The John Batchelor Show

Monday April 17, 2017

Air Date: 
April 17, 2017

Photo, left:  North Korea Closer To Having Missiles That Can Reach The Us Business  
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW 
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, The Great Voice of the Great Lakes 
 
Hour One 
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block A: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD, in re: MOAB  US forces showing off the scale of weapons we can call ion tour Afghan allies?  Nangahar province:  Taliban control much of it, IS controls some. . . . Baroon Nahim: in Indonesia, being sought 24/7, directing ops from there. Bomb-making skills.   Is a major problem for counterterrorism forces n Southeast Asia.  Jihadis are prolific on Telegram, an app.  Khalifa News for IS followers; are up to No. 157.   They use Telegram. Whatsapp, et al, to direct ops almost worldwide.   See: http://www.longwarjournal.org
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block B: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor & FDD,  and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal senior editor  & FDD, in re:   Highly educated Canadians at target practice in Canada. Went to Syria to training camps.  May have kidnapped Americans held by al Nusrah Front in Syria.   . . . Amul Fazoullah: one of the crazies: “mullah of radio,” prevented vaccinations, etc.   Pakistani govt in the northwest is no longer under as strong a jihadist threat as it was several years ago.  
IS mass-murders Copts in Egypt:  IS is still very active in Egypt.  See: http://www.longwarjournal.org
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block C:  Gordon G. Chang, Daily Beast & Thaddeus McCotter, in re:  
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 1, Block D:  Gordon G. Chang, Daily Beast & Forbes.com, & Bruce Bechtol, in re:  North Korea.  The hardware on display in the recent military parade: some of the mobile launchers were new to Western eyes, were indigenously-produced, not Chinese.  Was the missile launch failure from US sabotage?  No way to know. (How do you say Stuxnet in Korean?)
 
Hour Two
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent; John Fund, NRO, in re:  Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Jared Kushner, the West Wing Democrats, & tax reform. Congressional race: KS-4.  “Absence of governing political philosophy.”
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent; John Fund, NRO, in re:  . . . Gary Cohn was called by Jared Kushner, who also designated Peter Navarro as a trade representative. Cohn says, “I’m not a Republican or Democrat; I just get things done.”  Oops – not much has been done, and tax reform surely will not be accomplished before the autumn.  . . . Donald Trump’s career is one of intelligent opportunism.  P T Barnum always kept the show new and entertaining.   . . . Other than VP Mike Pence, none of Trump’s senior aides has any experience getting anything done in government. 
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block C: Larry Johnson, No Quarter, in re:  GCHQ surveilling Trump and his associates in 2016 as innocently reported by Larry, who then was in hot water for having mentioned it publicly.  GCHQ and CIA spy for each other, with neither having a FISA-type restriction on spying on a foreigner; then they trade info.  Wink and a nod. They do this all the time.
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 2, Block D: Harry Siegel, Daily Beast & Daily News, in re:  Immigration. Courts. Grave inadequacy of personnel, massively including judges, and space to accommodate the sagging number of cases.  http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/law-order-sanity-damned-article-1.3056800
The watchword is discretion. In New York, Police Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill has his cops using more of it. In Washington, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has his prosecutors using less of it. They’re on a collision course.
Sessions, a Southern gentleman, should visit his boss’ hometown to see how America’s safest big city, a haven for immigrants, has eliminated bad laws and cut down on needless enforcement while still maintaining order.  But in the Trump era, power is flowing back to Washington. With the President yet to nominate a single U.S. attorney to replace the 46 he fired, his A.G. is now ordering each of his 94 districts to designate a “border security coordinator.”  Among other things, they’ll press prosecutors to drop discretion and bring whenever possible identity-theft charges — which come with a mandatory two-year sentence — and also felony charges against anyone caught for a second time illegally entering, which is a misdemeanor.
America has 270 immigration judges now and a backlog of over half a million cases. Sessions, war-on-terror-style, is filling that “dire need” with a pathetically insufficient “surge” of 50 new judges this year and 75 more next year. At the same time, he’s demanding his prosecutors bring many thousands more cases so that a painfully clogged justice system is in danger of becoming one that provides no justice at all.
Hour Three
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 3, Block A:   Andrew McCarthy, in re: 
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior Fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor at National Review. He is a former Chief Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York and led the terrorism prosecution against the “Blind Sheikh” (Omar Abdel Rahman) and eleven other jihadists for conducting a war of urban terrorism against the United States that included the World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks.
 
 
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 3, Block B:   Andrew McCarthy, in re: 
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 3, Block C:   Matt Blitz, Popular Mechanics, in re: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a25857/operation-ivy-bells-underwater-wiretapping/   link  here.
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 3, Block D:  Katherine Kornei, freelance science writer based in Portland, Oregon; in re:   New theory may explain the ‘music of the meteors’   For centuries, some observers have claimed that shooting stars or meteors hiss as they arc through the night sky. And for just as long, skeptics have scoffed on the grounds that sound waves coming from meteors should arrive several minutes after the light waves, which travel nearly a million times faster. Now, scientists have proposed a theory to explain how our eyes and ears could perceive a meteor at nearly the same time. The hypothesis might also explain how auroras produce sound, a claim made by many indigenous peoples living at high latitudes.
Meteors release huge amounts of energy as they disintegrate in the atmosphere. They also produce low frequency radio waves that travel at the speed of light. Some scientists have suggested that those radio waves produce the sound that accompanies meteors. The waves can cause everyday objects—including fences, hair, and glasses—to vibrate, which our ears pick up as sound between 20 and 20,000 Hertz. This phenomenon, called electrophonics, is a well-known principle: “The conversion from electromagnetic waves to sound waves … is exactly how your radio works,” says Colin Price, an atmospheric scientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel and co-author of the new study. “But in this case nature provides the conversion between electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves.”
But nailing down that scenario isn’t easy. Reports of noisy meteors are . . . 
..  ..  ..  
Meteors release huge amounts of energy as they disintegrate in the atmosphere. They also produce low frequency radio waves that travel at the speed of light. Some scientists have suggested that those radio waves produce the sound that accompanies meteors. The waves can cause everyday objects—including fences, hair, and glasses—to vibrate, which our ears pick up as sound between 20 and 20,000 Hertz. This phenomenon, called electrophonics, is a well-known principle: “The conversion from electromagnetic waves to sound waves … is exactly how your radio works,” says Colin Price, an atmospheric scientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel and co-author of the new study. “But in this case nature provides the conversion between electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves.”
Now, Price and Michael Kelley, a physicist at Cornell University, have developed a model to answer that question. As a meteor streaks through Earth’s atmosphere, it ionizes the air around it, splitting it into heavy, positively charged ions and lighter, negatively charged electrons. The ions follow the meteor, whereas the electrons are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field. That separation of positive and negative charges in the meteor’s wake produces a large electric field that drives an electrical current. And it’s that current that launches the radio waves, Price and Kelley hypothesize in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The size of the meteor and its speed through the atmosphere would control the frequency of the radio waves, they predict.  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/new-theory-may-explain-music-meteors
 
Hour Four
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 4, Block A:  John Tamny, RealClearMarkets, in re: Spain's 'wasted generation' comprises the many talented Spaniards who've exited the country in pursuit of better economic opportunity elsewhere.  London's a popular destination, as is Dubai thanks to its evolved work laws.  Just about anyone is legal to work there.  So while Dubai is increasingly overrun with the world's ambitious, the U.S. sadly isn't.  Skilled or unskilled, attaining legal work status in the U.S. takes many months and thousands in legal fees IF one is lucky enough to win a lottery such that immigration officials actually open his or her file.  That the U.S. actively blocks the entrance of the world's strivers - again, skilled or unskilled - is one of the biggest unforced errors in a great nation's history.  Forbes.com.  
Spain's 'Wasted Generation' Tells a Sad Story of Unforced American Error      At $50/barrel, oil is presently trading for five times what it did in the booming 1990s when the U.S. energy industry was largely non-existent thanks to two decades of strong dollar policies under Republicans (Reagan) and Democrats (Clinton).  Despite oil trading at a level that would have horrified us in the 70s, 80s and 90s, fracking's cheerleaders are billing these nosebleed prices as evidence of U.S. producers having vanquished OPEC.  That's there's no outrage on the left and right over this bit of fake news is odd.  Without minimizing the importance of oil to global growth for even a second, without minimizing the engineering genius that has informed fracking's advance, and while wholly ignoring the weak-kneed hysteria of the warmists who think consumption of earth's resources endanger earth, the simple, enduring truth is that fracking's story is vastly oversold.  The much bigger informer of the price of crude is the value of the dollar, yet both political parties seemingly want to forget two decades in which Treasury's oversight of the dollar was responsible, and oil predictably cheap.  
Conservatives, Fracking, and the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations  

Almost as bad as the books that tell us the Fed is necessary for economic growth are the ones that explain to us that the Fed controls the economy, and as such is the source of our every economic ill. To read (and agree with) Danielle DiMartino Booth's 'Fed Up' is to believe that the Fed centrally plans nearly every economic outcome, and that the problem with our central bank today isn't its intervention in the economy as much as those in its employ are the wrong people to intervene in the natural workings of the marketplace.  If we ignore Booth's weak economic analysis, her overstating of the Fed's power by a mile, and her awe-inspiring self-regard whereby she regularly sees into the future in ways that would humble the world's greatest investors, we can't ignore that she learned all the wrong lessons from her time as a researcher at the Dallas Fed.  Booth thinks the Fed is necessary, but only if people like her are running it. A scary thought indeed.  Forbes.com. 
Book review: Danielle DiMartino Booth's Fed Up

Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 4, Block B:  John Tamny, RealClearMarkets, in re:
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 4, Block C:  Joseph Wheelan,Their Last Full Measure: The Final Days of the Civil War.   
Dramatic developments unfolded during the first months of 1865 that brought America's bloody Civil War to a swift climax.  As the Confederacy crumbled under the Union army's relentless "hammering," Federal armies marched on the Rebels' remaining bastions in Alabama, the Carolinas, and Virginia. General William T. Sherman's battle-hardened army conducted a punitive campaign against the seat of the Rebellion, South Carolina, while General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to break the months-long siege at Petersburg, defended by Robert E. Lee's starving Army of Northern Virginia. In Richmond, Confederate President Jefferson Davis struggled to hold together his unraveling nation while simultaneously sanctioning diplomatic overtures to bid for peace. Meanwhile, President Abraham Lincoln took steps to end slavery in the United States forever.
Their Last Full Measure relates these thrilling events, which followed one on the heels of another, from the battles ending the Petersburg siege and forcing Lee's surrender at Appomattox to the destruction of South Carolina's capital, the assassination of Lincoln, and the intensive manhunt for his killer. The fast-paced narrative braids the disparate events into a compelling account that includes powerful armies; leaders civil and military, flawed and splendid; and ordinary people, black and white, struggling to survive in the war's wreckage
Monday 17 April 2017 / Hour 4, Block D:   Joseph WheelanTheir Last Full Measure: The Final Days of the Civil War (1 of 6)