Controls

"One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”

"Half of X is pointless, we just don't know which half"

Prerogative of the harlot

"... power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."

Clash of the press titans

Collapse & Rescue

Morality, public opinion, and punishment

"道德不能代替法治，舆论不能代替法治，而严厉的刑法更不能代表真正的法治"

仲伟志 - 明史、海瑞、主旋律

"Morality cannot replace the rule of law; public opinion cannot replace the rule of law; severe penal codes cannot represent a true legal system."

Zhong Weizhi - Ming history, Hai Rui, and the main theme

The Last Space Shuttle

What if mankind, realizing he will never reach the stars, builds himself a digital universe to spite God?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - opening title, closing credits

Interregnum

Courtesy of Wikipedia,

An interregnum (plural interregna or interregnums) is a period of discontinuity or "gap" in a government, organization, or social order. Archetypally, it was the period of time between the reign of one monarch and the next (coming from Latin inter-, "between" + rēgnum, "reign" [from rex, rēgis, "king"]), and the concepts of interregnum and regency therefore overlap.

Everything is forgiven Pearl Buck, everything

Women in China: A Social Revolution

L.A. Noire - 'Main Theme'

Tales from the Annals of French Exceptionalism

Band of Insiders

'Once again, Lévy claims that the rules of law do not apply to those with whom he dines:

"I hold it against the American judge who… pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other."

Even more incredibly, he writes:

"I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed ‘accusatory’, meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime."

One wonders what system of justice Lévy would propose.'

France attempts to impose e-book prices on Apple, others

"I am happy, as we all must be tonight, that our gathering is prepared to vote definitively on what will be the first such law in the world for digital books—a pioneering text in our ever-changing world," said MP Hervé Gaymard last week as a joint parliamentary commission presented its final version of the bill text.

eG8

"In France, there are still people who maintain their criticism of this [three strikes authority HADOPI], who view it as a repressive body, whereas in actual fact it creates momentum from a pedagogical standpoint." (Minster of Culture)

Beverly Hillbillies and fukujinzuke

V: I am watching this anime version of X-Men. It's really cliche. It just doesn't fit, X-Men is too American.

HAHAHA. Like, every Japanese show that's set in some other country suddenly and inexplicably returns to Japan. In this case, every one of the X-Men has been recalled by Professor X to investigate the disappearance of a mutant... who just happens to be from Japan.

And Professor X is talking about how she's from some city in some tiny prefecture, and no one has any question about, like: what's that? where is that?

It's like if the Japanese remade the Beverly Hillbillies, they'd go out to eat ramen in the second episode and argue about whether to eat it with fukujinzuke or not.

They don't know how to look at themselves from an outsider's perspective. I mean, it totally makes sense for a bunch of American and Canadian mutants who have never been to Japan to have intimate, detailed knowledge of Japanese geography and history, right?

I just think that the producers and consumers of this media are unable to dissassociate themselves from their own cultural context. Which is not terribly uncommon, but it does show a lot of their cultural arrogance. Smaller countries may be similarly unable to disassociate themselves, but they won't then suddenly put themselves at the centre of every story. It also suggests that the Japanese could never make an Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The voice acting is also in the cliche dramatic mode. Lots of elliptical phrases, single word answers, and lots of grunting/sighing... The grunting is what really gets me, though. Just too much. And it's just not an acceptable substitute for dialogue. I cannot be sure, but I suspect the dialogue itself is nothing special.

These characters have no personality at all. Well, there's gruff and not-gruff, that's about it.

Oh, gruff, not gruff, and woman.

Gruff, not gruff, woman, and villain

Those are the character types.

I guess this must be a children's show.

On Self Doubt and Constructed Realities

V: self-doubt is too difficult to actually communicate.

Like... If you express a rational self-doubt, you will just come across as a loser. Even if you are capable and effective and elite.

me: Self-doubt has no merits to a girl

V: Precisley. It's really hard to convey a multi-dimensional personality. That is, if you have self-doubt, you'll come across as a loser. If you are capable and effective, you will come across as a winner. But you cannot communicate a personality that has both without necessarily being either of the two predicates.

Revolutions

There will be no education revolution before there is an employment revolution.

Either/Or

I felt immeasurably happy the moment I found this passage in Kierkegaard's Either/Or. I remember reading this when I was younger (in high school); finding it again cheered me up and made me feel less alone in the world.

My Friend!

... I think of my early youth, when without clearly comprehending what it is to make a choice I listened with childish trust to the talk of my elders and the instant of choice was solemn and venerable, although in choosing I was only following the instructions of another person. I think of the many occasions in life less important but by no means indifferent to me, when it was a question of making a choice. For although there is only one situation in which either/or has absolute significance, namely, when truth, righteousness and holiness are lined up on one side, and lust and base propensities and obscure passions and perdition on the other; yet, it is always important to choose rightly, even as between things which one may innocently choose; it is important to test oneself, lest some day one might have to beat a painful retreat to the point from which one started, and might have reason to thank God if one had to reproach oneself for nothing worse than a waste of time...

And although my life now has to a certain degree its either/or behind it, yet I know well that it may still encounter many a situation where the either/or will have its full significance. I hope, however, that these words may find me in a worthy state of mind when they check me on my path, and I hope that I may be successful in choosing the right course; at all events, I shall endeavor to make the choice with real earnestness, and with that I venture, at least, to hope that I shall the sooner get out of the wrong path.

Two stand-ups

Stewart Lee on Skins



Russell Brand On Newsnight

Avatar: The Last Airbender (cont.)

me
You know what I think when a western martial arts related film and animation is set in a snow covered setting? I think, "Oh boy, there is going to be some allegory related to Tibet" - and this constant reference and inflation of some of the worst orientalism...

...I have to say, the fidelity to the martial arts movement sequences are incredible

V
Yeah, it's a good show, but your commentary on it is terrible.

me
Haha

V
There are references but they aren't dogwhistles, and they don't fit into any consistent or substantive or meaningful narrative.

Aang's son in the new series is named Tenzin and his monk tutor is named Gyatso, but this doesn't really mean anything, since the Fire Nation is so over-the-top Japanese. They are so aggressively Japanese: visually, culturally, symbolically, linguistically... I mean, the derive their power from the rising sun? They are ruled as a feudal empire? Their names are orthographically almost Japanese: Azula, Sozen, Ozai, Iro...

A 'Sozin's Comet' moment - a beautiful illusion

I was particularly struck by the scene in which Azula loses her mind, and in a state of paranoia cuts locks of her hair. "What a shame," Azula hears a woman's voice and and sees her mother's image in the mirror: "You always had such beautiful hair," the image laments...

"Even YOU fear me." Azula says coldly, resentfully.

"No; I love you Azula, I do," her mother's image responds, and clasps its hands together in benediction...

GoT on HBO

Not promising. There are two executions in the first 15 minutes of the show, there's no economies of scale in the violence, and it reeks of desperation to create this grim dark atmosphere for the show.

The screen writers for this show are terrible. For one, the physical direction is awful. Twice, the prologue Nightwatch characters have come across a suspicious circumstance in the woods and they draw their swords, but these are very short weapons and i would imagine they'd be useful only in very close combat. So why would you even bother, if you could see all around you?

Is having a sword drawn meaningful preparation? Or is this just a trope? Like the police office drawing his gun as he investigates the suspect's house?

Ugh, part of me want to skip the TV series and just reread to the books. But I'll be on watch for two scenes: 1) Ned's fevered dream about the Tower of Joy and 2) Maester Aemon's Reveal.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

V: The show's internal consistency, long story arcs, and inventiveness with its basic premise illustrate a lot of love and care on the part of its creators

They cared enough to pay this kind of attention to detail.

Still in the dark

The Springtime of Peoples

R: As all good things in the Middle East, Springtime started with a noble cause and ended up a tool of regional politicking. This is not a revolution anymore, its everyone settling scores.

The sun rises for everyone

""

Star Wars

V: The ‘Star Wars’ universe has just become pathetic. The original series of licenced fiction were bad, but the official materials in the past few years have just destroyed it. Well, the original films paint this picture of a gigantic, sprawling galaxy. Then the films and ancillary material make basically everyone important know everyone else. And then rigourously map out and explain as much as they can. Making the universe seem simple and trivial.

This is even without all the badness of the prequel films. The prequel films tried to normalise all these little interesting features of the original films. The original films hint at some allegorical parallels, but the prequel films just go over the top trying to cast each new species introduced with an existing ethnic group. So now all the flying things are Jews, the trade federation guys are all Chinese, the floppy eared guys are all Jamaicans. And it's this constant theme of racial essentialism. Humans are the only species which show any variation in accent, culture, or personality.

Then lots of weak fan service. The videogame lets you fight and beat Darth Vader. The television shows that Jabba the Hut is, like, Luke's brother-in-law, and Chewbacca bagged his groceries at the supermarket. Oh, and then lots of really stupid political content.

The ‘Battlestar Galactica’ prequel series ‘Caprica’ had this, too, which is what made it so incredibly boring. Very dull, simplistic political plots. It's like if you took the love triangle stories from any average soap opera and just replaced ‘X loves Y’ with ‘X is allied with Y‘. No consistency or realism, and just lots of names and dates to memorise, but no real thematic content.

This isn't even touching the bad acting and just general dumbness in plots. There's an episode of ‘Clone Wars’ where the main characters stumble across an enemy Jedi's base. And one of the supporting characters is, like, let's finish our main mission first. But, no, they decide to set a trap for the evil Jedi, but they do it so incompetently, the enemy Jedi side steps it trivially, and they have no real backup if he exploits the obvious flaw of their trap.

So he kills the supporting character and gets away. And at the end of the episode, the main characters are, like: "Man, war is so bad. We lost a good man today". Even though it was their own decisions and incompetence that precipitated everything that happened in the episode.

It's one of those shows where, like, the good guys will take a bad guy hostage without checking him for hidden weapons, and then the bad guy will conveniently escape at just the right moment to advance the plot.

One good example of how they take something that was interesting in the original movies and then beaten to death is Yodi's speech patterns. In the original movies, there is this conceit where he speaks in this sometimes reversed English. He is this oriental master of some sorts. But this is done very naturally as just a little ornamentation of the character. But in the movies and the series, they decided to make this a central feature. So now he always speaks in this exact same fashion, which just comes across as lame, clumsy, and annoying.

As you can see, it's such a stupid conceit, they can't actually give the character any good dialogue, because the addition of too many relative clauses would quickly make him incomprehensible. So it has this side-effect of disallowing the character from ever speaking more than the simplest of phrases.

Modern Slavery (in the Big Apple)

V: "The slave whips himself harder than the master, in hope of destroying the whip."

me: Sounds like some cheesy line from Ayn Rand

V: The opposite. It is mocking you for working hard to make money to not have to work.

me: No. Ayn Rand would mock you for not being a genius who righteously crack the whip on the huddled masses.

V: Well, she grew up under a brutal, insane regime - I can forgive her some madness.

me: It's the same incalculated personal exceptionalism experienced by the privileged

V: You're feisty today

me: I'm just being exceptional

V: It's surprising how little money means to me anymore.

me: According to Bloomberg, the average millionaire feel they need $7.5 Mln to feel secure. I am guessing you already have that amount of money.

V: No, but I have become numb to it since my days of poverty.

me: Numb in your palatial suite eh? In the city at the center of the world while making six digits? I can see how it all could feel like a dream.

V: Numb to the misery of middle class slavery

me: You sound like a proper ibanker, for a moment I thought you were going to row out the galley slave analogy and complain bitterly about how you have to work ten hours a day and then go home to your penthouse.

There is no better form of self-aggrandizement.

Power and Prerogative

9:39 PM

V: I wonder how this Net Neutrality thing will pan out.It is interesting, because I have difficulty conceiving of the telecom industry as being particularly astute in any fashion.

But it's quite amazing so far how much they seem to have accomplished. Well, let's ignore the actual merit of the arguments for a moment. Let's just look at who is on what side. Content providers all want net neutrality, because this is how can ensure their own survival. This means Google, Netflix, Hulu, Facebook...

Carriers wants net neutrality done away with, because this could lead to all sorts of market advantages in terms of optimising revenues or pushing their own content businesses.

I guess this could be a skewed portrayal, but it does really suggest a different type of management. It suggests on one side you have a bunch of much more agile and competitive companies trying to ensure a level playing field - that they do not have to compete in terms of basic access but in terms of services.

It gives this feeling that these carriers are just these lumbering giants who can only think in terms of their monopolies. I get this same impression from how some big media companies seem to operate. That they almost begrudge the need to create a product. That it is this burden for them to have to actually make something so that they can transfer money from your wallet to theirs, and if they could just find a way to charge you directly without this unnecessary intermediary of providing a good or service, they would happily do so.

I think that companies of this sort actually can be very successful and profitable, but that it's not sustainable. This kind of operation does not lend itself to astute or clever action, so these organisations have no ability to actually compete on merit.

This is a very interesting political battle, because it is really a fight between two large corporate groups. It isn't the public against corporations (since we already know that the public almost always loses in these cases.)

You too can be good if you have enough money from perpetrating evil

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Is Lost to Tax Loopholes

I tend to treat organizations with purported good intentions with great skepticism, because it is easy to talk about those things when you have the money, money from tax evasion no less.

M01

me: Here is the operative anime formula: have a silly philosophical idea, inject some violence, add a boy meet girl situation and/or fan service. If that doesn't work then it means you haven't dialed it up far enough.

V: The counterpoint to anime structure is that regular western programmes are themselves so adolescent - western animated shows have no choice but be worse.

me: Really? Even for films like Toy Story?

V: Toy Story is good, but it is good children's entertainment. Calling something children's entertainment generally means it's bad, but that's only because this country doesn't care what it feeds its kids.

Houston, we hardly know ye

Trinidad

From Trinidad

Over the Gulf of Mexico

From Trinidad

From Trinidad

From Trinidad

From Trinidad

Port of Spain

From Trinidad

The two lane roads are narrower, yes, narrower. In my haste I forgot to take pictures of driving down Waterloo.

From Trinidad

Busy streets

From Trinidad

If one gets the impression that there are not enough pictures of the inhabitants then the fault is entirely one of the photographer

From Trinidad

The Red House

From Trinidad

The building where the Jamaat staged their coup in 1990

From Trinidad

Port of Spain by night

From Trinidad

The Lion House (Naipaul's ancestral house), Chaguanas

From Trinidad

lions

From Trinidad

Green mountains

From Trinidad

Green building

From Trinidad

Chaguaramas

His eyes always that of an outsider

V: I had a discussion with one of the traders last week about how he wanted to make sure his kids grew to respect hard work and the value of a dollar.

I think it's very easy to ignore one's own privileges. He talked about how he had to work from being a poor boy to where he was and so on and so forth, and he had a lot of pride in having accomplished what he has. But this does not seem quite correct. Because if he were urban minority poor, I think he could have worked just as hard but still ended up nowhere.

Similarly, I should thank my background for the advantages it has given me. If I were white, I'd probably belong to some unimpressive but competent professional class. A good amount of my analytical skills are a direct result of my background, I think.

me: Yes, the consequence of being an outsider

V: Actually, that is it exactly. If I were not an outsider, I wouldn't have such a strong desire to rebel intellectually, and I would be much less curious and much less analytical.

...

V: Being an outsider means that even if it's easy to make friends, it's still very easy to remain dis-integrated.

me: I'm not so certain I want to become fully integrated

V: Why not? It's lonely otherwise.

me: You can be integrated and lonely

V: Really?

me: Is that not a possibility?

Happy New Year!

Avatar

11:49 AM

V: ... the natives present this unified cultural force, right? We're supposed to support their choice to retain this primitive culture that is close to nature, because it's presumably the most environmentally intentioned.

But this seems flawed, because they are hunters and gatherers. They don't seem to farm, but they are still predators, despite whatever pseudo-religion they practice after their kills. (Unfortunately, it's never explored whether the killed creature really appreciates or cares being dispatched in such a natural spiritualist fashion.)

These hunting techniques the native aliens use could potentially be extremely ecologically damaging. In fact, I would suggest that, given their primitivism, they probably have a very poor understanding of preservation.

Though our own ideas may not apply to this world, which seems to be full of movie-style predators. Predators without behaviours realistic to earth animals. Like, completely omnivorous across all species. Like a grizzly bear eating snails.

Yeah, this is a pretty shite alien planet. Yeah, this is still neocolonialism. It fails to really understand nativist resistance.

12:49 PM

V: Wow, this movie is so bad. A decent sign of a bad movie is probably how many lines of dialogue are devoted to `woo!' `yeah!' `nooo!'

Also, I guess, in the end, it's the white man's burden to help the natives. And they are lost without him.

Man, I wish this movie had been made better. And it would have been pretty easy to do.

1066

"A thousand years ago, a great war came to Middle Earth, the Anglo-Saxon name for the world of people.

Three kingdoms fell into battle, the victors would change England forever.

Then English, led by the newly crowned King Harold Godwinson.

The Normans, their Duke William of Normandy, eager to extend his territories.

The Vikings, fearless, warlike, and fronted by the great King Harald Hardrada..."

link

Singular purpose

The Rise of the New Global Elite

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

11:01 PM

V: This article talks a lot more about finance high-rollers than industrialists. In fact, I would suspect a lot of these stereotypes are applicable only to finance high-rollers.

I am skeptical how much the world of finance really means in the short or long term.

... for all this article talks about idea festivals and idea makers and thought leaders and whatever. Well, what was the last idea that you heard come out of one of those? That wasn't just, hey, I have an idea, why don't I go network with a bunch of people so I can hob-nob and make money?

I think Taleb makes the point that people who are successful almost always attribute their success to some remarkable quality of their own personalities - some individual exceptionalism - even when such success could just as adequately be explained by pure chance.

I guess there is just a continuation of the same excesses of past plutocracies. This sense of personal exceptionalism, singular purpose - the pretenses of culture and nobility.

The Last Psychiatrist

Are Chinese Mothers Superior To American Mothers?

"...[it] is really a summary of her episode of MTV Cribs. "Welcome to my home, yo, let me show you my gold toilet. It's for peeing and flushing the coke down when the heat comes in the back way."

Twas The Night Before Christmas

The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks

Secrets

The Elusive Underpinnings of U.S. Venturesomeness

"...Differences in the growth rates in the U.S. and other Western countries during the 19th and 20th centuries also raise questions about the degree to which the basic supply-side formula is a sufficient (rather than a necessary) condition for rapid growth. By historical standards, economic growth in the 19th century—when per capita incomes doubled—was unprecedented. But in the 20th century, incomes increased four times as rapidly as they did in the 19th century. Given the higher “base,” one might have expected growth in the 20th century to have been slower. Strikingly, the modern economy has also been less prone to lurch from exhilarating boom to devastating bust. In the 19th century, several depressions interrupted economic growth, whereas in the 20th century, apart from the Great Depression, downturns were relatively mild and short-lived—in spite of two great wars. Yet conditions in the 19th century conformed to the basic supply-side formula more closely than those of the 20th century. In the United States, government expenditures and taxes were extremely low—and, except during the Civil War, there was no income tax. There was no federal bureaucracy to impose minimum-wage laws, regulate health and safety standards, or resist monopolies and trusts. No Clean Water or Securities and Exchange acts had been passed. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs had not been conceived. And property rights—another mainstay of supply-side recommendations—were at least as secure, if not more so, in the 19th century than they are now.

Another puzzle: according to Solow’s groundbreaking research, technical progress rather than capital accumulation was the source of nearly 90% of U.S. growth in the first half of the 20th century. In the 19th century, capital accumulation made a larger contribution to growth than did technical change. Yet the new products invented in the 19th century were extraordinary. Inventions between 1850 and 1900 include the monorail, telephone, microphone, cash register, phonograph, incandescent lamp, electric train, steam turbine, gasoline engine, and street car, as well as dynamite, movies, motorcycles, linotype printing, automobiles, refrigerators, concrete and steel construction, pneumatic tires, aspirin, and X-rays. These may well overshadow inventions credited to the entire 20th century.

The smaller economic impact of 19th-century inventions suggests that they weren’t effectively commercialized; their widespread use was hampered by some combination of inappropriate features, high costs, poor marketing, or a paucity of venturesome consumption. Why in spite of a more congenial supply-side climate was this so? What changed in the 20th century that allowed the United States—and other countries with advanced economies—to extract more value from technological and scientific breakthroughs?
..."

The Venturesome Economy

The American Dream and delusions of the 'Real World'

8:34 PM

V: So this is basically the template of someone trying to become American middle or upper middle class from a (Chinese) lower class.

It's all very directed but without being introspective.

Like -
Go to school
Get a job
Get married
Save money
Buy a house
Have children

Each action is directed toward this singular goal but the actions are simultaneously very mechanical and automated.

It's a success story, but each part is just a fairy tale.

You study hard in school and get a PhD and get a job!

Might as well plant magic beans - it'll have just about the same effect.

...

There is a large limitation of perspective... a lot of self-delusion that can come from it, too.

When you finally get your break to the next level, you can very easily delude yourself into thinking it was all about the things you did.

That you finally figured out how the real world works.

On the watersheds of thought

I have often wondered whether people can change so suddenly and so drastically...

Or if these are the case of just never really seeing the person for who he or she is?

The Fall of French Cuisine

Some of the ‘declinists’ think that what would set France right is a good dose of Thatcherism and Chicago School economics, and Steinberger considers that this sort of remedy would do much to fix the national cooking crisis. Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, Reagan was elected president in 1980, and Mitterrand’s long reign began in 1981: ‘Insofar as the restaurant business was concerned, the United States and Britain unquestionably took the better route,’ Steinberger says, and this despite the fact that Mitterrand was a very great gourmand while Thatcher was of the ‘food is fuel’ persuasion and Reagan’s favourite foods were macaroni and cheese and liquorice jelly beans.

Down to the Last Cream Puff

Vahalla Rising

Among many things, good soundtrack.

Nordic landscapes can be so dark and brooding. It's a wonder how civilization emerged out of all the mist and bog.

Regressive

9:43 PM

V: ... I am very wary of these kind of arguments about how something is socially regressive.

It's manipulative: there is implication of civilisational conflict between western liberalism and eastern fundamentalism. Look how terrible and regressive this fundamentalism is (true) - we have a duty to combat this!

This is exactly an argument that you see through when applied against China. That there is a very false concern that masks crasser political desires.

Yeah, I mean, I won't argue that these systems are backwards and awful, but it's not like they formed in parallel to a superior western system.

It's more like the western system oppressed, abused, and brutalised people, who then later turned to embrace backwards social systems.

It's flimsy thinking to turn this into a moral equivalence.

But it's equally sloppy to suggest that there is a developmental equivalence - that there is some new white man's burden to enlighten these natives - when the powers most interested and able to pursue this conflict are those who brutalised these people in the first place.

An NGO that opens a battered women's shelter? Is this what we oppose?

Or just the continued otherising by those whose brutalisation created a context for these social regression?

I mean, a lot of this backwardness is clearly unsustainable...

Actually, I mean the other way. That liberalism seems to accompany the development of wealth. The stabilisation of political systems and economies.

It is this constant state of conflict - this destabilisation - that seems a better culture for this sustained backwardness.

Do you think a wealthy (not just rich), politically and economically stable middle eastern nation is going to resist liberalisation?

The production of wealth has strong educational implications.

What is the other explanation? That brown people are just inferior and backwards and need to be enlightened? Their political situation is so backwards, it really isn't even such a terrible thing if they are killed as part of a larger political conflict - not like their lives are worth much anyway.

Sign and Sight

Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?

It is well known that in the struggle of the weak against the strong, it is easier to attack the former. Those who resist will always be accused by the cowardly of exciting the hatred of the powerful.

Anyone with a mind to contend timidly that liberty is indivisible, that the life of a human being has the same value everywhere, that amputating a thief's hand or stoning an adulteress is intolerable everywhere, is duly arraigned in the name of the necessary equality of cultures. As a result, we can turn a blind eye to how others live and suffer once they've been parked in the ghetto of their particularity. Enthusing about their inviolable differentness alleviates us from having to worry about their condition.

Trading

V: The CEO is showing off to a bunch of impressed traders his Blackberry bull whip app. Makes a sound when you shake it.

The Fall of 0-W

And so, yet another alliance rose and then crumbles into ashes.

Such is the history of EVE.

Dijkstra

One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate.

PDF

manuscripts archive

Med school

...

V: well, the med students are all abcs
so they inherit all of the standard abc fakeness
their stated motivations seem at once both more idealistic and less idealistic

...

V: more idealistic in that they talk about these broad, grand notions of live saving
but less idealistic in that it's like this desire to be a television doctor
self-centred idealism

A walk in mortal paradise

Ipanema/Le Blon

From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

Barra

From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

Law school

11:50 PM
V: Reading an interesting discussion of law school. Some very choice quotes.

There's a pretty sad reason for this glut: there's the constantly-circulating idea that law school is the French Foreign Legion for the intelligent and aimless; they accept any scoundrel and turn them out a gentleman.

a review of Mad Men

As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan society – ‘Look, they used to burn their witches!’ – while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake. If we’ve managed to become less credulous about advertising, to make it more normal and the bearer of more reasonable expectations, perhaps in 50 years’ time viewers will look back on the silly self-congratulatory subtexts of Mad Men, shake their heads, and be grateful that gender and sexual tolerance have likewise been normalised. Advertising circa 1960 is genuinely interesting. Would that Mad Men had been genuinely interested in it.

And sometimes time just passes by

Went sailing for the first time. Pelicans! Their wingspans are huge.

The Reveal

Enjoyed reading the latest Dunk and Egg short story. The title first led me to hope that it would about the tournament at Harrenhal in the Year of the False Spring, but I later realized my chronology is off by a few decades.

I like reading GGRM's books. The events that happen are as amazing and shocking to the characters in the story as it is to the reader.

It just has this sense of verisimilitude that is hard to find else where. The small and mundane details, the characterizations, the myth and legends; vivid but never pompous...

Ideas

The Maine line

Veil of Ignorance

C. Lispector

"Grown up, she was extraordinary-looking, all eyeliner, cheekbones and pout: Gloria Grahame crossed with Sophia Loren. Men fell for her, but she seems to have been above such things."

Arthur, Merlin and love magic

"The role of the romance heroine in healing the knight’s injuries overlaps with her granting him her love, so that at first healing and loving go hand in hand. Only later, as medical knowledge becomes the preserve of university- educated men and female empirics are excluded from practice through professional regulation, does the idea that women literally cure their lovers dissolve into a metaphorical understanding of the beloved as healing the wounds made by Cupid."

The Exasperational Age

The Aspirational Age?

"It is a pessimism, first, about there being any way in which society collectively, acting primarily through the state, can reshape its underlying socio-economic structure. Staggering inequalities of wealth are simply taken to be part of the natural order. Where it used to be said that ‘the poor are always with us,’ eternal existence is now granted to the rich as well."

In need of an analysis

basti: I really like ‘Entourage’...It kills all the magic of movies entirely.

On the surface, this show is like a male-version of ‘Twilight.’ It's all wish-fulfillment. They do whatever they want with no consequences. Except if you really pay attention to it, it has some very interesting themes.It's not clear whether they are intentional or not, though.

Look at the so-called artistic characters. And look at the examples of the movies they create. Like Billy Walsh and ‘Medellin’/‘Queen's Boulevard’. He's just this pretentious prima-donna. He is obsessed with his artistic initegrity, but the movies themselves are just pseudo-intellectual art. The characters talk about how much they want to make great movies, but it's just crass business.

Inter-generational progress?

"In a society of this sort, with stability in both the underlying growth in productivity and the propensity to consume, each succeeding generation must be richer in material terms than its predecessor."

And this is the way it is

Google Redirects! But Will The Chinese Government Block?!

# The Chinese, in their amazing capacity to endure, conscious of the very real progress the Chinese government has thus far delivered to them in so many other areas, decide this still isn’t big enough for them to rise up and rebel.
# They adapt, switch to other services, and continue with life, making the best of things.
# They may even begin to resent Google and “the West” for abandoning them, for not respecting their circumstances enough to work with them and instead end up being seen as working against them in the guise of working “for” them.

The Virtuous Poor

basti: Some people at work were talking about collecting art.
It was very much like in ‘Wall Street’
I guess if I weren't so poor, then I might go back to coveting wealth.

Predicting the Future

CPUs and GPUs in the next ten years

"Today’s CPUs have already reached higher heat density than a nuclear reactor, and maintaining Moore’s Law will be a considerable challenge once five nanometer gates are achieved.

The Itanium architecture was conceived two decades ago as insurance against that inevitable day...

Unfortunately, the compiler technology to pull this off did not even exist when Intel and HP began the project"

A gift from the past, part 1

For me, access to the internet around the early part of the decade made TV in general, and Cartoon Network in particular, one of those things that fell by the wayside. But just recently I found something that was not in my teenage subconsciousness: Justice League.

When confront with this artifact of a past era it is difficult to say what effect it would have had if I watched it back then, but I definitely appreciate watching the show now. Perhaps I am just becoming capable of appreciating these things.

The most surprising part is how much I enjoyed watching a series that is almost a decade old, and with decent - not great - animation. It wasn't a breakthrough in technique by any means, but the story telling is quite compelling.

When I think back on what meant so much to me as a child, as a teenager, and even as short a while back as one year ago, I can comfortably say I have come to ridicule many of them. This is somewhat of a reversal.

The series is well written with some surprising characters. In watching the Justice League I've gain a sense of appreciation for the American canonical superhero characters who always uphold the same ideals, and sometimes, fight the same supervillains. In the past I've mocked this aspect of DC comics as stagnant, preferring instead the more fast paced anime (perhaps I would not have appreciated this back then after all). But as time passed, many of these new animes felt hollow - because style is no substitue for substance. And plus, one can only withstand so much the confused philosophical meanderings and misogyny of their 'autuers'.

What came across as uplifting in Justice League is the exploration of themes such as love, redemption and renewal amidst the backdrop of characters that we thought we knew. And of some surreal existentialist themes...

(to be continued...)

France, or what's left of it, in Africa

Nodding and Winking

'...we maintain the fiction of our "presence" and endorse the course of events we no longer determine.'

A poet

Interview with Imtiaz Dharker

"And you are as God made you, beautiful
And you are as God made you, unexpected"

Post-colonialism in Dune

basti: It's interesting. I am half-watching the SciFi channel version of ‘Dune.’ There are certan elements they stress that the Lynch version does not.

Like, for example, they stress how kind the Atreides are to the natives. This is meant to be understood directly. Like, that they are generous, benevolent rulers. But I think there is a lot of room for a different interpretation. The movie's attempts to construct this interpretation are faulty - it's just not that well done.

So it's possible to look at this the other way. That these foreigners come in with all of these high-minded ideals about social equality and wontonly disrupt the native culture without any real care for its long-term health.

They show up, dismantle all of these old customs overnight, but there is no real, lasting attempts at building a better society. Just these token gestures.

This, I think, is interesting, because the original Dune does not take this approach at all. Only the 2000 version does, which seems very telling of the intended audience and the preconceptions of the writers. There is this additional burden for the writers to portray the colonial masters as benevolent, but it always takes this very apologetic stance. And the stance seems very hollow. Whereas Lynch seems to have had no need to address this at all.

Diary of an EVE Industrialist, Part 6

Just how unequal is EVE's hyper-capitalistic universe? Apparently, not so unequal than our own.

I remember a while a go, someone calculated the average income of a surface dweller in EVE based the on the price of a dinner meal in one of the official EVE chronicles. The figure came out to be 4 million ISK (Interstellar Kredits) per year.

Well, here are some back of the napkin calculations. To put the 'average' income into perspective, the income of a capsuler, an EVE pilot, is a good 20 million ISK, per hour. Let's take the U.S. as a basis of comparison. The average U.S. income is $33,000 per year. That means, for the U.S. to reach that level of wealth disparity, there needs to be people who are earning $165,000 per hour, or, $1,446,225,000 a year.

According to Forbes, there are 793 identified billionaires in the world with an average net worth of $3 billion each. The yearly income of a capsuler in EVE is half the networth of the average richest people on a 2009 basis.

Consider that the "lifespan" (average subscription month) in EVE is 8 month, the networth of the richest people in EVE are in the same range as the richest people on Earth. Since the average number of EVE capsuler residents is 50K (I use this because EVE recently reached this peak number, with room for future growth) against a background of untold billions on the surface of planets. I have to assume that ratio is not so different from 793 out of 7 billion people. Looking at it that way, the stratification of the richest people in EVE are similar to the wealth divide of this era.

They might as well call it...

There Will Be Time Enough for Love

Private, Public

One of my friends was annoyed by the inanity of some people's advice. Specifically, the advice to "just be yourself" that, although maybe sound at its core, comes across so facile as to be irresponsible. Obviously, people are themselves, and if they don't have a problem as they are then there would be no need for advice.

The problem is not so much with being yourself as with its presentation.

My friend illustrates this dilemma by the way of bringing up a person our age who told everyone how she felt as though she is a child of the 1950s, and watching shows like Mad Men fills her with a sense of nostalgia. Knowing me, my friend said I would have ridiculed her, on the ground that she romanticized the time period and so on, and it would have made me a misanthrope.

I can see both happening, one as the consequence of the other so I didn't disagree. But even our own actions are capable of betraying our underlying beliefs. My friend said what is readily lost in translation in my immediate reaction is my sense of wonder of the contemporary era, and my optimism in man's progress. Those would have been closer to my personality.

Our outward presentation is thought to be set in stone, immutable (but a devastating refutation to this thesis is that since this post's publication, I've edited it at least fifteen times). Often, a person must reconcile the past with the present. This is where we have problem with presenting ourselves. A moment in time against an eternity of changes.

I don't believe there is a simple advice to the issue of self presentation. And my friend said mastery of it is not where we begin, and perhaps not where we will ever reach. 12/29/2009

Seventeen Moments of Spring

Actor who immortalised Soviet spy Stirlitz dies at 81

Wheat

The production value of Chinese movies have gotten better. I Just watched Wheat, a rather pedestrian (it has been a disappointing year for Chinese cinema) historical drama. Of the few things that felt memorable was choreography of the environment, centering around a bend in the river as the day and weather changes. There is also a hint of trending toward realism in the way details are captured, and also understanding of the grimness of the historical subject. Could this mean the general taste, and therefore the psyche of the Chinese people are also changing? In encountering these small details, I only have an instinctual feeling.

Time will tell.

Lu Xun's outspoken grandson

Interview with Zhou Lingfei from Danwei on Vimeo.

In Dreadful Deeds Fearless

the original...

O Prince, O Chief of many throned Powers
That led the embattled Seraphim to war
Under thy conduct, and in dreadful deeds
Fearless, endangered Heaven’s perpetual King,
And put to proof his supremecy,
Whether upheld by strength, or chance or fate;

Now playing Solium Infernum

Catching up on reading

Who Benefits from Equality

Khrushchev and the birth of the modern media riot

1984 Miner's Strike

Gravity's Rainbow and more recent Pynchon stories

Zhivago's children

Marquez

Weber

Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Honor Killing

a perverse tribute to the social power of fantasy

The rules of the game

Chancery rules

To the layman, nevertheless, those are diplomatic niceties. The fundamental purpose of the book is serious: humans are a contentious and destructive species and so the opportunities for peaceful interaction must be maximized. Here is an essential aid to doing so at the highest levels of professional effectiveness.

The American Dream

11:47 AM basti: ...it's all about this transition to upper middle class success and this American dream of being successful and rich and having a great job but not having to ever think much about anything.

Tango

me: tango...

basti: you can't do it if you're american
sorry
too nouveau

me: what do you mean too nouveau?

basti: you need actual old world cred to pull it off
otherwise, it's just consumer choice and appropriation

me: ...what's the implication?

basti: It's a nasty one.

me: explain

basti: Authenticity.

me: so what do those of us who grew up in the intersection of cultures say to ourselves? at which point can we say we are 'authentic'?

basti: I don't know.

me: it's an important question no?
authenticity could be no more than a set of caricatures

basti: That's why I said it was a nasty implication.
I think the whole obsession with authenticity is self-delusion.

me: why is that?

basti: What does it really mean?

me: aside from the phenomenon that it is what seems to be most valued...

basti: It has illusory value.
And it's not something I put a lot of time or effort into worrying about.

The Frankfort Book Mess

... in Europe

The decision to name China as the guest country of the 2009 Book Fair made the clash of the economic-superpower-China and the repressive-Communist-regime China virtually inevitable. Both images are simplistic and little more than caricatures of the complexities embodied by contemporary China. It is discomforting to see, then, how easily an otherwise well-informed European public could be taken hostage by images so crude and superficial.

Informed observers, including those from the academic community, have tried for years to emphasize the diversity of contemporary China and the complexity of its cultural sphere, but as the tumultuous symposium shows, they seem to have made little headway in communicating this more nuanced understanding to the public at large, which all too readily looks at China through the lens of Stalinist Eastern Germany.

...the conceptualization of the event reads like a public demonstration of a European brand of tolerance and dialogue that never took place. A stage-managed confrontation of different opinions has little to do with the commitment to nuance and mutual respect that real dialogue requires.

The public is unlikely to be served any better unless decision makers such as those in charge of the Book Fair take into serious account the significant amount of expertise on China that is available in Europe, and develop a more nuanced understanding of China that goes beyond the economic-powerhouse and repressive-Communist-regime dichotomy.

Aganjú

Te esperei na lua crescer
Ví cadeira boa sentei
Espirrei na tua gripei
Por ficar ao léo resfriei

Você me agradou me acertou
Me miseravou, me aqueceu
Me rasgou a roupa e valeu
E jurou conversas de deus

Aganjú

Quem sabe a labuta quitar
Sabe o trabalho que dá
Batalhar o pão e trazer
Para a casa o sobreviver

Encontrei na rua a questão
Cem por cento a falta de chão
Vou rezar prá nunca perder
Essa estrutura que é você

Aganjú

The Two Gilbertos

Jun 24

5:55 PM
basti: Bebel Gilberto is pretty good.
I haven't listened to her stuff in a while.
But there is some nice vocalisation here.

me: you mean Astrud?

basti: No, Bebel
Astrud has much less polished vocalisation than Bebel.

me: yes, but it is intentional
English is not Astrud's native tongue

5:57 PM
basti:
I think that she just didn't undergo the same degree of formal training.
The result, of course, is spectacular.
But even in Portuguese, her vocalisation is less polished.

me: and you get all these terrible anime song tracks try to imitate her (Astrud's) style (a la "Fly Me to the Moon" of Evangelion horridness)

basti: Japanese pop music often has too much polish.
It is too formalised.
It lacks texture and genuineness.

But ‘Tanto Tempo’ and ‘Aganjú’ are very beautiful songs.
(‘Tanto Tempo’ benefits from the contribution of Amon Tobin.)

The Masters of Illusion

The great management consultancy swindle

It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of "Nietzsche and German Idealism". The annual recruiting season had long since gone. My life savings had dwindled into three digits. It came to me in a pub, over a game of pool. I was losing badly to a pair of undergraduates who had recently received offers from a prestigious management consulting firm. They were about 22-years-old; I was going on 26. As I gazed at the pool balls ricocheting around the table, it hit me that, instead of spending the next year watching daytime TV, I too, could earn some ready cash by offering strategy tips to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

The more I thought about it, the grander it seemed. The next morning, I sent out 10 CVs. One ended up in the hands of the founding partner of a small and enlightened consultancy firm based in New York. I landed the job by providing a credible response to this question: How many pubs are there in Great Britain? The purpose of that question, I realised after the interview, was to see how easily I could talk about a subject of which I knew almost nothing, on the basis of facts that were almost entirely fictional. It was an excellent introduction to management consulting.

Drum playing robot

Something sublime

¡Ay! En Chiclana me crié;
que me busquen en Chiclana
si me llegara a perder.

Los arroyos y las fuentes
no quieren mezclar sus aguas
con mis lágrimas ardientes.

Si porque no tengo madre,
vienes a buscarme a casa,
anda y búscame en la calle.

Que me dijo mi madre
que no me fiara
ni de tus ojos, que miran traidores,
ni de tus palabras.

Something silly

A Recent History of...

CDOs

Fool’s Gold begins in a conference room in Nice in spring 2005. Tett admits that at that point she was baffled by the technical language – ‘Gaussian copula’, ‘attachment point’, ‘delta hedging’ – used by the participants. However, before joining the FT she had conducted fieldwork in Soviet Tajikistan for a PhD in social anthropology, and the ethnographer in her was now reawakened. The conference reminded her of a Tajik wedding. Those attending it were forging social links and celebrating a tacit world-view – in this case, one in which ‘it was perfectly valid to discuss money in abstract, mathematical, ultra-complex terms, without any reference to tangible human beings.’

"I don't know," she said rather artlessly, hinting at a personal depth that is perhaps too painful to understand.

Future Sublime

A Review of "To-Day and To-Morrow"

Most of the authors were British, but covered world civilization, culture and history, and world politics. They were largely experts in their fields, rather than men and women of letters. But in trying to visualize the future they found themselves writing fiction, and often science fiction, in the manner of H. G. Wells, to whom many of them inevitably refer. Their futurology thus represents another kind of interface between science and humanities, in that it can be seen as apply-inthe methods of speculative fiction to scientific or sociological fact.

A deeper look into Eileen Chang through Roland Soong

Ace British social parody

9/5/2009 I haven't been able to watch the youtube version since late August, BBC enforcing its copyright by pulling the video has put another hole in the cultural subconsciousness

Even more compound nouns

German language adds 5,000 words

Turkey admits to 'genocide'! The world dies of shock

Turkey admits to 'genocide'! The world dies of shock.

Turkey, the paragon of ethnic relations, finally opens to admissions of genocide... in another country.

As well.... Turkish TV shows coup d’etat in Honduras, including scenes of the Honduras military confronting Honduran protesters, as well as the Honduran president-in-exile’s airplane and its attempt to land in the capitol and pass them off completely as footage of race riots in China.

Tax Havens

Terribly funny

Then you have the ‘big four’ accountancy firms – KPMG, Ernst and Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte – whose expertise is indispensable for anyone hoping to diminish their tax exposure. Writing in an Irish magazine, a KPMG partner spelled out the mindset:

A worrying tendency seems to have emerged among external stakeholders to make ‘moral’ judgements about tax planning and to expect companies to manage their tax affairs in a ‘moral’ way . . . Let’s be clear about this. Tax is a cost to business. As with any other cost, the board members owe their shareholders a duty to manage that cost by the legal means afforded to them.

KPMG gave us a sense of its attitude to legality when it paid a fine of $456m in the US for ‘designing, marketing and implementing illegal tax shelters’. The big four have now set up a body to regulate themselves called the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Not only do the accountancy firms appoint representatives to the IASB’s committees, they actually fund it themselves – through a foundation registered in a tax haven.

Trine

Anyone want to play co-op?

Silent Hill Origins: O.R.T.

Dwarf Fortress

Doing some reading on the DX

Got my Kindle DX. The form fact is perfect, but it feels a bit heavy.

PDF support is a bit botched. You can't zoom in on the PDFs, only rotate them to enlarge the text.

A very neat touch. When the device goes to sleep/turned off, a screensaver goes up with a picture and name of a great author.

Written out of Revenge

Written out of Revenge

Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the death. Not that theirs was a tempestuous relationship in the usual sense. There were occasional scenes and some quarrels, but not, apparently, many. The struggle was between two complex and internally divided natures at war with themselves as much as with each other and constrained by circumstances largely of their own making. After her death Ritchie destroyed his letters to Bowen and some of hers to him. We are left, therefore, with her remaining letters and his diaries: she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just within earshot of one another they seem sometimes to fall into dialogue and at others to be taking part in completely different dramas.

Let's Talk about 6-4

The tide of cultural war must be turned and equilibrium must be re-established so that we can look at the present with a fresh set of eyes.

West miscasts Tiananmen protesters

To the extent that the protests were directed at abuses of an existing system by an emerging elite, they were motivated more by outrage at the betrayal of socialist ideals than by aspirations for a new system. The mood in the square was at least as much conservative as it was activist.

Such arguments may seem arcane two decades later. But, in my view, they are keenly relevant. The styling of Tiananmen as a pro-democracy movement helped to miscast the west’s narrative on China’s past and future.

Not Everything is About Democracy