Photo: Standard of His Imperial Highness Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (obverse). See: Hour 1, Blocks A and B.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block A: Gregory Copley, Defense and Foreign Affairs, in re: Hadrian’s Wall, East-West across the north of England to keep out the babarbarians; wall lasted about 300 years. US and Russia, both with nukes, oppose each other in Ukraine and Syria.  Neither seems able to restrain the threats. The use of sovereignty – to what do you owe allegiance?
The intersting thing is that for forty years we've seen a progressive assault on the concept of sovereighty, esp by the USSR, which intended to usher in global governance (“anti-national, anti-sovereign entity”). Oppressed states recovceverd ownership in the 1990s. Now, concept is movng through Eurppe and the US. Loss of identitiy.  Occurs sporadically throughout history: we get rich ensconced in cities, trade, feel we no longer need the protecton and securty of clans, families; we transfer allegiance from innat nationaism to material things.  We see  our greatness as embodied in what we own. A most transitory sense of security and identity. Ultimately, we feel lost.
What does our country or civilization represent? Around the world, peoples returning to ancient forms of identity.  The nation-state begins with an individual’s sense of identuity, and his family and clan, and esp with his sense of geography.  Individual sense of sovereignty goes: family-clan-nation-civilization. 
If people no longer think of themselves as Canadian or Australiaan or French, where are we drifting to?  Countries reveting most rapidly to sovereign identity are the ones who will succeed soonest. Chinese and Rusians stand out. National-ism [sic] gives the most coherence to decisin-making, emphatic in rotcting and achieving their own goals. Where sovereignty is a thing of the past, tend to lack goals. Trump at UN said “sovereignty” nineteen times. Obama in his final speech to the UN attacked the very concept of sovereignty.   Fortune of he US and similar declined inn htat period; fortunes of the others rose. . . . What we’re seeing is the future in an old form – cyclical: sovereignty will create cohesion. A way of organizing ourselves with loyalty to a nation-state. This explans our fecklessness of the past dozen years. Naval-gazing by both GOP and Democrats; Bush 41 spent the “peace dividend” for a new world order where we no longer had to worry about borders and sovereignty.  This continued through Clinton, G W Bush and Obama.
Chinese are opening a new base in Vanuatu. Have absolute control over their miliitary base in Djbouti – where they took over the old US-forces base! Commercial part of port is separate, where Chinese are developing a free trade area.
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block B: Gregory Copley, Defense and Foreign Affairs, in re:   We have a large group who vote for transnational orgs – UN, climate change, world court. Our ntionalism has a battle ‘twixt those who favor and those who oppose: Enemies take advantage of us. Collapse of the antignione of Delta; the original UN.   Philip of Macedon grew weary of them, then swept them s aside throug the sheer use of power using ability to raise troops, provision them, etc.  Seized control of the Helllenic states. Again, League of Nations created by rich states hoping to defer settlement of scores. As soon as it was obvious that it was only a powerful talkfest, Italy seized Ethiopia. The Emperor Haile Selassie’s famous and prophetic speech ended: Today it is us, tomorrow it will be you.
We’ll start to see changes showing the UN to be powerless. We see it today in its peacekeeping operations – has never actually resolved any crisis at all; merely suppresses the problems while it’s physically there.   See: Middle East, Korea, Balkans, Cyprus.  Urban sophists demand open borders; every time that’s occurred in history, someone violated it, with return to nationalism, leading to bilatralism in trade. First, a surge of the mechanincs of globalization; then the economies falter and start to return to trust-only relationships (bilateral in nature).
In Syria: a battle space proving advantageous to the stronger national state, disadvantage to the transnational actors. Difficulties will only grow, render the UN and its ilk as ineffective (which has already and obviously occurred).  Up until the present, US has evinced no strength in the South China Sea. It could have been resolved much earlier by dipl manoeuvering and thereby avoided confrontation. Absent that from the West, China stepped in.
Syrian anarchy:  expect restoration of a stable Syrian govt and perhaps removal of Turkey from Syria — which will drive Turkey in to a war with Greece in the next year or fourteeen months.
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block C: Harry Siegel, The Daily News (New York), in re:  Police in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, shoot a mentally ill man. Suspect menaces the neighborhood, waving what looks like a pistol; citizens called 911 (emergency police telephone) to report a crazy man brandishing a gun.  Later, we find out that it was not a gun but a piece of pipe. Consider 1991, when a conservative Jewish ambulance service hit a Black youth; caused much upset.  Police released in dribbles video (edited), telephone transcripts, and the dead man’s police record (shot one of his beast friends? stole a car?).  Saheed Vassell was shot at ten times and hit nine times in a moment. Did the police identify themselves as police?  Recall Amadou Diallo, 1999, in the Bronx, shot 41 times.  Here, cops arrive and start shooting almost immediately.
Mayor De Blasio releasing bits of exculpatory data.   Withholding the central fact: what did the police do just before firing??  Crisis is created by the withholding of facts.  Note that mayor’s chief spokesman . . . De Blasio does not have enough control over the NYPD, which generally does not like him at all. 
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block D: Dr Scott Atlas, Hoover Defining Ideas, in re: Congress will regulate the high price of drugs. Regulation is the wrong direction because we look at countries where they have top-down heavy regulation, such as with price caps, and find that there’s very delayed availability of drugs.  If you regulate activity of he dominant buyer, such as govt, you wind up with [vacuities].  Big Pharma:  what's wrong with controlling profit margins?  We shd do that by making sure that patients are paying more for drugs instead of as in the current system, where we pay $5 out of pocket and there’s an extraordinary lack of price transparency.  Scandalous: 20% of co-pays are higher than if you bought it out of pocket! AS for experimental anti-cancer dugs: we pay more but have access to [semi-miraculous] new, effective drugs.  Four times more of these here than anywhere else. We have better survivals from cancer, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, than any other country.  Scott Gottlieb has done an excellent job. With the second generic version introduced, price comes down by half — from competition.  Too much bureaucracy.  . . . Consumer Reports study: difference in price for same generic drug differed by a factor of 20 in different cities!
 
Hour Two
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block A:   Sebastian Gorka, Fox News, in re: The Syrian anarchy of the last 48 hours: IAF launched an attack vs what looks like an Iranian base in Syria at Tiyas Military Airbase. The president has a visceral response to neoconservative ((aggression)). Expect a full-throated response to the transgrassion of the taboo vs using chemical weapons. Also, at this moment a slew of covert unconventional means are being delployed to squeeze the Syrian regime. Assad isn’t going anywhere just now, but he can be pressed.  We cannot allow chemical weapons to be used by anyone.
Russians have a very sophisticated air defense in Syria.  Recall the 2017 Mar-a-Lago chocolate cake incident; will we escalate this one?  Russians exploited the region deftly under Obama. But there’s a limit to what they can do, as their capacities are literally a fraction of ours, including intelligence assets (technical). The mistakes – the sizeable number of Russian mercenaries recently killed there – at the end of the day, how thinly can they spread themselves? Putin has limits.
A Trump model is dvpg: Smallest-possible footprint worldwide, withdrawing troops where other actors have the means to maintain [peace] and the US can support them. The NSC with Bolton at the head is negotiating with the GCC to fund the stabilizing. The brunt wil not be borne by Americans.
The president is a very empathetic individual – anent a mass shooting in Floriida or a chemical atack in Douma.  But he’s a prgamatist, not a Trotskyite neoconservative; yet something must be done to stop the bloodshed. Half a million people killed in seven years — this is not all right.
Secy Kerry: for eight years the priority was narrative, not accomplishment – creating an articifical story, as in Ben Rhodes’s notorious echo chanber.  When the US is inactive, the world becomes a more dangerous place, from invasion of Crimea to Chinese atolls to Middle Eastern wars, Ukrainian shooting wars.
North Korean bad actors: another example of how Francis Fukuyama was so wrong in 1992. Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, even Putin – maynnot share the same ideology but all are linked by anti-Americanism. The focus at DPRK will be denuclearization of the peninsula, having a peace treaty after 65 years of merely an armistice.  Process is complex but not derailed.
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block B:  Jeff Bliss, Pacific Watch, in re:  In New York, we have the commons where homeless people congregate. In California, an overwhelming number, now incl in the subways, with which the authorities no longer can deal.  Massive frustration of riders and subways staff.  Governance problem – where’s the LA city council?  You're right, it's a matter of political will. We’ve seen this in San Francisco, what’s been going on in the BART for a decade -  people living here, human waste, a list of horrors. AS th LA homeless problem gets worse and worse, homeless moving in to undergrounds alcoves, alleyways, everywhere.. Rapid changes.
People suffering from mental illness and drug addiction. They’re relatively helpless.  Currently, regular citizens don't feel safe traveling, commuting.  Homelessness spreading across the state.
Sanctuaries: a revolt started in Orange County, Los Alamidos; spread to other towns – San Juan Capistrano, Fullerton, other OC towns, saying Hey, Sacramento is out of touch and we’re being overrun. We’re a law-abiding state; will side with the US Constitution, not Sacramento. Cities, state, feds, have been forcing stuff down our throats and we’ve had enough; we’ll cleave to basic legality.   Reminds me of a Congregational Church: there exists no authority – everyone decides for himself.
Marijuana houses in Sacramento: Chinese gangs bought dozens of houses, with only two occupied, the remainder as a massive buffer against the drug-growing in the central houses.  The workers are basically Chinese slaves run by Chinese thugs. Hydroponics set-ups, water, or sheeting and soil to grow marijuana. What gives them away is that their electrical bills got to $60,000 a month!
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block C: Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, and Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com, in re: Promonotory, Utah, “solid-rocket city,” to a space and mil defense enterprise, Orbital ATK, solid-fuel rocketry.  Gridded out in gridded streets, Mormon fashion.  Much old eqpt.  Steeped in history. They sell 20 rockets annually? They’re solid & store very well, incl strap-on side boosters for Deltas, and . . .
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block D: Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, and Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack.com, in re:  Solid-fuel rockets – can fire right away and they store well vs. liquid fuel – much admired now, for low cost and practical matters.
 
Hour Three
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block A:  Cliff May, president, FDD, in re: Globalism. Why don't we have a fixed definition of globalism?  Confusion, even among the elite media. Wonky: “transnational progressivism”: statist on a worldwide level. Michael Gerson, conservative columnist, said that globalism is a “combination of America’s purpose with unavoidable intl resp0nsibilities.”   Bret Stephens: globalism “means almost nothing.”
Anti-globalism is [[negative]].  John Bolton has been writing about this for 20 years, calls himself “an Americanist,” doesn't share sovereignty. Part of what he’s written is that most Americans oppose divesting us of sovereignty. Pres Obama concluded an intl nuclear arms limitation treaty & decided he didn't need the approval of Congress (and thus of the American people), needed only the UN.  Wow. 
“Globalists are eager for America and other nations to ‘surrender’ or ‘share’ sovereignty.”
Want to impose a global solution on the US. Overbearing.  Supranational organizations will decide for us.  Anne-Marie Slaughter*: “Need coercive power to pierce the shell of state sovereignty, even let intl parliaments overrule American law.”   Yike.  This is all concentrated on the East and West Coasts, except for a few universities.  Embraced by the left, not by the center of the country, whom the elite call the Great Unlettered and Unwashed.
See:  http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/may-clifford-d-give-anti-globalism-a-chance/ — “Some of our enemies, Mr. Bolton will make clear, are implacable. There can be no appeasing them. They will not unclench their fists no matter how fervently we outstretch our arm. Attempting to address their ‘legitimate grievances’ is a mug’s game.”
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block B:  Cliff May, president, FDD, in re: Globalism and antiglobalism. Very large, nuclear-tipped states coming at us.  Russia and China are threats; no longer call them trading partners. They provoke North Korea, the world’s largest gulag. Globalists have great fait in “the intl community,” believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran would like to join all of us and quit saying Death to America.  The EU has become an experiment in surrendering sovereignty – rules are made by Brussels, by unelected bureaucrats.   Antiglobalists say: let's stick to our own lawmakers unless in a treaty approved by Congress. What do we have other than antiglobalism to defend ourselves from Chinese aggression?  Very little. China has its own version,  incl neocolonialism in Africa – a Chinese-Firster philosophy. 
WTO and climate change are not serving the interests of the American people. How many electoral votes does the UN have?  Not so many. If Pres Trump and others press this point in elections, I think they’ll have a good issue.  I prefer not to have tariffs, but will not relinquish decision-making to bureaucrats, Americans deserve to make their own decisions. Xi an the like see intl organizations as tools of their own goals; certainly have no intention of ceding any of their own power to them
JB:   Admiral Ernest King, in WWII: “When they get in trouble, they send for the SOBs.”  That is globalism. 
* . . . Princeton professor and former senior State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter on the need for the “coercive power” of “vertical government networks” that can “pierce the shell of state sovereignty.”  Such piecing, she said, would enable “supranational” institutions – international courts, international regulatory entities and international parliaments -- to enforce rules over Americans and others.  This is meant to lead to “a post-American global administrative state and transnational legal system that are light years away from such quaint notions as the supremacy of the Constitution, representative democracy, and government by consent of the governed.”
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block C:  Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, by John Mack Faragher
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block D:  Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, by John Mack Faragher
 
Hour Four
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block A: Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor, by James M. Scott
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block B: Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor, by James M. Scott
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block C: Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor, by James M. Scott
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block D:  Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor, by James M. Scott
 
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