Great reviews for Thiel

Reason takes a bat to Thiel's speech that my "Asian Latham" reader Jason thinks was "a good thought provoking speech"*:

Thiel used to be roughly identified, including, at times, by me, as a libertarian. One reason was his decision to fund what started as a libertarian-rooted wild idea, Seasteading. Another indicator was his big-money support of an ultimately feckless Ron Paul-oriented SuperPac. These decisions made his warm embrace of Trump back in 2016 confusing, but he has now made it clear he has, and wants, nothing to do with the idea that human liberty is overall good and enriching.

Instead, Thiel has some interests and some enemies, and he wants to use the power of the state as a weapon to help one and harm the other. The main enemies are Google, China, and the U.S. university system. He advocated vigorous police actions against the first and third, and a trade war (at least) against China.

One of the comments following the article contains a handy list of things Thiel's President buddy has done:

You probably can’t but try to imagine how fast Obama would have been thrown out of office and probably arrested if he had done and said the a 10th of things Trump has said and done in office. Whether it’s threatening people, paling around with dictators, using the public office to enrich his businesses, spending $100 million dollars playing golf, putting his children in positions of authority, lying everyday, inviting foreign help in his election, engineering a disaster on the border for political gain, encouraging police to beat people up, encouraging his supporters to commit violence, the obstruction of the special counsel investigation, the attempt to rig the census, singlaling out certain states for punitive attacks such as withholding disaster aid or writing a tax law designed to damage states that didn’t vote for him and more. I can’t help but chalk up the double standard to racism but maybe it’s partisanship which probably comes from the same place in the brain as the racism. Anyway one day a future generation is going to look and this time from a detached perspective and they will recoil in horror at the madness of it all just as we do so now at the madness that existed in our past.

*  Yeah, I would agree if the thought provoked was "what an outrageous and dangerous nut, using his influence on the dumb-as Trump to try to incite investigation of a rival company."

Zen terrorist discussed

Aeon has an interesting article up, talking about a Zen Buddhist terrorist who sort of kicked off the military/imperial power period in Japan that led to World War 2.

I didn't realise that things were quite this dire in that country in the 1920's - 30's:

Following his father’s death in 1926, Emperor Hirohito had ascended the throne at a time of great social and political domestic instability. Across Japan, banks were closing, and the government was arresting Left-wing activists, accusing them of harbouring ‘dangerous thoughts’ as defined by the Peace Preservation Law.

The Great Depression that began in the United States in 1929 greatly reduced both demand and prices for raw silk, Japan’s single largest export product. At the same time, Japan’s population was increasing by nearly 1 million people a year. Its workforce was growing at an annual rate of approximately 450,000 people, all seeking jobs in a shrinking economy.

In addition, successive poor harvests in the early 1930s, especially in the northern prefectures, brought widespread starvation to many parts of the country. Rural debt rose rapidly, leading to delinquent tax payments, and more and more farmers either lost their land altogether or were forced to take desperate measures, such as selling their daughters into prostitution. Japanese society was in a state of crisis that in many people’s eyes required immediate and drastic remedies.

The article goes on to note that Nissho Inoue, the Zen terrorist, saw his revolutionary role as entirely consistent with Buddhism:

Inoue threw himself into the work of training a small group of about 20 young people. He drew on a variety of Zen training methods, including meditation practice; assigning koans (Zen riddles) and conducting private interviews with his disciples, all to create an intrepid group of volunteers with a ‘do or die’ spirit.

At first, Inoue planned to train young people for legal political activism. However, by 1930, under the pressure of events and young civilian and military activists, Inoue decided to take more resolute measures. ‘In an emergency situation,’ he wrote, ‘emergency measures are necessary. What is essential is to restore life to the nation. Discussions over the methods for doing this can come later, much later.’ Inoue fully expected that his political actions would lead to his death: ‘We had taken it upon ourselves to engage in destruction, aware that we would perish in the process.’

In his previous Zen training, Inoue found the basis for his commitment to destruction. Drawing on the lessons of a 13th-century Zen collection of koans known as the Mumonkan, or ‘The Gateless Barrier’, he claimed:

Revolution employs compassion on behalf of the society of the nation. Therefore those who wish to participate in revolution must have a mind of great compassion toward the society of the nation. In light of this there must be no thought of reward for participating in revolution. 

In other words, in the violently destructive acts of revolution one would find the mind of Buddhist compassion.

And there is more:

In October 1930, Inoue and his band shifted their base of operations to Tokyo. From there, he recruited more young people, including some from Japan’s most prestigious universities. One of Inoue’s band members later explained: ‘We sought to extinguish Self itself.’

Inoue’s band chose assassination as their method of revolution. Assassination, Inoue explained, ‘required, whether successful or not, the least number of victims’. He also thought it ‘was best for the country, untainted by the least self-interest’. He and his band members were prepared to die in the process of the revolution. By being prepared to sacrifice themselves, they believed they could ensure that as few people as possible would fall victim to revolutionary violence.

Well, that was big of them.  

Anyway, read the whole thing.

 

Comedy analysed

An opinion piece at the Washington Post notes that some prominent Hollywood comedies have not performed well at the box office, regardless of whether well reviewed or not.

He thinks comedy as a movie genre may be suffering because of the culture wars, and he might be right.

But he ends on a good point - which ties in with my take that I only like Marvel films if they are funny enough:

Still: I’m not entirely sure big-screen comedy is as bad off as some suggest. Indeed, it may be flourishing. You just have to squint a little. The biggest comedies in the world right now come wrapped up in spandex and armor: What is the Marvel Cinematic Universe but a series of spectacularly done (and spectacularly successful) action comedies?

“Spider-Man: Far From Home” is almost entirely a teen rom com wrapped up in a superhero bow: My audience was rolling at the mentions of “Peter Tingles” and polite Dutch hooligans and the amateurish high school news program explaining life after Thanos. “Captain Marvel” is basically a buddy comedy with a dreadfully dull straight woman and her wacky S.H.I.E.L.D sidekick. (This is among the reasons that movie didn’t really work, but I digress.) And “Avengers: Endgame,” with its Fat Thor and Smart Hulk, is almost an existential action comedy, a darkly comic look at how to deal with tragedy that culminates in a lot of punching.

The staff room chat must be interesting

What's this?   An economist at RMIT, who presumably runs into Sinclair Davidson from time to time, has an article up at The Conversation finding this:

Wholesale prices in the National Electricity Market have climbed significantly in recent years. The increase has coincided with a rapid increase in the proportion of electricity supplied by wind and solar generators.

But that needn’t mean the increase in wind and solar generation caused the increase in prices. It might have been caused by other things.

Colleagues Songze Qu and Tihomir Ancev from the University of Sydney and I have examined the contribution of each type of generator to wholesale prices, half hour by half hour over the eight years between November 1, 2010 and June 30, 2018.

We find that, rather than pushing prices up, each extra gigawatt of dispatched wind generation cuts the wholesale electricity price by about A$11 per megawatt hour at the time of generation, while each extra gigawatt of utility-scale solar cuts it A$14 per megawatt hour.

Surely she knows that Sinclair runs Catallaxy, which campaigns relentlessly on the alleged cost disaster of renewables?   Doesn't that annoy her?   I hope she is at least sarcastic and condescending.

The strange Thiel in the news again

Axios has some questions for Peter Thiel which are nicely sarcastic:

Peter Thiel doubled down last night on his "Google has maybe been infiltrated by the Chinese government" claim, which was eventually picked up by President Trump. When (lightly) pressed for evidence, Thiel simply said he was "asking questions."

Why it matters: You don't propose that someone deserves to face a firing squad without at least a single receipt.

So a few questions for Mr. Thiel:

1. Have you shorted Google stock or is Palantir currently competing with Google for a major U.S. government contract?
2. You've said on the record that you're "not a vampire." Are you able to provide independent verification of this claim? Because, were you a vampire, it could pose a national security risk given your ties with senior U.S. officials.
3. Is it because you're actually a vampire that you deny being a vampire? And would that not be seemingly treasonous, in that the generally accepted societal punishment is death (albeit by wooden stake, in this case)?

He remains a weirdo.  

Yeah, that was cool

Mind you, any real soldier doing this anywhere near a battlefield could not be a bigger target.  But yeah, looks cool.
 
His next feat:

Zapata, who first developed his device flying above water, says that the flyboard has the power to take off and reach speeds up to 190 kilometres an hour (118 mph) and run for 10 minutes.

He is now eyeing a crossing of the English Channel which, for the first time, will require a refuelling in mid-flight.

Zapata aims to make the crossing on July 25, 110 years to the day after pioneering aviator Louis Bleriot made the first airplane flight across the Channel.

Big solar, big battery

In Science magazine:

This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world's largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That's cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel.

"Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear," Mark Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, tweeted after news of the deal surfaced late last month. "Because of growing economies of scale, prices for renewables and batteries keep coming down," adds Jacobson, who has advised countries around the world on how to shift to 100% renewable electricity. As if on cue, last week a major U.S. coal company—West Virginia–based Revelation Energy LLC—filed for bankruptcy, the second in as many weeks.

The new solar plus storage effort will be built in Kern County in California by 8minute Solar Energy. The project is expected to create a 400-megawatt solar array, generating roughly 876,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity annually, enough to power more than 65,000 homes during daylight hours. Its 800-MWh battery will store electricity for after the sun sets, reducing the need for natural gas–fired generators.

The article goes on to note that the battery storage is only good for a few hours, but I guess if it deals with the evening peak, it might have a disproportionate effect on emissions.

There is a long, long way to go with solar and battery storage - and I have my doubts that lithium batteries will end up the key player for grid level storage.   But solar with some form of storage is some very sunny places - such as California (and the Northern half of Australia) seems to have a lot of potential.

Late to the aviation party

Google doesn't seem all that wise about what to recommend to me on Youtube, otherwise I would have known about aviation and travel blogger (and vlogger) Sam Chui before now. 

Anyway, he popped up on recommendations last night, and I watched his recent 22 minute video in which he takes an 8 hour flight that costs $20,000, on Etihad's "Residence" - in which you get your own bedroom, private bathroom and even caviar and champagne breakfast in your double bed.

I felt at one point that the butler was so obsequious that he was going to offer "extras" in the same way as might a massage therapist, but it doesn't go quite that far.  Right up to the line, but not that far.

The service from the flight lounge on is so ridiculously over the top it's pretty funny - but I suppose at $20,000 a flight, the airline can buy a lot of cigars, caviar, champagne and grovelling.   Watch it if you will:

Do news editors read the article before they write the headline?

News.com.au ran an article yesterday with this headline:

Plastic bag ban: Critics warn it isn’t helping Australia reduce waste

The major supermarkets’ bag ban has kept billions of single-use plastic bags out of landfill in the last year, but critics say the policy isn’t working.

Yet the actual study by the economist (from America, but now in Sydney) showed this:

Using quasi-random policy variation in California, I find the elimination of 40 million pounds of plastic carryout bags is offset by a 12 million pound increase in trash bag purchases—with small, medium, and tall trash bag sales increasing by 120%, 64%, and 6%, respectively. The results further reveal 12–22% of plastic carryout bags were reused as trash bags pre-regulation and show bag bans shift consumers towards fewer but heavier bags. With a substantial proportion of carryout bags already reused in a way that avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag, policy evaluations that ignore leakage effects overstate the regulation's welfare gains.

So a net benefit of 28 million pounds less plastic in bags thrown out in California is meant to be showing us the ban isn't working here??  

And if people want to argue about the thickness of resuseable bags being an environmental problem in waste tips - I find this remarkably ironic, given that the same people are likely the ones who have recently taken to arguing that recycling any plastic is all a crock and we should just bury it all.

I think it extremely likely that thicker bags are not so readily going to end up in the ocean, which is where the great concern over lightweight bags, which are more easily windblown and resemble food to too many sea creatures, has been coming.  Thicker bags, simply by the way they are going to be re-used for groceries until they break, are more likely to end up in the tip, and stay there.   That would be my strong, common sense, hunch, at least.

If you want a genuine study as to the environmental impact of the change, you would need to be looking at whether it has made a difference to beach, river and ocean pollution, and where the thicker bags are ending up.

Britain in safe hands

A harsh, but somewhat amusing, take on a TV debate between Johnson and Hunt:

Brexit dominated the first 45 minutes and as expected neither man had any answers. But then a lack of realism has been the default position of both Boris and Hunt throughout and they weren’t about to change now. Brexit was something that would happen providing you believed in it enough. What had been missing was someone who would look the EU in the eyes and tell them we were mad and self-destructive enough to trash the entire country to get things done. Of course there would be casualties along the way, but true patriotic Brits should be prepared to lay down their lives so that everyone who survived could be made poorer.

On and on the nonsense went. Both men unilaterally ditched the Northern Ireland backstop and put their faith in alternative border technologies that did not yet exist. Boris even promised to take back control by increasing immigration. Not exactly what many Brexiters had voted for, but trust in politics is now so low that no one really cares what anyone says. Coherence is a state to which no one now even aspires. Lying is now truth.

Johnson was just as confused on a trade deal with the US. This time he had at least read clause 5(c) of Gatt 24 but he still hadn’t bothered to mug up on clause 5(d). Details, details. Asked to condemn President Trump’s tweets about four Democrat congresswomen, Hunt said that his three children were half-Chinese. Boris avoided talking about his children. Mainly because he can’t always remember how many he has. Or what their nationalities might be. Both men couldn’t bring themselves to say what they thought was racist about the racist tweet. That’s the strong type of leadership that’s on offer. Britain standing up to the US by lying down.

Against Assange

A collection of links showing the carelessness and endangerment inherent in the Wikileaks enterprise, and the flakeiness of Julian Assange:

The Wiki leak is more and less important than you think

Private lives are collateral damage in WikiLeaks' document dumps

WikiTargeted

That last link is to a story summarised in a Vox article.   This is worth extracting in full (and Graeme, your comments about this are bound to be deleted.  Don't even bother.):

Shamir, who has gone by six names over the course of his life, was born Izrail Schmerler, in Russia. He converted from Judaism to the Greek Orthodox Church later in life, and turned viciously on his former co-religionists. He has denied the Holocaust, called Jews “a virus in human form,” and, in 2010, published a book titled Breaking the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Shamir was also a longtime friend of Julian Assange, who tasked him with helping to disseminate WikiLeaks documents in his native Russia in early 2010.

“Shamir has a years-long friendship with Assange, and was privy to the contents of tens of thousands of US diplomatic cables months before WikiLeaks made public the full cache,” James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer, wrote at the Guardian the next year. “Shamir aroused the suspicion of several WikiLeaks staffers — myself included — when he asked for access to all cable material concerning ‘the Jews,’ a request which was refused.”

The first thing Shamir did with the documents was hand some off to Russian Reporter magazine, a Kremlin-friendly newsweekly. He then offered to sell access to them to the highest bidder, David Leigh and Luke Harding write in the book Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

But what he did next was exceptionally curious. Shamir traveled to Belarus, a country ruled by dictator Alexander Lukashenko and perhaps Putin’s staunchest ally in Europe. Shamir was a fan of Lukashenko; in a 2010 piece, he called Belarus “the Shangri-la of the post-Soviet development.”

In Belarus, Shamir shared State Department cables pertaining to the country with government officials — in unredacted, unedited form.

In January 2011, Belarusian state-run media began publishing what it said were US diplomatic cables from Shamir’s cache, alleging that Lukashenko’s opponents were funded abroad. According to several Belarusian dissidents who spoke to Tablet, the names in the cables were also used to identify lower-level dissidents.

“The extent to which WikiLeaks and Israel Shamir have endangered the lives of pro-democracy activists in Belarus will become chillingly clear as innocent men and women continue to disappear,” Kapil Komireddi, author of the Tablet piece, writes.

WikiLeaks issued a weak public disavowal of Shamir’s Belarusian caper in February 2011, saying “obviously it is not approved.” But according to Ball, the internal discourse on Shamir was somewhat different.

“Assange shamefully refused to investigate [the Belarus incident],” Ball recalled in his Guardian piece. “The two [Shamir and Assange] remain close.”

Next link:  a lengthy piece in The Atlantic, containing amongst other stuff a claim about Assange's attitude to release of names of Afghan informants:

I might further direct you to Assange’s own unique brand of journalism, when he could still be said to be practicing it. Releasing U.S. diplomatic communiqués that named foreigners living in conflict zones or authoritarian states and liaising with American officials was always going to require thorough vetting and redaction, lest those foreigners be put in harm’s way. Assange did not care—he wanted their names published, according to Luke Harding and David Leigh in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. As they recount the story, when Guardian journalists working with WikiLeaks to disseminate its tranche of U.S. secrets tried to explain to Assange why it was morally reprehensible to publish the names of Afghans working with American troops, Assange replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.” (Assange denied the account; the names, in the end, were not published in The Guardian, although some were by WikiLeaks in its own dump of the files.)**

It is very clear that Assange lied about matters during the Trump campaign:  hence lying about this is not hard to imagine.  (He claimed he would sue The Guardian, he never did.)

  

The strange world of American evangelical "heaven tourism"

Slate has a long, sad story about a book that sold well amongst  US evangelicals, but the guy at the centre of the story denies that it was true.  (He was in a bad accident and the book was about his journey to heaven and back.)

As I don't keep up with the peculiar world of American evangelical circles, I did not know about this:

The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven sold more than 1 million copies and spent months on the New York Times’ bestseller list. It was also on the leading edge of a boomlet of “heaven tourism” stories in Christian publishing, including Heaven Is for Real, a memoir about 4-year-old Colton Burpo’s experience that came out later in 2010 and was eventually adapted into a movie starring Greg Kinnear. Time magazine published a cover story in 2012 titled “Rethinking Heaven,” opening with Burpo’s story—even more detailed than Alex’s—about seeing a rainbow horse and meeting the Virgin Mary. Other such books included 90 Minutes in Heaven (2004, car accident), Flight to Heaven (2010, plane crash), To Heaven and Back (2012, kayaking accident), and Miracles From Heaven (2015, fall into a hollow tree, made into a Jennifer Garner movie). After the Malarkeys’ success, “all Christian publishers were looking for the next heaven book,” said Sandy Vander Zicht, a former editor at Zondervan, a large evangelical publisher based in Michigan.

Until things came crashing back to earth. The cover of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven calls the book “a true story.” But the boy himself now says it was not true at all. Four years ago, Alex sent a letter to a conservative Christian blog dramatically renouncing the book. “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven,” he wrote. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. … People have profited from lies, and continue to.” Alex’s retraction also became a sensation, with reporters unable to resist the sudden, hilarious perfection of his last name: Malarkey. 

Although The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven has been off shelves for years now, yanked by the publisher after Alex’s disavowal, the drama around it has quietly continued to roil. Last year, Alex filed a lawsuit against Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher based in suburban Chicago, accusing the company of defamation and exploitation, among other charges. He’s seeking a payout at least equal to the book’s profits. Alex, who recently turned 21, now lives with his mother. He was valedictorian of his high school, but he has been a quadriplegic since the accident and requires full-time care. Kevin and Beth divorced last year, and Beth says she has no idea what happened to the money Kevin earned from the book. The suit alleges that she and Alex are “on the verge of being homeless.” Alex was a minor when the book was published, and claims he was not a party to the contract. (Tyndale says in court filings that Kevin entered into an agreement on his own and Alex’s behalf, and that while Beth was not party to the contract, she “consented as a matter of fact” to the book’s production by helping to arrange interviews and supplying family photos.) A judge has dismissed most of the lawsuit’s counts. The next court date is in August.

More generally, the article is of interest for the way it describes how some evangelicals frequently think they are sensing the presence of angels or demons.  Some really do live in a world of high imagination. 

Back on the domestic front

In another of my "I am a wannabe 'influencer' but I am a complete failure at it" posts, I endorse the following products, having consumed them this last weekend:

The "tacos" in this are soft tortillas, and they are best heated up in a hot fry pan.  The "flame grilled BBQ taco sauce" in this kit is not like your usual bland taco sauce, and is very delicious.   I fried an onion and red capsicum with the steak strips, and threw in a drained can of black eyed beans at the end, too, which extends a relatively small amount of steak into enough for 4. 

This is the best of the pre-made butter chicken sauces out there.  Some fresh cream added at the end probably makes all the difference.  Add carrots, and beans (and even some red capsicum) to make a more balanced meal.  Having no naan bread handy, I tried heating up some ordinary wraps in the dry fry pan last night, and they still puffed up a bit and were a decent substitute.

I should have been a home economics teacher. 

A rare, pro-scooter, opinion piece

I still haven't been on one.  Still tempted.  But someone writing at the Washington Post now loves using them. 

Crud

I found a surprising amount of sticky, brown crud stuck in the front loading washing machine today, behind the mould affected rubber seal and in a hard to reach crevice on the outside of the drum.   

I suspect it may be to do with rarely running the machine at the top temperature of 60 degrees.  (Or perhaps to do with using fabric softener, which I recall a plumber/repairman telling us never to use.  But for towels, it really needs something, and vinegar does leave a bit of a smell and doesn't do much softening.)

Anyway, I ran the machine at 60 degrees with a cup vinegar, after removing as much crud as I could with a sponge and my finger.  Hopefully, this has cleaned it all out.

I love the front loading washing machine, but it is an interesting challenge to keep clean.

That is all in today's edition of "The Domestic Life of Steve".  Thank you.

Update:  Yes.  The brown gunk build up in front loading washers is a well discussed problem on the 'net.   Glad it's not just my household...