Photo, above: Echoing Tiananmen, 17-year-old Hong Kong student prepares for democracy battle He's one of the fieriest political activists in Hong Kong — he's been called an "extremist" by China's state-run media — and he's not even old enough to drive.  Meet 17-year-old Joshua Wong, a skinny, bespectacled teen whose meager physical frame belies the ferocity of his politics. Over the last two years, the student has built a pro-democracy youth movement in Hong Kong that one veteran Chinese dissident says is just as significant as the student protests at Tiananmen, 25 years ago.

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-hosts: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, & Dr. David M. Livingston, The Space Show.

Hour One

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Harry Kazianis, managing editor, National Interest; China Policy Institute; in re: this ebola outbreak is worse because West African infrastructure is improved, allowing for more travel.  Add in global travel on planes, et al., and this is likely to be global swiftly.  We do not have global resources to protect large populations from this.  Ban Ki-moon, who specializes in speaking by saying naught, the other day spoke of "unprecedented crisis."   The American people were done – cooked – on foreign policy issues for a while, but now that 's not a solution to the problem; rather, need American leadership in the world.  Note erosion of the international system.   Pres Obama entered office intending to focus on domestic issues; but with crises in Iraq, Syria, China, US must provide a leadership role or other people – perhaps much less desirable – will do it for us.  Sequestration damages: we need to do training to be prepared, but that's where the Pentagon is cutting back.

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block B: James Holmes, professor at the Naval War College and co-author of Red Star over the Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy; in re: The Silent Service - Australia is spending a lot on quiet, diesel electric subs from Japan; also allows for interoperability 'twixt the Japan and Australia. American new attack sub is superb but costs five times as much.  Also has the advantage of buying from a nation that has plenty of practice using it .  US and UK do the best that can be done with nuclear but its still noisier than electric diesel. Why don’t; we buy a squadron of the Japanese subs and station them in Japan: a quiet platform at low cost where you need it. Can use attack subs for long-distance fighting.  China will have 70 attack boats by 2020.  US shd deploy just outside the First Island Chain; if needed, can block it, and inflict heavy costs on China in reverse; using existing geographic features.  US Navy traditions:  nuke subs and aircraft carriers – all premised on having two thing work, and if they don’t work we don’t have a navy.  US began to build its last nuke sub soon after Hyman Rickover set out.    FDR while Asst Secy of Navy called the navy a "pillow" – whack it as hard as you like and it'll nonetheless always spring back into its previous shape. The Silent Service .

U.S. Submarines: Run Silent, Run Deep . . . On Diesel Engines? "Under way on nuclear power", radioed the skipper of USS Nautilus in 1955, after taking history's first nuclear-powered attack submarine to sea for the first time. Nautilus's maiden cruise left an indelible imprint on the navy. Her success, cheered on by the likes of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the godfather of naval nuclear propulsion, helped encode the supremacy of atomic power in the submarine force's cultural DNA.

Things were never the same after that. America built its last diesel-electric sub, once the state of the art, not long after Nautilus took to the sea. Not since 1990 has the U.S. Navy operated conventionally powered boats. It's been longer than that since they were frontline fighting ships. For a quarter-century, then, it's been all nukes, all the time. No U.S. shipbuilder even constructs diesel boats nowadays.

That was then. Now may be the time to break up the nuclear monopoly. To wit, imagine permanently forward-deploying a squadron of diesel attack boats, or SSKs, to likely hotspots. Such a force would expand America's silent service, reversing the ongoing slide in numbers of hulls. It would do so at reasonable cost in this age of budgetary stress. A standing East Asia squadron would be close to the action. Likely based in Japan and Guam, it would amplify the U.S.-Japanese fleet's prowess vis-à-vis China's navy and merchant marine. It would empower Washington and Tokyo to deny China access to offshore waters without committing the whole fleet of U.S. nuclear-powered boats to the endeavor. And in the process it would open up new vistas for . . .

 

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Michael Listner, Esq,, Space Law and Policy Solutins, spacelawsolutions.com, in re: Hotel Mars, episode n.  Space development moves into the courts: competitions; all  competing for the same things – turf, water landings, et al.  The dispute at han between Elon Musk, SpaceX, a prominent figure bldg a spaceport near ____ Texas en rot to Mars.  Opposing: Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and WaPo, of Blue Origin.    It all revolves around re-usability.  SpaceX early on said it'd land Falcon 9 on a barge on water.  Blue Origin picked up on that, got a patent.  Presto, a suit.  The original 1990s drawing was on a barge (to tow it back to land, or to refurbish right at the ocean), whereas Blue Origin had a [different description],.  Blue Origin is highly secretive; might be Bezos's personality, but this whole thing is extremely competitive SpaceX; fly-back booster.   Barge is an intermediate step; if Musk loses the suit, he can either change practices or go to Bezos to pay for use.  The Blue Origin engine is a BE-4, which is smaller, less powerful than the current RD180.   . . .  Michael Listner tweets often; recommend following.  Space law: early in the discipline.

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Aaron Back, WSJ Hong Kong, Heard on the Street, in re: BABA – Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. : eBay, Amazon, maybe other endeavors.  Alibaba: Now Comes the Hard Part. Alibaba Group Holding comes with a possible golden goose known as Alipay. Calculating how golden this online-payment platform will become may require magical thinking.

Alibaba Margin Squeeze Overshadows Mobile Success Alibaba's core e-commerce business is powering ahead. Too bad that's not all investors will get in its initial public offering.

In the last batch of quarterly results that investors are likely to see before its initial public offering, Alibaba posted a 46% on-year rise in revenue for the three months to June. Also encouraging was its rapid progress migrating to mobile devices. Mobile accounted for 33% of gross merchandise volume, up from 27% the previous quarter. Less encouraging for those banking on a big Alibaba valuation is that profitability is still being squeezed. While net profit nearly tripled from a year earlier to $2 billion, this was largely due to a one-off revaluation gain on previously acquired assets, which contributed $1 billion to the bottom line.

More important, operating margins fell to 43% from 45% the previous quarter and 50% a year earlier. Sanford C. Bernstein, whose estimate for Alibaba's valuation has already come down to $205 billion from $230 billion in June, still projects operating margins of 50% or higher for the next three fiscal years, even though they are already well below that level.  Last quarter, optimistic analysts argued the margin squeeze was largely due to higher share-based compensation, not underlying costs. That's not the case this . . .

Hour Two

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Mike Davis, professor of law at Hong Kong University, in re:   Beijing decided that universal suffrage lets everyone vote: for candidates whom Beijing chooses. College students now leading the movement as Occupy Central.  Yesterday there was another huge march. Democracy movement has grown in the last month when Beijing took such a rigid, confrontational stance that no one could accommodate, which brought the Occupy movement into greater favor.  Mainland-run govt often spies ob who marches, them arrests them a month later.  On National Day, when all the big shots are in govt bldg toasting.  Benny Tai!   Beijing made a mockery of democracy, and so turned Hong Kong into a base of resistance. Communist Party officials simply don’t get it.  The Party is in distress safest thing to do is take the hardest line possible.  Attacks in Hong Kong, the one against the Uyghur scholar yesterday, make no sense.    Article 23 group and colleagues have always been peaceful. Then the government has becoe more aggressive, cops wear shields, often outnumber the marchers.  Negative policy The question is: how heavy-handed will the govt be? OCTOBER 1.

Echoing Tiananmen, 17-year-old Hong Kong student prepares for democracy battle He's one of the fieriest political activists in Hong Kong — he's been called an "extremist" by China's state-run media — and he's not even old enough to drive.  Meet 17-year-old Joshua Wong, a skinny, bespectacled teen whose meager physical frame belies the ferocity of his politics. Over the last two years, the student has built a pro-democracy youth movement in Hong Kong that one veteran Chinese dissident says is just as significant as the student protests at Tiananmen, 25 years ago.

Echoing the young campaigners who flooded Beijing's central square in 1989, the teen activist wants to ignite a wave of civil disobedience among Hong Kong's students. His goal? To pressure China into giving Hong Kong full universal suffrage.

Wong's movement builds on years of pent-up frustration in Hong Kong.  When the former colony of the United Kingdom was returned to Chinese rule in 1997, the two countries struck an agreement promising Hong Kong a "high degree of autonomy," including the democratic election of its own leader. But 17 years later, little resembling genuine democracy has materialized. China's latest proposal suggests Hong Kongers may vote for their next leader, but only if the candidates are approved by Beijing.

Hong Kong is a seed of fire... the Communist Party is very scared of this tiny bit of land.

Wong is bent on fighting the proposal — and impatient to win.  "I don't think our battle is going to be very long," he tells CNN. "If you have the mentality that striving for democracy is a long, drawn-out war and you take it slowly, you will never achieve it.  "You have to see every battle as possibly the final battle — only then will you have the determination to fight."

Youth awakening   Doubt him if you like, but the young activist already has a successful track record of opposition.  In 2011, Wong, then 15, became disgusted with a proposal to introduce patriotic, pro-Communist "National and Moral Education" into Hong Kong's public schools.

With the help of a few friends, Wong started a student protest group called Scholarism. The movement swelled beyond his wildest dreams: In September 2012, Scholarism successfully rallied 120,000 protesters — including 13 young hunger strikers — to occupy the Hong Kong government headquarters, forcing the city's beleaguered leaders to withdraw the proposed curriculum.

That was when Wong realized that Hong Kong's youth held significant power.

"Five years ago, it was inconceivable that Hong Kong students would care about politics at all," he says. "But there was an awakening when the national education issue happened. We all started to care about politics."

Asked what he considers to be the biggest threats to the city, he rattles them off: From declining press freedom as news outlets change their reporting to reflect a pro-Beijing slant, to "nepotism" as Beijing-friendly politicians win top posts, the 17-year-old student says Hong Kong is quickly becoming "no different than any other Chinese city under central administration." That's why Wong has set his eyes on achieving universal suffrage. His group, which now . . . 

MORE: Democracy isn't dead, say Hong Kong's activists

Photo, below: Prof Ilham Tohti. See: Nuri Turkel, Hour 2, Block B

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Nury Turkel, Esq; past president of the Uyghur American Association; in Washington; in re: Uyghurs of East Turkestan. Sentencing of a Uyghur professor of economics to life in prison for being an interlocutor.   Three explosions in Luntai County, south-central East Turkestan, multiethnic area, mostly, Han, Uyghur and Mongol.  Radio Free Asia. In "terrorist  attacks," only the  Uyghurs die. Chinese police now are authorized to shoot anyone who resists: "punishment on the spot," no judicial inspection. Execution on the spot.  Before, it used to be that human rights activists criticized lack of judicial transparency; now it's immediate murder.  Ilham Tohti is a remarkable, wise, scholarly man who's spent his life working to resolve disagreements between Chinese leadership and Uyghurs, has earned respect across the world for his promotion of reconciliation.  Xinjiang officials gave him a term of life in prison,  Ilham Tohti opened Uygur Online in Chinese and Uyghur; was a facilitator for moderation.  He's officially a resident of Beijing, where his trial should have occurred. However someone in Urumchi, the Uyghur capital, wanted to use him as an example of how dangerous it is to be an intellectual who resists.  The US ambassador and many international observers went to attend the trial and were forbidden entrance. 

 

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Melik Kaylan, The Russia China Axis.; in re:  You can win or lose on how much you spend on military, but the real determinant is how many people sign on with you.  If there's one way we won the Cold War enduringly, it seemed to be our ideology - but not. China and Russia present illiberal democracies, elected dictatorships – also Venezuela, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq – elections are used to consolidate power that is not democratically applied because the democratic checks and balances aren’t there, e.g., in Singapore: wealth without democracy.  Russia: controlled democracy toward a consolidation of power. Many regimes are happy to sign on to this new ideology that justifies their position.    We act as though we'd won from natural virtues that don’t need to be articulated; this makes us vulnerable, since the rest of he world doesn’t see it that way, as in Middle East and Arab Spring: fault the US and Western ideology as a whole for "instability" – their code word. They like to present it as a reversal: the US now represents instability whereas Russia represent stability; this is why Putin adheres to the Orthodox Church,  We play into their hands – during our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq we turned away, let Russia and China  grow enormously. During Bush 2 they invaded Georgia with impunity; this is an example to the world and to Putin, who feels free to do this again and again.   There's much evidence of late that Assad has been complicit with ISIS: doing oil deals together, released a lot of radicals.  The Shite Axis aligned with Moscow encourages a certain amt of [excitement] that takes up Western attention.  That axis uses proxies:  North Korea for China, Iran for Russia.  They distract us constantly, put pressure on our military and resources (Iran uses Syria and Hizballah) in a full-court press to distract us, The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: absent the architecture of the Cold War, we cannot do long-term planning. 

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 2, Block D: Melik Kaylan, The Russia China Axis.; in re:  They point to the kind of instability of new democracies to condemn the entire notion of democracy. We hold that if you clave to certain principles you have a march toward progress. The USSR challenged that, then failed, now challenge again: in an era of superpowered media – its effect on democracy crates instability in world markets: can’t regulate the flows of capital, etc. We've given them a series of ideological tools with which to debase our sense of hat's virtuous in [politics and economy].   China pretends hat grow1nnnth should be steady ad continuous, thus attacking not only our politics but our economics.  Serves them well: even if you put it to a vote, you’re likely to have an electorate that halfway through loses confidence in boom-and-bust cycles. Without proper information in how to protect oneself, a check of human nature choose to have wise men at the e elm who somehow will protect them. The post-Soviet collapse rationale: we couldn’t distribute pensions to elders.  Of course, if you have information and wait through, these things to do sort out, Rather tempt populace to take shortcuts.   Authoritarian regimes may begin with a populist surge, but eventually the winds  [die down].  If you base an economy on a short surge of populist restructuring you shut down people's ability to [control life over time].  The intermittent bombing of Syria:  looks as though we're entering to taking the reins of control form Iran, Russia, but I think the Middle East is a place that will distract us from superpowers with nukes, plan over the long term. Am somewhat sympathetic to containing the threat, not stamping it out. 

Hour Three

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block A:  Jillian Kay Melchior, National Review Online, in re: Christians in Erbil (1 of 2)

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  Jillian Kay Melchior, National Review Online, in re: Christians in Erbil (2 of 2)

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block C:  Olivier Guitta, geopolitical risk analyst, in re: Algerian Islamic Militants Behead French Hostage  

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 3, Block D:   Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director & author, UnCivilization, in re: Islamic extremists surrender in Nigeria, Cameroon   Hundreds of Islamic extremists have surrendered in Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon following the military’s recent victories with air and ground attacks, military authorities said Wednesday.

The Nigerian Defense Ministry has said it has killed hundreds of insurgents recently in the country’s northeast. Several militant commanders were among the dead including Mohammed Bashir, whom the Nigerian military identified as a double who posed in videos as Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, a military statement said Wednesday.

The military has claimed Shekau was killed in battle last year.

Nigeria’s military said it was victorious around Konduga town just 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Maiduguri, birthplace of Boko Haram and the headquarters of the military offensive to contain the Islamic uprising. “It became apparent that the terrorists ... were determined to take over communities around Maiduguri, which is their prime target,” the statement said, adding the insurgents made four attempts to take Konduga between Sept. 12 and 17.

It said 135 insurgents surrendered Tuesday night, some at Buni-Yadi some 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Konduga and others at Michika, 165 kilometers (100 miles) south of Konduga.

Cameroon’s defense ministry said more than 300 Boko Haram fighters have surrendered there in the past three weeks. Spokesman Lt. Col. Didier Badjeck told The Associated Press that . . .

Hour Four

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block A:  Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: State Department adds Chechen, Moroccan-led jihadist groups to terrorist list  The US State Department added ten individuals and two organizations to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists today.  The designated parties include the Chechen-led Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar and the Moroccan-led Harakat Sham al Islam, as well as Murad Margoshvilli, the leader of the Junud al Sham. The two groups and the jihadist leader are closely allied with the Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, al Qaeda's official branch in Syria, and other jihadist organizations in the region. Harakat Sham al Islam was founded by three former Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The additions to the State Department's list of terrorists is part of a series of designations that includes four al Qaeda leaders, a Shabaab leader, and three Islamic State leaders and operatives. [See LWJ report, US government designations target al Qaeda's international network and Threat Matrix report Islamic State, Shabaab leaders added to US terrorism list.]

Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar, or the Army of the Emigrants and Helpers or Muhajireen Army, is an al Qaeda and Islamic State-allied jihadist group that is populated by commanders and fighters from the Islamic Caucasus Emirate as well as a large number of Syrians. The group is considered to be the Islamic Caucasus' branch in Syria. After the death of Islamic Caucasus Emirate leader Doku Umarov, the Muhajireen Army swore allegiance to his replacement, Ali Abu Mukhammad.

The Muhajireen Army was founded by Omar al Shishani, a Chechen leader who joined the Islamic State in the fall of of 2013. Salahuddin al Shishani is the current emir of the Muhajireen Army. . . .

US targets Islamic State in 21 strikes in Syria, Iraq  The US military launched 21 more airstrikes against the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria yesterday and today. The strikes did not target the so-called Khorasan group, a cadre of al Qaeda leaders and operatives who are embedded with the Al Nusrah Front and are plotting to conduct attacks in the West.

Yesterday, "a mix of bomber and remotely piloted aircraft " targeted Islamic State "armed vehicles" southwest of the city of Dier al Zour in Syria, US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced in a press release. One of the armed vehicles, which are likely technicals, or pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the bed, was destroyed and the other was damaged.  Another armed vehicle was destroyed in an airstrike at an undisclosed location northwest of Baghdad. . . .

CENTCOM issued another press release today that noted five strikes in Iraq and Syria in the past 24 hours. Two Islamic State "armed vehicles and a weapons cache" were destroyed in two strikes west of Baghdad, and two 'fighting positions" were destroyed in another two . . .

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block B:  James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, in re: Beating About the Bush  Obama's war embarrasses some journalists. 

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block C: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-09-23/news/54239645_1_...

Wednesday  24 September 2014 / Hour 4, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: http://online.wsj.com/articles/sadanand-dhume-a-brief-honeymoon-in-delhi...