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JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes
 
Hour One
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD, in re: The full Orlando transcript includes phrases connecting the shooter to al Baghdadi. Sounds  like ceremonial, cult-like statements of Islamic killers.
Early today,  FBI released a partial transcript, quoted Mateen during a 911 call:  “I pledge allegiance to  [omitted].”  How dumb can you get??  Then the FBI and DoJ jointly issues a less-cut-up version.  With Omar Mateen, a consistent cult mentality through his life.  ISIS wants jihadists to commit attacks and pledge bayah (allegiance) to Baghdadi jus before you die.  Mateen did this four times the night of the attack. The whole idea of IS is that the leader of the caliphate is the Top Guy.  At odds with how al Qaeda operates. 
Taliban and US drone strikes killed an emir – Taliban says the West has failed to understand the psychology of Taliban –p we long to die while fighting for our cause of Islam; Quran says here’s no greater honor.  Killing us won't take us to the negotiating table; you're giving us exactly what we want.   The US has done zilch to get them to negotiate. And why would they now??   Our best chance would have been when we had the most troops in-country.   They translate modern, robotic warfare into their own strength.
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD, in re:    Fifty-one members of State Dept wrote a letter proposing a change in course of US policy and strikes on Assad’s regime in Syria.  What would that accomplish”?  Assad, agree he’s evil, is the source of most of the deaths in Syria – but if the US bombed Assad to oblivion, what would happen? “Assad is the real cause of ISIS” – not.  ISIS is not monocausal and that’s a stupid analysis. The noti0n that removing one guy would solve it all is absurd.  A US mil action in Syria would immediately tangle with Russia; does State want actual hot war with Russia?  Don't ask a practical and realistic question which is not the purview of State bureaucracies. They're just frustrated.  Is State just trying to work with al Nusrah (= al Qaeda)?  Yup, some are.    Some high people in Washington foreign policy establishment want to collaborate with al Qaeda.  /  Iran:  ”We’ll fight in Iran and Syria till the last jihadi is killed” – i.e., Iran is in this for the long haul. Iranian resources? (The US just gave Teheran $150 billion.) Maybe have lost a thousand Iranian troops so far; recall that Iran and Iraq fought a bloody war for eight years and millions died. 
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 1, Block C:  Gordon G. Chang, Daily Beast & Forbes.com, in re: Chinese PLA navy says: if the Hague Court rules that China annexed the rocks that it now occupies, China will immediate militarize the entire bogus island.  Chinese navy, masked as fishermen intruded deeply into Filipino waters and also Indonesian. China is increasing the tempo of it s provocations in anticipation of Hague Ruling,  One Chinese ship rammed a Filipino boat, and Indonesia was obliged to fire on a Chinese vessel way out of line and one crew member may have been injured,  The US has the Stennis and the Reagan nearby.  Indonesia is bringing military assets to bear. It detained a Chinese “fishing” boat – which was seized out of detention by a pirate Chinese military vessel.  Henceforth, Jakarta elected to bring in much heavier craft and stand its ground.  A Weibo Chinese user: “Where's the hawkish faction in the military” – a  billet-doux sent by the PLA to itself.  The Chinese Communist Party has encouraged a raw form of nationalism to empower itself – in its view, everyone needs to be in the tributary system of the imperial era, and kowtow. Beijing is displeased. Indonesia is over a thousand miles from the Chinese coastline, which is inconvenient for Beijing. 
A former diplomat, a major Chinese dove, died in a car accident three days ago.  Much national suspicion thereupon.  Recall Arunachal Pradesh, and the South China Sea and the East China Sea – China is overextending itself militarily. 
Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, now all activated against China.    Recall the ASEAN meeting in Kunming where guests (incl Singapore and Vietnam) condemned China.  Ouch.   China is arming fishing vessels to the teeth, which will lead to bad events.  China’s interbank rate rose 80% y-o-y -  overnight lending is now 83%  of all lending.  China is playing its last card and it’s not working.  Once you pollute the interbank mkt with dodgy participants, it’s over.
Bad Assets to Soar in China's Interbank Market, by Gordon G. Chang ,  
Last month, overnight lending in China’s interbank market rose 80% year-on-year.  This surge is the result of a general reluctance to lend for more than a few hours, an acknowledgement that bad assets are rapidly accumulating in that market. Perverse incentives are encouraging banks and nonbank financial institutions to take on risky investments, both on and off balance sheets. Concerns about exposure are unmistakable symptoms of financial stress.
The People’s Bank of China , the central bank, has kept short-term money cheap as a means of maintaining GDP growth in an economy that is relentlessly slowing. Almost all financial institutions are under pressure to boost returns as rates fall, so cash has found its way to dubious projects. High-risk lending, unfortunately, is increasingly common.
Specifically, banks have, through various means, invested in high-yielding wealth management products, the notorious WMPs, which are making a comeback from the first years of this decade.
All banks have been bulking up on risky “shadow” assets. For instance, . . .
Read the article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2016/06/19/bad-assets-to-soar-in-chinas-interbank-market/#67440b624c0e
Follow me on Twitter TWTR +1.49% @GordonGChang and on Forbes.  
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 1, Block D:  Jed Babbin,  American Spectator, in re:  Syrian civil war, al Nurah gangsters, ISI gangsters, and plenty of oddly-named groups running around in between . Fifty-one State Dept members have signed a letter avowing a policy wildly divergent from the policies of the White House? Independently?  No.  They have this dissent channel, established during the Vietnam War.  Assad has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism since 19__.  Will the White House call in a drone strike on the State Dept?  The Vichy John Kerry chieftain.   .  . There’s an air defense system at Latakia that’s first –rate – owned and run  by Moscow.  For the US to take out Assad, we'd have to take on half the Russian air force and also Iran. There’s an S-400 at Latakia - top of the line.  This is what State calls policy???  State doesn't think at all about defense or missile systems.  Are these political appointments? What’s going on?  In the interagency appointment process - -  John Brennan testified that we haven't at all interrupted ISIS.   Can’t take this seriously.   . . .   If Assad disappears, that doesn't solve anything – like poking a stick into a wasps’ nest.   This scale of knuckleheadedness from the State Dept?  Yes – they have an ivory tower from their first day, and they do whatever they want irrespective of facts on the ground.  People obviously not in touch with reality being consulted by this Administration. Asking for air strikes on a head of state whose country is in a civil war with our enemy.  The whole crew should be run out of town.
 
Hour Two
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 2, Block A:   David M Drucker, Senior Congressional correspondent, Washington Examiner, and John Fund, NRO, in re:   Lewandowski is escorted out of the building. Like major-league baseball, where you can't fire the players so you fire the manager.    Skipping over the meeting in the boiler room of the Titanic; the RNC put up $13 million, c.f. $2 mil at the DNC.  The billionaire has on hand for his election:  FEC report, he had 1.2 million the bank at he end of May; the RNC had $20 mil then.  The RNC is the guts of the Trump campaign – not in dreadful shape but not good.  Trump has theoretically hundreds of millions at his disposal.  The biggest commodity in a presidential campaign is money, and second is time. Trump has lost a month, and has no fundraising network. Currently a small superPAC of a mil or so; a Navy SEAL vet speaking to camera on Orlando killings, but nothing like the array of battleground ads htat the Dems have.  No boots on the ground in battleground states.   How you disperse them is a really big deal. In  the UK, people are puzzled and appalled by Trump; even more to have a campaign manager so consummately incompetent and his firing took a family intervention.
Trump says he has a campaign staff of 76, of whom half are personally loyal to Lewandowski.  Who's left in the boiler room?  The band playing , “Nearer My God to Thee.”   Mrs Clinton is still a historically unpopular candidate, but her numbers are rising.   
Trump needs to raise funds; he’s put $2 million in as personal loans to the campaign, and next incoming money needs to be assigned not to personal repayment.  
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Senior Congressional correspondent, Washington Examiner, and John Fund, NRO, in re:    Brexit led by Red Boris Johnson, London mayor; the Remain camp led by the PM.  Then the tragic assassination of the young member of Parliament, Jo Cox.  On Monday, the stock mkt and pound sterling rallied on the thought that Remain might win.   Stay side has hired Jim Messina of the Obama campaign to get the voters out. Can the surge last through Thursday’s vote?  After the murder, more somber. Yes – 60% of the laws passed by UK Parliament have been passed at the behest of Europe. Who controls Britain’s democratic powers? Polls in UK get a lot of major prognostications wrong – much more than in US.  There’s a shy-voter problem in England.  The status quo always has an advantage of one or two points at the end.  The Great American PAC (pro-Trump) had $500 K in May.  He’s lent his campaign more money; in FEC filing, money paid to Mar-a-Lago, to his children ; aides paid handsomely by campaign standards.  Has Trump paid himself?  A lot of cash to Trump businesses that’ll raise a lot of scrutiny.  This is called “self-dealing.”  The June report will be made public on July 20; probably will look different. 
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Frans Willekens, den Haag; & Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock; & Science magazine,  in re:  . . .  Fully 40% of migrants in that 80-yar period became re-migrants: they returned.  We don't record this! How can people today make policy on migrations when they have totally inadequate data? Policies need to be based on evidence. Absent evidence, they’re based on opinions . . .  A picture of a family in Serbia crawling under barbed wired; heartbreaking  Do we know where people came from and where they are now? Usu we know where they come from; otherwise, it’s all anecdotal. That’s a horrible photo; we’ve learned nothing since WWII.
International migration under the microscope BY FRANS WILLEKENS, DOUGLAS MASSEY, JAMES RAYMER, CRIS BEAUCHEMIN  Although humanitarian crises, such as the ongoing mass exodus from Syria toward Europe, tend to focus global attention on migration, each year millions of people migrate to and from affected countries throughout the world. Progress has been made in understanding drivers of migration, and we have relatively good data on immigrant populations, but we lack information on how many people leave their country each year to settle elsewhere and who these emigrants are. The impact of migration on the individual and on sending and receiving communities and countries is only partly understood. Economic effects can be very different from the impacts on society and culture; some gain from migration, whereas others lose. The lack of knowledge creates systemic risks and uncertainties and frustrates public debate and the formation of effective policies. As high-level leaders convene to discuss such issues at the first United Nations World Humanitarian Summit, we outline priorities for migration data collection, research, and training.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6288/897.full
Frans Willekens is Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. He is Emeritus Professor of Population Studies, University of Groningen and Honorary Fellow at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague. He is a member of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His main research interest is life course modelling and simulation. Simulations result in synthetic life histories and virtual populations that are accurate representations of real populations. Frans Willekens studied agricultural engineering and economics at the University of Leuven and holds a PhD in Urban Systems Engineering and Policy Planning from the Technological Institute, Northwestern University, USA. He was Deputy Director of NIDI from 1980 to 1993, Professor of Demography at the University of Groningen from 1989 to 2003 and Director of NIDI from 2003 to 2011. In April 2013 he joins the MPIDR in Rostock. His research will focus on modelling and simulation of international migration.
 
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: Frans Willekens, den Haag; & Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock; & Science magazine,  in re:  Lack of data for international migrations. Huge need therefor.  Currently 3.3% of the world’s population is living not in its home country.  . . . Finland, Norway and Sweden successfully share data; the European Commission is trying to [catch up].  Second recommendation is a World Migration Survey: interview people may places, find out where they intend to go, conditions, and related info.  The theory of behavior says hat people’s intentions are fairly good indications of behavior.   This will cost hundreds of millions.  A proud group can do this: economists, sociologist, mathematicians – a group to be trained, involving mobility and diversity.  People migrate for many reasons – for jobs, to join families.   Fragmented research and limited data must be addressed. . . .
Frans Willekens is Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. He is Emeritus Professor of Population Studies, University of Groningen and Honorary Fellow at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague. He is a member of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) . . .
 
Intermediate broadcast: . . .Combination of warmer temperatures and Man’s hunting led to extinctions, incl of a grizzly bear then times the size of one now,  and . . .
 
Hour Three
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 3, Block A:   Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board & host of Opinion Journal on WSJ Video; in re:   Opinion Journal: The Senate's Gun-Control Debate  The WSJ editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, on efforts this week to limit the Second Amendment. / Lewandowski left the Trump campaign bldg.  Maybe escorted by security, Manafort is now campaign manager; says he’ll be hiring, There’s no staff, fundraising, get-out-the-vote.  The only good news may be that the Trump family has realized the campaign is in free fall.  Can Manafort muster what he needs to muster a successful campaign against Clinton? (“Do you lose by five runs or twenty-five?”)  The FBI releases a severely edited transcript of Orlando. Geniuses.  A classic definition of an own goal. Obama constantly tried s to shift discussion from national security to gun control and gay rights.   In the transcript you see that Mateen was a confirmed jihadist.  The largest massacre in US history was an ISIS deed.   White House avoids talking about jihadism; speak instead of gun control Opposite:  the NRA tries to focus on terror, as does Trump in an inartful and crude way . .  . Need to let people on no-fly list appeal, for Pete’s sake.  The elephant in the room is the fact that we've had ISIS attacks in Florida, Texas, California, New York   There’s a serious threat here and the Democrats don’t want to talk about it.   A GOP donor said, “This isn't triage; it's a massive, surgery-type deal and we don't have enough time left.”   . . . Utah and Arizona may be in play for Democrats – this is nuts.
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 3, Block B:   John Tamny, Forbes.com, RealClearMarkets, & author, Who Needs the Fed?; in re:  Fiat money: the US prospers with it while Haiti wouldn’t. Fiat money has no exchangeable value, as in no exchange for gold or silver.  When we invest, we’re buying dollars for the future. If the value is decreasing, we’ll buy land or safe things.   If money holds its value, the investor can say, I’ll commit a million dollars today hoping to get five mil back in a decade. Holztman doesn’t like govt debt because he doesn’t like govt spending,; but to crate unlimited paper makes it easy for govt to run up lots of debt. I have a problem with that: buying Treasurys is that.  . .  . Does the money come from the govt? NO – it has no resources – it c an only use our money.  Uses it in a way that doesn't grow the economy.    All govt spending is govt debt b/c that money is ours.  The real problem is the size of govt, itself.  . . . In a rich country like outs, govt has a lot of resources to extract in order to build roads.  Keynesians think that govt spending creates wealth – wrong. 
“As recently as the year 2000, the state of Ohio had more paved roads than all of Russia combined.  This is a reminder that contrary to Paul Krugman's confused belief that government spending drives economic growth, it's always and everywhere an effect of private growth.  Government spending is an unfortunate tradeoff of productive private economic activity.  Still, certain Austrians aren't much better than Krugman in assuming the right to print money without the restraint is the same as the right to borrow money.  Each thought process presumes that governments, for being governments, can conjure resources out of thin air.  Forbes.com.
“Confusion About Deficits and Spending Isn't Just a Keynesian Thing    Though Russia as a country is so geographically vast as to comprise no less than eleven different time zones, a fun fact about it is that as recently as the year 2000 the state of Ohio had more paved roads than Russia in total.  Think about that.  A state that is mid-range by U.S. economic standards, and that embodies the perception of ‘Midwest’ perhaps more than any Midwest U.S. state, has more paved roads than Russia.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2016/06/19/keynesianaustriancomity...
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 3, Block C:   Harry Siegel, New York Daily News and Daily Beast, in re: "New York’s Finest Taxi Service was not your usual taxi service. It was a ring of corrupt cops in the NYPD who ran a high-profit racket driving smugglers and drug dealers all over the city. For a few hundred dollars a mile, you got your own blue-and-white and a police escort. They even had their own business cards.”
Sometimes, life imitates art — in this case the neo-noir The Usual Suspects. It had been two decades since I’d seen the film in the theater, but I watched it again this week after one ranking officer in the NYPD, appalled by the deluge of ugly news about peers on the force, brought up the Finest Taxi Service.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/harry-siegel-usual-suspects-nypd-arti...
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 3, Block D: Lou Ann Hammond, Driving the Nation, in re:  The next 25 years for BMW? Rolls-Royce: an autonomous Batmobile? – completely out of this world. It looks like a chariot with fur wheels; opens up, you sit down; a Starship Enterprise deck; it closes and rolls forward. You tell it what to do and it takes you there. The Spirit of Ecstasy is the lovely figure on the hood*; the model for the emblem was Eleanor Velasco Thornton.  Hence, the new, magic voice is called Eleanor.   When you order the car to come over, a little step emerges. 
BM has already bought a carbon-fiber company. There’ll be no steering wheel, no combustion engine.  The only familiar thing will be the four tires.  Audi took a vehicle from LA to Las Vegas autonomously with no problem.   Elon Musk is launching Dragon in 2018; car mfrs are sluggish, Vaporware? No – the problem is regulations. Remember, there are no stop signs in the sky for Elon Musk to have to obey.  Best way to start is to use all the HOV lanes for autonomous vehicles.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-16/rolls-royce-s-vision-next-100-concept-includes-a-silk-sofa  ;  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGSm082ELXY
* The Spirit of Ecstasy is the bonnet ornament on Rolls-Royce cars. It is in the form of a woman leaning forwards with her arms outstretched behind and above her. Billowing cloth runs from her arms to her back, resembling wings.
 
Hour Four
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 4, Block A:  Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen (1 of 4)
“This well-written narrative of legal history demonstrates what happens when the powerful and elite in society fail to protect the powerless and poor…Imbeciles combines an investigative journalist’s instinct for the misuse of power, a lawyer’s analytic abilities, and a historian’s eye for detail to tell this compelling and emotional story…[The book] serves as a cautionary tale about what may happen when those who have, or obtain, power use the institutions of government and the law to advance their own interests at the expense of those who are poor, disadvantaged, or of different ‘hereditary’ stock.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“[IMBECILES is] the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism—human survival of the fittest—to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of ‘feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistics and other degenerate persons.’”—David Oshinksy, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
“In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America… Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an exposé of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“IMBECILES indicts and convicts any number of villains, albeit with proper judicial restraint. Cohen mostly lets the facts speak for themselves…[and] skillfully frames the case within the context of the early 20th century eugenics movement…[The book’s] considerable power lies in Cohen’s closer examination of the principal actors…Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. But thanks to Adam Cohen, we shall never forget it.” —Boston Globe
“Cohen…tells the shocking story of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S. history…and demonstrates to a fare-thee-well how every step along the way, our system of justice failed…The last chapter of the case of Carrie Buck, Cohen reveals, hasn't been written…IMBECILES leaves you wondering whether it can happen here — again.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“An important new book…which details the eugenic horror that still haunts the American legal system… Cohen’s narrative of the legal case that enshrined these practices is a page-turner, and the story it tells is deeply, almost physically, infuriating… Cohen reminds us of the simple, shocking fact that while forced sterilizations are rare today, they remain legal because American courts have never overturned Buck v. Bell.”—The New Republic
“Imbeciles is lively, accessible and, inevitably, often heart-wrenching.”—Nature
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen (2 of 4)
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen (3 of 4)
Monday 20 June 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen (4 of 4)
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