evaluating the current challenges facing the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) and the lessons learned from America’s nearly 15-year campaign in the country. The report argues that security priorities guiding US decisions early in...
https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2017/10/lessons-learned-from-15-years-in-afghanistan-sigar.php
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 1, Block C: Gordon Chang, Daily Beast and Forbes,com, in re: Bannon in China, economic nationalist, made a house call on a prominent man, Wang Chi-shan, said to fight corruption (i.e., consolidate power).    What went on in that mtg?  Bannon came back, renewed his call for the US to defend itself in the trade war with China.  Every conversation he holds between now and the 2018 elections will be about China. In 60 Minutes, Bannon said: “China is at economic war against us.” He recalled the 1950s Cold War, the Committee on the Present Danger.  “China ran up a $309 bil deficit against the US last year.” How? Are Chinese better salesmen than Americans? No. Rather, they close their market to foreign competitors; outright break laws; return state enterprises [SOEs] to being monopolies.  China cannot successfully compete with the US because its system is antithetical to that. They make up for it by theft of IP or plain cybertheft.  US is wrong not to have stopped this in the past.
Beijing just picked up an especially formidable opponent.  The Chinese don't have a chance.  See this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2017/10/02/smart-money-on-bannon-as-he-takes-on-china/#2cefda937e96
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Zuckerberg blocks billionaire.    “Facebook blocks Chinese billionaire.  [Guo]”Blocked WhatsApp (owned by FB) to intimidate.  Zuckerberg has a sot spot for China – his wife is Chinese.  We're doing business with people who use strong-arm methods common to gangsters. It’s up to Trump, this Adm, and Congress, to create conditions where Americans aren't forced to cave in in such a craven manner. Craven: also Tim Cook.  Tillerson also evinces a warmth toward China unearned by Beijing.  A puzzle: on his first trip there, he repeated China’s formulation of Great Power relations.  Scared the daylights out of neighbors.’
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 1, Block D: Gordon Chang, Daily Beast and Forbes,com, in re: North Korea. Mr Tillerson and the Kim regime.  “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State State, that’s he’s wasting is time talking to little Rocket Man.”  Wonderful?  Yike.  State Secy has a foreign policy inconsistent with that of the president. Lots of reasons to fire the Secretary of State.   Tillerson shd have brought in his own people. Anyway, he’s out of his depth.  On his first visit to China, he undermined all US policy there. Tilllerson sounds as though he’s been talking to the Chinese, crediting them with special insight. “Appease the Chinese” – after all they've not done to rein in Rocket Man.  Norks are not willing to speak about ending their nuclear weapons.  Tillerson has made the same mistake twice.  He’s beyond improvement.  He’s trying to sell China something, wants them to smile when he leaves the room 
 
Hour Two
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner, and John Fund, NRO, in re: The Las Vegas shooter: a high-stakes gambler dabbled in real estate investment in Texas.  Twice divorced, owned two small planes; son of a famous bank robber.  Three times, the Amaq News Agency, ISIS propaganda, has claimed that the shooter converted to Islam and carried out his attack at the direction of ISIS.  Amaq rarely lies on this scale.  He had ammonium nitrate (which sounds like ISIS), and he killed people he didn't know at all; no suicide note; left his car with the valet; his wife is from Indonesia (the world’s most populous Muslim nation). The whole event was a mission: no triggering event. Would have been in contact with his control agent digitally right up to and into the shooting. Twenty-four hours later and no motive?  A one-way missi0n for a convert?  Note that some of the 9/11 bombers were in Vegas first. Five hundred wounded (and 60 dead) is a major strike. Look for a digital pattern.
Recall the French attack on the soccer stadium; other attacks large gatherings.  Devolved into an argument about gun control here.  . . . Shooter’s not having left a suicide note is disturbing.
Puerto Rico represents a unique logistical challenge. Infrastructure not up to US standards, will have to be rebuilt. PR on Tuesday, Las Vegas on Wednesday.  San Juan mayor is well known as a hothead; other mayors on the island strongly disagree with her evaluation. PR vote is extremely important to Democratic party; many displaced islanders will move to Florida, which has 29 electoral votes. That importantly changes voting demographics.
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 2, Block B:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner, and John Fund, NRO, in re: Taxes! If the GOP doesn't get this done, 2018 will be disastrous – Republicans will think, “If they control all three houses and can't get it done, I won't bother voting.”
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 2, Block C:  David Livingston, The Space Show, and Dr Pete Worden, former director of NASA AMES and chairman, Breakthrough Initiative*; in re:  . ., incl Breakthrough _____ from Santiago, Chile, looking for evidence of life elsewhere.    . .  Can unfurl a very light sail and accelerate a tiny probe (1 gram) to a major percentage of the speed of light. . . . Chairman Avi Loeb (Harvard); we identified about 265 big challenges. First, laser beamer, itself – 50-100 gigawatts of power. A thousand times more powerful than anything we've produced to date; today, wd be a trillion dollars. Need it at closer to $10 bil. Light sail: 4 or 5 meters in diameter, ultralight.  Acceleration = 50K Earth gravities.  Also, question of how to communicate back from Alpha Centauri (4.3 lightyears).  Maybe a tiny laser on the spacecraft; turned the sail back and used it like a telescope to send back. Yuri Milner has committed $100 million.
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 2, Block D: David Livingston, The Space Show, and Dr. Pete Worden, the former director of NASA AMES and chairman, Breakthrough Initiative; in re:
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* Breakthrough Initiatives is a program founded in 2015 and funded by Yuri Milner to search for extraterrestrial intelligence over a span of at least 10 years. The program is divided into multiple projects. Breakthrough Listen will comprise an effort to search over 1,000,000 stars for artificial radio or laser signals. A parallel project called Breakthrough Message is an effort to create a message "representative of humanity and planet Earth." The project Breakthrough Starshot aims to send a swarm of probes to the nearest star at about 20% the speed of light. The project Breakthrough Watch aims to identify and characterize Earth-sized, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth
 
Hour Three
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 3, Block A: Adam White, Yale Journal on Regulation**, in re: How Scalia would handle today’s legal matters.
** A Blog from the Yale Journal on Regulation and the ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice. An Affiliate of the Law Professor Blogs Network / http://yalejreg.com/nc/scalia-and-chevron-not-drawing-lines-but-resolvin...
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 3, Block B: Adam White, Yale Journal on Regulation, in re: How Scalia would handle today’s legal matters.
**Scalia and Chevron: Not Drawing Lines, but Resolving Tensions  Among the many reasons for mourning Justice Scalia’s untimely passing (on which I’ve written at length elsewhere) is the fact that his death abruptly cut short his late-career reconsiderations of the administrative state.
As Aaron Nielson observes, recent years had seen Justice Scalia expressing serious doubts about judicial deference to agency interpretations of their own rules — that is, doubts about the Seminole RockAuer doctrine that he had expounded for so long. Beginning with his Talk America concurrence in 2011, Scalia newly questioned whether allowing agencies to both write and interpret the law clashed with the Framers’ fundamental view, per Montesquieu, that the tasks of lawmaking, execution, and adjudication be kept separate.
By the time that he issued his concurrence last Term in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers, Scalia was long past the point of asking questions. Wholly embracing this critique of Auer, which he had drawn from his former clerk John Manning, Scalia announced that “I would . . . restore the balance originally struck by the APA with respect to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations, not by rewriting the Act in order to make up for Auer, but by abandoning Auer and applying the Act as written. The agency is free to interpret its own regulations with or without notice and comment; but courts will decide—with no deference to the agency—whether that interpretation is correct.”
But his Perez concurrence contained an even more surprising attack: on Chevron itself. The “problem” of judicial deference “is bad enough,” Scalia wrote, “and perhaps insoluble if Chevron is not to be uprooted, with respect to interpretive rules setting forth agency interpretation of statutes.”
Scalia made at least a passing attempt to distinguish Chevron from Auer: “As I have described elsewhere, the rule of Chevron, if it did not comport with the APA, at least was in conformity with the long history of judicial review of executive action, where ‘[s]tatutory ambiguities . . . were left to reasonable resolution by the Executive.’ United States v. Mead Corp., 533 U. S. 218, 243 (2001) ( Scalia, J., dissenting ). I am unaware of any such history justifying deference to agency interpretations of its own regulations.”
But no matter how he nominally limited it, even this restrained criticism of Chevron surprised those who had watched 
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 3, Block C: Jerry Hendrix, CNAS, in re: US Navy and Puerto Rico 
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 3, Block D: Eric C. Anderson, Osiris.
 
Hour Four
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 4, Block A: David Reynolds, Ph.D., The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 4, Block B: David Reynolds, Ph.D., The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 4, Block C: Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War
Monday 2 October   2017 / Hour 4, Block D: Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War