Those formidable bank robbers

"The Calabrian family gangs (again the meaningless journalistic term ’Ndrangheta blurs their diversity) who delivered the cocaine northwards were and are incapable of coping with the reverse flow of used euros, zlotys and rubles. Their first need was to pay the Colombian suppliers, who refused to accept cash because it was no good for investing in Miami real estate or local hotels and restaurants. The Calabrians needed real money: not bundles of paper but deposits in bank accounts that could be wired to the Colombians. Their second need was to have their own laundered money, to invest in property: Umbria became a particular favourite, as did the high streets of major cities. Ignorant of foreign languages, unfamiliar with international banking practices, the semi-literate Calabrians could supply cocaine to distributors but turned to the Sicilians to launder their profits. With a century of experience in the export trade and the fluent English of educated men, the Sicilians organised the system – still operating today – that sends banknotes from Calabria to Beirut, Dubai, Kaliningrad and other places where money-changers will accept vast sums in many currencies, paying for them with personal cheques that can be deposited in local banks. Funds can then be wired to commercial accounts in Western Europe, perhaps by way of an additional passage (Cyprus was a favoured way until the Sicilians were scared away by those formidable bank robbers the European Commission and the ECB)."

The Honoured Society

Dog Eat Dog

Just got my copy of this delightful game:

"Dog Eat Dog is a game of colonialism and its consequences. As a group, you work together to describe one of the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, defining the customs of the natives and the mores of the outsiders arriving to claim it. One player then assumes the role of the Occupation force, playing their capable military, their quisling government, and whatever jaded tourists and shrewd businessmen are interested in a not quite pacified territory. All the others play individual Natives, each trying in their own ways to come to terms with the new regime. The game begins when the war ends. Through a series of scenes, you play out the inevitably conflicted relationship between the two parties, deciding what the colonizers do to maintain control, which natives assimilate and which run amok, and who ends up owning the island in the end."

A Game of Imperialism and Assimilation in the Pacific Islands

Those who cannot afford justice must do without it

"Maybe we are an overly litigious culture, too quick to insist on our rights and unwilling to compromise in the face of reasonable disagreement. Maybe many disputes are made worse by the legal framework within which they operate. Maybe. But Clarke and Grayling didn’t plan to kill all the lawyers. Instead, the plan has been to place law out of the reach of the poor."

Necessity or Ideology

Interstellar - Main Theme

Parts of the piano/organ reminded me of Philip Glass's "Koyaanisqatsi".

Tinkerbell

"Fact is, when I see the eagerness of Western supporters to celebrate the Hong Kong democracy movement, I reminded I’m still waiting for the Asian Edward Said to write about the West’s need to frame, appropriate, and validate its 21^st-century concept of the “Orient”—and self-validate its own values, attitudes, and increasingly embattled sense of superiority—by defining, parsing, and condemning the mainland Chinese Other it chooses to observe across the Pacific."

Clap Harder or the Hong Kong Tinkerbell Gets It!

The singular accomplishment that is Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

When I think of the watersheds of thought, SMAC stands out as something that enabled intense engagements with ideas.

Its value as a cultural artifact should be judged by its ability to successfully go beyond entertainment and wish fulfillment. And in so succeeding, SMAC changed the outlooks and expectations of a whole generation.

To defend inequality, and make acceptable the status quo

"... this is an establishment that has had experience of not being the establishment, although it has always drawn most (though, crucially, not all) of its membership from the ruling class. It ‘is made up – as it has always been – of powerful groups that need to protect their position in a democracy in which almost the entire adult population has the right to vote’. These groups are ‘amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it.’"

"Most startling to our descendants will be that ‘this was passed off as normal, as entirely rational and defensible,’ and that ‘institutions run by the elite’ had ‘considerable success’ in redirecting ‘people’s anger to those at the very bottom of society’."

Who will stop them?

Longevity

"... when pundits discuss the future, the excitement around driverless cars and nanotechnology gives way to long faces when the topic moves to human longevity. It may be nice to live longer, but what about the effect on the economy? The question is absurd. Economic growth is about giving people more choices, and no choice is more earnestly sought than the chance of a longer life"

Live longer — and thank economics 

Cultural Identity

"... does not think that cultural identity is therefore intrinsically valuable. On the contrary, he regards it as potentially harmful. In ‘A Dissent on Cultural Identity’, he sets out his position with brutal candour: ‘That cultural identity is “a permanent feature of human life” is trivially true. We all come from somewhere … But why must each of us be more than matter-of-fact in committing our lives to our history, our culture, our identity? They – culture, history, identity – have done many things for us and many things to us. What makes us affect gratitude instead of anger in return?’"

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence; Moral Imagination: Essays

The politics of resentment and complaint

A strong central government is needed for politics to function and for the state to survive the empowerment of the people.

The curse of all stable societies is capture by elites.


Francis Fukuyama’s ‘Political Order and Political Decay’

Drive by decision making

People often want to know enough to make decisions, but not enough to make good ones.

Our Dark Ages

How people lived, who they really are, and how they change over time are rarely entirely known. We encounter their artifacts from time to time and look upon them in mystification: their thoughts in writing, their visage and symbols, their memories through the mediation of how others remembered them. We glimpse at the occasional laughter, sorrows, and fears in lives that are shrouded in mystery.

Remix

Björk - All Is Full Of Love (Chris SU Remix)

Confession

Det Sjunde Inseglet

Sounds like a butcher's shop

silence, before the chop, panic, before the lack of mercy, powerless

'Content'

Some time ago, one of my co-workers told me, as if he is doing me a big favor, that "you need to have your own opinions." Yeah, ok. I suppose he gets to judge whether an opinion is my 'own'?

This reminds me of a particular self-aggrandizing strand of make-believe: everything that is not one's own is bad.

That is to say, people conflate ownership and actual value, and give free pass to aggressively ignorant attitudes: "So long as the opinions are my own, who cares about the truth?"

Let go your earthly tether

In the episode The Metal Clan, an interesting work within a work appears:

出尘世羁绊,入虚无如风

Let go your earthly tether. Enter the void and become emptiness, like the wind.

Starving artist as an aesthetic and all round excuse for being an asshole

There was a time when artists and writers flocked to inexpensive cities to allow themselves the trials of making art over the trials of making a living. In North America today, the main site of literary activity or literary business – which more and more amount to the same thing – is Brooklyn. Yet it’s probably one of the toughest places for a writer to live cheaply and noodle about, wearing rags. What happens when artists gravitate to places where they can make art only with great financial effort; where writers have to be journalists, adjunct professors, or work in cafés to pay the rent, leaving little time to write their novel, while learning every few months that one of their herd has secured a six-figure advance for their first book? What do their relationships and values look like, and how do their love stories unfold? This is the world of Adelle Waldman’s first book.

 
Starving artist as an aesthetic and all round excuse for being an asshole

Class war

"Thailand’s political crisis is a sorry tale of bad losers... their responsibility, and their disgrace, are very great."

 Thailand’s political crisis

The Legend of Korra Book 3

Excited!

Beauty and the Beast

Red

Flutter

Introductions are MANDATORY

Fear Not This Night (Piano)

Reactionary thought in contemporary China

From China Airborne: The Test of China's Future, by James Fallows (Pantheon, 2012), Kindle Loc. 3326 of 3816

"All reactionary thought in contemporary China is of the same tradition," that philosopher, Ai Siqi, wrote in 1940. "It emphasizes China's 'national characteristics,' harps on China's 'special nature,' and wipes aside the general principles of humanity, arguing that China's social development can only follow China's own path."

 

Fantasy General OST - Track 3

The Wolf Among Us Opening Credit Music

The Forgotten Resources of Space

The Forgotten Resources of Space

There are no unique raw materials waiting for us in space (possible exception of 3He). There are a lot of hydrocarbons on Titan, but because of delta-v costs, it will always be cheaper to derive them from marginal locations on Earth, like oil shales or biofuels. Even if a platinum-rich asteroid were found, platinum would be obtained cheaper by re-opening a depleted low grade mine on Earth.

If extraterrestrial raw imports will never be economical, is there any motivation for going there? Increasingly, it is processes rather than raw materials that are important for industry. Space processes can control the gravity, vacuum, radiation, temperature, and energy density to a degree impossible on Earth. These characteristics, the forgotten resources of space, can produce high-strength membranes using surface tension effects, long whiskers and gigantic laser crystals grown in microgravity, nano-engineering using ultra pure vapor deposition, strong glassy materials produced by exploiting a steep temperature gradient, and alloys mixed by diffusion alone. Relatively small machinofactured and nano-produced objects, including pharmaceuticals and bio-tech, will be the first space imports to Earth.

Phil Eklund, 2009

High Frontiers is an interesting example in the way how high science diffuses through culture and make accessible concepts and ideas that were once the preserve of the specialized few.

The application process

Sometimes I feel that the application process is a bit like FTL. You go into the final stage feeling you have a chance (after all, you've made this far). And then...

Remembering Snowscapes

Something to watch for the weekend

Beats watching.... say, Whitechapel.



the trailer music

A war within the Chinese internet autarky

"Each of the big three is so big, so wired in politically and so vital to the Chinese economy that its survival is assured. An employee at one of the companies likened BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) to Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the superstates of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which are so big as to be undefeatable and permanently at war."

 

Chinese internet: Mobile wars 

Neverwinter Nights main theme

Do not mistake wishes for truth

云宮音

Forest Green

Tales of English justice

"[L]ong before 1825, when they were professionalised by being removed from everything except the administration of justice and put on salaries of £5500 or more a year, the judges had been wealthy men. On George I’s accession the puisne – i.e. ordinary – judges had been put on £1500 a year, with large periodic increases until, by 1800, they were on £3000 a year ‘free and clear from all taxes and deductions whatever’, and by 1810 on £4000. The purpose of the Hanoverian introduction of automatic knighthoods for the judiciary was probably to elevate the status of the honour rather than of the bench, and was reportedly resented by the latter. The further pay rise of 1825 may not therefore have been the massive buying-out it is sometimes said to have been; but it does mark a cleansing of the constitutional stables. In 1832 the basic judicial salary was brought down to £5000 a year, and there it remained until 1954, when it was still a pretty good wage in spite of inflation, but was finally raised by £3000 in one go. By then, as the Lord Advocate had written to the Lord Chancellor, it was ‘most unsuitable for a High Court Judge to travel in a public conveyance’. This is why many of them now cycle to work."

Above it all

Tales of English justice

"Mr Justice Hallett... was sent for and asked to resign for ‘asking too many questions’... I was once told by a very old lady what the source of the problem was. ‘We used to be taken to the Halletts’ when we were children,’ she said. ‘My sisters and I would be put in the nursery to play with Hugh, and he would line us all up at one end of the room and lecture us. I could have told the Lord Chancellor he was making a mistake appointing Hugh Hallett."

Above it all

Tony Blair 1987

Tony wrote once for the LRB. Who knew?

In it he spoke about the North Sea oil driven success of Thatcherism, Tories' rule based on ~41% of the votes and a divided opposition, and a vision for government in which power was not simply devolved to the markets.

Then the prophet turned into a preacher on a tank.

Tony Blair - diary

Dragonfall

"You look at a moth and barely perceive sentience. You glance its way, amused, as it flutters towards a bright light in a vain attempt to... what?

To enter? To draw strength? To burn? It doesn't know. Its epic struggle is barely one-hundredth of your lifespan. The sum total of its existence is nothing against the vast scale of your struggles, your hopes, your dreams - which it could not fathom in a thousand thousand years.

Poor moth."

What not to do as a retail investor

Why would anyone trade forex?

It's even harder than making a return trading bonds.

Crime and punishment

I take one look at that picture of her and think she should be sent to bed without any supper.

US woman arrested over nine-year overdue rental video

Damages

Beautiful montage

Bauklötze (original)

And a better enunciated version:

Morant Bay Uprising, Jamaica - 1865

From Sedley, Stephen. Ashes and Sparks: Essays on Law and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 56-57.  

"[T]he uprising was put down within a week, in the month that passed before the decree expired the military was allowed an orgy of shooting, flogging and more or less arbitrary executions. The Cornhill Magazine put the number of deaths at 439 and floggings at 600.

If this had been all, there would probably have been a transient fuss in England, after which (Governor) Eyre's career would have continued to flourish..."

However,

"The controversy was not about whether there had been a necessity for martial law to be invoked at Morant Bay: there almost certainly had been. It was ostensibly about the unnecessary duration of the decree and the abuse of the powers it created; but neither of these features distinguished it from the measures adopted in response to other such risings. What gave the outrage a focus was that Eyre had personally authorised the arrest in Kingston of a man named George Gordon, and what today would be called his extraordinary rendition to Morant Bay. Arriving there on a Saturday, Gordon was given an instant trial without access to counsel and hanged two days later."

"Gordon was that dangerous thing, a rogue member of the ruling elite: but he was racially and economically compromised, and that made him not only dispensable but serviceable as an example to others. All Eyre needed was an excuse and an opportunity to sweep him into the net of bloody reprisal..."

The Levellers

From Sedley, Stephen. Ashes and Sparks: Essays on Law and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 89-90.  

"[T]he power of the Leveller programme - the first true political programme of a modern kind - lay in its amalgam of principle and realism. That principle rapidly becomes unrealistic and that realism is too often a betrayal of principle was the dilemma of the Levellers as it is of all politics. But their thinking and action show a clear consciousness of the dilemma and a serious endeavour to meet it. In this, and in their combination of a thought-out political programme with grassroots organisation, lies their modernity."

Borgen

Statsminister

Statsminister!

Tales of English justice

"[I]n 1746 the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas gave judgment for £1000 damages in favour of a Lieutenant Frye against the president of a court martial which had wronged him, and then encouraged Frye to sue the other members. When they protested through the Lords of the Admiralty to the King, the Chief Justice had the whole lot of them arrested for contempt and released them, when they apologised, with the warning: ‘Whosoever set themselves up in opposition to the law or think themselves above the law will find themselves mistaken.’"

Above it all

Wir sind die Nacht 我们是夜晚

From a 'language learning' site:




"Wenn du wüsstest , dass

如果你知道

es auf dieser Welt nur einen einzigen Menschen gibt ,

在这个世界上只存在唯一一个

Der dich glücklich macht , 

能让你幸福的人

Der für dich bestimmt ist , 

为你注定的人

Was würdest du opfern , um ihn zu finden? 


为了找到他你会舍弃什么

Wie viele Jahrhunderte würdest du nach ihm suchen?

你是否会用几百年去寻找他

Und wenn du ihn dann gefunden hättest ,

然后当你找到他之后

würdest du ihn je wieder gehen lassen?

你会让他再次离开你吗


Würdest du ihn nicht auch mit


你是不是也会

beiden Armen so fest umklammern , wie du nur kannst , 

紧紧地把他拥在怀里

und ihn nie , nie , nie wieder loslassen? "

绝对绝对绝不会再放手

Dumpfe Träume

Kalte
Kalte
Nächte
Nächte
Lass deine Augen leuchten...
Dumpfe
Dumpfe
Träume
Träume
Und meine Seele fordert...

Kalte
Kalte
Nächte
Nächte
Lass deine Augen leuchten...
Dumpfe
Dumpfe
Träume
Träume
Und meine Seele fordert...

Schneller
Schneller
Atmen
Atmen
Unsere Körper beben...
Leises
Leises
Zittern
Zittern
Und meine Seele lodert...

Süsse Bisse
Kaltes Schaudern...
Und meine Seele lodert...
Kalte
Kalte
Nächte
Nächte
Lass deine Augen leuchten...
Dumpfe
Dumpfe
Träume
Träume
Und meine Seele fordert...

Who judges the judges?

‘His Majesty’s Judges are satisfied with the almost universal admiration in which they are held.’

‘Her Majesty’s judges have a greater understanding of human nature than any other body of men in the world.’ 

Above it all

Configuration of international justice

From Sedley, Stephen. Ashes and Sparks: Essays on Law and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 15-16. 

In speaking of a 'consensus [that] is eroding the old impunities afforded by statehood and state office':

"If this epoch-making jurisdiction is not simply to degenerate into the twenty-first century's version of victor's justice, into a regime in which the war criminals of the lesser nations get their deserts while nationals of the greatest power are shielded from all process except that which their own state elects to deploy against them, the long arm of international law has to be able to reach everyone against whom there is a triable case, and the mailed fist has to be there to punish those who are found guilty by due process. A system which replicates the very insolence of office from which human rights abuses spring cannot properly call itself a system of justice. One law for the powerful and another for the weak is no law at all."

It is unclear...

"whether internationals criminal jurisdiction is instead to slide back into its ambivalent twentieth century role as a secondary and localised manifestation of military and political power."