The John Batchelor Show

Friday 11 January 2013

Air Date: 
January 11, 2013

Photo, above: Mesopotamian city state. See below: fourth hour, blocks C and D, UnCivilization by Gregory Copely.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 1, Block A:  Henry Miller, Hoover, in re: Politics and the Poor Man's Plate, coauthored with Drew Kershen, http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/137641
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 1, Block B:  John Bolton, AEI and US ambassador to the UN, 2005 to 2006, in re: Richardson and Schmidt in North Korea; why? We see the pattern repeat from President Carter’s unwise efforts to negotiate over the North’s nuclear weapons programs in the 1990s, to President Clinton’s 2009 visit to extricate two reporters who had foolishly crossed into North Korea, to the laughable New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2008 visit to serenade North Korea’s dictatorial elite: Pyongyang uses gullible Americans for its own purposes.
     While it may sound counterintuitive, the most humanitarian approach is not to render assistance that perpetuates the Kim dictatorship, but to work to undercut and end it. We should, for example, encourage refugee flows into South Korea, negotiate with China for the peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula and otherwise struggle to liberate the prison camp of a country that sits north of the 38th parallel.
     That would be a truly worthy mission for Richardson and Schmidt.  To read the article online, click here.
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 1, Block C: . Marie Rim, artist, in re: What does it feel like to wear a burka? Artist Marie Rim has been criss-crossing the US offering "Burka Fittings Across America," inviting participants to experience the all-over face-covering worn in some Muslim countries
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 1, Block D:  Terry Anderson, PERC, in re: massacres of rangers and wildlife in Chad reserves, "Deadly Risk for African Wildlife Rangers"  As ivory poaching gets more militarized, with rebels and even armies slaughtering elephants across Africa, rangers are wading into the bush to confront hardened soldiers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/central-africas-wildlife-...
 
Hour Two
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 2, Block A:  . Mary Pilon, NYT, in re: Seau Suffered from Brain Disease   The former N.F.L. player Junior Seau, who committed suicide last spring, suffered from a disease widely linked to contact sports, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 2, Block B:  . Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Businessweek, in re:   CEO Meg Whitman says she has a five-year plan to solve HP's woes. Bloomberg Businessweek's Ashlee Vance and Aaron Riccardela go inside the Silicon Valley cultural icon and detail a never-reported conversation between former HP CEO Mark Hurd and Steve Jobs about Jobs' desperate plea to save HP, and their interview with Whitman, who says “that [HP] will be one of the greatest comebacks stories in American business.” For Full Story…http://buswk.co/HP
HEWLETT-PACKARD'S FREE FALL  Will Hewlett-Packard survive the year intact? The granddaddy of tech lost 70 percent of its market value in two years thanks to churning strategies, bad acquisitions and a revolving door of executives. Now CEO Meg Whitman says she has a five-year plan to solve HP's woes. Bloomberg Businessweek's Ashlee Vance and Aaron Riccardela go inside the Silicon Valley cultural icon and detail a never reported conversation between former HP CEO Mark Hurd and Steve Jobs about Jobs' desperate plea to save HP, and their interview with Whitman, who says “that [HP] will be one of the greatest comebacks stories in American Business.” For Full Story…http://buswk.co/HP
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 2, Block C:  Richard Epstein, Hoover,  in re:  To James Madison, the chief mission of government is to develop permanent institutional restraints to guard against factions On this point, it is necessary to insist, as a constitutional matter, that all taxes be flat, as yet another protection against the risks of redistribution of wealth through faction. This can be done through a consistent application of the Takings Clause. There is, in principle, no watertight distinction between taxes and takings. In both cases, the government is allowed to take so long as it supplies compensation. Without a flat tax, popular groups can isolate and outvote persons of property in ways that will give Congress more resources to spend money on special programs whose costs are high and benefits are dubious…   Defining Ideas is a journal of the Hoover Institution. http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/137471
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 2, Block D: Amy Chozick, in re:   
 
Hour Three
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 3, Block A:  The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks; 1 of 4
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 3, Block B:  . The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks; 2 of 4
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 3, Block C:  . The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks; 3 of 4
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 3, Block D:   The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks; 4 of 4
 
Hour Four
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 4, Block A:  I Sleep in Hitler's Room - An American Jew Visits Germany by Tuvia Tenenbom
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 4, Block B:  John Avlon, Newsweek, Daily Beast, in re: remembering the columnist.   "We will have to hope for more thorough anthologies, bringing together his magazine and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper work, most notably for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The diamonds are now scattered throughout library stacks. When I was compiling Deadline Artists: Scandals, Tragedies and Triumphs, Carl Cannon emailed me a Richard Ben Cramer piece from 1981, whose lede he still clearly remembered from three decades before:
In a grimy gray drizzle, under ragged black flags that lifted and waved balefully in the fitful air; to the wail of a single piper, on streets through charred and blasted brick spray-painted with slogans of hate; by silent tens of thousands, past fathers holding sons face-forward that they might remember the day, past mothers rocking and shielding prams that held tomorrow’s fighters, past old men who blew their rheumy red noses and remembered their own days of rage … Bobby Sands was carried Thursday to a grave of raw Ulster mud. 
Now, Rest in Peace, Richard Ben Cramer – literary journalist and, just maybe, the best that ever was.    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/08/richard-ben-cramer-dies-iconic-writer-had-an-unerring-ear-for-dialogue.html
 
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 4, Block C:  UnCivilization: Urban Geopolitics in a Time of Chaos by Gregory R. Copley (Oct 22, 2012); 1 of 2   City-states in the Twenty-first Century. [Deeply exciting. –ed.]
Friday 11 Jan 2013 / Hour 4, Block D:   UnCivilization: Urban Geopolitics in a Time of Chaos by Gregory R. Copley (Oct 22, 2012); 2 of 2
..  ..  ..
Music
 
Hour 1: Ghost Writer
Hour 2: Person of Interest
Hour 3: The Pacific
Hour 4: Knight & Day, Crysis
..  ..  ..