JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 1, Block A:  Dan Henninger: @DanHenninger, @WSJOpinion; editorial board and Wonder Land column; in re: The Wall Street Journal recommends that President Trump resign rather than suffer a second impeachment.   This would give him “agency” over his situation.  Our political system is damaged, contributed to by many  people.  Invoking the 25thAmendment would deepen the damage.  Starting impeachment proceedings can begin after Jan 20.   Mr Trump will never get more than 50% of the votes again. Nancy Pelosi has continued hyperpartisanship; Pelosi and Schumer have all but killed [comity].
No resignation, no impeachment, no 25th, no self-pardon; next twelve days?  President Trump will prepare to depart. 
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 1, Block B:  Jeff Bliss: @JCBliss, #PacificWatch; in re:   Triage in Los Angeles hospitals: ORs, ERS, tent areas, doctors’s offices, are all stretched to breaking. Ergo, they’ve started treating only the people they think they can save.  Notice out to police ambulances, fire departments. Every day with a new record of deaths is hampering Garcetti’s future career. LA losing its entire hospitality industry – may survive for weeks.   Half the restaurants are gone—and losing all the vendors who supply them. A nail in the coffin. The atmosphere is so dark that there are a million signatures on a recall petition of Governor Newsom.
San Diego, San Francisco, Chesa Boudin: Were it not for the rich, none of these downtrodden would be in this predicament.  Btw, they’re drug dealers, not users.  Tommy LaSorda.
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 1, Block C:  Richard Epstein: @RichardAEpstein, Chicago Law, NYU Law, Hoover Defining Ideas, in re:   Trump has exasperated everybody [except for 80 million citizens].  A tragic situation.   He should get out, or be quarantined in the White House. How to neutralize him.   Zimbabwe is denouncing the US as a fake democracy.  The Constitutional process wasn't designed for this.  Invoking unused legal processes is [unwise].  Schumer and Pelosi on the 25h Amendment: designed for a president who’s been incapacitated, not [disliked].  There’s no way to litigate this.  Pelosi and Nadler: can begin impeachment next Monday, and perhaps disenfranchise the president for the rest of his life.   All terra incognita.  After he leaves office could entertain criminal prosecution.  Can he do a self-pardon?  Does not prevent you from being punished in state court. Trump is obstreperous.  So we just muddle through?  We’re there whether we like it or not. Shut down his account on twitter, Facebook, everywhere.
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 1, Block D:  Francis Rose,@FRoseDC,  Host of @GovMattersTV @ ABC7News & WJLA 24/7 News; Washington D.C., in re:   The greatest damage wouldn't be a bomb, but a thumb drive left by a foreign agent in a laptop. And a laptop was stolen. Lots of different kinds of federal agents entered the building by Wednesday evening, all working to secure the assets of the federal government. Can they sweep the building and make it secure? 
       I was deeply offended to see the Stars and Bars were paraded inside the Capitol building—the very building that erased the Confederacy.  All the videos: no one’s face is covered, so facial-recognition tech makes it easier to round up the malefactors. We don't know what we don’t know.  So far, not clear that Chinese intell hasn't penetrated.
 
Hour Two
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael E Vlahos: @JHUWorldCrisis; Johns Hopkins; in re: Londinium. Tiberius elevated one of his servants, then feared that he’d try to succeed the emperor, so “erased” him. A revenge cycle is an inescapable snare, cannot be disentangled or escaped. The desire for revenge lays down unimpeachable authority, is too irresistible an affirmation of one’s own power to be foregone.   Here: Blue has appealed to our better spirits, yet proposes to achieve reconciliation via massive public displays of punishment. Blue’s goal has been to overthrow the president since day one, which has caused much anger among his supporters. The rage has finally bubbled over, is now met with a desire to inflame it.  Within one country: alienation, submission and punishment creates a revenge cycle.  The women’s march on Versailles.  Expect more moments of calm but easily followed by more violence.  Today, violence threatened; at some point, violence threatened becomes actual violence. 
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 2, Block B:  Jim McTague: @Mctaguej; in re:  The federal jobs report: seven months of growth is halted! Attributed to virus resurgence. “Driven by a sharp decline in leisure and hospitality industries.”  Eighteen of those jobs were in cafes I patronized until they recently closed. This was engineered because we don't know how to deal with a pandemic, although we have a vaccine on our doorstep. Joe Biden can’t to a lot worse than Donald Trump. As recently as December, the markets [were optimistic] about 2021.  Markets have been buoyant for the last days; warranted?  Investors are way ahead of the technology. Biden is willing to pick winners and losers in the energy industry; recall Solyndra, which went belly-up. He’ll pour billions into that sector.  NY NJ MA IL CA: the creatively-financed states.   Democrats buy votes by bailing out the fiscally-challenged blue states. It’ll be stimulative in the short run because tax revenues are so weak.  The blue states will jack up taxes, risk strangling the economy—to a recession?  Bitcoin: favored by financial industry survivalists.
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 2, Block C:   Josh Rogin: @joshrogin, in re: Matt Pottinger wasn’t a likely Trump Admin official, but after Trump bumbled the China issue with a call from Tsai Ing-wen, president of Taiwan, Matt was brought in and slowly worked with govt officials to rework its approach to China for the first time in generations. A massive awakening to China’s influence and interference in American academe, commerce, mfrg.  He rose to be deputy national security advisor, and was here when the Chinese virus stuck.
       Hawks and hardliners vs appeasers and engagers. Hawks: favor decoupling from China; Matt and others don’t want to blow up the relations but to reset it after years of neglect.   Matt, reading Chinese, was first in the govt to announce the virus. Mulvaney and others fought tooth and nail—opposed closing down travel from there, although that policy was the wisest to be promoted. Problem: Chinese money inside politics. Think Hunter and family—peddling power to enrich themselves with the help of shady Chinese businessmen; Bush Foundation is the same.. 
       China buying institutions, pension funds, Silicon Valley corporations.  Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians; but CCP also wants to direct how we think, using money from US investors. 
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 2, Block D:  Andrew C McCarthy, @AndrewCMcCarthy, Ball of Collusion; and Thaddeus McCotter, @ThadMcCotter, American Greatness, in re: The 25th Amendment, spoken of by Schumer and Pelosi, and Pompeo and Mnuchin. The 25th is an option if they're willing to abuse it, as it wasn’t designed for this purpose. Could only run the clock. If it’s for punishment, that’s what impeachment is for, and definitely will not lower the temperature. In a sub rosa way, preventing Trump from ever holding public office again might help the GOP.  His running in 2024 frightens them.  To unite Republicans and baseline MAGA supporters, just impeach Trump. Self-pardoning:  Best option is for Trump to resign and be pardoned by Pence with the Gerald Ford–Richard Nixon precedent.  No good—you can be impeached without a crime.  
      A bumpy ride, and we have seatbelts for it.
 
Hour Three
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 3, Block A: Jerry Hendrix: @JerryHendrixII, To Provide and Maintain a Navy: Why Naval Primacy Is America's First, Best Strategy, by Henry J Hendrix
China’s and Iran’s efforts to close free transit across the Seas, beginning to impinge on the norms of the last 400 years.   Underlying assumptions maybe not getting through—we’ve had peace for so long that people no longer pay attention. The story of why the US needs a much larger navy.
The concept of a free sea derives from the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius, who was defending a case for a ship that had been captured by the Portuguese [possibly the Englsh]. Grotius lost the court case, but created the concept of the free seas. In many ways, the concept of free citizens grew out from his concept of free seas.  Today the US has 290 ships; there are 19 maritime regions where the US has significant interests, requiring a minimum of 325. The real number needed to maintain free seas plus defend against a military competitor is 450.   Keeping ships maintained while others are forward deployed requires [extra numbers]. At present, our Navy is overtasked. Do we want to be all things to all people or become a sea power once again?
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 3, Block B:   To Provide and Maintain a Navy: Why Naval Primacy Is America's First, Best Strategy, by Henry J Hendrix
       The national conversation regarding the United States Navy has, for far too long, been focused on the popular question of how many ships does the service need? To Provide and Maintain a Navy,a succinct but encompassing treatise on sea power by Dr. Henry J "Jerry" Hendrix, goes beyond the numbers to reveal the crucial importance of Mare Liberum (Free Sea) to the development of the Western thought and the rules-based order that currently govern the global commons that is the high seas. Proceeding from this philosophical basis, Hendrix explores how a "free sea" gave way to free trade and the central role sea-borne commercial trade has played in the overall rise in global living standards. This is followed by analysis of how the relative naval balance of power has played out in naval battles and wars over the centuries and how the dominance of the United States Navy following World War II has resulted in seven decades of unprecedented peace on the world's oceans. 
      He further considers how, in the years that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, both China and Russia began laying the groundwork to challenge the United States maritime leadership and upend five centuries of naval precedents in order to establish a new approach to sovereignty over the world's seas. It is only at this point that Dr. Hendrix approaches the question of the number of ships required for the United States Navy, the industrial base required to build them, and the importance of once again aligning the nation's strategic outlook to that of a "seapower" in order effectively and efficiently to address the rising threat. To Provide and Maintain a Navyis brief enough to be read in a weekend but deep enough to inform the reader as to the numerous complexities surrounding what promises to be the most important strategic conversation facing the United States as it enters a new age of great power competition with not one, but two, nations who seek nothing less than to close and control the world's seas.
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 3, Block C:  To Provide and Maintain a Navy: Why Naval Primacy Is America's First, Best Strategy, by Henry J Hendrix
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 3, Block D:  To Provide and Maintain a Navy: Why Naval Primacy Is America's First, Best Strategy, by Henry J Hendrix
 
Hour Four
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 4, Block A:   At the Crossroads Between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930,by John Maurer       This volume provides fresh perspectives on the international strategic environment between the two world wars. At London in 1930, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan concluded an important arms control agreement to manage the international competition in naval armaments. In particular, the major naval powers reached agreement about how many heavy cruisers they could possess. Hailed at the time as a signal achievement in international cooperation, the success at London proved short-lived. France and Italy refused to participate in the treaty. Even worse followed, as within a few years growing antagonisms among the great powers manifested itself in the complete breakdown of the interwar arms control regime negotiated at London. The resulting naval arms race would set Japan and the United States on a collision course toward Pearl Harbor.
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 4, Block B: At the Crossroads Between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930,by John Maurer
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 4, Block C: At the Crossroads Between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930,by John Maurer
Friday 8 December 2021  / Hour 4, Block D: At the Crossroads Between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930,by John Maurer