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JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-hosts: Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board & host of Opinion Journal on WSJ Video. Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents.
 
Hour One
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: John Fund, NRO, in re: Congressman Ed Whitfield in ofc for 20 years, but his wife became a lobbyist for The Humane Society. An ethics committee decided he’d given her special access (but no enrichment or quid pro quo alleged); Paul Ryan sent him away – “It’s time for you to go.”  “Failed to prohibit contacts between his staff and his wife”!  American people trending toward Ryanism?  Ticket-splitting: voters want divided govt, or they like the extant pol but want another person to serve in a different part of the ticket. Rob Portman running away with his election in Ohio; Las Vegas; more examples.  “Distinction between mouth and brain.”  Seventy per cent of Republicans say they'll vote for Donald Trump; also want some sort of accommodation with illegal immigrants. Bellwether of bellwethers . . .
Kentucky Republican to resign from House Retiring Rep. Ed Whitfield will resign from the House next week instead of serving out the rest of his term that ends in January. The Kentucky Republican’s early departure will set in motion a special election for his successor.
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 1, Block B:  Edward Hayes, Esq, criminal defense attorney par excellence; in re: Largest group entering New York Police Department are Latinos, mostly Dominican.  Among the largest Latino populations in New York also are Mexicans, who work very hard and live like monks in order to send money home to family.  EH: I expect to have a Hispanic mayor in one or two elections; and in local juries, they hall have a relative who's a detective or a cop., and many are Evangelicals and conservative. Look a bricklayers, concrete workers, skilled construction workers, incl in electrical – all work very, very hard.   A Little Havana in East New York, Brooklyn. 
English-speaking requirement scrapped for NYC taxi drivers under ... People who hope to drive New York City's famous yellow cabs must pass tests on such details as driving rules and where ...
Donald Trump makes pitch to Latino, black activists in New York City More than a dozen members from the New York City office of the ... comes as Trump tries to increase his outreach to black and Latino voters, ..
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Eli Lake, Bloomberg View, in re:  Hangzhou, a completely Potemkinized island, where China will host the G20 and demands that no one speak of China’s violent aggression. Japan sees this as “ambiguous warfare” as China sends “fishing boats” (they are not) into Japanese waters.  Senkaku Islands are very, very far away from the South China Sea.  China insists on being respected in both South and East China Sea; and the US has a long tradition of maintaining freedom of navigation, which doesn’t much suit China’s goals. China demands to be seen as the dominant power.   A major shift of power der Abe: without changing the Constitution, he’s shifted military activities within the pacifist constitution.  When Japan went to places like Iraq, they couldn’t fire back.  Here, Japan sends Coast Guard to announce “please leave out waters.”  Also, using intl organizations – but waiting for the US to do something.  What the US does s continue Freedom of navigation/innocent passage . . . Improving relations in Asia, but nothing like the profound alliances hat the US enjoys in Europe.  US considers Senkakus to be protected by the US under the US-Japan alliance.  Kerry sent the wrong message; continual momentum and China can't seem to guide this and holds a sort of rogue status. Intl law has no enforcement mechanism, is enforced by self and community.   https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-31/china-s-little-green-boats-have-japan-on-alert
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 1, Block D:  Lou Ann Hammond, DrivingTheNation.com in re:  . . .  See; 2029 AD site; a fully autonomous vehicle probably will be on the road in 2025. Steering wheel? Baidu working on one; “Baidu hasn't decided it its first version will have a steering wheel or not.” HOV lanes will probably be the early experimental lanes for this [junk –ed]
Nvidia, Baidu partner to develop AI powered autonomous vehicle ...  The companies are going after Level 3 autonomous vehicle control, which means the car can drive itself (and park itself) in some circumstances ...      Baidu to test autonomous vehicles in California  Chinese Internet giant Baidu said it has received permission from authorities in California to test its autonomous driving technologies in the ... ;  Baidu gets approval to test self-driving cars in California
Michigan Senate panel OKs autonomous vehicle research bills   SAGINAW — A Michigan Senate panel Wednesday approved four bills aimed at accelerating autonomous vehicle projects in Michigan.  ;  Senate committee approves autonomous vehicle legislation  ;  The Autonomous Vehicle Market has Caught Up with Google  Tesla and other carmakers, including Honda, BMW, Volvo and Mercedes, are introducing cars with semi-autonomous features such as ...   ;  Autonomous vehicles coming 'Much sooner than any of us thought'   Members of the Economic Development and International Investment Committee meet Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016, at Nexteer Automotive's ...  ;  Ford Sets a Date for Its Autonomous Vehicle Future   Ford held a press conference to announce its plan to launch a fully autonomous vehicle in 2021. Even though the response at the live event ... ;  Ford remains wary of Tesla-like autonomous driving features
 
Hour Two
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 2, Block A:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:   The White House official said the administration had briefed Congress "frequently and comprehensively" on the joint commission's work.   Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, a leading critic of the Iran deal and a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Reuters in an email: "I was not aware nor did I receive any briefing (on the exemptions).”
As part of the concessions that allowed Iran to exceed uranium limits, the joint commission agreed to exempt unknown quantities of 3.5 percent LEU contained in liquid, solid and sludge wastes stored at Iranian nuclear facilities, according to the report. The agreement restricts Iran to stockpiling only 300 kg of 3.5 percent LEU. The commission approved a second exemption for an unknown quantity of near 20 percent LEU in "lab contaminant" that was determined to be unrecoverable, the report said. The nuclear agreement requires Iran to fabricate all such LEU into research reactor fuel.   If the total amount of excess LEU Iran possesses is unknown, it is impossible to know how much weapons-grade uranium it could yield, experts said.
The draft report said the joint commission also agreed to allow Iran to keep operating 19 radiation containment chambers larger than the accord set. These so-called "hot cells" are used for handling radioactive material but can be "misused for secret, mostly small-scale plutonium separation efforts," said the report. Plutonium is another nuclear weapons fuel.  http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-exemptions-exclusive-idUSKCN1173LA
A federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday threw out a multimillion-dollar judgment awarded to a group of U.S. terrorism victims, ruling that the U.S. lacked jurisdiction over a lawsuit brought by the victims against the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization. The ruling is a significant setback for the 10 American families who sued over terrorist attacks in Israel in the early 2000s that left 33 dead and more than 400 injured. After a trial in Manhattan federal court last year, jurors found the PLO and Palestinian Authority liable for the attacks and ordered the groups to pay the families $218.5 million, which was automatically tripled to $655.5 million under a U.S. antiterrorism law. http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-appeals-court-dismisses-ruling-against-palestinian-authority-plo-1472660849
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 2, Block B:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents.(2 of 2)
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 2, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack, in re: SPACEX Static Test Fail at Cape Canaveral: the investigation begins, everything else in train for launch slows down. The video below shows the explosion, at about the 1:10 minute mark. If you watch closely you can see the rocket’s nose and payload fall to the ground and explode following the initial explosion of the upper stage. http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/video-of-falcon-9-launchpad-explosion/
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 2, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack, in re:
 
Hour Three
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 3, Block A:   John Tamny, Real ClearMarkets, in re:  Robert Shiller's Inequality Confusion Is the Real Catastrophe  An economy is just a collection of individuals, and as individuals we all hope to find work that makes us most unequal relative to everyone else.  To Yale economist Robert Shiller, the realization of individual talents represents future catastrophe.  Laughing as I type, he says robots will render well-paid work impossible to find, while at the same time increasing inequality. The scenario is logically impossible.  Inequality only (happily) increases insofar as entrepreneurs are fulfilling the consumptive needs of the majority. So if inequality grows in the future, that will be a certain sign of a majority employed in exponentially more productive pursuits thanks to robots thankfully erasing the work of today.  RealClearMarkets.
The economist Robert Shiller predicted in a recent New York Times piece that economic inequality "could become a nightmare in the decades ahead." He believes that the very economic evolution that has always led to higher living standards for all "could lead us into a world in which basic work with decent pay becomes impossible to find." Shiller cites the proliferation of robots to allegedly bolster the previous statement. Shiller's limp arguments are a reminder of why we should approach the musings of economists in much same way we do the projections of palm readers.
To see why Shiller is promoting know-nothingness and alarmism over serious thought, readers need only consider Henry Ford, the late Steve Jobs, and computer entrepreneur Michael Dell. Each grew extraordinarily rich not by harming the poor and middle classes, but by virtue of turning luxuries once solely enjoyed by the rich (the automobile, a smartphone that is realistically a supercomputer, and the personal computer itself) into common goods accessible to all. Inequality isn't a catastrophe, rather when it's on the rise the lifestyle gap between rich and poor is in decline. By definition.
That's the case because as the history of wealth in the world reveals quite plainly, individuals grow rich mostly insofar as their innovations make all income classes better off. They can only grow wealthy - and highly unequal - to the extent that they're able to fulfill the needs of the majority that is not rich. Assuming a world defined by a lack of "decent pay," there would be no chance for entrepreneurs to grow rich in the first place due to a customer base lacking funds to spend.  Assuming the "nightmare" of joblessness and/or low pay for the masses that Shiller naively predicts, inequality will shrink simply because there will be no major market for the innovative to produce for.
This speaks crucially to the rise of the "robot." Producers don't produce just to sit on their innovations, or to warehouse the goods and services that spring from their innovations. They only do so to once again serve the needs of a growing market. The rise of the robot presumes not a life of joblessness for everyone not rich, but in fact the opposite of what Shiller predicts. Robots and other labor saving devices signal a well-employed and well paid workforce of the future that will be able to purchase more and more of the world's plenty at lower and lower prices. Future, and much greater inequality will spring from entrepreneurs and businesses serving the needs of everyone at prices that we'll marvel at. The more that inequality increases in the future, the more certain the sign that the needs of all workers will be served. Stated simply, the lowest earners of the future will enjoy living standards and access to all manner of goods and services that will render the lifestyles of today's "1 percenters" austere by comparison.
Thinking about "robots" in an historical sense, the tractor, automobile, computer, ATM and internet were all "robots" of an earlier time. All were labor-saving devices that made redundant certain jobs only to lead to the voluminous creation of new forms of work. The U.S. and the rest of the developed world plainly gained from these labor-saving devices, and as evidenced by the abundant prosperity that exists in the developed world, these advances hardly put everyone in breadlines. Quite the opposite. It's only in the underdeveloped parts of the world bereft of what will eventually be described as primitive robots that individuals suffer en masse. In that case, the rise of robots capable of saving us from all manner of historical forms of toil signals abundant job creation, not a life of poverty presumed by Shiller.
Implicit in Shiller's unserious and comically failed attempt to draw a picture of what's ahead is that the nature of work is static. In reality, the work of today doesn't predict the work of the future any more than the work of 150 years ago (half of all Americans worked on farms) predicted the work of today. Shiller is an economist for what that's worth, but whatever his profession he can't possibly know the kinds of jobs the innovators of today and tomorrow who operate in the profits-and-losses sphere will create in the decades and centuries ahead. Rest assured that if the economy is protected from the faux insights of people like Shiller, the nature of work will evolve beautifully thanks to ever more advanced robots freeing us from simple toil in favor of work that more and more of us love, and that powers our productivity in ways that will make today's work seem rather pedestrian by comparison.  Robots and surging inequality signal more and more people working at rising rates of productivity such that they can access more and more of the goods and services created by the innovative and economically unequal.
Notable about Shiller's baseless attack on inequality is that he never explained why it's harmful for the individuals who comprise what we call the economy to pursue the career paths that make them most unequal relative to their peers.  If inequality is good for the individual (presumably Shiller thinks himself better than most economists, just as the most famous astrologers think themselves superior to their sign-reading peers), it's by extension good for the economy. Reducing all of this to the absurd, if a scientist or doctor comes up with a cure for cancer that renders it yesterday's killer, will any readers clamor for the fix to be buried as a way of slowing the growth of inequality? It's a question worth asking simply because the entrepreneurs who cure cancer will grow exceedingly rich for doing just that.
Along the lines of the above, Ford died very rich, Jobs died worth billions, and Dell is worth tens of billions. Would any reader say he wished all three had been layabouts? Inequality would surely be smaller today as a result. More realistically, most of us would prefer to live in a world defined by hundreds of entrepreneurs possessing not just the skills of each business visionary listed, but also one defined by abundant capital that would be directed toward these kinds of innovators. This is important simply because Shiller desires higher taxes on wealth creation that would not only penalize the Fords, Jobs, and Dells of tomorrow, but that would also penalize investment in these types of people. Shiller cites polls to make his argument in favor of wealth taxes. Missed by Shiller is that "democracy," to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, is two wolves and one lamb voting on what's for lunch. Thankfully the rich, and yes, very unequal United States is a constitutionally limited republic, as opposed to a mob and poll-driven democracy pined for by redistributionists like Shiller.
Looking ahead, let's hope Shiller's right about one thing: that robots and inequality soar in the coming decades and centuries. If so, readers can rest assured that such an outcome will produce an increasingly employed and productive workforce with staggering abundance, health, and wellbeing. That same outcome will properly expose Shiller's alarmist reasoning as pointless, and completely backwards.  (1 of 2)
John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, Political Economy editor at Forbes, a Senior Fellow in Economics at Reason Foundation, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research and Trading (www.trtadvisors.com). He's the author of Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank (Encounter Books, 2016), along with Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James Can Teach You about Economics (Regnery, 2015).
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 3, Block B: John Tamny, Real ClearMarkets, in re:  Robert Shiller's Inequality Confusion Is the Real Catastrophe  (2 of 2)
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 3, Block C:  Laurence Kotlikoff, Boston University, in re:  Laurence Kotlikoff for President (see www.kotlikoff2016.com). The one at the top is an economist. He’s pretty well known. He’s been ranked among the 25 most influential economists in the world  according to The Economist Magazine. He’s also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a NY Times best selling author. He’s written books on banking, healthcare, Social Security, and taxes. He’s spent years studying the determinants of economic growth. He’s advised governments around the world. He has a small personal financial planning software business in addition to servicing full time as a professor; in re:   Laurence Kotlikoff for President (see www.kotlikoff2016.com)  Today we added Maine to our list of states in which we’re registered write-in candidates.
Only registered write-in candidates have their votes counted.  Since we are registering across the country and no other write-in candidate appears to be doing so, we are, apparently, the only real write-in candidates in the country.
It takes writing just these nine words on your ballot on election day to rescue our country, our politics, our future: Laurence Kotlikoff for President & Edward Leamer for Vice President
Here’s the updated list. You can write us in in all these states:
Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York,  Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington State, West Virginia, and Wyoming ; and: in Louisiana   —we’re on the ballot. https://kotlikoff2016.com/2016/08/28/now-registered-in-maine-heres-the-l.../
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 3, Block D:  Laurence Kotlikoff, Boston University, in re:  Laurence Kotlikoff for President (see www.kotlikoff2016.com).(2 of 2)
  
Hour Four
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 4, Block A:  David Montgomery and Gordon Chang, Daily Beast, in re: Emperor Yu's Great Flood   We know of the legendary Emperor Yu through the story of China's Great Flood, a tale already ancient when first recorded around 1000 BCE (1). On page 579 of this issue, Wu et al. offer a provocative new explanation for this story. They present evidence for an enormous landslide dam break 1922 ± 28 BCE (2) that coincided with the major cultural transition from the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in China and that also helps explain curious details of Yu's story.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6299/538.full  (1 of 2)
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 4, Block B:  David Montgomery, Science magazine, and Gordon Chang, Daily Beast, in re: Emperor Yu's Great Flood   We know of the legendary Emperor Yu through the story of China's Great Flood, a tale already ancient when first recorded around 1000 BCE (1). On page 579 of this issue, Wu et al. offer a provocative new explanation for this story. They present evidence for an enormous landslide dam break 1922 ± 28 BCE (2) that coincided with the major cultural transition from the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in China and that also helps explain curious details of Yu's story.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6299/538.full  (2 of 2)
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 4, Block C:  Nicholas Wade, NYT, in re:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/science/last-universal-ancestor.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Thursday  1 August 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Ken Croswell, author, The Lives of Stars, and The Alchemy of the Heavens: Searching for meaning in the Milky Way; and Science Magazine, in re: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101713-hyperactive-galaxy-could-run-out-of-gas-in-just-8-million-years/ .
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