The John Batchelor Show

Monday 14 October 2019

Air Date: 
October 14, 2019

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, the Great Voice of the Great Lakes
 
Hour One
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 1, Block A:  Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD; in re: Fog of war in Syria: Kurds were denied their own country at the end of WWI by the Versailles conference.  End of Sept, in Afghanistan inn Helmand Province there was a raid in which civilians were killed in heavy fighting in a battle against al Qaeda.  Captured Asim Umar’s wife [one of them?] and other central figures; Asim Umar* was killed. This was occurring as the Afghan “peace talks” were falling apart. Al Qaeda integrated with Taliban.  Many useful people killed: couriers, leaders; Special Forces were sent in, but it became a fierce slugfest and finally air support had to be called  in. 
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* Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security claims it has confirmed that Asim Umar, the emir of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, was killed during a well-publicized Sept. 23 raid in Helmand province. For proof, the NDS released side-by-side photographs of what it claims to be Umar, both dead and alive.
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 1, Block B:  Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD; in re: Fog of war: Turkey has launched an offensive against the YPG in northeast Syria?  The Versailles conference began a century of extraordinarily bad management, cynical Lloyd George, Pres Wilson, and Clemenceau.  Behind Pres Trump, and Erdogan, and Assad, are long lines of men who abysmally mismanaged everything there.  Can blame Hafez al Assad, but not only him. 
        Iraqi Kurds, the Peshmerga, are an entirely different group from the YPG of Rojava.  The PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) has many photos of Abdullah Öcalan at Rojava weddings, and the like.  Turks won't let the PKK establish a stronghold in northern Syria.   US military, and State, kept kicking the can down the road.   There’s been no US govt effort to mitigate this problem, of which Trump owns part, but the real blame is truly widely distributed.
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 1, Block C: Gordon Chang, Daily Beast, in re: Chinese exports numbers are poor, but imports are down over 8%, which is serious.  They can't lie, cheat and steal too much on import & export figures.  Having a very bad African swine fever, and a debilitating rust on wheat.  Setting aside the “trade war,” China needs to import a lot of food, making the leadership unhappy.
        Most Americans now hold that China is a really bad actor. If the current president holds out, he’s likely to keep support of American people.   A bad trade deal would alienate voters. A bad deal would hurt worse than no deal.  China’s plan is to hold out till there’s a new guy in the White House. Beijing has misunderestimated Trump, to quote from a while ago; they want him out because he’s unpredictable, and they want feeble US policy such as we’ve see in in the last many Administrations. 
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 1, Block D: Michael Yon (see livestreaming videos of Hong Kong protests and crazed police), Hong Kong reporter, & Gordon Chang, Daily Beast, in re: Hong Kong police out of control, tried to seize our reporter’s camera, beat the daylights out of another reporter – in error; they released him after hours of brutalization, and he was then rushed to a hospital by other reporters.  The trigger for this was petrol bombs thrown at a police station.  The side of the Mongkok police station was charred, no other damage. Next to the TRR station.  On 31 Aug, a bad beatdown in the TSS station; believe that three patriots were killed, as they vanished, and police refuse to release the CCTV coverage. That’s probably why that station was closed.  Citizens leave memorials of flowers and candles; police destroy them each time.
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Prince Edward (Chinese: 太子; Cantonese Yale [Yalu]: Taaijí) is a station of the MTR rapid transit system in Hong Kong. It is located in Mong Kok, Kowloon, under the intersection of Nathan Road and Prince Edward Road West. The station is named after this road
 
Hour Two
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner, in re: Hunter Biden’s success in China and in Ukraine while his father was vice-president.
Schiff said, it might be necessary never to reveal the identity of the “whistleblower.”  Remove a president based on an anonymous allegation? Unconstitutional?   The Trump call to Ukraine, whose transcript has been public from Day Two. American eventually won't accept that. GOP doesn't appreciate the fact that the summary transcript is actually pretty damning.   Hunter Biden: no transparency at all.  Probably more of a liability for Biden than for the Democrats as a whole. 
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 2, Block B:  Claudia Rosett, Independent Women’s Forum, in re: Hong Kong: a “leader” of HK, Carrie Lam, a stooge of Beijing, one of whose ideas is a “Dialogue Platform.”  This is bureaucratic policy information office? Patriot singing in he streets, holding hands, asking for liberty, while Carrie Lam can’t figure out the cause of this social unrest. Carrie Lam is none too bright. She had a dialogue in late Sept where she picked 150 “lucky” winners to speak with her in a large room. Each given a minute or two; outside, thousands and thousands were calling out, “Fight for freedom.”  She keeps offering useless lagniappes, entirely missing the pint of the protests that have been going on for well over a hundred days. She hopes it’ll all fizzle out if she offers enough subsidies. Of course, they're not demanding hand-outs; they demand freedom. Mainland knows this could spread; they intend to crush it, as they did thirty years ago at Tien An Men. It may happen that Hong Kongers have no choice by to die or accede, but we haven't got  there yet. Today, tens of thousands of people at a rally.
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 2, Block C:  Aaron Klein, Breitbart, in re: Whistleblower? Compass Rose Legal Group. Am dumbfounded at the links between the attorneys for whistleblower and his [previous work].  WhistleblowerID [?].  Andrew Bakaj, atty., worked for CIA’s Ofc of Inspector-General. His tweets call for Trump to be removed according to the 25th Amendment.   Openly financed by Soros and aligned groups. Mark Zaid (founded Madison Project, with Podesta a board member); Andrew Bakaj, former CIA officer; Charles McCullough, III, advertises that he worked directly under and reported to then-Director of Natl Intelligence, James Clapper, who now works as CNN as a Trump denunciator. A small circle of commingled friends. 
Monday 4 February 2019 / Hour 2, Block D: Marianna Yarovskaya*, filmmaker, in re: Women of the Gulag.  Six elderly women who were teenagers when the disastrous events occurred.  On Oct 18 and Oct 22, the film will be screened at HK Film Festival.  VisibleRecord.com     The film was shown at the Moscow Intl Film Festival, and brought one survivor, who was able to walk. Two more remain, blind, one paralyzed.   The attendee got five minutes of standing ovation. Then it was shown on Rossiya ___ TV, and Aeroflot will show the longer version starting in November.  In the gulags, women were worked as hard as the men, were brutalized. In  a timber camp, one woman said that if she didn’t haul back a tree she got no dinner.  “Women in the camps were slaves of slaves.” No family is unaffected.  Not on YouTube, but we’re selling DVDs to universities and schools.  Will screen it in London next year. In the US, it’ll show at the UN Intl Festival at Stanford on October 22.  Screenings in Croatia and elsewhere. I attended a festival in South Korea – North Korean camps are carbon copies of what Stalin camps were [and note that until extremely recently, North Koreans were sold en masse by the Kim family to slave-labor timbering camps in Siberia  —ed.]; in South Korea we got an audience award. 
       * Marianna Yarovskaya is an award-winning Russian-American documentary filmmaker who is the director and producer of the 2018 Academy Award short-listed documentary film, Women of the Gulag based on the book, Women of the Gulag: Stories of Five Remarkable Lives, by Paul Roderick Gregory.
 
Hour Three
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 3, Block A:  Andrew C McCarthy, Ball of Collusion author, NRO & former Southern District Assistant United States Attorney; and Thaddeus McCotter; in re: Whistlegate, Adam Schiff
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 3, Block B:  Andrew C McCarthy, Ball of Collusion author, NRO & former Southern District  Assistant United States Attorney; and Thaddeus McCotter; in re: Whistlegate, Glenn Simpson, . . .
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 3, Block C:  Behnam Ben Taleblu, FDD Senior Fellow, in re: Armenia “We look to Armenia as an important” member of the regional community —Azerbaijan.  During the war of Nagorno-Karabakh, Iran stood with the Christian Armenia, not the predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan. Destabilization efforts.  Nothing in Central Asia is simple, neat and elegant.
Adam Schiff and two others have written a letter opposing US aid to Armenia. Armenian expat community in Los Angeles. Schiff opposes Russia in one room in the Congress, is hand in glove with it in another.
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 3, Block D:  Henry Miller, MD, Hoover Institution, in re: GMO.
 
Hour Four
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 4, Block A: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, by Thurston Clarke
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 4, Block B:  JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, by Thurston Clarke
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 4, Block C: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, by Thurston Clarke
Monday 14 October 2019 / Hour 4, Block D:  JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, by Thurston Clarke
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