Photo, above: Palais Coburg, Vienna - where your tax dollars are sending negotiating representatives to discuss Iran's nuclear lunges forward with the charming Ambassador Zarif. See Hour 1, Block A, Claudia Rosett, FDD and WSJ, on  Waltzing with Iran in the Nuclear Ballroom. 

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Claudia Rosett, FDD and The Wall Street Journal OPINION, in re:  Waltzing with Iran in the Nuclear Ballroom.  Nuclear discussions among Javed Zarif of Iran, Baroness Catherine Ashton of the EU, and someone from the US, all staying in the Palais Coburg in Vienna, a breathtakingly lavish hotel, all paid for by the Austrian govt.  Their press announcements are seven, and five, sentences respectively.  Not much info, but jacuzzis, feasts, barrelsful of excellent wine, and so forth.  As for the negotiations, "everything has to be agreed for anything to be agreed." Russians have observed that the US desperately wants an agreement, so has cannily managed to create lots of leverage at the bargaining table. The circus returns again from 7 to 9 April.   Austrians are deeply uninterested except to avoid the motorcades.

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block B:  John Schwartz, NYT, in re: Rescued Puppies in Gambling Haven Steal Hearts

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Mona Charen, NRO, in re: Losing Our Grit

What makes Americans successful?

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Abraham Lustgarten, ProPublica, in re: Chesapeake Energy's $5 Billion Shuffle  When Chesapeake Energy, one of the nation's largest oil and gas companies, was facing a financial crisis at the end of 2011, it managed to execute an adroit escape -- raising nearly $5 billion by gouging rural landowners out of royalty payments they were supposed to receive in exchange for allowing the company to drill for natural gas on their property. In this new investigation, it's explained that drilling companies like Chesapeake can levy any fees they want for moving gas through gathering lines to the nation's interstate pipelines. Chesapeake took full advantage of this by selling a significant portion of its local pipelines system to Access Midstream, a newly formed company that evolved out of Chesapeake itself, for $4.76 billion in much-needed cash.

Chesapeake agreed to repay Access along with a 15 percent return by sending much of the gas it discovered for at least the next decade through its pipes at an inflated cost. The added fees would be taken out of royalty payments --forcing landowners to cover the principal and interest on what amounts to a multi-billion dollar loan from Access. 

·  Access agreed to buy industrial equipment used in the gathering process from a company owned by Chesapeake -- essentially giving the company a rebate on fees it had guaranteed to Access. In fact, ProPublica's projections show that Chesapeake could earn back billions of dollars of the transportation fees it's paying Access over the next 10 years. 

·  A landowner, Joe Drake, saw his monthly royalty payments drop from $5,300 in July 2012 to $541 last February for the same amount of gas. Some saw their monthly checks fall by as much as 94 percent. 

·  For a landowner to know how Chesapeake calculated his gathering costs, he has to pay lawyers and accountants to audit the company, or take his grievance to arbitration, a process that would cost him tens of thousands of dollars. In either case, he would need to see the purchase agreements that describe the company's gas sales in detail, but these documents are considered proprietary so Chesapeake doesn't have to share them.

Hour Two

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block A:  Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, in re: Fresh from prison, my old friend Dan Genis, "the sorry robber," takes in the city's changes.   My old friend Daniel Genis just returned — “from the dead,” he says — after 10 years in state prisons, with a belly now but otherwise looking no worse for the wear than the rest of us.

Long story very short, we were high school friends — delinquent nerds who’d roam the city, drinking and reading and flirting with real trouble — until we lost touch after I dropped out of Stuyvesant. Later, while at NYU, Dan developed a taste for heroin that, as it will, quickly became a raging appetite. Feeding that left him a few thousand in the hole and, taking the advice of a junkie pal, he embarked on a brief career as the “sorry robber,” as one tabloid deemed him — politely but firmly robbing people at pocketknife-point, returning their IDs and wallets after removing the cash. [more]

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Russell A. Berman, Hoover and Los Angeles Review of Books, in re:  The Goal of the Boycott 

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Toshio Nishi, Hoover, in re: Three years have passed since the comprehensive nuclear meltdown, which continues to contaminate everything it touches. During all that time, invisible odorless particles with unspeakable consequences have been descending over the region every time rain or snow falls. The next big earthquake might end life for everything around. If one of the vulnerable nuclear tanks were to topple, the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, with adjacent large cities like Yokohama and a total population of 33 million, could become a vast wasteland with no willing inhabitants. An exodus of panicked people would ensue from an island archipelago that is smaller than the State of California.  [more]  

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block D:  Elizabeth Economy, Bloomberg, in re: THE CHINESE AWAKENING   Cleaning up the environment is an urgent task for China’s leaders, who face a backlash from enraged citizens. A July 2013 study found that air pollution in China’s north reduces life expectancy by an average of five and a half years, and water pollution has been linked to increased rates of cancer in almost 500 villages along China’s highly polluted rivers. The Chinese people are voting with their feet. Almost two-thirds of the country’s wealthy—those with assets of $1.6 million or more—have left or plan to leave the country, citing China’s pollution. Those who can’t leave are taking to the streets: The environment has surpassed land expropriation as the leading inspiration for the more than 180,000 popular protests each year. Elizabeth Economy questions whether Chinese leaders are prepared to meet the people's demands, not simply for bold promises of change but also for change itself.

Hour Three

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block A:  Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: Ukraine signs EU trade pact as Russia finalizes Crimea annexation   Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk signed the political elements of a trade pact with the European Union on Friday . . .  [more]

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  Michael Vlahos, Naval War College, in re: John McCain Just Responded in a Hilarious Way to Russia's Sanctions Against the U.S.  Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Thursday brushed off the news that Russia had imposed sanctions against him and eight other American . . .

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Lee Smith, The Tablet, in re:  Middle East   For Gulf Allies, Obama’s Turn Away From the Region Looks Like a Gift to Tehran  Disengagement from a region whose power structures are predicated on American management is a recipe for disaster . . .  [more]

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block D:   Gene Marks, NYT, in re: Mercatus Center (@mercatus)   We've released a new tool to help you calculate the cost of #regulation to your business 

Less Than a Month Left to File Your Taxes: An Attack Plan

The Best Small Business Credit Cards – 2014

Small Business: Learn tax tricks of travel expenses

How Banks Can Pass the Sniff Test with Small Businesses

Is It Legal to Bet on March Madness at Work?

Hour Four

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block A: Sebastian Gorka, FDD, in re: The crisis will not go away. Tuesday, for the first time, a Ukrainian officer was shot and killed by the Russian forces in Crimea. It’s no longer just about posturing and local referendums anymore. The Prime Minster of the UK, who was lampooned for so long as just a self-promoting Tony Blair in conservative’s clothes, has called for the permanent expulsion of Russia from the G8. If you don't think America should just sit back, let other nations respond, and at the same time send the powers that be in Beijing or Tehran the message that we don’t care if borders are redrawn by force – then what should be done?

My day job is educating counterterrorism officers, members of the special forces community, and federal law enforcement agents to think strategically. I always tell them the most important thing you can do is to ask the right questions and answer the “So what?” question at the end of the day. So here we go, in a thumbnail sketch, for Ukraine.

What do we know about Russia? It is driven by a corrupt elite and has been for the last hundred years. (Doesn’t matter what they called themselves - Tsarists, Communists, or former KGB colonels.) It acts as a regional bully. Nothing surprising there. Just think about the end of WWII, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, or Georgia just a few years ago.  What’s new? Two things: the Kremlin is now prepared to use force to enlarge its national territory, and even neutral states – like Sweden – are afraid and want to join NATO.

So what? Why should we care?  Whatever you think of our “adventures” in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last thirteen years, you can probably agree that it would not be good for America if a full-scale war erupted in Europe. I would add that – in a related fashion – the security of our treaty allies remains important and that we have some interest in the survival of the small numbers of people who live in non-NATO nations that are pro-American.

Subsequently, we need to come up with an objective for our national response that realizes these interests. That’s what being strategic actually means. Given the above, and if we don’t want a shooting match to drag us into another war in Europe, I would argue that America’s mission is to make Russia think twice about its grand plans to expand even further into the West. To do that we have to cause Putin enough pain personally that he decides that after swallowing the Crimea it’s better not to go any further.

To make him do that, America should do the following:

Covertly attack the financial assets of the oligarchs. Putin was a second-rate KGB officer who is only in power because a handful of kleptocrats keep him in power. Hurt them and their off-shore bank accounts in Cyprus and the tanks stop rolling – fast. (We should also finally use our superb cyber potential to attack his government systems, just as NATO’s networks were attacked during the Kosovo campaign.)

Help the Ukrainian people help themselves. We will not – and should not – deploy US or NATO assets to fight for the independence of the Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians could use a little help. A good friend from an Allied nation has . . .

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: John Tamny, Forbes.com, in re: The Fed isn't printing money despite what the pundits say; it's doing something much worse.  In borrowing from banks en masse it's acting as a $4 trillion capital allocator that is logically robbing the economy of a much more impressive recovery.  . . . The Federal Reserve's seemingly endless program of quantitative easing (QE) begun under Ben Bernanke, and continuing at a slightly slower pace under Janet Yellen, has some of the punditry and much of the electorate up in arms. With good reason.  [more]

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block C: Ed Hooper, filmmaker, in re:  Medal of Honor: The History (2014) - IMDb

Friday  21 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block D:   Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re:  Before and after images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have discovered the formation of a new gully on Mars sometime between November 2010 and May 2013. The winding gully seems to have poured out from an existing ribbon channel in a crater in Mars’ Terra Sirenum region. The leading hypothesis on how the gully formed is that debris flowed downslope from an alcove and eroded a new channel. Though it looks water-carved, the gully is much more likely to have been formed when carbon dioxide frost accumulated on the slope and grew heavy enough to avalanche down and drag material down with it.

Using images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have assembled a 360 degree zoomable portrait of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.  The image is in infrared, which is why it can see parts of the galaxy obscured by dust in visible wavelengths, and you can explore it at your leisure, from home.

China’s Yutu rover is still functioning but cannot move.  Last week Yutu and its companion spacecraft, the Chang’e 3 Moon lander, awoke from a period of dormancy after the frigid, two-week lunar night — the third awakening since landing on 14 December, Chinese scientists said this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The probes continue to gather data and send it back to Earth.

But Yutu may never move more than the 100–110 metres it has already travelled from its landing site — in the Mare Imbrium. Mission officials had hoped that Yutu would travel to the rim of a nearby crater and explore it, but a mechanical failure in Yutu’s drive system has stilled the rover since late January.

I wish they'd get their story straight. This article suggests that the problem wasn’t in the circuit that controls the storage of equipment during the long lunar night, as reported previously, but in the system that actually moves the rover. It also appears from the story above that scientists were disappointed by the amount of information released at the Texas conference.

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