How to upset my daughter

She drove us nuts until we relented and got her a low-end iPhone, because, like, the iPhone/Android ratio amongst teenage girls in Australia is about 99.95/.05.   And she's still the most Apple phone conscious person I know - she can spot and tell which model someone is using from 30 m away, I swear.

So, the possibility of me acquiring a Motorola phone (now my favourite brand) that will look absolutely identical to a high end iPhone amuses me no end:

Here's the story:   Motorola phone 'brazen copy' of iPhone X

It was the 60's, man [see the last paragraph, if nothing else]

Back in 2014 I put up a post about an important physicist of the 20th century who I felt I should have known about:  Leo Szilard.   (He's credited with coming up with the idea of a nuclear reactor, as well as writing the letter that Einstein gave to Roosevelt to get the Manhattan Project going.)

I can now update that post with some amusing material about how eccentric he was:

Leo’s plan was to study engineering at the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, but engineering proved boring—“the routine application of established knowledge,” in his appraisal. At Willhelm, he attended lectures by Nobel physicist Max Planck, who sparked his interest in theoretical physics, and befriended Albert Einstein by walking him home from school. But even with Einstein’s guidance, Leo struggled to secure a job in his chosen discipline: undoubtedly brilliant, he was also, in the words of his friend Eugene Wigner, “an ass in some respects,” bored by teaching and lab work, distracted by his own quixotic ideas. Tellingly, he put the word “job” in scare quotes. By the end of the decade, he was broke, and Berlin was in crisis. On January 30th, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. A few months later, once Einstein secured him a last-ditch fellowship, Leo moved to London.

It was in London, on a street corner in Imperial Park, that Leo had an epiphany, motivated, characteristically, by irritation. He had just read an editorial by Ernest Rutherford declaring the Wellsian dream of atomic power a theoretical impossibility. It occurred to Leo that a nuclear chain reaction could be precipitated by the neutrons, then a recent discovery, in a “critical mass” of uranium. Vindicated, Leo filed his first patent. Five years later, he fled Nazi-occupied Europe for the United States.

In 1942, under the auspices of Roosevelt, Leo began work as Chief Physicist at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Lab, where the Manhattan Project was first conceived. He collaborated with Enrico Fermi to create Chicago-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, partially devised from Leo’s 1934 patent.  Unsurprisingly, Leo was a frustrating colleague from the very beginning—a “peculiar man,” in the words of Fermi, with too many ideas and too few social graces, who “seemed to enjoy startling people.” Chiefly, he enjoyed startling “brass hats,” or the bureaucrats and government officials with whom he would be in conflict for most of his adult life.

As the Manhattan Project continued, the Met Lab came under the control of Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, the director of the Army Corps of Engineers and Leo’s eventual nemesis in life and death. Groves was a career soldier with a puny mustache, a pugilistic face, and a hearty American distrust of intellectuals; Leo was a Hungarian with a heavy accent, a jocular contempt for military authority, and an ecstatic, evangelizing confidence in his own ideas. The two were instant enemies, bound by a beautifully counterpoised hatred. 

You can read the article further for the conflict between Graves and Leo, but I'll skip to this paragraph about his rather unsettled life:

During the war, Leo never described himself as socialist or, for that matter, as a Jew. Instead, in a famous quip, he described himself as a Martian. Alien or not, he had always been a moony annoyance, bidden by odd, insistent habits. He didn’t marry until 1951, when he was fifty-three years old, and courted his wife, Trude, by mail over a period of decades—aware, perhaps, that he charmed in prose but chafed in person. Mostly left to his own devices, he seldom bothered with anything so terrestrial as labwork, or laundry, or living in houses. He felt most at home in hotel rooms, roosting anywhere with room service. Leo lived precariously, portably, with everything he owned—clothes, books, papers, patents—slopped into suitcases. His first real permanent address in America was in La Jolla, where he retired and where, in 1964, he died.

But here's the real reason I felt compelled to post further about him.  The article I'm quoting from deals with a book of science fiction stories Szilard wrote in the early 1960's.   Remembering that he had tried to persuade the US government to delay using the atomic bomb, the title story from his book is described thus:

...“The Voice of the Dolphins” takes place in the near future, and follows a cabal of messianic dolphins who take over the Vatican. Possessed of a frighteningly superior intelligence, the dolphins also demonstrate a preternatural understanding of nuclear warheads. To everyone’s relief, they crave only peace. They start a radio show, on which they predict the U.S.-Soviet nuclear crisis of the 1980s. They also resolve it, through a series of byzantine policy proposals. Then, under mysterious circumstances, they die, evoking either a political assassination or the death of Christ. 

 !!
 

The stupid use of "socialism"

What Paul Krugman says in this twitter thread makes perfect sense:   Republicans have been referring to the "social safety net" of other (typically European) countries as "socialism" for years.   [He doesn't go this far back, but what about that old Ronald Reagan ad from 1961 in which he was paid to warn about "socialised medicine" as the beginning of a slippery slope:  "pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him."]

The thing is, of course, that for a lot of Americans, the conditions in many European countries actually do look really good compared to the problems of life at home.  As Paul says (he's just returned from Denmark):

Yes:  the ridiculous hand wringing from the Right over some Americans saying that "socialism" doesn't look bad at all is pretty much all due to the ridiculously exaggerated use of the word by Republicans themselves over many decades.  

Save the oyster

I don't eat that many oysters anymore - the general cost of most wild caught seafood has escalated so much that the good quality fish shops where I used to buy them have closed in the shopping malls of my part of Brisbane, and the supermarket fish counters don't routinely have them.   But I do prefer the Sydney rock oyster over the Pacific if I have a choice.

Anyway, some bad news in The Guardian about how ocean acidification (both from soil run off and the ocean's general increasing acidification) is apparently making Sydney Rock oysters smaller (they were already small enough) and fewer. 

I have posted before about oysters being affected by ocean acidification, including in 2014 in which I noted that research that indicated that the variety could adapt to increasing acidification.   I expressed a bit of skepticism about that at the time, and it looks like that may have been well justified.

Something to worry about

An opinion piece at the New York Times:

Worried About Turkey’s Economic Problems? China’s Could Be Worse 

Back to Nazis as Leftists

My dedicated reader Homer pointed out to my other dedicated reader Jason in comments recently an anonymous economics blogger pseudoerasmus who had some lengthy posts a couple of years back about how the Nazis are not appropriately, retrospectively, classified as Leftists.  

I've read the posts now - they are pretty good.

First one is here.   Follow up one is here.

The thing is, this "Nazis were really Leftists" argument was never tried until US conservative political thought started going off the rails over the last couple of decades and turned into the basket case it is now.   That alone should cause hesitation. 

A serious, underestimated, problem with climate change

From the Washington Post:

How climate change is making ‘red tide’ algal blooms even worse 

Once again I ask:  how did economists trying to model the economic effects of climate change factor this into their calculations?  

Energy storage by batteries - or compressed air?

I've been thinking about renewable energy storage using compressed air.  As you do.

I started looking at the topic because of a recent article in the normally techno optimist MIT Technology Review which talks about the limited role, due to expense, that massive lithium ion battery banks can play in providing large scale grid storage.   Sure, they have their place in providing short term power when needed - as in the South Australian Tesla battery case - and the article doesn't argue against their effectiveness in that role.  But it argues that for very large scale storage as you increase renewable energy generation, they are just going to be too expensive.

(It doesn't talk about the benefits of household lithium ion batteries, but that is a different issue, even if important in its own right.)

Bill Gates and many others are looking into alternative forms of grid batteries, and we hear of potential new flow batteries and such like, but it seems that there is some way to go in terms of cost.

Which made me think - how is the idea of compressed air storage holding up?

There seem to be various companies promoting their ideas for compressed air energy storage, but the fundamental issue appears to be - where to store the air?   Many companies are suggesting underground storage, perhaps in salt caverns or former natural gas wells.   But this seems a pretty limiting idea as far as siting is concerned.

However, one idea from Canada by a company called Hydrostor has caught my eye as a clever proposal:  store compressed air in deep enough water in bladders that take advantage of the surrounding water pressure:

The concept is simple enough: When the energy bag is anchored underwater—at least 25 meters deep and ideally 100 meters or more—the weight of the water naturally pressurizes the air, allowing more air, and thus energy, to be stored in a given volume. (The pressure increases roughly 1 atmosphere, or about 100,000 pascals, every 10 meters.) At depths greater than 500 meters, says Garvey, “the cost of the containment becomes negligible compared with the costs of the power-conversion machinery.”

In the Toronto system, the bags (or “flexible accumulators,” as Hydrostor calls them) will be deployed at a depth of 80 meters, and they should be able to supply about a megawatt of electricity for 3 hours or so. The company will also be testing fixed-wall accumulators, in which the compressed air will displace water inside the vessel. “This is the smallest size we would contemplate,” says VanWalleghem. A more typical capacity, he says, would be 20 to 30 megawatts that can be discharged over 10 to 20 hours. Eventually, the company will aim for an efficiency of about 60 to 70 percent. The technology easily scales up, he adds. “We just make the air cavity bigger, so there really is no upper limit.” By year’s end, the company plans to build a bigger and deeper underwater energy storage facility in Aruba.

In an interview, the President of the company goes into more detail about the depth at which this should work best (my bold):

Cameron Lewis: We have an interesting twist on it because we do underwater CAES. For the roundtrip that we do, we’ll take electricity and run it through a specialised compressor, and we capture and store the heat generated out of that compression. We’ll add that back in later and increase our efficiency. So we store the heat and then the air is sent underwater to depths of 80m, 100m, 200m and put into flexible accumulators. You could say that they look an awful lot like a hot air balloon – the balloon will expand and hold the air there. So just like traditional underground fixed-wall caverns do, we store the air at pressure, but the pressure is a result of the depth. Now, when we reverse the flow, the accumulator will collapse and it will push the air back to the surface at pressure, and we will then add back in the heat that we’ve stored. We then run it back through a generator and put the power back into the grid. We get about a 70% roundtrip efficiency on this, but without needing to use natural gas and with several benefits. You’re dealing with an underwater environment so it can be a bit tricky at depths like that, but the advantage is that you get a very low cost cavern in which to store the air. The other advantage is that unlike a fixed-wall cavern, you get out every drop of energy that you put in, because it’s not a ramp up power curve.

Matthew Wright: So is the material for the accumulator – a buoyant bag, or whatever – something special that needs to be able to handle pressure or is it just the water pressure that’s holding all the air in?

Cameron Lewis: It’s the water that’s doing it. When we pump the air down, it’s at the same pressure that you would find hydrostatically that you’re at. When you look at the fabric that the accumulator is made of, it doesn’t hold much pressure at all – maybe one or two psi.

Matthew Wright: I noted that on your website you’re talking about an example that’s at a depth of around 80m, I think that’s about 1 atm per 10 m. What is the minimum depth at which you can operate? Some of the bays around cities in Australia are not that deep.

Cameron Lewis: The minimum is about 60m, but the range is roughly between 60-500m in depth. In this case, what depth really affects is the cost. The deeper you go, the cheaper it becomes. The reason is that you hold more power per cubic meter at a higher pressure at a greater depth than you do at a lower depth. At a lower depth, you’ll need many more cubic meters to hold the same amount of energy as you do at a greater depth.

Well, there's a problem - how far off, say, Brisbane or Sydney do you need to go to get to water more than 60 m deep?   Let me Google that for you.  The images below from this website show depth contours of 20, 40, and 100 m:

It would seem that for both of these cities, there are points of land where it would be under 10 km to get to 100 m depth (and of course it would be less if working at 80 m).

I wonder - does having a compressed air pipe 10 km long possibly work, or introduce its own inefficiencies?   I don't know the answer to that, but it is the only way it would work unless you get wind turbines out to sea at such distance - which then has the issue of getting the power back to land across 10 km.  :(    (Incidentally, I see there is talk of using floating wind turbines that don't need to sunk into the sea bed, and could work out to sea scores of km from land.  But to use the benefit of compressed air storage, you need a regular turbine too.)

Anyway, apart from getting your spare renewable energy from wind turbines, there is always solar, as long as it is coastal.

It's not as simple as I would like, but still,  the idea of using water pressure to do a lot of the work is clever.  We just need deeper water nearby...

Took too long

The ABC will not renew the terrible, terrible Tonightly with Tom Ballard. 

Not a moment too soon.   It was awful in all respects, from the host to the very concept that they could produce quality, news based comedy material 4 or 5 nights a week without a big team of writers.  

And besides, I can't stand Tom Ballard.   Did I mention that? 

Blair & Bolt call for Jihad - on Malcolm Turnbull

Gee, Tim Blair is upset that Malcolm Turnbull looks like getting his way on an energy plan which no one (including me) seems to understand anyway - and for which the matrix of support makes it very hard to know who's right.  

I mean - Blair and Bolt hate it, and their nonsense climate change denialism would indicate that it's probably therefore a worthwhile plan;  but Bernard Keane and John Quiggin seem to think it entrenches a pretty carbon emissions friendly scheme that should be opposed - and seeing big emissions companies like BlueScope  are supporting it, that makes me suspect the K & Q view is right.

So maybe it is a bad plan for the opposite reasons that Blair and Bolt maintain.  Although, I thought this morning on Radio National that Keane seemed less uptight about it than he does no Twitter - calling it a plan which doesn't achieve much.  And then I have to work out what Bill Shorten and Labor really think about it - is their support just for cynical "clear this issue off the decks so it's not a liability for us at the election" reasons, or do they think there is scope to fiddle with the details to achieve a good outcome.

It is all very unclear...

Anyway, Blair makes the big rallying call:

This is idiotic. Australians are already paying insane power bills in a nation rich with coal and other electricity-generating resources. Signing into law a 26 per cent cut on 2005 emissions levels by 2030 would only be achievable by erasing more than a quarter of our economy.

Shrieking about “the future of the planet” and complaining that “the people that are opposing me within the party do not believe in climate change at all”, Turnbull was turfed by enormous numbers of Liberal voters who contacted their local Liberal branches and representatives.

An identical situation now demands an identical response.

 Yeah, sure.   Back to Abbott, is it?   Surely even they have their reservations about that.

Who, in the scintillating firmament of climate change denying Coalition politicians do they think has any credibility and popular appeal?   Tell me, dimwits.  

The sinking city

I saw on TV last Christmas a report about the terrible problems with the potable water supply of Jakarta, but it didn't mention another water related problem for the city:   it has a massive subsidence problem.  From the BBC:

It sits on swampy land, the Java Sea lapping against it, and 13 rivers running through it. So it shouldn't be a surprise that flooding is frequent in Jakarta and, according to experts, it is getting worse. But it's not just about freak floods, this massive city is literally disappearing into the ground. 

"The potential for Jakarta to be submerged isn't a laughing matter," says Heri Andreas, who has studied Jakarta's land subsidence for the past 20 years at the Bandung Institute of Technology.

"If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95% of North Jakarta will be submerged."

It's already happening - North Jakarta has sunk 2.5m in 10 years and is continuing to sink by as much as 25cm a year in some parts, which is more than double the global average for coastal megacities.
Jakarta is sinking by an average of 1-15cm a year and almost half the city now sits below sea level.

Gosh.

My 12 Rules

I was very amused by Kitty Flanagan's own version of "12 Rules for Life" as appeared on The Weekly last week:



In fact, I had been thinking of trying to compile my own list of 12 Rules, but I keep stumbling after "Always carry a clean, ironed handkerchief in your pocket.  Always". 

Oh alright - I have thought of another one:  "Never buy into timeshare.  Never."

But beyond that?   Well, there are potentially controversial ones to do with sex and relationships, but they are a bit serious and not in the tone of this post.  Some other time. 

A completely normal presidency

She may be a nut herself, but this story from Manigault has an air of "this is too weird to be an invention" about it:

Trump Chewed—and Swallowed—a Piece of Paper

Manigault Newman claims she took Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, into the Oval Office in early 2017 and saw the president eating a piece of paper. “I saw him put a note in his mouth,” she writes. “Since Trump was ever the germaphobe, I was shocked he appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper. It must have been something very, very sensitive.”

 Axios explains, hilariously, that she did very little in the job, but had everyone running scared of her:

What they're saying:

• "I'm scared shitless of her... She's a physically intimidating presence," a male former colleague of Omarosa's told me. (He wouldn't let me use a more precise description of his former White House role because he admitted he's still scared of retribution from Omarosa. Other senior officials have admitted the same to me.)
• "I never said no to her," the source added. "Anything she wanted, 'Yes, brilliant.' I'm afraid of her. I'm afraid of getting my ass kicked."
• Three other former officials shared that sentiment: “One hundred percent, everyone was scared of her,” said another former official.

The big picture: Trump has nobody to blame but himself for Omarosa's raucous book tour, in which she calls him a racist and a misogynist, and says he's in mental decline. Trump brought her into the White House at the senior-most level with the top salary.In many ways, two former senior administration officials pointed out, what Omarosa is doing now is pure Trump.

A thorough Dinesh D'Souza takedown

Gee, David Frum gives a good history of D'Souza's decline in this piece at The Atlantic.    He includes a link to historian Kevin Kruse, who uses his twitter feed to set out very detailed corrections to D'Souza's ridiculously inaccurate historical claims.

It would seem that D'Souza is largely behind one of the most successful wingnut memes (at least, in the minds of bubble world wingnuts) about the Nazi Party being really Left wing and a forerunner to today's Democrats.    I find the popularity of that one particularly hard to credit, but as Greg Jericho said last weekend,  denial of climate change has become a "crossing the Rubicon"  for wingnut conservatives into the world where anything is believable, as long as it is told to them by a member of their own tribe.  (The tribe that gaslite themselves, using the modern technology that was meant to open people's minds, but has had the opposite effect for so many.)

I liked this part of Frum's article in particular:

There is obviously much for a conservative to criticize in the Obama record at home and abroad. Unlike Bill Clinton, who in many ways ratified the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Obama repudiated it. Yet an annoying thing for those who disliked Obama’s politics: He is at the same time a genuinely high-quality personality—intelligent, considerate, dignified, and self-disciplined. Those who hated him were deprived of any rational basis to despise him. Lacking a rational basis, they reverted to irrationality instead.

Which is how the Dinesh D’Souza who in 1995 proclaimed “the end of racism” in America could react to a humorous 2015 photograph of Obama playing with a selfie stick: “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO … Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment.”   

Even as D’Souza published books attributing all American racism to “the Democrats,” his own writing seemed gripped by an ever less controlled and concealed racial animus.

Pants

If I ruled the world, there are certain things about the design of business trousers I would legislate for:

a.  having decided on a certain cut, the manufacturer must maintain it for a minimum of 3 years.  If I decide a pair of trousers are nice and comfortable, and they seem long wearing, I don't want to go back and try buying the same trousers in the same size 6 months later and find they do not fit so well.   Especially if I have actually lost a bit of weight since I bought the first pair.  :(

b.  no matter the width of the leg below the knee, the cut above the knee must allow for the insertion of a wallet in one pocket, and keys in the other, without causing undue tightness in the leg and an obvious outline of said wallet and keys to appear and disrupt the look;

c.  pocket material must be particularly strong to resist the wear of keys within them.  There is nothing worse than having a perfectly fine pair of trousers develop a hole in a pocket that makes you have to reverse the customary sides you keep your wallet and keys in;

d.  must be machine washable.  None of this "dry clean only" malarkey;

e.  some natural fibres must be incorporated.   No one should wear purely synthetic fibres - I'm pretty sure God was trying to pass that message on in Old Testament but it got a bit muddled up when the audience didn't follow what "synthetic" meant;

f.  coin pockets on the right hand side are still required, for now.  They can be abandoned in another 5 years;

Authoritarians used to fuss about clothes (Hitler, Mao - I think);  what's the use of modern day ones like Trump if he can't deal with these fashion problems?

Back to the Apocalypse

I saw Apocalypse Now back in the cinema in 1979, and felt a bit so-so about it.  Last night, I re-watched it for the first time, but this version (on Netflix) is Apocalypse Now Redux - essentially an extended director's cut version that I didn't remember had come out in 2001.  It runs for an extra 49 minutes (!)   Wikipedia talks about it here.

I can give myself a pat on the back for having identified while watching it the key additional sequences even though it's been nearly 30 40 (!) years since viewing the original.   But what did I think of it overall?:

*  Of the additional material, I think only bit one really works - the surfboard theft. 

*  There seems to be much more pondering by Willard (Martin Sheen) on the boat about Kurtz's career, and that's OK, except it all seems a bit wasted by the time Kurtz turns up, as I don't think the problematic final section of the film has much added to it.  (See more below.) 

*  The French plantation sequence is absolutely awful:  it kills the momentum stone cold, and has a cheesy romantic interlude accompanied by awful music and no emotion.   It's incredible to think that that Coppola  even thought it played well on paper - but then again, the movie was driving him nuts, so his judgement was probably way out at the time.   Even so, why put it back in now?   I suppose it's interesting, to see what makes the cut and what doesn't in a final release, but it's a curious thing to throw in additional parts which I feel pretty sure the vast majority of people will say were always best left on the cutting room floor.

*  As for the other extended sequence - involving the boatcrew finding the Playmates who had been in the surreal concert in the jungle in a marooned camp (and having their way with them - sort of) feels very wrong for other reasons.   As my son (now 18) said "it's a bit rape-y", and indeed it feels that way;  but what's more, Willard setting it up doesn't seem to make sense with the rest of his character in the movie.   That the Playmates appear to have gone nuts plays into the whole "madness increasing the further up-river we go" theme of the film, but it still feels very ill conceived and inappropriate. 

*  In hindsight, the early helicopter attack scenes play more impressively than ever, for their no-CGI realism  - my son noted that too.  I kept thinking about how dangerous so much of it looked, with helicopters continually landing so close to actors, and with Vic Morrow's death via Hollywood chopper in 1982 now in mind too.

*  But overall, nothing changed my opinion about the movie's ultimate failure:  the lack of insight into Kurtz's mind once Willard finally locates him.   Where there should be more clarity about his madness - or ironic lack thereof - and what he thinks he's now doing, there's just mumbo jumbo in the dark, and a bit of shock value and a faux attempt at depth involving a poor cow.  The film's most obvious possible interpretation, that Kurtz is really no madder than the insanity of the war, or other military leaders in it, has never felt satisfactory to me in the absence of an explanation of what's going on with all of the killing within his jungle hideout.     

Reading about the original version on Wikipedia, I see that it seems to have increased in critical reputation since it was released.   But, even ignoring the new sequences, I don't retract my original opinion that it's  about 3/4 of a great movie that threw it all away in the last act.

Let me bore you with another dream jumble

One of those dream jumbles seemed particularly lengthy last night, and I could work out the inspiration for the part about my involvement in an artificial flood in an area around the Vatican which had something to do with recovering something in a house that was part of a deceased estate.  [I won't bother explaining here.]

What I had a lot more trouble figuring out was why in another part of the same dream sequence, I was outside loading an old 303 style bolt action, single shot rifle with Nespresso coffee pods instead of bullets, and trying to shoot rabbits that way.   [The gun still went "bang", but, unsurprisingly in retrospect, was very ineffective at killing the targetted rabbits.  I did finally realise this during the dream.]   Someone behind me then suggested that it was Tim Blair's gun, and it was a bit dangerous (ie, bad for the gun) to be using coffee pods as ammunition.  I realized I had used nearly all the pods in the box, and thought I had better buy some more so that Blair wouldn't realise I had been doing this with his gun.

Now I do see Nespresso coffee pods every day at work, and check Blair's blog to annoy myself regularly.    But the bolt action rifle and rabbit shooting?

Wait - I did see a rabbit briefly on a Youtube video yesterday.

I'm down to tracking down the bolt action rifle, I suppose...

Update:   could the bolt action gun be somehow connected to my daily dismay at reading Andrew Bolt!  Heh.

Rich and thick (Part 2)

When I search back over some of my past posts on Peter Thiel, I see that my opinion of him has steadily grown worse.  

Now, Jason Soon has linked to a "fascinating" interview with him from German publication (the date is not clear.)   I'll say it's fascinating - for once again showing that being rich involves no necessary alignment with wisdom and good judgement.   It provides plenty of ammunition for further downgrading my  opinion of him.  Take this:

My support for Donald Trump was, on some level, the least contrarian thing I have ever done. If it is half the country, it cannot be that contrarian. And yet, in the Silicon Valley context it has felt extraordinarily contrarian.

What it is contrary to is good common sense.   But look, he seems to have been caught up in the whole "we're on a path to national dis-ast-er!" utter bullshit wingnut assessment of the state of the US under Obama:

At some point, you described that the last presidential election felt like an apocalyptic battle. What exactly did you feel was at stake?
There are these essays by a person called Michael Anton. They are all written pseudonymously because he felt it was too dangerous to write names. One of them was titled “The Flight 93 Election”. Flight 93 was one of the four flights that was hijacked after 9/11 but it was the one where the passengers took over, they charged the cockpit – plane still crashed. And it was like that it felt that the country had been taken over and it was on a catastrophic trajectory, that people were going to try to charge the cockpit. It didn’t mean that they would be able to ride the plane or the ship or whatever the metaphor is, but “we’re gonna try”. So I do think that “The Flight 93 Election” is a powerful metaphor and, emotionally, that certainly resonated with me.

Well, that's nice.  Sees himself as one of the plucky, concerned public who felt compelled to seize control of a government of malevolent forces determined to take everyone down with them?   (And failed anyway.)   Look, this is genuinely moronic fantasy land stuff. 

He expands upon it further (my bold):

What is the explanatory power of this metaphor?
It is this very deep sense that the United States – the western world as a whole – are not progressing in the direction they should. We have a center-left establishment in both Western Europe and the US that mainly glosses over all the short- and long-term problems in our societies. And if something is not done, at some point it becomes too late to fix things. And the hour was very late.

 This is freaking ludicrous in light of Trump and the Wingnut Right absolutely denying the more world threatening and disruptive global issue of the 21st century - climate change!

I have noted in an earlier post that Thiel seems not overly perturbed about it as an issue (he said he didn't think he was an extreme skeptic, but left open the extend of his skepticism) - even though he apparently is spending some of his fortune on some clean energy research.  He may have grounds for arguing that the Left gives the issue more lip service than effective policy - but you cannot in any way conceive that the Trump led wingnut Right is addressing the issue at all.   They are denying it against science and the evidence in front of their noses.

As for what he thinks is good about Trump:

You were on Donald Trump’s transition team. In which respect is he different than everybody else you’ve met before?
I think it is his extraordinary ability to understand people.

Oh please.   Trump's narcissism means he "understands" and praises everyone who praises him.  Otherwise, it's all ridiculing former POWs for not being brave, mocking a journalist with a disability, making up childish nicknames for opponents, and vilifying immigrants.   And Thiel is in Trump's good books for being a rich tech person who doesn't find him creepy and dumb.    Of course Thiel will think he'd great at "understanding people".

As for his views on tariffs and Trump, I'm not sure that this bit really makes sense:

Another issue that is debated very controversially is Trump’s trade policy. People are shocked by his imposition of tariffs.
At the center of this is the question with China. The US exports something like 100 bn a year to China, we import 475 bn. What’s extraordinary, is that if we had a globalizing world, we would actually expect the reverse to hold: you would expect the US to have trade surpluses with China and current account surpluses because we would expect that there is a higher return in China because it is a faster growing country than the US. This is what it looked, let’s say, in 1900, when Great Britain had a trade surplus of 2 percent and a current account surplus of 4 percent of GDP. And the extra capital was invested in Argentinean railroads or Russian bonds.

He then goes to make other great observations, such as:

If you didn’t have a welfare state and someone wants to stay at home and play video games all day, maybe we should not make judgements about that. But if you have a big welfare state and people do that, maybe you have to do something to correct that. We live in a world where there is too much welfare and where work is undervalued. 

 Gotta treat people mean to keep them keen, hey billionaire Pete?   This is just a tabloid wingnut vision of welfare. 

I see that he's spoken about Asperger's not being a bad thing in business, but has he said he thinks he's on the scale himself?   Because I seriously doubt his emotional (and rational) judgement.

So that's what social modernisation looks like in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia Rejects Human-Rights Criticism, Then Crucifies Someone

(It's not exactly the same as Biblical crucifixion, but possibly more gruesome for the onlooker.) 

What is going on in Rupert's decrepit head?

While people who have worked with him say that Rupert Murdoch isn't so blatant as to ring up his media underlings and tell them outright what editorial line he wants them to run, it also seems clear that  in more subtle ways he gives the nod to certain positions being taken.  Otherwise, we wouldn't have the spectacle of Fox, Sky News and the Australian print media all suddenly running with "immigration and multiculturalism will be the death of us!" as per Pauline Hanson, 1996.

The latest example from Fox is being much tweeted about:

“In some parts of the country it does seem like the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. And they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like,” Laura Ingraham said Wednesday night on her Fox News show. “From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed. In some ways, much of this is related to illegal, and in some cases, legal immigration that progressives love.”

I had the impression that Murdoch was generally supposed to be "classic liberal" and tend towards a libertarian approach to matters such as immigration.    As such, I've complained for years that it must massive, money making cynicism which justified his backing of obnoxious Trumpism on Fox News - he's not a redneck but he's happy to pander to their prejudices and gullibility and take their money.

And he's decided that this can extend to a fake immigration and culture panic?  I can only presume so.

How long is his influence going to go on?   I mean, we were recently greeted in the press with this photo, indicating that the body (not to mention the mind) is not doing so great:

Which, I have to say, reminded me of this:

But seriously, where's the humanity in his judgement in what he's letting go on in his media?

I predict that watching his empire mourn his passing, as well as the IPA circle who worship money above all else, will be very nauseating.